Parsnipe Cooking with Olive of Jamestown

Thanks to Forager Chef

Title: Parsnipe Cooking 

Author: Olive of Jamestown 

Publisher: Not known 

Source book: The Woman Who Died a Lot by Jasper Fforde (Thursday Next #7)

Parsnipe Cooking with Olive of Jamestown is a thirteenth century bestseller, and the first known cookery book to have a production run of over two figures. A fragment is found in the archives of the Wessex All You Can Eat at Fatso’s Drink Not Included Library: the librarians are urgently searching through Brothels of Dorset on Sixpence a Day* for palimpsests (old documents or pages reused after the original text has been removed), and a page of parsnip recipes is found to have been reused by the cheapskate author who didn’t want to pay for fresh paper.

Of course this is totally not what the librarians are searching for, but everyone needs a good parsnip recipe.

Another palimpsest they discover is more difficult to identify. At first it was suspected to be from the Respected Keith’s Evadum, or perhaps Dry Rot & Other Cankers of the Joist by Howard de Winforton. But then, the librarians think it might be written by the Venerable Bede. Only… he’s not known for humour. Could it be that Bede translated a long lost comedy by Homer? 

Apparently The Margites really is a long lost comic mock-epic of which little survives. Possibly by Homer - and I don’t mean Simpson. If the Venerable Bede had had access to a copy to translate that would have been an extremely important discovery.

If.

* I probably should have done a separate post for Brothels of Dorset on Sixpence a Day. What do you think? Sixpence sounds like a lot of brothels.

Thanks to RHS

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