reference: austin-1440

Bread sauce with crushed garlic and pepper. A sauce for beef. Known only from 15th Century manuscripts.

Beef or sheep-meat steaks, spread with herbs and spices, rolled or pressed together on a spit and roasted (Austin 1440, Noble Boke 1480, Wright 1857)

A fake earthenware pot filled with sausagemeat. One of many comical imitation dishes devised by medieval cooks for grand establishments.

Bastard Gravy appears in several medieval texts as a sauce for different dishes, including oysters, baked meat or "wheder that thou wolt" (Austin 1440). The ety...

Opaque, sweet, white set-jelly desert, most traditionally flavoured with almonds but now often prepared with other fruit flavourings and coloured pale pink.

Strips of a stiff paste made from fruit puree bound with flour, either fried or baked. Served with a sauce of wine and fruit (Austin 1440, etc)

Gobbets of meat in a thickened sweet sauce with spices (Cury 1390, Liber Cure 1430, Austin 1440, Noble Boke 1480)

A general term for thickened drinks. Typically wine, milk or ale thickened with flour, oatmeal or egg, sweetened and spiced.

(Soupes Jamberlayne) Wine and ale stewed with ginger, cinnamon and sugar, thickened with grated toasted bread (Austin 1440)

Prepared fruit pulp. Chardequynce (or chardecoynes) being made from quince, chardewarde from warden pears (Austin 1440)

This term appears regularly in ancient cookbooks including Cury 1390, Liber Cure 1430, Austin 1440 and appears to indicate either some type of sauce or a servin...

The Cockatrice (or Cockagrice or Cokentrice) is an entirely mythical beast, said to be like a bird's body with a serpent's tail, and able to kill just by lookin...

General term for any mixture, most commonly now of fruit, but earlier a stew of mixed ingredients (Liber Cure 1430, Austin 1440, etc).

A blown egg shell filled with a paste confection of almonds and sugar, the centre part being yellowed with saffron to imitate a yolk, for eating in Lent (Austin...

Small strips of fried plain paste, either pasta-type flour paste, or poured batter (Cury 1390, Austin 1440)

Small open crust tarts filled with a semi-set confection of milk with spices and fruit (Austin 1440)

Open sweet egg custard tart with minced white meat such as pork or veal. Known to have been served at Henry IV's coronation banquet in 1399 (Austin 1440, etc)

"Take a chepis wombe" (take a sheep's womb) ... and stuff it with chopped chicken, pork, cheese with eggs spices, boiled (Austin 1440)

Fancy putting on an old-style feast? You'll find thousands and thousands of individual dishes on these pages, but, to re-discover the true taste of Old England,...

Open pastry cases filled with a confection of milk, sugar, egg yolks and ale, baked and then sprinkled with sugar (Austin 1440)

A milk-and-garlic sauce, especially for goose (Liber Cure 1430, Austin 1440)

Edible entrails, especially of fowls. See also, 'Apetito'.

Figs, grapes and small bread cubes in an almond sauce (Austin 1440)

Nowadays gingerbread is most usually a form of biscuit made with a proportion of oats, but many makers follow the older form of a softer, more bread-like, produ...

Goose pieces stewed with onions, spices, wine or ale and thickened and darkened with either burned bread or boiled blood (Cury 1390, Liber Cure 1430, Austin 144...

A general term for any form of cake made on a flat griddle.

A dish of chopped, cooked, fish livers (Cury 1390, Austin 1440)

Omelette with chopped fried onions (Austin 1440)

Minced meat, typically pork, broth with finely chopped herbs and whole egg, baked in a dish. Later versions have a pastry case (Cury 1390, Austin 1440, Gerard 1...

Small, shallow (c 3ins diameter, ½ins deep) sweet shortcrust open base filled with fruit jam and baked.

A dish of minced herbs, sometimes with minced meat or fish, thickened 'til it be standing' with, for instance, egg or breadcrumbs (Cury 1390, Austin 1440, etc.)

Dish of layered meat broth, pasta and cheese.

Beaten whole egg in a frying-pan, a bread slice placed on before the egg sets, the whole turned over to cook. Served with sugar.

