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Cooking and Dining in Medieval England

by Peter Brears

The history of medieval food and cookery has received a fair amount of attention from the point of view of recipes (of which many survive) and of the general context of feasts and feasting. It has never, as yet, been studied with an eye to the real mechanics of food production and service: the equipment used, the household organisation, the architectural arrangements for kitchens, store-rooms, pantries, larders, cellars, and domestic administration. This new work by Peter Brears, perhaps Britain's foremost expert on the historical kitchen, looks at these important elements of cooking and dining. He also subjects the many surviving documents relating to food service - household ordinances, regulations and commentaries - to critical study in an attempt to reconstruct the precise rituals and customs of dinner.

An underlying intention is to rehabilitate the medieval Englishman as someone with an appreciation of food and cookery, decent manners, and a delicate sense of propriety and seemliness. To dispel the myth, that is, of medieval feasting as an orgy of gluttony and bad manners, usually provided with meat that has gone slightly off, masked by liberal additions of heady spices.

A series of chapters looks at the cooking departments in large households: the counting house, dairy, brewhouse, pastry, boiling house and kitchen. These are illustrated by architectural perspectives of surviving examples in castles and manor houses throughout the land. Then there are chapters dealing with the various sorts of kitchen equipment: fires, fuel, pots and pans. Sections are then devoted to recipes and types of food cooked. The recipes are those which have been used and tested by Brears in hundreds of demonstrations to the public and cooking for museum displays. Finally there are chapters on the service of dinner (the service departments including the buttery, pantry and ewery) and the rituals that grew up around these. Here, Brears has drawn a wonderful strip cartoon of the serving of a great feast (the washing of hands, the delivery of napery, the tasting for poison, etc.) which will be of permanent utility to historical re-enactors who wish to get their details right.

Peter Brears was formerly director of the museums at York and Leeds and has worked all his life in the field of domestic history. He has written extensively on traditional foods and cookery in Yorkshire, as well as a groundbreaking illustrated catalogue of domestic and farmhouse materials in Torquay Museum. He supervised the reconstruction of several important historical kitchens, including those at Hampton Court, Ham House, Cowdray Castle and Belvoir Castle. 557p, 74 b/w illus. (Prospect Books Hardback 2008, Paperback 2012)

Review Quotes

"This is an important and authoritative book."

Constance B. Hieatt
Speculum (July 2009)

"...a work of great erudition..."

Gastronomica (2010)

"If you have any idea of how people ate in England six hundred years ago, you may well have gotten it from Hollywood productions featuring castles in which rollicking banqueters dined exclusively on whole suckling pig, and practiced their belching and food-throwing at table. It won’t come as any surprise that what makes good movies can make bad history. If you are interested in food, cooking, and historic recipes, and you want to get a more accurate picture than Hollywood offers, Peter Brears is your man."

Rob Hardy

Awards & Recognition

Winner of the André Simon Memorial Fund Food Book Award for 2009.

Related Titles

• Spices and Comfits: Collected Papers on Medieval Food
  by Johanna Maria van Winter

• Jellies & Their Moulds
  by Peter Brears

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