Ymir – 2023

Ymir is traditionally a Viking event, but 2023 broke with tradition — the event was themed around Shakespeare’s Hamlet, with war points assigned based on whether fighters and artisans declared for Hamlet or his uncle Claudius. The feast followed the theme.

Elizabethan England is a well-documented period for food, with a good variety of household books and published cookeries to draw on. The sources for this feast cluster mostly in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries — squarely contemporary with Shakespeare himself, who was writing Hamlet around 1600.

Selected recipes are linked below. Primary sources for each recipe are also included at those links.

Menu

First Course

• Roast Beef with Pepper Sauce: Beef with pepper sauce appears as a menu item in both A Book of Cookrye (1591) and The good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchin (1594); recipe adapted from Handmaide’s roast venison with pepper sauce.
• Pork Pye: Similar recipes are found in both A Noble Boke Off Cookry Ffor a Prynce Houssolde or Eny Other Estately Houssolde, 1468 and The Accomplisht Cook, 1660.
• Sallet: The whole body of cookery dissected, 1661 (Mushrooms), The Good Huswifes Jewell, 1596 (Sallet)
• Oat and Spinach Potage: The English Housewife, 1615
• Flavored butters: Delightes for ladies…, 1602
• Manchet: Fine white bread rolls — the highest-status bread of the period, appropriate to a royal progress feast. The Good Huswifes Jewell, 1596

Second Course

• Rice of Genoa: Gentyll manly Cokere (~1500)
• Buttered Worts: Gentyll manly Cokere (~1500)
• Chicken with Green Sauce: Similar recipes are found in several manuscripts, including A Noble Boke Off Cookry Ffor a Prynce Houssolde or Eny Other Estately Houssolde, 1468, and The good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchin, 1594, among others.
• White Fricassee of Chicken: Recipe book of Sarah Longe, 1610
• Calvered Salmon with Beaten Butter: The Accomplisht Cook, 1660 (Salmon), The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Kt. Opened, 1669 (Butter Sauce)
• Cheese Tarts: The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Kt. Opened, 1669

Banquet

• Apple Fritters: Recipe book of Sarah Longe, 1610
• Candied Citrus Peels: Delightes for ladies…, 1602
• Gingerbread: Mentioned in Delightes for ladies… (1602); recipe is earlier — Harleian MS 279, 1420
• Digby Cakes: The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Kt. Opened, 1669

Background: The Sources

The recipe sources for this feast span the late fifteenth through mid-seventeenth centuries, with the majority clustering in the Elizabethan and early Jacobean period.

• Gentyll manly Cokere (~1500) is an early Tudor manuscript, and the earliest primary source used here. It contributed two dishes — Rice of Genoa and Buttered Worts.
• A Book of Cookrye (1591, attributed to A.W.) is a later Elizabethan cookbook that went through several editions, expanding with each. It’s a solid general-purpose source for the period.
• The good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchin (1594, with a later edition in 1597) appears here as a supporting source for the roast beef — both it and A Book of Cookrye list beef with pepper sauce as a menu item, and Handmaide’s recipe for roast venison with pepper sauce provided the basis for the dish as cooked.
• The Good Huswifes Jewell (1596) is a practical Elizabethan household cookbook covering both cookery and medicine, typical of the genre.
• Delightes for ladies… (1602, Sir Hugh Plat) is less a cookery book than a collection of recipes for preserving, candying, and distilling — it’s the source for the flavored butters and the candied citrus peels, and also mentions gingerbread, though for that recipe I reached back to Harleian MS 279 (1420), which preserves an earlier version of the same dish.
• The Recipe Book of Sarah Longe (1610) is a manuscript household recipe collection, representative of the genre of personal receipt books kept by gentlewomen of the period. It contributed the fricassee and the apple fritters.
• The English Housewife (1615, Gervase Markham) is a comprehensive Jacobean household guide covering cooking alongside other domestic arts — more systematic than the earlier sources and particularly useful for understanding how dishes related to each other within a meal.
• The Accomplisht Cook (1660, Robert May) is a substantial professional cookery book from the Restoration period, drawing on recipes and techniques developed across May’s long career. It’s slightly post-Elizabethan but documents a culinary tradition with deep roots in the preceding century.
• The whole body of cookery dissected (1661, William Rabisha) is another Restoration-era work, used here specifically for the mushroom component of the sallet.
• The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Kt. Opened (1669) is a posthumously published collection of recipes gathered by Sir Kenelme Digbie, a fascinating figure — natural philosopher, naval commander, and apparently an obsessive recipe collector. It contributed the butter sauce for the salmon, the cheese tarts, and the Digby cakes.

