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(More customer reviews)This comes from a velum Scroll which was illuminated sometime in the late 14th century - around 1390 and was recipes or receits for the favourite dishes of King Richard. It came into the collection of Gustav Brandus who gave it to the Queen a couple of centuries later - but what really sets this book apart is that in the 1790's Samuel Pegge got hold of it and reprinted it - around 150 recipes - but also added invaluable transalation to some of the less common terms (remember this was written in the English of Chaucer)
The recipes are wonderful - if somewhat foul sounding - Creme Bastarde for instance, and the infamous Sawse Madame. You can learn how to cook diverse 'Briddes' (birds).
The language of cooking is wonderful - you take "grete hepes" of things, and "meddle them togedyr". Or 'smyte in gobbets' which means cut into large pieces. They are forever 'casting' things into pipkins.
The recipes for cooking lampreys, sparrows, swans and bitterns are probably not going to appeal to many people, especially as they called pies 'coffyns' which seems more than appropriate.
There was much great cooking of offal and entrails as of course you would expect, but what I was interested in was the great mixture of sweet and savoury. Most things seemed to involve a mixture of sugar and vinegar, or sweet mixed with savoury in some way. A bit like old plum puddings which have really only altered since the end of the nineteenth century.
Much of the cooking is very reminiscent of cooking of Morroco - the recipes use a great deal of saffron, cinammon, mace and other spices, along with raisins and currants.
Samuel Pegge's contribution is not only to footnote most of the recipes individually but to provide a discussion of cooking in the first part of teh book, and also put a wonderful glossary of terms in the end. So the bits you don't understand you can interpret
As with all cook books of this time there are no real amounts, temperatures, or real directions. They are simply collections of ingredients with some direction of the order of putting them together.
This is an excellent book if you have someone who is keen on Cooking - it is both amusing and a wonderfullly enlightening text.
Click Here to see more reviews about: The Forme of Cury: A Roll of Ancient English Cookery Compiled, about A.D. 1390
As to the Romans; they would of course borrow much of their culinary arts from the Greeks, though the Cook with them, we are told, was one of the lowest of their slaves
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