Medieval Cooking

I’ve been chicken information heavy lately. With preparations for Pennsic taking up the very little free time that I have, I haven’t been doing much in the way of research apart from building the menu for Agincourt. I will be posting the first draft menu in a week or so, so there will [...]

I have been struggling with taking the step towards having chickens for meat. The idea of terminating the life of a living creature, for any reason, is a difficult one. This is all being said from a place of no experience and I realize that it’s a purely intellectual problem for me at [...]

Master Emrys Eustice (aka. Broom) recently posted pictures from War Practice and he got a picture of my Wooden Pin entry.
I also wanted to thank THL Katla Ulfeðinn for loaning me her table for the day. Having the table made all of the difference in the presentation and I am sure gave me a [...]

I was doing some of the research to build the menu for the Agincourt feast and I was looking for dishes that would provide something different and add a layer of complexity to the feast overall. Because I was trying to keep to two primary sources, my first thought was to make the cockentrice [...]

One of the things that I learned is that the Tacuinum of Liège is one of five books produced that was related to the Tacuinum Sanitatis. The Tacuinum Sanitatis was a book translated into Latin from the original Arabic works of Ibn Butlan in the second half of the thirteenth century by an [...]

I have decided to enter the Wooden Pin competition at Æthelmearc War Practice. The competition will be held tomorrow. Why I chose to enter was because it occurred to me that it was the fifth anniversary of my becoming an apprentice of James Matterer, known in the SCA as Master Huon Damebrygge and [...]

I was looking for something else and found another interpretation of the same recipe. It was done by Christianne Muusers, who is a Dutch food historian, and one of my heroes. I was disappointed that I didn’t know that she’d done this recipe.
Go to: http://www.coquinaria.nl/english/recipes/03.4histrecept.htm
I am trying to get everything together for the [...]

I am doing some pre-cooking for the Queen’s Rapier Championship event that will be held at the end of the month. Many of the recipes are out of Traveling Dysshes by Siobhan Medhbh O’Roarke and Cordelia Toser. This feast is being cooked on a very strict deadline, so there is no time to [...]

I had been fighting with myself over what it was that I would do for this, my fifth, Agincourt. The first year, I went with the general plan of the cook that had to step aside. The second year, I flipped the menu and went with more French food. By the third [...]

I’ve been doing some more thinking about the Wooden Pin competition and realized that I’d come to some wrong conclusions. Firstly, I had forgotten that the traditional “stomach openers” in humoral theory was not soft cheese, it is hard cheese. This would change the “Summer” (warm) course to:

Hard Cheese
Quince Paste with sugar and [...]