Brawn en Peuerade | Medieval Pork Pottage in Pepper Sauce (Harleian MS 279)

Brawn en Peuerade, a medieval pork pottage in pepper sauce from Harleian MS 279.

Originally published March 11, 2016. Updated June 24, 2026 with expanded historical notes, seasonality discussion, pottage classification, internal links, and a copy-friendly modern reconstruction.

Brawn en Peuerade is a fifteenth-century English pork pottage from Harleian MS 279. The dish combines pork, wine, onions, vinegar, pepper, ginger, and warming spices into a sharply flavored pepper sauce that the manuscript tells us should be "as potage shulde be."

That phrase matters. Although the modern title may sound like a meat dish with sauce, the original recipe gives us a strong clue about its intended texture and service. It should be neither too thick nor too thin, but spoonable, saucy, and substantial. For that reason, this recipe belongs among Pottages & First Course Dishes rather than among dry roasted, fried, grilled, or baked meats.

Auter Brawn en Peuerade | Medieval Pork Pottage with Pepper Sauce (Harleian MS 279)

Auter Brawn en Peuerade, a medieval pork pottage with pepper sauce from Harleian MS 279.

Originally published March 14, 2016. Updated June 24, 2026 with expanded historical notes, feast placement discussion, color theory context, internal links, and a copy-friendly modern reconstruction.

Auter Brawn en Peuerade, or "another brawn in pepper sauce," is a fifteenth-century English pork pottage from Harleian MS 279. It combines pork, onions, broth, wine, vinegar, pepper, saffron, and warming spices into a richly colored dish that sits somewhere between a stew, a sauce, and a medieval pottage.

This recipe is especially useful because it appears alongside another version of Brawn en Peuerade. The earlier version is based more heavily on wine, while this "auter" version begins with a strong broth of beef or capon. Together, the two recipes show how medieval cooks could adapt the same flavor family to different ingredients, textures, and service styles.

Murrey: A Mulberry-Colored Medieval Pottage from Harleian MS 279

First published February 7, 2016. Updated June 19, 2026.

Murrey served over sops of bread. The rich reddish-purple color appears to have been one of the defining characteristics of this family of medieval dishes.

Medieval cooks paid attention to color in ways that modern diners often overlook. Color was not merely decoration. It could signal status, season, symbolism, feast day, humor, or even the identity of a dish.

Murrey is a perfect example. At first glance, the Harleian MS 279 recipe looks like a thick meat preparation made from pork, veal, broth, bread, honey, ginger, galangal, and saunders. When I first reconstructed it in 2016, I described it as another meat sauce. Years later, with more manuscript evidence in hand, I think that interpretation was too narrow.

Murrey appears to belong to a wider medieval tradition of color-defined dishes. The word itself refers to a dark reddish-purple, mulberry-like color. Related recipes appear in several medieval sources, sometimes made with almonds and wine, sometimes with meat, sometimes with actual mulberries, and sometimes adapted for fish days or flesh days. What unites them is not a single ingredient list, but a color, a texture, and a culinary idea.

Why this recipe matters: Murrey is more than a medieval meat dish. It appears to be part of a family of mulberry-colored preparations that show how medieval cooks used color to define food. The Harleian version is best understood as a thick pottage rather than a modern sauce.

Mearh Smeamete – Reconstructing an Anglo-Saxon Sausage Delicacy

Originally served at Ceilidh XVI, March 29, 2003. Updated with additional research, source notes, and modernized interpretation in June 2026.

AI-assisted formatting and editing note: This article was developed with the assistance of ChatGPT for organization, source comparison, grammar, and HTML formatting. Historical interpretation, recipe testing notes, and final editorial judgment are my own.

Mearh Smeamete: Following the Trail of an Anglo-Saxon Sausage Recipe

Sometimes revisiting an old recipe does not reveal mistakes. Sometimes it reveals how much care went into the reconstruction in the first place.

That is what happened when I returned to Mearh Smeamete, a sausage dish I served as part of an Anglo-Saxon inspired feast in 2003.

At first glance, the recipe can look surprisingly modern: pork sausage, apples, spices, vinegar, bread, and a milk-thickened sauce baked together in a casserole dish. It was delicious. It was practical. It worked beautifully in a busy feast kitchen.

