Historical Cooking Classes & Workshop Resources

For more than two decades, Give It Forth has included classes, handouts, demonstrations, and practical notes on historical cooking, feast planning, manuscript interpretation, and kitchen skills. This page gathers those teaching resources in one place.

🏺 Looking for conversions, kitchen references, and interactive tools? Visit The Historical Kitchen.

Historical Kitchen Skills

• Almond Butter (or Cheese) – A 15th-century method of using almond milk to make a dairy-free butter or cheese. Ideal for Lent or dairy-free feasts.
• Almond Milk – How to make almond milk, with notes on its importance in medieval cuisine.
• Comfits – Spiced sweets for breath freshening, digestion, or decoration. Common in Elizabethan banquets.
• Dashi & Furikake – Three ways to make dashi, including a 1603 recipe, plus furikake made from leftover kombu and bonito.
• Homemade Vegetable Stock & Bouillon – Reduce feast costs and enhance flavor with shelf-stable stock powder and fridge-stored bouillon.
• Homemade Beef Stock – Save scraps and bones to make rich stock, perfect for canning or freezing.
• How to Render Suet – Stove, crockpot, and oven methods, with notes on non-food uses like soap or candles.
• How to Brine Fish & How to Smoke Fish
• Fruit Paste – A method of preserving fruit common in Elizabethan banquet courses.
• Potash / Cooking with Ashes – Make your own leavening with wood ash; includes a primer on saleratus.
• Sugar and Gum Arabic Preserved Flowers – A 17th-century method of sugaring edible flowers for decoration and preservation.
• The Importance of Color in the Middle Ages – Brief overview of medieval color theory and symbolism in food.
• Wortys – An exploration of the Brassica family in medieval cooking, including cabbage, kale, mustard, and turnip.

Reference Guides

• Measurements and Conversions – Tables for scaling, converting units, and temperature adjustments. Frequently used by the author.
• Apothecary Weights – Covers scruple, dram, grain, ounce, and pound measurements used in historic medicine and recipes.
• Spice Conversions: Ounces to Tablespoons – A helpful guide for converting spice quantities when working with bulk purchases or feast-scale planning.
• Spice Substitution Chart – Historical and modern swaps for hard-to-find spices. Great for feast stewards and reenactors.

Historical Cooking Classes

• Arranging the Feast – Applying medieval dietary theory and feast structure to modern menu planning.
• Cooking with Kids – Tips, age-appropriate skills, and safety for introducing children to historical cooking.
• Feast Budgeting – How to plan and cost feasts by servings, tables, and diner counts, with tips to save without sacrificing quality.
• Interpreting Manuscripts: My Process – An overview of how the author works through medieval texts to recreate recipes and techniques.

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