How to Read and Reconstruct a Medieval Recipe

Open a medieval cookery book for the first time and you may discover something rather startling: the recipe appears to have forgotten to be a recipe.

There may be no ingredient quantities. No oven temperature. No cooking time. Ingredients may have unfamiliar names, familiar words may mean something quite different, and the instructions may consist of a short paragraph that seems to assume you already know exactly what you are doing.

In many ways, that is because the text does assume knowledge on the part of its reader.

Reconstructing a medieval recipe therefore involves considerably more than replacing Middle English words with modern ones. It means reading the culinary instructions in context, identifying what the text actually tells us, recognizing what it leaves unstated, researching unfamiliar ingredients and techniques, comparing related evidence, and finally making a series of informed decisions in the kitchen.

Those decisions are where interpretation becomes reconstruction.

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Brǣdan Fisc: Reconstructing Apicius' Roman Fish Baked with Coriander

Fish seasoned with coriander and finished with vinegar, served as the Roman centerpiece of the third course at Ceilidh XVI, March 29, 2003.

Some historical recipes disappear and leave us to reconstruct dinner from shells, seeds, tools, and scraps of language. Others survive, but the reconstruction slowly wanders away from them.

Brǣdan Fisc belongs to the second category. I served this fish more than twenty years ago as part of an Anglo-Saxon-inspired feast, but I knew even then that the dish itself was Roman. The recipe came from the collection traditionally known as Apicius. Over time, however, the written version on Give It Forth became simplified. Olive oil and black pepper appeared as if they belonged to the ancient recipe. The fish was baked uncovered. The vinegar finish disappeared completely.

Going back to the Latin tells a different story. Apicius calls for fish coated with pounded salt and coriander seed, placed in a dish, covered, sealed, baked in an oven, and finished with very sharp vinegar. That method is much closer to what I remember actually serving than the simplified recipe currently preserved in the feast post. This article is therefore not about inventing a Roman fish dish. It is about recovering one.

Brǣdan Fisc – fish baked with crushed coriander seed and finished with sharp vinegar, reconstructed from the Roman recipe collection traditionally known as Apicius.

Medieval Fig Pottage in Three Colors | Harley MS 279 Fygeye

.Ciij. Fygeye | Harley MS 279, 1430s | New reconstruction, August 2026

I nearly missed the best part of this recipe.

When I added .Ciij. Fygeye to an older Rapeye post in 2021, I treated it as one more fig dish: figs, ale, bread, pine nuts, cinnamon, saffron, saunders. Useful, certainly. Interesting, yes.

But I had flattened the ending into an ingredient list, and the ending is where the cook has some fun.

The base is wonderfully simple. Figs are boiled until soft, pounded, mixed with ale, thickened with grated bread, and studded with whole pine nuts. Cinnamon is scattered over it at the dresser. Then comes the flourish:

if you want, color it in three ways.

One portion can remain the natural deep brown-purple of the figs. One can be colored red with saunders. One can be turned gold with saffron.

Suddenly this is not merely a bowl of cooked figs. It is a tiny lesson in medieval table color, presentation, and the delight cooks took in making familiar ingredients look surprising.

And unlike its sweeter Rapeye cousins, this recipe asks for no added sugar at all. The figs do that work themselves.

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