But more than twenty years later, with far more sources available online than I had in 2003, I wanted to understand the reconstruction more deeply.

Not to ask, “Was Mary Savelli wrong?”

But to ask:

What was Mary seeing?

Ceilidh XVI, March 29, 2003. The original Anglo-Saxon inspired feast where Mearh Smeamete appeared on my table.

Original Feast Context: Mearh Smeamete was originally prepared for Ceilidh XVI, an Anglo-Saxon inspired feast held on March 29, 2003.

📜 Read the original feast record:
Ceilidh XVI – March 29, 2003

🍎 Explore the updated feast research:
Reconstructing an Anglo-Saxon Feast: Ceilidh XVI Revisited

The Value of Revisiting Old Recipes

One of the gifts, and occasional discomforts, of maintaining a long-running historical cooking blog is that older work remains visible.

Old recipes show what sources were available, what assumptions were common, what questions had not yet been asked, and what tools did not yet exist. In 2003, many of the resources we now take for granted were not sitting one click away. Searchable manuscript databases, digitized dictionaries, OCR text, archive scans, and online facsimiles were far less accessible.

Historical cooks often worked from the books they owned, interlibrary loans, photocopies, handwritten notes, conference conversations, and the generosity of other researchers.

That is worth remembering.

Mary Savelli’s Tastes of Anglo-Saxon England attempted something genuinely difficult: turning fragmentary evidence into dishes modern cooks could prepare, discuss, and place on the table. That work deserves to be revisited with generosity.

A Note on Mary Savelli’s Work: This revisit is not an attempt to correct Tastes of Anglo-Saxon England. If anything, it deepened my appreciation for the care behind the reconstruction. Mary was building practical bridges between incomplete Anglo-Saxon evidence and real kitchens.

What Historical Food Reconstruction Actually Looks Like

When people imagine historical cooking research, they often picture a tidy manuscript recipe waiting to be translated:

Take sausage, apples, bread, and spice...

Anglo-Saxon food rarely works that neatly.

Instead, reconstruction often feels more like archaeology than recipe transcription. Sometimes we have a word. Sometimes we have a medical warning. Sometimes we have a list of foods owed as rent, a monastic rule, a glossary entry, a dietary recommendation, or a later recipe that seems to preserve an older habit.

Sometimes the evidence is literal archaeology: seeds in midden pits, butchered animal bones, shellfish remains, charred grain, hearths, ovens, cooking vessels, residues in pottery, and the ordinary rubbish of daily life. A broken pot, a fish bone, or an apple seed may not give us a recipe, but it can help us understand what ingredients were present and how food was handled.

Other times, reconstruction follows continuity. Roman foodways influenced later European cooking. Anglo-Saxon England did not exist in a sealed jar. Ideas, ingredients, medical theories, trade goods, cooking methods, and elite tastes moved across time and place. Later Anglo-Norman and medieval English recipes cannot prove an earlier Anglo-Saxon dish by themselves, but they can show which techniques and flavor patterns remained plausible in English kitchens.

Food Archaeology Is More Than Recipes: No single clue proves Mearh Smeamete. The argument becomes stronger when several kinds of evidence point in the same direction: language, cooking technology, comparative recipes, archaeology, medical texts, and practical feast experience.

That is the kind of trail I followed for Mearh Smeamete.

What Does Mearh Smeamete Mean?

The first clue was not culinary.

It was linguistic.

In the Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, mearh can refer to marrow or pith, but it is also glossed as a sausage. That single detail changes the way the dish reads. The title is not merely decorative Old English attached to a modern pork casserole. It points toward sausage as a meaningful part of the reconstruction.

The second word, sméa-mete, is glossed as a delicacy.

Put together, Mearh Smeamete can be understood as something like:

Sausage delicacy.

Or, more freely:

A fine sausage dish.

Language Note: The title does not prove that a complete Anglo-Saxon recipe for this dish survives. It does, however, make the reconstruction meaningful. Mearh points toward sausage, and sméa-mete points toward delicacy or fine food.

That was the first moment I began to appreciate the dish differently.

What Was Mary Seeing?

