Most of us imagine that a medieval banquet would have consisted of a series of great set pieces like Sir Osbert Sitwell’s recipe: ‘You first captured a swan - having previously been granted, of course, the necessary royal permission - and then stuffed it with a peacock, inside which you had placed a pheasant, which contained a partridge, and so ad infinitum.’ But the first written recipes in English, produced by Richard II’s cooks in 1391, have an amazingly modem ring about them. I was surprised by the variety of fruits and vegetables available; the numbers of ways of preparing fish, both salt and ‘green’; the different recipes for meat and game; the imaginative use of seasonings, wines and herbs; and the great variety of the recipes themselves. One, for example, advocates the use of grapes to stuff a chicken, together with garlic, parsley and sage.