As supporting citations rather than primary sources: A Noble Boke Off Cookry Ffor a Prynce Houssolde or Eny Other Estately Houssolde (1468) shows that both the pork pie and the chicken with green sauce have antecedents well before the Elizabethan period, though the recipes used here are based on later versions.

A note on methodology: several of the earlier sources here are used to support dishes whose primary recipes come from later in the period. Where a dish appears in substantially similar form in both an early source and a later one, I’ve taken that continuity as reasonable evidence that the dish would have been familiar in the intervening decades as well — the detailed redaction is in the individual recipe posts.

Background: Menu Arrangement

Full feast menus appear in A Propre new booke of Cokerye (1545), A Book of Cookrye (1591), and Markham’s The English Housewife (1615), covering both dinner and supper. I also consulted the Eltham Ordinances (1526), a set of household regulations issued under Henry VIII governing the operation of the royal household including meal structure — not a recipe source, but useful for understanding the structural patterns the later cookery books inherited.

A Propre new booke of Cokerye is one of the earliest printed English cookbooks, a short practical manual aimed at middle-class households rather than courtly ones and notable for including some of the earliest printed English menu structures. Markham’s The English Housewife is the most systematic of the three, and the most useful for understanding how dishes related to each other within a course.

All three sources describe a two-course structure, with the first course consisting of “gross” meats — larger, less delicate, less expensive cuts — and the second course consisting of more refined and expensive dishes, smaller birds, and baked goods. The table below shows the comparison across sources:

The table is included as a screenshot, as it doesn’t render well in HTML.

For this feast, I followed that two-course pattern for the savory dishes and split the sweets into a third course, partly for pacing and partly because modern diners expect dessert to arrive distinctly at the end rather than interspersed with everything else. Luckily, there is a late Elizabethan model for that – the “banqueting” course. The court of Elizabeth I was so fond of sugar that entire rooms were built for the sole purpose of relaxing with a variety of sweets.

Logistical Notes

This feast was held at Camp Millstone 4H in Sanford, NC — a well-equipped kitchen that’s hosted several Ymirs. I originally planned around a budget of about $1,540 for 120 servings, covering 112 paid guests plus high table, and did the initial prep work and grocery planning against that number. The event ultimately provided a larger advance of $1,754, which allowed me to add dishes and upgrade quantities; final grocery spending came to about $1,543, leaving roughly $212 of the advance unspent. Groceries were split across Restaurant Depot, Food Lion, and Harris Teeter (based on pricing), Sprouts for a few specialty items, and some Amazon orders for non-perishables placed earlier in the week.

Timing ran a bit long — probably 20–30 minutes behind where I wanted to be, partly due to thinner staffing than I’d planned for. Something I keep in mind for future post-Covid feasts: budget the man-hours conservatively.

Additional Background

For those curious about the logistical planning that goes into a feast like this, some of the planning is below.

Appendix 1: Timing

As for timing, the chart for this feast is below (it doesn’t translate well out of PDF). This was printed in tabloid form and posted in multiple places throughout the kitchen – it’s helpful for keeping the entire staff on track as each task can be checked off as completed and the color coding indicates where any given dish should be at a time.

Appendix 2: Budget

Dish	Serving Size	Total Amount Needed	Amount Budgeted
Oat pottage w/ spinach	1/2 cup	5 gallons	$67.87
Sallet	3–4 oz	40 lbs	$181.50
Roast Beef	3 oz	30 lbs	$203.73
Pork pie	1 pie	144 pies	$110.45
Bread	1 roll	144 rolls	$29.17
Butters	1 tbs	4.5 lbs	$53.74
Rice of Genoa	1/2 cup	4.5 gallons	$134.94
Buttered worts	2 oz	20 lbs cabbage +	$112.88
Chicken with sops + green sauce	1 drumstick	40 lbs	$76.83
Chicken Fricassee	3 oz	27 lbs	$91.87
Calvered Salmon	2 oz	18 lbs	$228.96
Cheese tarte	1/8 pie	18 pies	$167.75
Apple Fritters	2 fritters	10 lbs apples	$83.09
Assorted non-food goods	—	—	—
		Total Cost	$1,542.78
		Original Planning Budget	$1,540.00
		Over/Under Plan	$2.78 over
		Event Advance	$1,754.00
		Advance Remaining	~$211