Mary’s note for Mearh Smeamete does not point to one surviving Anglo-Saxon recipe. Instead, she connects several strands of evidence. She notes that sausage is an ancient method of preserving meat, that Roman cooks were making composed dishes with sausage and forcemeat, and that Anglo-Norman cooks continued the practice of baking ground pork with spices.

That is not guesswork.

That is reconstruction from pattern.

And once I recognized that, I began to see Mearh Smeamete less as a single disputed casserole and more as a practical answer to a historical question:

If an Anglo-Saxon “sausage delicacy” had to be reconstructed for a feast table, what evidence could guide the cook?

To answer that, we need to follow the breadcrumbs.

Bald’s Leechbook, Osterhlaf, and Food Clues in Strange Places

One of the most useful things Mary did in Tastes of Anglo-Saxon England was work honestly with fragmentary evidence.

Her reconstruction of Leaxes Hlaf, or salmon loaves, shows this method clearly. Mary notes that Anglo-Saxons served seafood in some sort of loaf or patty form because of the word osterhlaf, an oyster loaf or oyster patty, found in Bald’s Leechbook. She then compares that clue with Roman fish cakes or fish dumplings from Apicius and chooses salmon and oatmeal for her practical version.

That matters because it shows her reconstruction method:

• a food word survives,
• the complete recipe does not,
• comparative evidence helps suggest a form,
• the modern cook makes a practical, transparent choice.

This is exactly the kind of method we need for Mearh Smeamete.

Bald’s Leechbook is not a cookbook, but it preserves food terms, ingredients, and dietary ideas that help reconstruct Anglo-Saxon foodways.

Bald’s Leechbook is a medical text, not a collection of kitchen recipes. But in Anglo-Saxon medicine, food and health were closely entangled. Medical texts used everyday ingredients: apples, vinegar, honey, wine, milk, butter, herbs, grains, animal fats, and spices. They also preserve food categories and dietary warnings that help us understand what people recognized as food.

That does not mean every dish was medicinal.

It means that medical texts sometimes preserve culinary clues when recipe books do not.

Reconstruction Note: A medical text does not give us a feast menu. But when a medical text preserves words for prepared foods, cooking ingredients, or dietary habits, it becomes part of the food historian’s evidence pile.

Sala Cattabia and Bread as Structure

The most suspicious part of Mary’s recipe, at least to my modern eye, was not the sausage.

It was the structure.

Bread in the bottom of the dish. Sausage and apple layered over it. A thickened sauce spooned on top. More bread over everything. Then the whole thing baked as a composed dish.

At first glance, that can feel surprisingly modern.

But Roman cookery preserves a far older world of bread vessels, soaked bread, layered fillings, minced meat and fish, forcemeat, binders, pastry, eggs, sauces, and composed dishes.

One of the most useful Roman parallels is Sala Cattabia from Apicius. It is not a sausage recipe, and it is not Anglo-Saxon. Its importance lies in what it shows bread doing.

In one version of Sala Cattabia, the cook hollows out an Alexandrian loaf, soaks it with posca, a mixture of water and vinegar, and then fills it with layered savory ingredients. The seasoning mixture includes pepper, honey, mint, garlic, fresh coriander, salted cow’s milk cheese, water, and oil. Modern reconstructions often fill the loaf with layers of cooked meat, cucumber, cheese, nuts, capers, onion, herbs, honey, oil, and sharp liquid before pressing or chilling it for service.

Other versions read less like a neat bread box and more like a layered composed dish: soaked bread with the liquid pressed out, arranged with cucumbers, cheese, herbs, honey, vinegar, broth, and savory additions.

Either way, the important point is the same.

Bread is not merely served beside the dish.

It is hollowed, soaked, pressed, layered, filled, and used as the body of the preparation.

Sala Cattabia from Apicius is not a sausage recipe, but it shows bread acting as vessel, absorbent body, and structure in a composed savory dish.

That Roman bread logic helps explain why a stuffed-loaf interpretation of Mearh Smeamete is tempting. A sturdy loaf could be hollowed, lightly moistened with vinegar-water, filled with sausage, apple, spice, and softened bread crumb, then pressed and baked or sliced for service.

That would not make it “the original” Anglo-Saxon version.