General term for solid foods made from milk, such as cheese, or in Austin 1440, pancakes.

A soup so thick that you can literally 'stand a spoon up in it'.

Moy or Moise or Moill was a very ancient class of set pudings, the name possibly from the Old French Moller - to mould.

A medieval fried flour-paste patty. Either a flavoured poured-batter fritter, or a sort of fried pasty. One version includes fish (Cury 1390, Austin 1440)

(Oyle Soppys) Fried onions with stale ale, served poured onto toast. An accompaniment for fowl (Austin 1440)

Oysters in a sauce of ginger, sugar, saffron, pepper and salt (Austin 1440).

(also paindemeine, payndmayn, paynedemayne, peyndemayne, payndemayn, paindemain, pandemain, payman, paymen, paynemayn, paynmain, paynman, paynmayn, paynmayne, p...

A milk pudding with honey and saffron (Austin 1440)

Chopped parsley with vinegar, breadcrumbs and salt (Austin 1440)

Roast Peacock appears from the 15th to the 19th Centuries and is still occasionally prepared today, most distinctively in a manner where the whole skin with fea...

The making of milky drinks and liquids from plants is not at all a new idea.

Poached eggs coated in a sauce of egg yolks, milk and spices (Cury 1390, Austin 1440)

Thick toast with spiced honey and pine kernels.

Lozenge-shaped patties of minced pork with egg, fruit (currants, chopped dates) and spices (ginger, pepper), fried.

Porpoises are small cetaceans related to whales and dolphins, though the word has been used to refer to any small dolphin. Rarely eaten now, it appears in sever...

Very thin potato slices fried crisp in oil, seasoned and served as a cold snack.

Eggs soft-cooked in a hollow formed in a pan full of hot salt (Austin 1440)

A confection of spiced nuts cohered into a mass. In one receipt (Cury 1390) fixed with egg, in another (Austin 1440) with honey, perhaps like modern nut brittle...

A quince conserve with rosewater.

A very thick spiced sauce, typically for fish, made of dried fruit boiled in wine (Cury 1390, Austin 1440, AW 1591)

A small ball or patty of minced pork and spices, encased in dough and fried (Austin 1440)

Short grain rice boiled or baked in sweetened milk or cream until sticky. Flavourings, commonly nutmeg, but sometimes vanilla, almonds or a few raisins are occa...

Image: Gainsborough Old Hall

Thickened cream flavoured with sweet spices and rose petals (Cury 1390, Austin 1440)

Fried Ryschewys

This name appears in several 15th Century cookbooks. Its meaning and origin are obscure.

Almond milk boiled with sweet spices. It isn't clear if 'sardeyne' is 'sardine'.

A 'Sardine' is not a type of fish, but a category: the term is applied to any small silvery oily fish, typically a small fish of the Herring family, Clupea pilc...

Toasted bread soaked in a broth, sweetened and coloured with saffron.

A thickened cream confection flavoured with hawthorn flowers (Cury 1390, Austin 1440). Our corresponden Alex Bray describes the taste as; "hard to describe. The...

Minced pork in almond milk with spices, thickened to a semi-solid with eggs and rice flour. Served with a wine-and-honey syrup (Austin 1440)

Ornamental forms, often of sugar or moulded paste, either as table decorations, or to be eaten.

A sauce for game, eg. hare, made from the blood of the game with spices and ale, thickened with bread (Austin 1440)

A pudding or omelette of green leaf vegetables with fillers such as breadcrumbs, flavoured with tansy. Formerly popular at Easter-time.

A drink of almond milk with spices and wine.

Slices of bread heated rapidly so as to crisp the surface. Served with preserves, especially marmalade, and butter at breakfast, or as a snack.

Chopped dates, figs, raisins and almonds strung on a necklace-like thread and wrapped around a spit which is then rotated in front of a fire while wine-and-flou...

"I must have Saffron to colour the Warden Pies"

Old term for a mix of green vegetables, often with butter and oatmeal, known since the 9th Century. (Austin 1440, etc)

An ancient dish of a pig stomach filled with spiced pork, coloured and stuck over with spit almonds to imitate a sea-urchin or hedgehog. The spelling 'Yrchin' i...