Le Viandier

[citation needed] Le Viandier is one of the earliest and best-known recipe collections of the Middle Ages, along with the Latin-language Liber de Coquina (early 14th century, believed to contain recipes from France and Italy), the Catalan Llibre de Sent Soví (c. 1320), and the English The Forme of Cury (c. 1390).

[1] The oldest, found in the Archives cantonales du Valais (Sion, Switzerland), was written in the late 13th or very early 14th century, and was largely overlooked until the 1950s.

[2] It is this manuscript that calls into question the authorship of Tirel, but a portion of it is missing at the beginning, so the title and author given for this earlier work are unknown.

It was mentioned by Jérôme Pichon and Georges Vicaire in their 1892 monograph, Le Viandier;[3] however, the Saint-Lô manuscript was destroyed by fire caused by heavy bombing on 6 June 1944, during the invasion of Normandy.

To further this idea of "medieval haute cuisine", Taillevent also mentions how much emphasis was placed on presentation by noting that often dyes were used to color sauces and meat roasts were covered with gold and silver leaves.