But it would be a historically plausible reconstruction built from the same kind of evidence Mary was using: an Old English food word, Roman comparative material, bread as cooking structure, and a practical feast form.

Minutal, Forcemeat, and Roman Composition Dishes

Sala Cattabia explains bread as structure.

Edwards’ discussion of Apicius helps explain the forcemeat, binder, and composition-dish logic.

In the section on fish and forcemeat ragouts, Edwards explains minutal as a chopped meat or fish ragout that could be stewed with vegetables or fruit, highly seasoned, and thickened with flour, pastry, or bread.

That one detail matters enormously for Mearh Smeamete.

Edwards’ discussion of Roman fish and forcemeat ragouts helped explain the bread, binder, and composition-dish logic behind Mary’s reconstruction.

In Minutal Marinum, fish is cooked, cooled, minced, and formed into small cakes or dumplings. Other Apician dishes use eggs to bind, pastry or bread to thicken, and sauces to hold complicated dishes together.

This gives us another possible path for interpreting Mearh Smeamete. Instead of a casserole or stuffed loaf, one could imagine an enriched sausage patty bound with bread, shaped, and cooked more like a forcemeat cake.

Again, that does not prove the exact form of Mary’s recipe.

It shows that the underlying culinary logic was real: ground or minced protein, seasoning, binder, bread or starch, and a composed final dish.

But What About the Sauce?

The milk-thickened sauce is one of the easiest parts of Mary’s recipe to misunderstand.

Butter, flour, and milk can immediately make a modern reader think of later white sauce or French culinary traditions. That reaction is understandable. We should not imagine an Anglo-Saxon cook carefully whisking together a modern béchamel.

But thickening and binding are much older kitchen habits.

Roman cooks clearly understood how to turn liquids into cohesive dishes. In De Re Coquinaria, composed dishes are thickened or stabilized using flour, bread, eggs, reduced liquids, and starches such as amydon (or amulum). Translators sometimes use the familiar word roux as shorthand for these flour-or starch-based thickening systems because they perform a similar kitchen job for modern readers.

That does not mean Roman cooks were making French roux.

It means modern translators were translating the unfamiliar into the familiar.

The more useful historical question is whether cooks in the Roman and early medieval world understood how to bind meat, liquid, grain, and seasoning into a unified composed dish.

The answer increasingly appears to be yes.

Historical Translation Note: When modern translators use words like roux, they are not claiming Romans were preparing later French mother sauces. Instead, they are translating unfamiliar thickening systems into language modern cooks immediately understand. Roman cooks likely relied on starches, flour, bread, eggs, or reduction to bind and stabilize composed dishes.

References to binding and thickening in Roman composition dishes helped me rethink Mary’s sauce as a practical modern translation of an older culinary principle.

Mary’s sauce is modernized for a contemporary kitchen, but the job it performs is historically sensible. It binds sausage, apple, bread, vinegar, and spice into a coherent feast dish.

The Turning Point: I expected the bread-and-sauce structure to be the most difficult part of the reconstruction. Instead, Roman cookery gave me evidence for hollowed and soaked bread, layered savory compositions, forcemeat, bread-thickened ragouts, eggs, flour, and binding sauces. The casserole suddenly looked much less suspicious.

Fruit with Meat: Why the Apple Matters

The next question is the apple.

To a modern cook, pork and apples feel familiar enough that the combination can almost seem suspicious. It is easy to look at sausage and apple together and think, “That sounds like modern comfort food.”

But the pairing is not out of place in the early medieval flavor world Mary was reconstructing.

Ann Hagen notes that Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman foodways show a marked interest in fruit with meat and savory dishes. Fruit sauces, sweet-sharp accompaniments, and dishes combining richness with fruit appear repeatedly in discussions of English food traditions. Fruit could brighten heavy foods, cut fat, and make rich meat or fish more pleasant to eat.

Hagen’s discussion of baked composition dishes and fruit with meat helped explain why apple belongs naturally in a reconstructed sausage delicacy.

In Mearh Smeamete, the apple is doing useful culinary work. It softens the richness of the pork sausage. It adds sweetness without turning the dish into dessert. Alongside vinegar and spice, it helps create the sweet-sharp-savory balance that appears again and again in ancient and medieval cookery.

