Early English Recipes
Selected from the Harleian Ms. 279
of about 1430 A.D.

With Wood Engravings by
Margaret Webb

In 1888 Thomas Austin edited two Harleian manuscripts and published them as a cook book from the fifteenth century. Margaret Webb took the recipes from the first of the manucripts and added wood engravings and published that in 1937. Her book is the starting point for this collection of recipes. She published them in the original middle English. You will find only a smattering of middle English here; just enough to give an indication of the changes that have occurred in the language. Mostly the recipes are a transliteration from the originals.

You cannot cook from these recipes. The instructions are insufficient for that. There are almost no measurements; take some of this and add that -- with no hint about how much "some" is or how much of "that" to add. People interested in medieval cooking, often creative anachronists, have added quantities and cooking instructions -- to contemporary taste. Two websites that contain many more recipes than are here are Matterer's A Boke of Gode Cookery and Lindahl's Cariadoc's Miscellany.

We will read the recipes as a social document -- for hints about the organization of social life.

If you were lord and lady of the manor you did not do the foraging and cooking. There must have been people busy with food on a daily basis, however. Daily the fish and fowl could be caught and killed. And "pigges" might be small enough to be consumed in one or two meals. There is only one beef recipe, and that is for veal. And only one venison recipe. Otherwise the meat is from small animals. So, storage would not be required, which was good since there was no refrigeration, but it did require daily effort.

They had no stoves; no stove tops and ovens. They had only a hearth. One result was a pot suspended above a fire and much more boiling than we have today. Many meat dishes involved boiling, and that involved cutting into small pieces and grinding. There was less broiling, frying and baking than today.

One more observation about preparation -- there was much more preparation than today. The materials of cooking came to the cook unprocessed. There was more grinding. Not only did they grind their own meat they also ground their own flour [of wheat or rice]. There was also more straining, which seems to have been for cleaning as well as taking the lumps out. They used milk of almond in many recipes, and that involved grinding, cooking, and straining.

All of these features suggest that food was a labor intensive operation.

These are links to the recipes. Click on any of the links to look at the recipe. Below this list I have a list of ingredients.