More medieval recipes

A little while ago I blogged about medieval recipes.  There's been enough interest that I've decided to add some more.  Note that these are not all everyday recipes; many instead are dishes for great feasts in great households, and measurements are extremely free form by modern standards.  For example, they usually didn't bother mentioning salt, because of course you would salt your dish.  But it's fun to see how medieval tastes differed from ours, and how medieval cooks tried to be imaginative with what we would consider a limited choice of ingredients.

Fava beans with herbs
Take some fava beans and use hot water to skin them, the same as you would with almonds.  Add some good broth and boil them long enough to be cooked properly.  Add some parsley and chopped mint and a little salted meat and boil together.  This should be a nice shade of green.  You can also make this dish with peas but do not skin them with hot water.

Chicken stew
Boil up your chickens and save the broth.  Cut up the chickens and cook the meat in lard.  Pound together the meat, the chickens' livers, some almonds, and a little broth.  Boil it with ginger, cinnamon, cloves, pepper, and grain of paradise [another kind of pepper].  Add a little vinegar.  Serve the meat in bowls, with the broth poured over it.
[medieval people preferred capons for dishes like this--a capon is a rooster castrated when young, so it grew up large but tender]

King Manfred's meat pie
Take chicken gizzards and livers and add pork belly.  Chop it all up with a knife.  Add pepper.  Fry it all up in a deep pan.  Let it cool and add eggs.  Meanwhile make a crust, and put the mixture in.  Bake it gently until done.


Stuffed eggs
Hard boil eggs and cut them in half.  Take out the yolks and mix with marjoram, saffron, and cloves.  For every 8 eggs, also mix in one beaten raw egg.  Mash in a little cheese.  Fry the eggs in pork fat and eat with verjuice.
[verjuice was made from partially fermented grape juice and crushed grape seeds boiled together]

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 2019

For more on medieval food, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.