The Historical Kitchen

Welcome to The Historical Kitchen, a working reference hub for cooks who are translating, testing, scaling, and serving historical recipes in modern kitchens.

Here you will find measurement guides, apothecary weights, spice conversions, substitution help, and interactive tools designed for historical cookery, feast planning, and practical kitchen use.

Measurements & Conversions

Historical Kitchen Measurements & Conversion Guide

A practical guide for converting historical and modern recipe measurements, including oven terms, liquid and dry measures, weights, and common kitchen equivalents.

Open the Measurements & Conversion Guide

Ounce to Tablespoon Conversion FAQ

A focused FAQ for dry ingredient conversions, especially useful when a recipe gives ounces but the cook needs a spoon-based kitchen estimate.

Open the Ounce to Tablespoon FAQ

Apothecary & Historical Weights

Apothecary Weights and Measures

A reference for historical apothecary measurements, including weights and measures that appear in early medical, household, and culinary texts.

Open Apothecary Weights and Measures

Spices, Herbs & Substitutions

Spice Substitution Chart

A useful spice and herb conversion guide for cooks working from recipes that list ounces, tablespoons, or less familiar proportions.

Open the Spice Substitution Chart

Historical Cooking Knowledge

Historical cooking often asks us to work between worlds: manuscript language, household practice, feast service, modern food safety, and the reality of what is actually in the pantry.

This section will grow as more Give It Forth reference pages are added for interpreting historical recipes, understanding historical kitchen language, and moving from source text to tested dish.

Interactive Kitchen Tools

The Steward’s Table

An interactive historical recipe tool for scaling recipes, generating kitchen copies, and helping cooks move from small test batches to practical serving quantities.

Open The Steward’s Table

Future Tools Coming Soon

Planned additions may include more historical measurement tools, ingredient reference charts, feast-planning helpers, and printable kitchen resources for cooks working with medieval, Renaissance, early modern, and later historical recipes.

As new tools are built, they will be added here so this page can serve as the central workbench for practical historical cooking.

About This Page

AI assistance disclosure: This hub page was organized and drafted with AI assistance, then reviewed and edited for Give It Forth.

The Steward’s Table

Feast Recipe Calculator

Scale medieval and historical recipes for feasts, events, or home kitchens. Print kitchen-ready copies or save scaled recipes as PDFs.

Features:

Scale recipes up or down
Print kitchen-ready feast copies
Supports historic texts and modern redactions
Save scaled recipes as PDFs

Currently in active testing. Please double-check scaled ingredient quantities, especially for ranges and unusually formatted historical recipes.

Visit The Steward’s Table →

Weekend Spotlight

Weekend Spotlight: Reconstructing an Anglo-Saxon Feast (2003–2026)

This summer, we're revisiting one of the oldest projects in the Give It Forth archive: Ceilidh XVI, an Anglo-Saxon-inspired feast first prepared in 2003 and originally influenced by Mary Savelli's Tastes of Anglo-Saxon England.

More than twenty years later, our understanding of Anglo-Saxon foodways has grown considerably. What began as a feast recreation has become an opportunity to revisit each dish, reexamine the sources, and explore what current research can tell us about early medieval cooking.

The menu includes:

Mearh Smeamete – Sausage Casserole
Hlaf – Bread
Æppla Syfling – Apple Butter
Caules Wyrtmete – Cabbage Salad
Hriðer Smeamete – Stewed Beef
Beren Briw – Barley Polenta
Hunigbæe Moran – Honeyed Carrots
Sciellfisc – Shellfish*
Brǣdan Fisc – Fish Baked with Coriander
Pisan – Peas with Salt and Oil*
Sumerlio Mearhgehæcc – Summer Pudding***
Hunigæppel – Honey Nut Cakes

Recent research has already revisited Æppla Syfling and Mearh Smeamete, and additional dishes will continue to be explored as the project develops. Some recipes remain remarkably strong. Others reveal just how much historical food research has evolved over the past two decades.

This project isn't simply about recreating a feast. It's about understanding how we interpret the past, how historical cooking scholarship changes over time, and what those changes can teach us about Anglo-Saxon food culture. Many of the measurements, ingredient references, and kitchen techniques used throughout this series are also collected in The Historical Kitchen, our growing library of historical cooking reference guides and interactive tools.

→ Visit the Anglo-Saxon Feast Research Hub

→ Explore The Historical Kitchen

Browse Recipes

Explore historical dishes by feast course, ingredient, era, manuscript, and culinary tradition.

🏰 A Living Historical Kitchen
Give it Forth is continually updated as older recipes are retested, translated, reorganized, and expanded with historical context. You may occasionally notice new labels, revised categories, or updated pages as the archive grows.

Welcome to Give it Forth — a project devoted to reviving historical recipes and making them practical, accessible, and enjoyable for the modern kitchen.

Whether you're a reenactor, educator, feast cook, food historian, gardener, or simply curious about historic foodways, here are a few places to begin:

🍽 Feast Menus & Dayboards – Explore historical feast menus, event food, and dayboards.
📜 Harl. MS 279 – Dive into one of medieval England’s most fascinating recipe manuscripts.
🌿 Historical Herbal & Culinary Resources – Explore herbs, stillroom traditions, flower cookery, historical gardening, and culinary research sources.
🧂 Cooking Basics – Learn historical ingredients, spices, kitchen tools, and methods.

🍽 Browse the Feast Courses

Learn how historical meals were structured and explore dishes by course.

✨ Special Topics & Historic Curiosities

Comfits – Sugar-coated spices served as digestive aids and banquet sweets
Gilding – Adding shimmer, gold, and spectacle to historic food
Edible Art & Subtleties – Illusion foods, sugarwork, and feast theatrics
Jellies & Gelatin – Molded dishes, aspics, and Renaissance showpieces

🔎 Browse Recipes by Labels

Looking for something specific? Browse recipes by feast course, dish type, ingredient, era, use, and dietary notes.

👉 Visit the full Browse Recipes by Labels page.

Appetizers Pottage & Soups Main Dishes Sweets Drinks Anglo-Saxon Medieval Tudor