Roast unicorn, cannabis bread and other culinary delights...

[krusader74]

Roast unicorn, cannabis bread and other culinary delights of the middle ages

Here are some old recipes to add flavor to your Medieval fantasy role-playing...

On honest indulgence and good health

In 1999, the world's oldest printed cookbook was auctioned for about £6,000. The book, entitled De Honesta Voluptate et Valetudine, was written by Italian physician Batholomaeus Platina circa 1480. It's in Latin. It's 93 pages. It was bound in calf leather on wooden boards with two brass clasps. It contains 300 recipes and their medicinal use. About 20 copies survived. Recipes include:

• Medieval cannabis bread, to ward off the plague
• Cooked bear
• Left-over-hog

Here's an example, a recipe for Exicium ex Pulpa (meat sausage):

1. Finely slice a veal haunch and add lard
2. Combine and grind marjoram and parsely
3. Combine and beat egg yolks and grated cheese
4. Mix everything together
5. Use the mixture to stuff pork (or veal) casing in egg-sized lumps
6. Cook the sausages on a spit over a slow fire

Roast Unicorn

For April Fools Day in 2012, the British Library reported that they found a 14th c. "unicorn cookbook" complete with pictures in the margin. The pictures are hilarious:




(More recipes and pictures on their website.)

Even though this book is a joke, you could use the idea and pictures in a medieval fantasy campaign setting.

Zinzibar

In 2013, the oldest known Medieval cooking manuscript was found. It was written in the Durham Cathedral's monastery in 1140. Like De Honesta Voluptate et Valetudine, it is written in Latin and it concerns itself with health and the medicinal value of the food. Recipes include: "hen in winter" and "tiny little fish." Sauces were important -- they typically feature parsley, sage, pepper, garlic, mustard and coriander. This book was translated into English, and published in 2017:

  Zinziber - Sauces from Poitou: Twelfth-Century Culinary Recipes from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, MS 51 (Google books link) #NotAnEndorsement

(Zinziber is Latin for "Ginger.")

Baking the Law

In 1266, England enacted the Assize of Bread and Ale, the first law in England to regulate food and drink. It regulated the price, weight and quality of beer and bread.

This law was discussed by comedian Sue Perkins on The Great British Bake Off, series 3, episode 1, about 20 minutes into the show. (I'm not providing a link, but you can probably still watch it on dailymotion.)

A court met tri-weekly in baker's hall to try lawbreakers. The court beadle was in charge of tracking down lawbreakers and sending them to trial. The position still exists today, but it is purely ceremonial. Here is the current (as of 2012) beadle, Neil Fletcher, talking with Sue Perkins:



Your punishments for producing illicit beer or bread

1st Offense: You are tied to a gurney by your wrists and ankles and dragged by a horse through the shi filth on the street.



The punishment might seem harsh, but people were baking sand and cobwebs and other illicit substances into the bread that could kill someone.

2nd Offense: You are pilloried at the royal exchange, where people spend the day throwing rotten fruit in your face.

(At least you hope its only rotten fruit that they're throwing in your face...)

3rd Offense: The beadle and a bailiff go to your bakery and smash your ovens so you can no longer operate in the city.

Tragically, the law was repealed in the 19th century, and so the beadle doesn't get to smash ovens anymore.

[Scott Anderson]

Sounds fair. We should bring those punishments back.

[xerxez]

Cannabis bread with bardic accompaniment soothed many an irate king and peasant.

[ritt]

Cobwebs in the bread? What was the deal with that? Did it somehow make baking bread cheaper or was it some odd folk remedy?

[Starbeard]

I think the cobwebs likely were kept in rather than added in. Flour infected with moths and weevils will have 'cobwebs' all over it, and an unscrupulous and/or desperate trader might have tried to get away with selling or using the bad flour instead of writing it off as a loss.

The Assize also put limits on the weight of bread as an indirect way to have quality control on the ingredients. Some of the more commonly cited complaints were bakers sneaking a bit of sand into the meal to make the bread denser, or sneaking stones into the bread to make it heavier at the scales (and then presumably pulling the stones out at market so the buyers don't rat you out—but it would make for a good encounter to have a PC buy some rations, only to discover after the first bite that they're useless and he's broken his tooth!).

[ritt]

"No! No! Don't pick out the cobwebs, that's the best part of authentic Drow elf bread! That's why I paid extra for it!"

-Some 1st level dungeon hipster.