Welcome to Give It Forth – Medieval Cooking, Historical Recipes, and Manuscript Cookery
Originally published in 2015 | Updated June 2026
Welcome to Give It Forth. If you found your way here, I am guessing you have an interest in food, history, old recipes, feast tables, herbs, gardens, or some wonderful combination of all of those things. Pull up a chair. There is usually something simmering.
In the Society for Creative Anachronism, I am known as Mistress Bronwyn ni Mhathain. When this blog began, I was still finding my way through the recipes, feasts, and historical food questions that had captured my imagination. Since then, I have become a Laurel in Cooking Research in the SCA, and I host the Historic Cookery group on Facebook, where cooks, researchers, reenactors, and curious food-history people gather to ask questions, share sources, and puzzle through old recipes together.
Give It Forth began in 2015 as a place to keep track of what I was doing: experiments, feasts, almost-feasts, ideas, gardens, herblore, herbcraft, and my ongoing attempts to make historical recipes understandable for modern cooks. Over the years, it has grown into a long-running historical cookery project focused on medieval recipes, early historical foodways, manuscript interpretation, feast planning, redactions, and practical cooking for real kitchens and real events.
Where This Project Began
I learned to cook with my grandmother and my mom. That matters, because this project has always lived somewhere between the kitchen table and the manuscript page. It is research, yes, but it is also memory, practice, curiosity, and the stubborn belief that old recipes deserve to be cooked, tasted, questioned, and shared.
One of the central texts behind this blog is Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books: Harleian MS. 279 (ab 1430), and Harl. MS. 4016 (ab. 1450), with extracts from Ashmole MS. 1439, Laud MS. 553, and Douce MS. 55, edited by Thomas Austin. This book was the last book my mom gave to me before she passed. She had helped me when I was creating feasts in my earliest years in the SCA, and we had wanted to work through these recipes together. At the time, neither of us was able to interpret them confidently.
Give It Forth became, in part, my way of continuing that work.
What You Will Find Here
This blog is not only a recipe collection. It is a working notebook, feast archive, research cabinet, kitchen diary, and historical rabbit hole with crumbs in the margins.
Here you will find:
- Medieval and early historical recipes translated, interpreted, and adapted for modern kitchens.
- Harleian MS 279 and other manuscript cookery projects with attention to wording, ingredients, method, and context.
- SCA feast planning and feast documentation including menus, service notes, scaling, and lessons learned.
- Ancient, medieval, Tudor, Renaissance, and early modern foodways explored through practical cooking.
- Herbs, gardens, and seasonal food preservation because the kitchen does not begin at the stove.
- Camp and event cooking notes for people trying to serve historical food under less-than-perfect conditions.
Research, Redaction, and Real Food
My goal is to make historical recipes approachable without flattening them into modern food with old-fashioned names. A good redaction should ask what the source says, what the words meant, what ingredients were likely intended, what techniques were available, and how a modern cook can responsibly bring that dish to the table.
Sometimes that means keeping a dish simple. Sometimes it means admitting uncertainty. Sometimes it means revisiting an older interpretation and saying, “I would do this differently now.” That is not failure. That is how living research works.
Historical cooking is full of small mysteries: a verb that could mean more than one thing, a spice mixture that shifts by source, a manuscript recipe with no measurements, a dish that makes sense only when placed back into its course or feast setting. Those are the puzzles I love.
For Cooks, Researchers, and the Historically Curious
Whether you are an SCA cook planning a feast, a home cook curious about medieval food, a reenactor looking for practical dishes, a gardener interested in herbs, or a researcher chasing down one stubborn ingredient, I hope you find something useful here.
I try to write for the person standing between a source text and a cutting board. That means I care about historical context, but I also care about whether the dish can be cooked, served, transported, scaled, and eaten by real people.
Some posts are polished recipes. Some are feast records. Some are experiments. Some are old posts being revisited with better tools, better sources, and a few more years of cooking behind me. The archive is part research trail, part kitchen road map, and part invitation.
A Note of Thanks
I am still pleasantly surprised by how this blog has grown. To those who have subscribed, shared interpretations, cooked from the recipes, asked questions, pointed me toward sources, or helped make this project better: thank you.
Give It Forth began as a personal project, but it has become a community-facing one. Every question, feast, class, conversation, correction, and kitchen experiment has helped shape it.
Here is to the next chapter, the next manuscript puzzle, the next feast table, and the next dish worth giving forth.
Enjoy!
Yonnie
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