Flavor Note: The apple in this dish should not be treated as a modern garnish pasted onto an old recipe. Fruit with meat belongs comfortably within the broader English and early medieval culinary pattern Mary was exploring.

Anthimus and the Sweet-Sour-Spiced Meat Pattern

Another helpful comparison comes from Anthimus, a sixth-century Byzantine physician writing dietary advice for a Frankish king. His work sits in that useful borderland between food and medicine, where ingredients are chosen not only for flavor but also for digestion, bodily comfort, and balance.

In his section on beef, Anthimus recommends a slow-cooked meat preparation using vinegar, honey, pepper, wine, and aromatics. This is not a recipe for Mearh Smeamete. It is not even pork. But it shows a flavor family that belongs to the same wider culinary world:

• rich meat,
• sharp vinegar or wine,
• sweet honey or fruit,
• warming pepper or spice,
• aromatic herbs.

Anthimus preserves a sweet-sour-spiced meat pattern using vinegar, honey, pepper, wine, and aromatics.

That pattern matters because it helps explain why Mary’s sausage, apple, vinegar, pepper, cinnamon, and cardamom do not feel random once placed in context. The ingredients are not identical to Anthimus, but the flavor logic is familiar: richness balanced by sharpness, sweetness, and warming spice.

Later Medieval Continuity: Not Proof, But Pattern

Later medieval English recipes cannot prove that an Anglo-Saxon cook made Mearh Smeamete in Mary’s form.

But they can show that the techniques underneath the reconstruction were not alien to English cookery.

By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, surviving English manuscripts show many of the same culinary habits that make Mary’s reconstruction plausible: minced meat, pork, sweetness, spice, egg binding, bread thickening, baked enclosures, farced meats, and composed dishes.

That is useful continuity evidence.

It does not give us a straight line from Anglo-Saxon sausage to Mary’s casserole. History rarely hands us such tidy little ribbons. Instead, it shows that the underlying kitchen logic remained visible in later English recipes.

Continuity Note: Later medieval recipes are not proof of an earlier Anglo-Saxon recipe. They are useful because they show that minced meat, bread or flour thickening, egg binding, sweet-spiced pork, and baked composed dishes all belonged to the broader English culinary tradition.

Rapeye of Fleysshe

Harleian MS 279 includes Rapeye of Fleysshe, a dish of pork boiled, ground small, tempered with broth, sweetened with honey, thickened, enriched with egg yolks, and finished with spice. That gives us several useful parallels: pork, mincing or grinding, sweetness, broth, thickening, eggs, and spice.

It is not Mearh Smeamete.

But it shows that later English cooks were very comfortable turning pork into a sweet-spiced, thickened, composed dish.

Doucettes and Baked Sweet-Savory Pork

Doucettes, also known from later medieval English collections, brings pork, eggs, sweetness, spice, and baked enclosure into the conversation. Again, it is not Mary’s sausage casserole. But it shows that pork could belong in sweetened, spiced, egg-bound, baked preparations.

That matters because the modern eye often divides food into strict categories: sausage is savory, apples are sweet, milk sauce is modern, and pie crust is pastry. Medieval cookery is not so obedient. Sweet, savory, rich, sharp, and spiced could happily share a dish.

Liber Cure Cocorum and Thickening

Liber Cure Cocorum is also useful for understanding thickening and binding. Later medieval English recipes use words such as alye or ally for mixing, binding, or thickening dishes. Bread, flour, rice flour, egg yolks, amidon, and grains could all help bring a dish together.

This is directly relevant to Mary’s casserole. Her milk-thickened sauce may be a modern kitchen solution, but the need it answers is old: how to bind a composed dish so that meat, bread, fruit, spice, and liquid become one preparation instead of a loose pile of ingredients.

Farced and Stuffed Meats

Later English recipes also preserve farced or stuffed meats, where chopped, seasoned, or enriched mixtures are placed inside another structure. These dishes remind us that medieval cooks often thought in terms of form as much as flavor: stuffed, wrapped, enclosed, thickened, layered, pressed, or baked.

That matters for Mearh Smeamete because Mary’s dish sits in exactly that kind of world. It is not plain sausage on a plate. It is sausage transformed into a composed feast dish.

