On this episode of A Taste of the Past, Linda Pelaccio is talking with cooking instructor, author and founder of LaVarenne Cooking School, Anne Willan. Anne's cookbook, The Cookbook Library, includes cooking instructions from four centuries of recipe history. Tune in to hear about cooking instructions from all over Europe throughout the ages, the history of dining utensils, and the role of illustrations in cooking manuals. Hear about some of the difficulties involved with recreating dishes from the 15th or 16th century. Anne has collected over 5,000 cookbooks, and you can find some excerpts of these gems of cookbook history in The Cookbook Library! This program has been brought to you by White Oak Pastures.

"It's wonderful because the whole of Europe was interested in writing down and recording what they were eating." -- Anne Willan on old cookbooks, A Taste of the Past

"The oldest recipes were the most difficult to recreate because hard to know just what ingredients tasted like and what people were getting, so it was kind of a bit of a guess. What I wanted to do was to present something that's feasible in a modern kitchen." --Anne Willan on A Taste of the Past