Cooking and Dining in Medieval England - Softcover

Peter Brears

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1903018870 ISBN 13: 9781903018873

Publisher: Prospect Books, 2012

Synopsis

This new work by Peter Brears, perhaps Britain's foremost expert on the historical kitchen, looks at these important elements of cooking and dining. 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. 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 Peter Brears in hundreds of demonstrations to the public and cooking for museum displays. Finally there are chapters on the service of dinner and the rituals that grew up around these. Here, Peter Brears has drawn a 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.

About this title

Review:

This is an important and authoritative book.'--Constance B. Hieatt"Speculum" (01/01/0001)

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"

About the Author:

Peter Brears is former Director of the Leeds City Museums and one of England's foremost authorities on domestic artifacts and historical kitchens and cooking technology. His previous, recent book with Prospect Books is Traditional Food in Yorkshire.

About this edition

• Publisher: Prospect Books
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1903018870
• ISBN 13: 9781903018873
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 560