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.

Jump to the Modern Reconstruction

Medieval Fig & Pear Rapeye with Almond Milk | Harley MS 279

.Cxxj. Rapeye | Harley MS 279, 1430s | New reconstruction, August 2026

This poor recipe has been living in the margins of Give It Forth since 2021.

I found it while revisiting my old .Liij. Rapeye post, where I had tucked it underneath the recipe I actually cooked and given it a short ingredient list followed by the cheerful instruction, “Prepare as above.”

Except it is not prepared as above.

Not really.

The first Rapeye cooks figs and raisins in wine, pounds and strains them, then adds currants, pine nuts, sugar, and spices until the mixture is thick enough to stand. This one takes another road entirely. The figs and raisins are ground with almond milk and strained through cloth. Pears are boiled separately, peeled, cored, and pounded. The two fruit mixtures meet in the pot with wine and either dark sugar or honey, and then, just before the dish goes to the table, mace, cloves, cubebs, and grains of paradise are scattered over the top.

That is not a variation worth hiding under “prepare as above.” That is a recipe with a personality of its own.

So, eleven years after I first started wandering through Harley MS 279 and five years after I tucked this Rapeye into somebody else’s article, it finally gets its own kitchen adventure.

Jump to the Modern Reconstruction

Medieval Fig & Raisin Rapeye | Harley MS 279 Recipe

.Liij. Rapeye – Medieval Fig, Raisin, Currant & Pine Nut Pottage

Harley MS 279, 1430s | Originally published March 16, 2017 | Fully revised August 2026

Some old recipes grow when you revisit them. This one multiplied.

I first made .Liij. Rapeye in 2017: figs and raisins cooked in wine, pounded smooth, enriched with currants and pine nuts, sweetened, spiced, and served thick enough to stand. In 2021 I returned to the post and tucked two more Harley MS 279 recipes underneath it, .Cxxj. Rapeye and .Ciij. Fygeye, because they also contained figs and seemed closely related.

That was useful for comparison, but not especially kind to the recipes.

They are not three versions of the same fig sauce. One is a thick wine-and-dried-fruit pottage with pine nuts. One combines figs and raisins with almond milk and cooked pear, then finishes with an extravagant scattering of spices. The third cooks figs in ale with bread and pine nuts and can be presented in three different colors.

So in this revision I am giving them back their individual identities. This article returns to the recipe I actually cooked in 2017: .Liij. Rapeye. The pear-and-almond Rapeye and the three-colored Fygeye are becoming reconstructions of their own.

And this first Rapeye is more interesting than I gave it credit for.

Jump to the Modern Reconstruction

Pertrich Stewyde – Medieval Partridge Stuffed with Marrow and Pepper (Harley MS 279, 1430s)

Pertrich Stewyde – Medieval Partridge Stuffed with Marrow and Pepper

Harley MS 279, 1430s | Originally published March 2, 2017 | Fully revised August 2026

Sometimes revisiting an old reconstruction means discovering that the younger cook was wrong. Sometimes it means discovering that she was doing the best she could with the ingredients she could actually get.

This recipe is a little of both.

When I first reconstructed Pertrich stewyde in 2017, partridge was prohibitively expensive where I lived, marrow was not an ingredient I could easily put my hands on, and I was still learning how much information could be hidden in a few lines of Middle English. I substituted a chicken thigh, used its skin, fat, and cracked bone to enrich the broth, and recreated the stuffed shape by rolling and skewering the meat. It was a practical solution to a very real problem.

But there was one thing I misunderstood afterward. I thought the finished broth needed to be thicker.

Looking at the manuscript again, I no longer think it does.

Pertrich stewyde is not trying to become a modern gravy. It is a small game bird, filled with marrow and pepper, gently cooked in an aromatic mixture of meat broth and wine, with cloves, mace, and pepper simmered around it and ginger and saffron added just before service. Once the marrow is restored to the reconstruction, that apparently simple broth becomes part of what makes the dish interesting.

Jump to the Modern Reconstruction

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Sciellfisc: Reconstructing Anglo-Saxon Shellfish from Middens, Manuscripts, and a Missing Recipe

Mussels served simply with butter for the third course of Ceilidh XVI, March 29, 2003.

More than twenty years ago, I put a dish called Sciellfisc on an Anglo-Saxon inspired feast menu and served mussels with butter. At the time I knew that I was not working from a surviving recipe. My notes described the dish as one of my best guesses, built from archaeological evidence and the cooking methods I could document. The old post was cautious enough to say that mussels were "likely known" to the Anglo-Saxons.

