For many years, I only had a part-time permanent job as a museum curator, and I made up my weekly hours with education work and even re-enacting, at various museums. Food and cooking was a natural extension of my work on medieval and early modern pottery. I had an evening lecture on medieval food and cooking too, which was very popular with local associations, usually to follow their annual general meetings or annual dinners, and Dame Eileen Currant's Tudor Christmas had a regular spot at a local museum. Since the museum which was my home base was at an important Roman site, I ended up doing Roman food demonstrations at open days as well. I gradually accumulated a collection of replica kitchen equipment, and a set of recipes for demonstration purposes. I came to realise that for all of these periods, many of the recipes had a characteristic set of instructions, as to both ingredients and methods, which could be summarised as follows.

In cibum Romanum – to cook Roman food.

Pepper.  Honey.  Fish sauce.  Asafoetida. Herbs. Wine vinegar.

Roman recipes mostly come from the so-called “Cookbook of Apicius”, and many of them are extremely cryptic, often consisting of nothing more than a series of nouns. Project Gutenberg has a translation of Apicius with comments. The line above is a summary of the majority of Roman recipes, in the Apicius style.  To make anything taste Roman, use some or all of these ingredients. They seem to have used them to flavour everything from sliced cucumber to hard-boiled eggs to roast chicken and other birds (including parrot). But you don’t need to try to find sows udders or larks’ brains to go Roman. Most of the time they ate quite ordinary things like chicken or fish or lentils, flavoured as above. Serve them with wholemeal bread, and wine mixed with water.

The herbs could be any of lovage, mint, cumin seed, coriander seed, fresh coriander, oregano, celery seeds, caraway seeds, parsley, savory, thyme, fennel seeds, or ginger. Avoid rue or pennyroyal in case of bad effects.

Thai fish sauce makes a good substitute for the Roman version (“garum”). Hing or asafoetida is the nearest thing to the Roman herb silphium, which was a popular if expensive flavouring. Pine kernels were also used a lot. They were pretty fond of pouring beaten eggs over everything and turning it into a sort of omelette or frittata. Don’t forget that pepper was considered to go well on sweet stuff. Try dates stuffed with pine nuts, fried in honey and sprinkled with freshly-ground black pepper; they are delicious.

Moving on to the medieval period, we come to works such as the Menagier de Paris (The Goodman of Paris), a sort of medieval Mrs Beeton in French dating from the late 14^th century. The author is unknown but it is written as if narrated by an elderly Parisian householder to his inexperienced fifteen year-old wife, and gives instructions on almost everything, from how to roast a swan to how to make ink. The Form of Curye is one of the oldest surviving English cookery books, attributed to Richard II’s head cooks, also 14^th century. So:

For to make your food taste medieval

Smite hym in pieces

Fry hym up in grece

And do thereto good herbyes

Nym wine oder water

And seethe it tyl it be enow

And serve it forthe…

Smite i.e. chop it into pieces. This works for anything, meat or vegetable, but avoid potatoes and tomatoes because they come from South America which hadn’t been discovered yet.

Fry it in whatever you usually fry stuff in, but it should be animal fat (‘grease’)

Add whatever herbs you think will go well with it: thyme, parsley, sage, bay leaves and basil. Do NOT use chilli: again, it hadn’t been discovered yet. “Herbyes” included vegetables so add any that you like. The onion and cabbage families were popular.

Add wine or water

Seethe i.e. boil/simmer it until it is done. Medieval recipes didn’t give cooking times. After all, they didn’t have any clocks. The only clocks were in churches and other important buildings, and they were not very accurate. They didn’t give temperatures either, because they had no way of measuring them. They just had to move the pot closer to or further from the flames. Use your judgement.

Serve it forth, usually in a little wooden bowl with a spoon, accompanied by some “pain de main” (white rolls) or if you are a bit more down-market, some “maslin" i.e. mixed wheat and rye bread. And ale or wine of course. It’s really most authentic if two or three people share the same drinking cup…

If you want to show off, the medieval lord would expect dishes which included rice, almonds, rosewater, sugar, dried and citrus fruits, and a hint of exotic spices like cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger. These ingredients were mostly brought back to England from the eastern Mediterranean by the Crusaders. They might be used in something like a rice pudding flavoured with rose petals and a lot of cream, or a chicken dish, where the chicken is boiled, pounded to a paste, and then reheated with wine, ground almonds, dried figs and spices. And if you want to serve a medieval salad, leave out the tomatoes and peppers, go heavy on the spring onions, and use edible flowers and lots of herbs.

Finally we arrive in the 16^th century. For reasons of convenience in transporting the equipment in a small car, and setting it up in a very cramped corner of a small gallery, I usually concentrated on banqueting stuff, which may be summarised quite simply: sugar. They had just got hold of the New World and access to sugar cane in quantity.

A Tudor Banquet

 ‘Suckets’: candied everything – lettuce stalks, cherries, orange peel, rose petals, rosemary flowers, whole spices, etc, simmered in sugar syrup over a chafing dish.

“Manus Christi”: little sweets made of sugar flavoured with rosewater and decorated with gold leaf

‘Marchpane’: marzipan on a pastry base with a layer of icing baked onto it.

Gingerbread: made with breadcrumbs, honey and spices including ginger; it was often coloured red and shaped in small wooden moulds

Sweetened wine

If you were a Tudor with social pretensions, the banquet was a dessert course at the end of a feast. There are many surviving books with recipes for making banqueting stuff; The good huswife's Jewell by Thomas Dalton is as good as any. A banquet involved sweetmeats of all kinds, served on plates moulded from sugar paste, accompanied by sweetened wine drunk from goblets moulded from sugar paste, and enlivened by music, entertainers, and a “subtlety”, a huge sugar sculpture carried in by several servants. This often included a tasteful reference to the importance of the host, such as a coat of arms; or perhaps a reference to the occasion, for example a woman in childbirth if it was a wedding.

If you felt that providing your guests with sugar plates was a bit over-the-top, you might have a set of little circular wooden trenchers decorated in bright colours with gold leaf. Many of these little plates had a poem on the back. If you were going to eat a wet sucket dripping with syrup (my favourite is candied lettuce stalks), you might even use a fork. Fingers were still used for the rest of the feast.

If you were wealthy enough, you might have a separate banqueting house, where you went to enjoy your dessert after the rest of the feast was over. Some people built them on the roof of their mansion, others out in the garden, where they might be a permanent structure, or something made for the occasion out of green branches decked with flowers. My favourite was one built up a tree.

All this sugar was very bad for Tudor teeth, as Queen Elizabeth I is said to have found out the hard way!

Some of these dishes are really yummy. So if you get tired of making your food taste Chinese or Italian or Indian or Mexican, try a Roman, Medieval or Tudor dish instead.