Manuscripts – MONK'S MODERN MEDIEVAL CUISINE

There’s a new page on my website

I’m adding my translations of excerpts of medieval texts about food.

Tart of Brie in Lent, a fishy alternative?

In revisiting an old edited title of a medieval recipe, I end up exploring how a recipe for a fruit and fish pie might actually make good culinary sense.

Happy New Year! Top posts of 2024

Find out what the top five posts of 2024 were. And here’s to an even better 2025!

Cabbage pottage: not just for peasants

The humble cabbage wasn’t just something peasants grew in their gardens to put in their pottage. Lords and kings may have eaten it too… with a little spice and saffron added, of course!

Monks & Meat

Early Benedictine monks abstained from meat except for when gravely ill, but by the later medieval period they were regularly consuming meat. In this post, I take a look at the example of the Benedictine community at St Andrew’s Priory, Rochester, where even suckling pig was on the menu!

Jelly in 13th- and 14th-century England

Wobbling wonders: Dr Monk explores the early history of jelly recipes in medieval England.

Some follow-up thoughts on Forme of Cury video

More information about the John Rylands Library version of Forme of Cury… and a theory about who may have commissioned the copying of the text into the British Library roll.

In my study: reading and translating the John Rylands Forme of Cury

Dr Monk swaps the kitchen for his study to give you a behind the scenes look at the John Rylands Library copy of Forme of Cury (Richard II’s cookery book).

More on Parsley

What do pre-Conquest documents show about the use of parsley in early medieval England? One of the things I didn’t go into much detail about in my recent post Wild about parsley? was the use of parsley in medicine in early medieval England (more familiarly, the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ period). So I thought I would just shareContinue reading “More on Parsley”

Sugary comfort: making medieval comfits

I must own that I have a sweet tooth. And were I back in the fourteenth century, a VIP guest at Richard II’s table, I would be munching on his comfits with unbecoming gusto. Comfits are sugar-coated, or candied, seeds and spices. During King Richard’s time, they were often white but also coloured – redContinue reading “Sugary comfort: making medieval comfits”