My name is Carla Neal. I live with my husband and three of my four children. I never started out to love cooking. Although I do love to eat!

I went to school for fashion design and merchandising. I have a BS in home economics with a minor in clothing and textiles. While my sons were small I had a small business making Victorian styled clothing for children.

We moved when my boys were 4,6 & 8. This is when my life started changing. I divorced my husband, joined a historical reenactment society and met my future husband. I had my fourth child, a daughter, and started cooking.

I now study and redact historical recipes. I love it! It fascinates me when I see in a four hundred year old manuscript something that I know and have made. For example: meringues, mac and cheese, bacon jam, pasta, barbeque sauce, etc.

I am currently translating an Italian manuscript from 1549. It is available in the original Italian at archives.org but there is no translation to date. I plan on posting it on this blog when I finish, probably in another year.

That’s me in a nutshell. I hope you like historical bites as much as I do. Enjoy!

This is My Crazy

I love reading historical cooking manuscripts (or transcriptions or translations). I find it fascinating that I can still see the familiar recipes from 400, 500 or 1000 years ago. As we journey through time reading and redacting recipes, you will be able to see the humble beginnings of some of your favorite foods, some just barely recognizable and others with almost no changes.

I am not sure where, or should I say when to start our journey. I have been redacting historical recipes for almost 20 years now. Some are really good, so good that every time I serve them I’m asked for the recipes. Some definitely need tweaking to make them palatable for a modern diner. The oldest manuscript I have used is Apicius who died in 40AD; the most recent is “The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi 1570”.

I have sucked my husband into my crazy! I have shown him some things I know about baking and he has surpassed my knowledge. I am happy to have him as my “doughboy” (he has named himself this).