The Llibre del Coch, or Llibre de doctrina per a ben servir, de tallar y del art de coch cs (ço es) de qualsevol manera, potatges y salses compost per lo diligent mestre Robert coch del Serenissimo senyor Don Ferrando Rey de Napols, is a Catalan recipe book written around 1490 by Master Robert de Nola. Its earliest preserved printed edition is from 1520, published in Catalan in Barcelona. It includes mainly recipes from the Catalan cuisine of the time, some of them inherited from the Llibre de Sent Soví, and some from neighboring countries, such as the Occitan cuisine and the Italian cuisine, including traditions from different areas dominated by the Crown of Aragon, which at that time was spread to the northeastern Mediterranean, Southern Italy, Corsica and Sicily. Despite not including Castilian recipes, was also very successful in Castile, was translated into Spanish in 1525 and republished in this language several times. It is considered of great value for acquiring a good knowledge about the gastronomy of the Renaissance.
This book should not be confused with another lesser known work, which also deals about Catalan cuisine and is called Llibre del Coch o del Ventre de la Canonja de Tarragona, written in 1331 by Guillem Clergue, butler of Guerau de Rocabertí .
First editions
Llibre del Coch was the first cookbook published in Catalan using Gutenberg press. It is also previous to any cookbook printed in Spanish. A printed edition, printed on November 15, 1520, is preserved in the Biblioteca Nacional de Catalunya in Barcelona, being the oldest known copy extant. In the time of King Charles I it was requested its translation into Spanish and it was first published in this language in 1529 (or 1525 ) in Toledo . The same year, much of the text was plagiarised by Diego Granado in his book Arte de Cocina. Throughout the century at least another five editions were printed in Catalan and seven in Spanish,
There are clues for the printed book of 1520 being a copy of an older text: It is dedicated to King Ferdinand I of Naples, who was king of Naples between 1458 and 1494, and also, and above all, maintains the proportions of Lent preceding 1491. There is no mention at all of the foods forbidden by the Church during Lent, which from 1491 allowed the catholic people the consumption of dairy products (such as milk and cheese, for example) and eggs. In addition, the original ms. should have been written before Europe's contact with America in 1492, because it does not mention any products from the new continent.
Content
The book consists of more than two hundred chapters, and most of them (two hundred and thirty-six) correspond to recipes but, as its full title indicates, begins with chapters devoted to how to cut meat and they are followed by others teaching how to serve different people at the table, such as sharpening, serving water, acting as a butler, waiter, room teacher, cloakroom attendant, and so on. The last chapter, under the title "Table" contains an index.
In this book there is no recipe with mushrooms, so present and prized in today's Catalan cuisine. For some authors, this fact, could be explained as a prevention against possible poisonings. On the other hand, and as a novelty with respect to the Llibre de Sent Soví, there are already two recipes for rice, rice with meat broth and rice in a casserole in the oven, which could be the predecessors of rice in the casserole and the current rice and crust, representing the first rice dishes, as we now understand the rice dishes and paellas, described in writing about Catalan cuisine. There are eight recipes aimed specifically at patients. One of the Arabic recipes with an Arabic name, the alburnia, could be an ancient fig bread today, but with rose water, an ingredient, also of oriental influence, very common in this recipe and in the medieval cuisine of the Sent Soví. It includes two recipes explicitly titled "a la morisca" and others with a name that also specifies a foreign way of cooking, such as, for example: bona salsa francesa, torta a la genouesa xinxanelles a la veneciana or sopes a la lombarda, Only three recipes are specifying "a la catalana" (the Catalan way), perhaps due to a lack of awareness that the other recipes are also Catalan or because these recipes were known elsewhere with this qualifier. No recipe from Sent Soví has this label, although they are all Catalan.