Recipes outside books. Finding culinary recipes and their uses in fifteenth-century domestic accounts from Aquitaine

Résumé En

Culinary books are often considered as the only historical source for medieval and modern recipes, which is true in most cases. Practical uses of recipes in actual domestic contexts are however not as well documented due to the lack of historical sources and insights into the reality of everyday life of castles and elite households from the late Middle Ages. A doctoral work focused on food and culinary techniques in medieval castles of north Aquitaine (western France) gave us the opportunity of studying various fifteenth-century household and kitchen accounts from several sites, among which the until now unpublished accounts from the castles of Pons and Thouars (Nouvelle-Aquitaine) stand apart due to their length and detail level. The careful and exhaustive study of these written records gave us not only the expected information about domestic supply but also various insights into culinary recipes in use in these castle kitchens from the later Middle Ages. Comparison with various French recipe books from the 12 th to the 15 th century allows us to enlighten the culinary influences and preferences in these Aquitanian lordly courts as well as the diffusion of recipes outside of centres of culinaryinfluence such as Northern France. These documents ask, in a much larger scale, the question of the diffusion and concrete use of culinary recipes outside of their geographical cradles, and of their value as significant objects in a context of uniformization of aristocratic cultures at the end of the Middle Ages.