Returning to the dish in 2026 changed that sentence completely. Mussels do not merely seem possible. They appear in Anglo-Saxon archaeology, in Old English vocabulary, and in Ælfric's description of a fisherman's catch. Bald's Leechbook adds shellfish to the dietary record and, wonderfully, even preserves a preparation in which winkles are removed from their shells and served with peas. What still does not survive is the one thing a modern cook wants most: the recipe.

That absence is what makes Sciellfisc worth revisiting. This is not an article about discovering a lost formula for buttered mussels. It is about culinary archaeology: how shells, pits, hearths, manuscripts, words, chemical residues, dietary science, and comparative recipes can narrow the possibilities without pretending to erase the spaces between them.

Arbolettys: Medieval Cheese, Egg & Herb Pottage from Harleian MS 279 (c. 1430)

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Arbolettys: Medieval Cheese, Egg & Herb Pottage from Harleian MS 279

Arbolettys reconstructed from Harleian MS 279. Original 2016 kitchen photograph retained.

Some recipes announce themselves as winter comfort food the moment you read them. Arbolettys is one of those dishes. Milk, butter, cheese, eggs, parsley, sage, ginger, and galingale do not sound like hardship food. They sound warm, rich, savory, and deeply soothing.

I first made this recipe in 2016 on a cold, gray day and described it as a cheese soup. That interpretation produced a delicious dish and earned enthusiastic approval from the taste testers. Returning to the source now, I still think the old experiment was onto something—but I would name it differently. Arbolettys is best understood as a soft, spoonable cheese, egg, and herb pottage, somewhere between a savory custard and a very thick soup.

The reason this matters is simple: this recipe is often interpreted online as a kind of scrambled egg dish. Yet the manuscript tells the cook to boil milk, butter, and cheese together first, then add eggs, herbs, and spices, and finally serve it forth. It never tells the cook to fry, bake, or dry the eggs into curds. That makes a soft pottage-style reconstruction more defensible than I realized when I first wrote about it.

Why You Will Love This Recipe

• It is simple, fast, and genuinely comforting.
• The manuscript ingredient list is short and vivid: milk, butter, cheese, eggs, parsley, sage, ginger, and galingale.
• It sits in Harleian MS 279 among the Potages dyuers, which strongly supports a spoonable interpretation.
• The title links it to a broader medieval family of herb dishes, but this version takes the idea in a richer dairy direction.
• The original 2016 reconstruction was tested and loved by even a skeptical taste tester.

Jump to the Recipe

Historical Integrity: Harleian MS 279 explicitly gives milk, butter, cheese, eggs, parsley, sage, powdered ginger, and galingale. It tells the cook to boil the milk, butter, and cheese together, add the eggs, then the herbs and spices, and serve the dish. It does not give quantities, tell us whether the eggs are whole or separated, specify the cheese, or define the final consistency. The reconstruction below is a source-led working interpretation built from the manuscript sequence, the recipe's placement among the Potages dyuers, and comparison with related medieval herb-and-egg dishes.

Quystis Scun: Medieval Wood Pigeon Pottage from Harleian MS 279 (c. 1430)

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Quystis Scun: Medieval Wood Pigeon Pottage from Harleian MS 279

AI-generated visualization of Quystis Scun for the 2026 revision. The original 2016 food photograph was deliberately retired because it did the dish no favors. This image is illustrative rather than documentary.

Quystis Scun is a fifteenth-century English pottage of wood pigeons cooked in a broth of beef or mutton, wine, and water. The birds are filled with whole pepper and marrow, cooked in the covered pot, then finished with ginger, verjuice, and salt. At service, the cook places a pigeon or two into each dish and adds a little of the broth "in the manner of a pottage."

I first reconstructed this recipe on November 17, 2016 because pigeon was difficult for me to obtain. I substituted a Cornish game hen, used prepared beef broth instead of beginning with a piece of beef or mutton, and used vinegar in place of verjuice. The result tasted much better than it photographed. The wine-stewed chicken skin became gray-purple and deeply unhelpful to anyone trying to imagine how good the dish actually was.

Nearly ten years later, returning to the source revealed a more important problem than the photograph. My original interpreted recipe accidentally omitted the marrow that is explicitly named in the manuscript. The 2026 revision restores that ingredient, returns the broth-making step to the manuscript sequence, separates verjuice from the vinegar substitution, and makes a clearer distinction between what I actually tested in 2016 and what the surviving evidence now supports.

Why You'll Love This Recipe

• It is a compact but unusually informative recipe from Harleian MS 279.
• The manuscript gives us the bird, cooking liquid, stuffing, seasonings, cooking method, and serving style.
• Whole pepper and marrow are placed inside the birds rather than simply stirred into the broth.
• Verjuice gives the finished pottage a bright sour edge against the wine and rich meat broth.
• The original Cornish hen adaptation was genuinely delicious, even if its photograph was not.

