This wasn’t exactly an SCA feast in the usual sense — it was a demonstration meal prepared for the Garner Lions Club, who lets our group use their site for SCA practices, meetings & events on a regular basis, as one element of an all-day demo. About forty people ate, maybe half of them Lions members and the rest local SCA folks who’d been involved in putting the broader demo together.
One of the main themes I wanted to showcase for our guests was that medieval cooking gets a bad reputation it doesn’t deserve. Cooks of this period worked with fresh seasonal ingredients, layered spices thoughtfully (not to mask spoilage — that’s a preposterous modern myth), and produced food sophisticated enough to impress royal courts and wealthy households alike. My goal here was to show people that medieval food was more than renaissance faire turkey legs, and for them to eat and enjoy it. To that goal, the dishes I chose were specifically ones that had reasonably close modern analogues – herb tart? it’s a quiche. Roast chicken? one of the most familiar dishes possible. Custard and strawberries with a crispy wafer? I’m pretty sure I saw that on a bistro menu last weekend. The only “challenging” or “uniquely medieval” aspect was perhaps the cameline sauce – a sauce served on the side isn’t unusual, but bread thickened sauces and cinnamon-flavored savory dishes aren’t found on the average dinner table. I wanted to include something of that sort, though, else we’d just be recreating Medieval Times™ .
I chose a theme of England and France in the 14th and 15th centuries — a relatively coherent window to work in, with multiple major primary sources to draw from: the Ménagier de Paris (Paris, c. 1393), the Forme of Cury (England, c. 1390), and Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books (Arundel MS 334, England, 15th century). The menu itself follows some of the structure of a feast of that time and place: multiple courses served in sequence, each with several dishes brought to the table at once. However, the dishes served have been separated into more modern courses – an actual 14th century feast would have included multiple courses, each including a variety of dishes both savory and sweet. The emphasis is on variety within each course — savory and mild, rich and light — rather than the single-protein-plus-sides pattern we’re more used to today.
The Menu
First Course
- Herb Tart: An egg-and-herb tart from the Ménagier de Paris. The original calls for beet-leaves, parsley, chervil, spinach, and two cheeses; I substituted spinach, mint, and tarragon for reasons of availability. The mint plus tarragon combination works remarkably well in this context.
- Bread: White bread — which in the medieval period was a luxury made from refined flour, found on wealthy tables as much as a status signal as a food. Most people ate coarser breads of rye, oats, or mixed grains.
- Butter: House-made cultured butter. Butters’ use as an accompaniment for bread in the Anglo-French tradition is undocumented and not entirely proven. Still, Scappi was sending entire butter statues to table in the 16th century, and butter was important enough in Normandy that indulgences for its consumption during Lent funded entire cathedral towers, so it’s not entirely unlikely either.
- Salad with Radishes: Simple green salads are found across 14th–16th century European sources. One noticeable difference from a modern salad is that herbs appear in the greens themselves rather than in the dressing. Radishes are noted in the Tacuinum Sanitatis as beneficial when eaten before a meal — serving them at the start has roots in medieval medical tradition.
Second Course
- Roast Chicken with Cameline Sauce: Cameline is one of the most widely-attested medieval sauces, appearing in virtually every major French and English cookbook of the 14th and 15th centuries.
- Cormarye (Braised Pork): Loosely adapted from “Cormarye” in the Forme of Cury — pork marinated in coriander, caraway, garlic, and wine, then roasted, with the drippings served alongside in broth. I cooked it as a braise both for scheduling reasons and to make the final dish more texturally distinct from the roast chicken sharing the course. Cormarye as written (a marinated, roasted pork loin) produces a result that isn’t dramatically different in texture or flavor from a spiced chicken thigh, and I wanted contrast.
- Mustard: Ground mustard seed with wine and vinegar. Mustard was the standard table condiment of the medieval period; virtually every major menu source includes it as an accompaniment to roasted meats.
- Frumenty: Cooked grain enriched with milk and (optionally) with eggs— one of the most widely documented dishes in medieval European cooking, across English, French, and Italian sources. This is an almond milk version (commonly used for fast-day and elegant versions). Eggs are omitted to keep it vegan, and mushrooms are added; they’re documented in contemporary sources but typically served as their own dish rather than combined with the frumenty.
- Peas: Fresh peas cooked in broth with ground parsley, following the Ménagier de Paris potage vert and the Arundel MS 334 recipe for “Grene pesen unstreynet with herbs.”
- Carrots: Simply roasted with oil, spices and salt. Platina’s instruction to “cook root vegetables in the coals” gives the general period backing. (On the day of the feast, although roasting was planned, oven space demanded these were done in a stovetop braise. Texturally a bit different, although I did work to develop at least a bit of caramelization, still tasty.)
Dessert
- Pizelles (Anise Wafers): Thin anise-flavored wafers made in a patterned iron. Wafers were the standard conclusion to a medieval feast, documented from the 13th century onward; the tradition of ending with wafers and spiced wine (hippocras) was widespread.
- Strawberries in Wine: Fresh strawberries macerated in white wine with sugar — a simple seasonal preparation consistent with period fruit-in-wine traditions.
- Daryoles (Baked Custard): Individual baked custards from Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books (Arundel MS 334), served in small ramekins. Similar in effect to a creme brûlée without the sugar topping, which wouldn’t be invented until almost the 18th century.
How It Went
This one went well!. A smaller feast with under 50 guests is just a different beast than feeding 120 (or 300) — the quantities are more manageable, the pressure is lower, and there’s actually room to think. Due to some changing numbers over the course of planning, we did cook for closer to 56, which left us with substantial leftovers, but we stayed roughly in budget and people took most of the leftovers home so I’m not unhappy about that.
Service came in within 15 minutes of schedule across all three courses, and even that delay wasn’t on the kitchen end — we were holding prepped platters waiting for diners to either get situated or finish the previous course. Every dish that was meant to went out hot, which I had made a specific priority when planning the schedule
A few advance-prep decisions that worked particularly well:
- Pizelles were made the night before using an electric iron — the right call for an event where the feast would be in mid-afternoon rather than in the evening. NC humidity isn’t kind to wafers, so we shoved them in the oven to re-crisp before service, which solved it nicely.
- Bread dough was made the night before and cold-fermented overnight, then shaped, proofed, and baked first thing on arrival. Fresh bread without the chaos of making dough from scratch the morning of – again, otherwise the scheduling for a mid-afternoon feast wouldn’t work.
- Frumenty was cooked fully in advance and reheated by boil-in-bag, which worked cleanly with no texture loss. This is important because frumenty is extremely easy to scorch.
The Lions Club members loved it — genuinely curious about the food and engaged with the handouts.
The planned Cooking Schedule for the event. Mostly accurate, although a few things moved to the stovetop instead of the oven.
Sources
More sources will be added as individual recipe posts go up.
One Comment
Fantastic!