Image: Master chef of Richard II of England · Public domain
The Forme of Cury (printed editions)
- Year
- 1780
- Era
- 18th century
- Origin
- England · Europe
- Language
- Middle English
- Category
- Specialist
The Forme of Cury, edited by the antiquary Samuel Pegge and first printed in 1780, made publicly available one of the earliest substantial English culinary manuscripts, a vellum roll compiled by the master-cooks of Richard II in the late fourteenth century. Its appearance in print opened medieval English cookery to scholarly study, preserving recipes, ingredients, and terminology that document courtly gastronomy, spice use, and Anglo-Norman influence on the royal kitchen.
Cooking from this book
Pynnonade
A sweet-spiced pine nut pottage characteristic of Richard II's court cookery, where pine kernels (pynes) were imported from the Mediterranean and combined with dried fruit and warm spices. The editor Samuel Pegge notes the dish takes its name from the pynes employed within it.
Take pynes and fry them in oil or lard. Take ground dates, raisins, good powder, and salt, and mix with the pynes. Add powder-fort, saffron, and salt. Serve forth.
Reproduced from the public-domain text via Project Gutenberg. Spelling lightly modernised; the headnote is editorial.
Blank Desire (Chese and Capon in Almond Milk)
A rich pounded capon and cheese pottage thickened with almond milk and rice flour, coloured yellow with saffron and egg yolks, and finished with whole cloves and powdered galingale. This is the recipe reproduced in facsimile in Pegge's 1780 edition as a specimen of the manuscript's hand.
Take the cheese and of flesh of capons, or of hens, and hack small and grind them small in a mortar. Take milk of almonds with the broth of fresh beef, or other fresh flesh, and put the flesh in the milk or in the broth and set them to the fire. Alye them with flour of rice, or gastbon, or amydoun, as chargeaunt as the blank desire. With yolks of eggs and saffron for to make it yellow. And when it is dressed in dishes with blank desires, stick above cloves de gilofre, and strew powder of galingale above, and serve it forth.
Reproduced from the public-domain text via Project Gutenberg. Spelling lightly modernised; the headnote is editorial.