Jump to Historical Reconstruction

Historical Integrity: The main recipe below is a source-led reconstruction of Harleian MS 279. The manuscript explicitly gives beef or mutton, wine, water, wood pigeons, whole pepper, marrow, ginger, verjuice, salt, covered cooking, and brothy service. It does not provide quantities, cooking times, wine type, bird size, marrow amount, or exact proportions. The original 2016 Cornish hen adaptation was tested and enjoyed. The fully restored 2026 version has not yet been cooked as a separate controlled test, so source-led corrections are identified as such rather than presented as new kitchen results.

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Beren Briw: Reconstructing an Anglo-Saxon Barley Pottage from the Lacnunga to Mary Savelli

Beren Briw entered my kitchen more than twenty years ago as a barley “polenta” from Mary Savelli’s Tastes of Anglo-Saxon England. Whole barley was soaked, then simmered with butter, minced radish, beef broth, salt, and a whisper of cinnamon. It was mild enough to sit beside a richly seasoned beef dish, sturdy enough for feast service, and unusual enough to remain memorable.

It also left a question simmering at the back of the pot:

Where did the broth and cinnamon come from, and how closely does this recipe follow the Old English evidence?

The answer is more generous than a simple verdict of “authentic” or “invented.” The Lacnunga preserves genuine Old English instructions for thick briw made with barley meal, butter, radish, crop-leek, elecampane, salt, and prolonged cooking. Bald’s Leechbook assumes that cooks already knew how to turn fresh barley meal or groats into pottage. Later medieval and Renaissance sources then show barley flour or hulled barley entering preparations made with poultry broth, meat broth, beef-boiling liquor, almond milk, sugar, and cinnamon.

Mary Savelli’s recipe stands where those trails meet. It is not a transcription of one Anglo-Saxon recipe. It is better understood as a historically informed composite: an approachable modern dish built from a direct Old English core, later barley-pottage traditions, and the practical decisions required by a modern kitchen.

This article preserves Savelli’s recipe exactly as I received and cooked it, traces its evidence backward and forward, and offers a second reconstruction that begins with the ingredients and texture most securely supported by the Old English texts.

Why This Article Matters

• It preserves Mary Savelli’s influential recipe rather than quietly replacing it.
• It identifies the barley, radish, butter, salt, long cooking, and hot service that are directly supported by the Lacnunga.
• It explains why briw is better understood as thick cereal pottage than thin broth.
• It follows beef broth and cinnamon into later barley dishes without backdating them into the Anglo-Saxon source.
• It separates a medicinal text, ordinary cooking knowledge, comparative evidence, and modern reconstruction.
• It provides a conservative feast-table version for continued kitchen testing.

Mary Savelli’s Recipe Give It Forth Reconstruction

Historical Integrity Statement

No complete culinary recipe titled Beren Briw survives from Anglo-Saxon England. The phrase is a modern descriptive title assembled from genuine Old English vocabulary and can be understood approximately as “barley pottage.” The closest direct evidence is a cluster of medicinal briw instructions in the Lacnunga. These support barley meal, butter, radish, crop-leek, elecampane, white salt, long cooking, a thick consistency, and hot service. Beef broth and cinnamon are not named in those passages. They enter through later comparative barley cookery and Savelli’s modern reconstruction.

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Hriðer Smeamete: An Anglo-Saxon Beef Reconstruction from Bald’s Leechbook to Pies of Paris

Hriðer Smeamete entered my kitchen more than twenty years ago as a sweet, spiced beef casserole from Mary Savelli’s Tastes of Anglo-Saxon England. Beef was browned, layered with apple, raisins, and dates, moistened with honey, wine, vinegar, and saffron, enclosed beneath breadcrumbs, and baked. It was rich, fragrant, and memorable. It also raised a difficult question:

How much of this dish can actually be traced to Anglo-Saxon evidence, and where do its later medieval features begin?

The answer is more interesting than a simple verdict of authentic or invented. A tenth-century Old English medical text preserves a genuine preparation of cattle meat cooked in vinegar and seasoned with oil, salt, dill, and leek. A sixth-century dietetic written by Anthimus gives a fuller beef casserole with vinegar, honey, wine, pepper, leeks, herbs, and aromatic spices. Later English cookery books document an increasingly elaborate tradition of meat combined with dried fruit, sweetness, spice, and pastry. By the fifteenth century, Pyej de parej, or Pies of Paris, had gathered many of those elements into a single baked dish.

Mary Savelli’s casserole stands where those trails meet. It is not a surviving Anglo-Saxon recipe, and it should not be presented as one. It is a modern composite reconstruction built from real but widely separated evidence. This article preserves Savelli’s original recipe, traces its ingredients and structure backward and forward through the sources, and offers a second reconstruction that begins with the directly attested Old English preparation.