A Conservative Fourth Possibility: Coffin-Baked Sausage

There is one more possible interpretation worth mentioning, carefully.

Mary’s recipe uses bread in the baking dish. The Roman evidence gives us soaked and layered bread. The osterhlaf clue gives us loaf or patty logic. Later medieval cooking gives us enclosed dishes and coffins.

Today, when we hear “pie crust,” we often imagine tender, flaky, edible pastry. Medieval coffins were not always that. A coffin could be a sturdy paste container, made from flour and water, designed to hold food during cooking. Sometimes the enclosure might be eaten. Sometimes its main job was more practical: to hold shape, protect the contents, trap moisture, contain juices, and make transport easier.

A flour-and-water paste made thick enough to hold meat could become hard and functional rather than delicate and delicious. In that sense, it was cooking technology as much as food.

Conservative Possibility: A coffin-baked version of Mearh Smeamete is more speculative than Mary’s casserole, a stuffed loaf, or sausage patties. Still, it belongs in the range of plausible interpretations because it uses bread or paste as cooking structure rather than treating it only as a side dish.

In a coffin interpretation, the sausage, apple, vinegar, spice, and binder could be enclosed in a thick paste and baked gently. The paste would protect the filling, preserve juices, and help the dish travel or hold for service.

I would not call this the most likely original form.

But as a conservative historical possibility, it is useful. It reminds us that the question is not simply, “Casserole or not casserole?” The deeper question is:

How might an early cook have contained, protected, bound, and served a rich sausage delicacy?

Four Plausible Reconstructions

After following the evidence, I do not think Mearh Smeamete points toward one inevitable form.

Instead, it points toward a family of plausible reconstructions.

1. Mary Savelli’s Feast Casserole

This is the version I served in 2003: sausage, apple, spice, vinegar, bread, and a milk-thickened sauce baked together. It is practical, scalable, delicious, and well suited to feast service.

Its strongest support comes from Roman composition dishes, bread and pastry thickening, binders, later English thickened meat preparations, and the practical needs of a large feast kitchen.

2. A Stuffed Bread Loaf

This version leans into Sala Cattabia and osterhlaf: a hollowed loaf, lightly moistened, filled with sausage, apple, spice, and bread-bound filling, then pressed and baked or sliced for service.

This interpretation treats bread as vessel and structure.

3. Enriched Sausage Patties or Forcemeat Cakes

This version follows the logic of Minutal Marinum, oyster loaves, salmon loaves, and forcemeat dishes: sausage mixed with bread, apple, vinegar, spice, and perhaps egg, then formed into patties and pan-fried or griddled.

This interpretation treats Mearh Smeamete as a small, fine sausage delicacy.

4. Coffin-Baked Sausage Delicacy

This version is the most speculative, but still worth considering: a sausage mixture enclosed in a thick flour-and-water paste, baked for moisture retention and structure.

This interpretation treats bread or paste as cooking technology.

The Important Point: The evidence does not require one single reconstruction. It supports several historically reasonable approaches. Mary chose the one best suited to a feast kitchen, and that choice deserves respect.

Mary Savelli’s Original Reconstruction

One of the things I expected when revisiting this recipe was that I might want to move far away from the original.

Instead, I found myself appreciating Mary’s work more.

Her recipe does not claim to be a surviving Anglo-Saxon manuscript recipe. It is a practical reconstruction built from a meaningful Old English title, Roman and early medieval culinary parallels, Anglo-Norman baked meat traditions, and the English fondness for fruit with meat.

It also worked.

That matters.

Historical feast cooking is not only about what can be defended on paper. It is about what can be prepared, held, transported, baked, portioned, and served to real people at the right time. Mary’s casserole version does that beautifully.

Feast Cook’s Note: Mary’s casserole version is delicious, scalable, and practical. It can be assembled ahead, baked day-of, and served easily in a busy feast kitchen. That practicality is part of the reconstruction, not separate from it.

My 2026 Interpretation

If I were reconstructing Mearh Smeamete today, I might choose a different form.

After revisiting Sala Cattabia, osterhlaf, Roman forcemeat dishes, bread-thickened ragouts, later English pork dishes, and coffin logic, I can imagine several versions.

I might make a stuffed loaf, especially for a dramatic feast presentation.

