Le Viandier

Le Viandier (often called Le Viandier de Taillevent, pronounced: [lə vjɑ̃dje də tajvɑ̃]) is a recipe collection generally credited to Guillaume Tirel, alias Taillevent. However, the earliest version of the work was written around 1300, about 10 years before Tirel's birth. The original author is unknown, but it was common for medieval recipe collections to be plagiarized, complemented with additional material and presented as the work of later authors.

Le Viandier is one of the earliest and best-known recipe collections of the Middle Ages, along with the Latin Liber de Coquina (early 14th century) and the English Forme of Cury (c. 1390). Among other things, it contains the first detailed description of an entremet.

There are four extant manuscripts of Le Viandier. 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. 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. A manuscript from the 14th century housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris), was formerly thought to be the oldest. The version in the Biblioteca Vaticana (Vatican City), is from the early 15th century. The fourth extant version is in the Bibliothèque Mazarine (Paris) and also dates to the 15th century.

There was a fifth version from the 15th century in Saint-Lô, in the Archives de la Manche. It was mentioned by Jérôme Pichon and Georges Vicaire in their 1892 monograph, Le Viandier; however, the Saint-Lô manuscript was destroyed by fire on 6 June 1944during the invasion of Normandy.

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