Why This Article Matters

• It documents the complete evidence trail instead of presenting a modern redaction as a recovered recipe.
• It separates an Old English medical food from later comparative culinary evidence.
• It shows how translated Mediterranean knowledge became part of Anglo-Saxon literary and practical culture.
• It follows meat, fruit, honey, vinegar, wine, spice, and baked coverings into later English cookery.
• It preserves Mary Savelli’s influential reconstruction while making its assumptions visible.
• It provides a second, evidence-weighted version for continued kitchen testing.

Mary Savelli’s Recipe Give It Forth Reconstruction

Historical Integrity Statement:

No culinary recipe titled Hriðer Smeamete survives from Anglo-Saxon England. Mary Savelli’s title appears to be a modern construction made from genuine Old English vocabulary. The closest direct evidence is a brief dietary instruction in Bald’s Leechbook for hryþeren flæsc, cattle meat cooked in vinegar and seasoned with oil, salt, dill, and leek. Honey, wine, pepper, fruit, imported spices, breadcrumbs, and the baked casserole structure enter through comparative sources or modern reconstruction.

Venyson in Broth: Medieval Venison in Spiced Broth from Harleian MS 279

Venyson in Broth: Medieval Venison in Spiced Broth from Harleian MS 279

Venyson in Broth is a compact but revealing recipe from Harleian MS 279. Ribs of venison are washed, placed in their strained washing water, and boiled with parsley, sage, pepper, cloves, mace, vinegar, and a little red wine until done.

The receipt contains no bread thickener, almond milk, eggs, onions, or elaborate finishing sauce. The meat and its seasoned cooking liquid remain at the center of the dish. Herbs lend freshness, wine and vinegar provide acidity, and a restrained measure of warm spice gives the broth its medieval character.

When I first published this reconstruction in 2016, I combined it with the following receipt for furmenty. Returning to the manuscript makes the division clearer. Venyson in Broth is recipe xxij. Venyson with Furmenty follows as recipe xxiij and gives a separate method for preparing the wheat. They belong together at the table, but each deserves its own reconstruction.

Why You Will Love This Recipe

• It places venison at the center rather than burying it beneath a heavy sauce.
• Parsley, sage, wine, vinegar, pepper, cloves, and mace create a bright, aromatic broth.
• The recipe demonstrates how medieval cooks balanced herbs, acidity, and warm spice.
• It can be reconstructed with venison ribs or practical boneless stew meat.
• It pairs naturally with saffron-colored furmenty, bread, or another mild grain dish.

Jump to the Modern Recipe

Historical Integrity: The surviving receipt, historical interpretation, tested reconstruction, and modern food-safety accommodations are identified separately. The practical recipe uses fresh water rather than reusing raw-meat washing water.

Furmenty (Frumenty): Medieval Creamy Wheat Dish from Harleian MS 279

Furmenty (Frumenty): A Medieval Creamy Wheat Dish from Harleian MS 279

Furmenty, now more often written frumenty, is a wheat dish cooked until the grain becomes tender, swollen, and creamy. In Harleian MS 279, the wheat is cleaned, dampened, pounded, winnowed, boiled until it breaks, enriched with fresh milk, colored with saffron, and seasoned with salt.

It is a simple recipe, but not an insignificant one. Harleian MS 279 is a selected culinary collection, and furmenty was important enough to receive a distinct receipt and a defined method. Its inclusion beside venison reminds us that the grand medieval table did not rest upon spectacular meats and costly spices alone. It also depended upon cooks who understood grain, heat, texture, and timing.

When I first reconstructed this dish in 2016, I used Kamut-brand khorasan wheat. Its large grains produced a substantial, pleasantly nutty dish rather than a smooth modern breakfast cereal. Returning to the manuscript years later changed how I explain the recipe and where I place the saffron, but it did not change my conviction that furmenty deserves to be understood as a preparation in its own right.

Why You Will Love This Recipe

• It uses a short ingredient list to create a rich and satisfying historical dish.
• It preserves the texture of softened, broken wheat rather than turning the recipe into instant cereal.
• It explains why a basic grain preparation mattered in a fifteenth-century culinary collection.
• It can be served with venison, beef, fish, or another savory medieval dish.
• It includes both the manuscript method and a clearly labeled practical reconstruction.

Jump to the Modern Recipe

Historical Integrity: The manuscript evidence, historical interpretation, tested modern reconstruction, and practical substitutions are identified separately. The main household recipe uses soaking as a practical substitute for the manuscript's labor-intensive pounding and winnowing process.