If you have difficulties to find medieval ingredients, check out this webshop. You can find more medieval recipes in my medieval cookbook and on my Dutch website. The recipes on this page, from Europe and the Arab world, have been worked out for you so that you can easily recreate them at home. Unfortunately, you will hardly find any quantities and methods of preparation in medieval cookbooks, so we have to experiment a lot to bring medieval flavours back to life. In contrast to Europe, Arab recipes from more than 500 years ago are remarkably similar to current recipes in the Arab world. A beautiful cookbook appears in the 10th century and many follow throughout the Middle Ages. In the Arabian world, it was slightly different. It is remarkable that European cookbooks that survived throughout history almost all came from the late Middle Ages, especially 14th and 15th century. The medieval cuisine had rich and strong flavours. and that was well into the 20th century.Medieval flavours in Europe were different from those that we are used to today. Even here in San Francisco's China Town, there are residents who had the food delivered prepared by local restaurants and then was consumed in the living quarters. Ancient Romans, Chinese, or as I said large dense populations did not have kitchens in the home, most food was bought prepared or brought to the home of the average family or worker, not prepared in the home. It is well know that fast food has been the main staple of the majority of humans living in large populations. I would venture to say most or our human culture that were record is not of the working classes, or urban workers. Also you have to remember that the majority of even the wealthy classes were illiterate, so cooking was still a passed on and oral tradition. So, yes I guess it is a note, but it was just the way our society was, Instead of retail or service industries we had domestic help. Fish would either be sold fresh or smoked and salted. They would also dine on other meats beef, bacon, lamb, and those living close to water may have regularly dined on salmon, herring, eels ands other fresh water fish. The idea of the nuclear family with the mom and female children were the only ones working on the domestic work is only since the mid 20th century. Fowl such as capons, geese, larks, and chickens were usually available to the lord and his family. The middle classes up until then almost always had some kind of domestic help. Food for anyone under the wealthy and merchant classes are the only ones who would have been targeted, and it is not until after WWI that not having domestic help would have been an issue. I agree, but I would also say that there are no low end cookbooks until Mrs. Photos by James Ransom, except eels by David Doubilet via National Geographic So the next time you think the food at your neighbor's dinner party looks unappetizing, just be glad we aren't living in the 13th century. The eel is then cooked, often in red wine, and served. They are then filled with a mixture of meat and spices and sewn back together, inside out. One of the most intriguing recipes in The Good Wife’s Guide is for “eels reversed.” Eels are skinned and deboned, then sliced lengthwise and flattened into long rectangles. The book contains over 400 recipes (some of which come from Taillevant, chef to the King of France) that showcase just how different medieval European food is from contemporary cuisine. Le Ménagier de Paris, known in English as The Good Wife’s Guide, is a medieval household book written by an anonymous older man as instructions to his 15-year-old wife. More: A menu for a medieval feast you'll actually want to eat. Meat was ground and shaped to look like apples, birds were disassembled, cooked, and put back together, and fish were prepared three ways and in three different colors. The cuisine relied on intense combinations of sweet and sour, huge quantities of spice, heavy processing (so that no ingredient was identifiable or distinct), and trompe-l’oeil, a French term for optical illusion. Medieval food was in no ways simple or refined. In reality (or what we know of it), medieval food was unbelievably elaborate, so much so that Paul Freedman, a professor of history at Yale and the editor of The History of Taste, claims that the only place it could possibly be recreated today is in the kitchens of modernist molecular gastronomy restaurants.
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