I might make enriched sausage patties, especially if I wanted something closer to a small delicacy.

I might experiment with a rough coffin, more for cooking technology than eating pleasure.

But that is preference, not correction.

Mary’s casserole remains historically plausible, practical, and very much worth serving. Revisiting the sources does not make her version weaker. It makes the range of possibilities richer.

2026 Reflection: The question is not whether Mary chose the only possible form. The question is whether her form belongs within a historically plausible reconstruction framework. After following the evidence, I believe it does.

Humoral and Historical Flavor Notes

Mearh Smeamete balances richness with sharpness.

Pork sausage is fatty and substantial. Apple brings sweetness and tartness. Vinegar cuts through the richness. Pepper, cinnamon, and cardamom warm the dish. Bread absorbs juices and gives structure. Milk and butter soften the sharper elements, binding everything into a rich feast dish.

In an early medieval medical and dietary worldview, these contrasts mattered. Food could warm, cool, moisten, dry, stimulate digestion, or soothe discomfort. That does not mean every feast dish was medicine, but it does mean food and bodily balance were closely connected.

Seen this way, Mary’s recipe is not simply sausage, apple, and bread. It is rich meat tempered by fruit, acid, spice, grain, and dairy.

More from the Anglo-Saxon Feast Project:

• Ceilidh XVI – March 29, 2003: Original Feast Record
• Reconstructing an Anglo-Saxon Feast: Ceilidh XVI Revisited
• Æppla Syfling: Following the Trail of an Anglo-Saxon Apple Butter
• Leaxes Hlaf – Anglo-Saxon Salmon Loaves

Mearh Smeamete – Sausage Casserole

Serves: 8 as part of a feast

Ingredients

• Butter, for greasing the baking dish
• 3 cups cubed bread, divided
• 1 tablespoon oil
• 1 small onion, chopped
• 1 1/2 pounds pork sausage
• 2 large apples, chopped
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon cardamom
• 3 tablespoons white wine vinegar
• 6 tablespoons butter
• 6 tablespoons flour
• 3 cups milk

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 375°F.
2. Butter a large baking dish. Scatter half of the cubed bread over the bottom of the dish.
3. Heat the oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add the onion and cook until softened.
4. Add the pork sausage and cook until browned, breaking it into small pieces as it cooks.
5. Stir in the chopped apples and cook for 2 to 3 minutes, just until they begin to soften.
6. Spoon the sausage and apple mixture over the bread in the baking dish.
7. Sprinkle with the salt, cinnamon, black pepper, and cardamom. Drizzle the vinegar over the sausage mixture.
8. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat. Stir in the flour to make a smooth paste.
9. Add the milk all at once, whisking or stirring until the sauce thickens and bubbles.
10. Spoon the sauce evenly over the sausage mixture.
11. Top with the remaining cubed bread.
12. Bake uncovered for about 30 minutes, or until the top is lightly browned and the casserole is hot throughout.

Cook’s Notes

This dish can be assembled earlier in the day and baked before service. If making ahead, cover and refrigerate after assembly. Allow extra baking time if placing the dish into the oven cold.

For a firmer, more loaf-like texture, reduce the milk slightly or increase the bread by about 1/2 cup. For a richer version, use a good-quality pork sausage with enough fat to season the apples and bread.

Alternate Reconstructions

Stuffed Bread Loaf Version

Hollow out a sturdy round or oval loaf. Lightly moisten the interior with diluted vinegar, apple juice, or a mild posca-style mixture. Fill with the cooked sausage, apple, spice, and bread-bound mixture. Replace the top, press lightly, and bake until heated through. Slice to serve.

Sausage Patty Version

Combine cooked or finely chopped sausage with apple, bread crumbs, egg, vinegar, and spices. Shape into small patties and pan-fry. This moves the dish closer to oyster loaf, salmon loaf, and Roman forcemeat logic.

Coffin-Baked Version

For an experimental version, enclose the sausage mixture in a thick flour-and-water paste designed more as a baking container than a delicate edible crust. Bake until the filling is cooked through, then open the coffin and serve the contents. This version is more speculative, but it explores bread or paste as cooking technology.

