The old recipe cards often include things no one would be caught dead eating the rest of the year, like canned green beans mixed with canned mushroom soup and topped with canned onion rings, or canned sweet potatoes topped with marshmallows. Both of these are baked, but unfortunately not enough to reduce them to a cinder.
But I digress. Medieval homemakers for the most part didn't have cookbooks and stained recipe cards for the excellent reason that most of them couldn't read. (They also didn't have turkeys, but that's a separate story.) Meals were normally cooked at home, because restaurants weren't an option. Bread and beer could be bought, but villages wouldn't have other sources of prepared foods. The inns in the cities (and occasionally at crossroads) catered to travelers for the most part, not the locals. So we know what medieval people ate but not necessarily how it was prepared (well, how many ways can you cook lentils and onions?).
But we do have some medieval recipes! These were written for cooks at great aristocratic households toward the end of the Middle Ages. For the most part they give us an insight into foods prepared for great feasts, not for everyday consumption. But Thanksgiving is a great feast too, so that's okay.
Medieval recipes were far less exact than modern recipes. Indeed, the idea of having exact measurements for ingredients is really only a little over a century old, having started with Fanny Farmer and her Boston School Cookbook. Before then there was a great deal of "stir in a heaping spoonful of this or that" and "cook for an hour or so." Medieval recipes were even more free-form.
The reason of course is that they were aimed at people who already knew how to cook and who had a pretty good idea when something was done or if it needed a little more or a lot more seasoning. Even now, Chinese recipes, written for Chinese people, just list the ingredients, because of course you'll know what to do next.
Even when medieval recipes call for a "quart" of this liquid or a "pound" of that solid, it's hard to know if their pounds and quarts correspond to ours. Medieval eggs, we know, were substantially smaller than ours, so you'll want to reduce their number. So it's fun to experiment with medieval recipes, especially since it's interesting to see ingredients combined in ways that wouldn't have occurred to us, but the key term is "experiment." Here are a couple to get you started, straight out of medieval cookbooks.
Chickpea soup (this would have been a good everyday supper)
To make eight bowlfuls, take a pound and a half of red chickpeas and wash them, drain them, and put them in the pot where they will be cooked. Add half an ounce of flour, some good oil, a little salt, about twenty crushed peppercorns and a little cinnamon. Mix with your hands. Then add three measures of water, along with a little sage, rosemary, and parsley root. Boil until it is reduced to eight bowlfuls and add a little more oil. If making for an invalid, leave out the oil and spices.
White cheese tart (this is a dessert, using sugar, which came into Europe at the end of the Middle Ages)
Take a pound and a half of good fresh cheese, chop it fine and pound it well. Now take twelve or fifteen egg whites and mix them very well with the cheese, adding half a pound of sugar and half an ounce of white ginger. Also add half a pound of good pork fat and some milk, as much as is needed. Then make the pastry crust, as thin as it ought to be. Put in the cheese mixture and bake it nicely, until the top is slightly browned. Put a little sugar and good rose water on top.
Here are some more medieval recipes if you enjoy these.
A good source for medieval recipes is Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy, by Odile Redon, Françoise Sabban, and Silvano Serventi (University of Chicago Press, 1998).
© C. Dale Brittain 2018
For more on medieval food, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.
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