Medieval recipe sale

EVER WONDERED what to do with that left-over bear or wild boar? The world's oldest cookery book is to be auctioned today and the 15th century volume has celebrity chefs and antique book collectors salivating

The book, De Honesta Voluptate, compiled by an Italian physician Bartholomaeus Platina in 1460, is expected to fetch pounds 6,000. The book's 93 leaves are bound in calf leather over wood - with hand-drawn capitals to each section. None of the first two editions are known to have survived and of the third, only 20 copies remain.

Book auctioneer Dominic Winter, who is handling the sale in Swindon, Wiltshire, said: "The book is of enormous historical significance for the fascinating information about diet which it gives. It discourses at length on the quality of all variety of meat, fish, fruit, and vegetables of the era. And it outlines the manner in which they ought to be prepared, indicating the correct sauces to be served with meat and fish."