Feast Service Version

Mary’s casserole remains the easiest and most reliable option for serving a crowd.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Mearh Smeamete mean?

Mearh can mean marrow or pith, but Bosworth-Toller also glosses it as sausage. Sméa-mete means a delicacy. Together, the phrase can be understood as “sausage delicacy” or “fine sausage dish.”

Is Mearh Smeamete an original Anglo-Saxon recipe?

No complete Anglo-Saxon recipe for this exact dish survives. This is a historically informed reconstruction created by Mary Savelli using Old English vocabulary, Roman culinary parallels, and evidence from Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, and later medieval foodways.

Did Anglo-Saxons eat sausage?

The Old English word mearh can refer to sausage, and sausage was already an ancient method of preserving meat. Mary’s reconstruction draws on that linguistic evidence as well as Roman and later medieval traditions of minced, ground, or forced meat dishes.

Why are apples included with sausage?

Fruit with meat appears in discussions of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman foodways. Apples help balance rich pork, while vinegar sharpens the dish and warming spices add depth.

Why does the recipe include bread?

Bread and pastry appear in Roman ragouts and composed dishes as thickeners, binders, vessels, and structural ingredients. Anglo-Saxon evidence for osterhlaf, or oyster loaf, also suggests that bread-based savory preparations were part of the broader food world Mary was reconstructing from.

Why does the recipe use a milk-thickened sauce?

The sauce is a modern practical method for binding the casserole. While the exact sauce is not Anglo-Saxon, the broader principle of using binders and thickeners in composed meat dishes is well supported in Roman and later medieval cookery.

Could this be made another way?

Yes. The evidence could support a baked casserole, a stuffed bread loaf, enriched sausage patties bound with bread, or a more experimental coffin-baked version. Mary’s casserole version is especially useful for feast service because it scales well and can be made ahead.

Sources and Further Reading

• Mary Savelli, Tastes of Anglo-Saxon England. Anglo-Saxon Books, 2002.
• Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, entries for mearh and sméa-mete.
• Ann Hagen, Anglo-Saxon Food: Processing and Consumption. University College London, 1992.
• Thomas Oswald Cockayne, ed., Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England, Vol. II.
• Bald’s Leechbook, British Library Manuscript Viewer.
• Anthimus, De Observatione Ciborum, especially De carnibus vero vaccinis: https://archive.org/details/anthinideobserva00anthuoft/page/8/mode/2up
• Apicius, Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome, available through Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29728/29728-h/29728-h.htm
• Edwards, Roman Cookery of Apicius, especially the discussion of fish and forcemeat ragouts: https://archive.org/details/romancookeryofap0000apic/page/86/mode/2up
• Harleian MS 279, including later medieval English recipes such as Rapeye of Fleysshe and Doucettes.
• Liber Cure Cocorum, for later medieval English thickening and binding practices.

Final Thought: Revisiting Mearh Smeamete made me appreciate Mary Savelli’s reconstruction more, not less. I began with questions about the structure of the dish. I ended with a web of evidence: sausage, delicacy, bread as vessel, bread as binder, fruit with meat, sweet-sour-spiced flavor logic, forcemeat, thickened ragouts, later English continuity, and feast practicality. I might build the dish differently today, but Mary’s version still deserves its place at the table.

Would you serve Mearh Smeamete as a baked casserole, a stuffed bread loaf, crisp sausage patties, or a coffin-baked feast dish?

Renaissance Bolognese Sausages – Salsiccioni Bolognesi from a 1560 Carnivale Feast

Bolognese Sausages – Salsiccioni Bolognesi

Bolognese sausages served with chicken pinwheels as part of the Primo servitio posto in tavola, the first service from Domenico Romoli’s 1560 Carnivale feast.

These were the surprise champion of the first service. Of all the dishes placed on the table for the Primo servitio posto in tavola, the Bolognese sausages were the ones people fought over. The cold roasted crane-style chicken may have been the prestige dish in theory, but at our table the sausages staged a quiet little coup and vanished.

That reaction makes sense. These sausages are familiar enough to be comforting, but layered enough to make people stop and wonder what they are tasting. Pork, fat, pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, rosewater, and cheese come together into something warm, subtle, and deeply savory. Nobody guessed that there was cheese in the sausage, and nobody could taste the rosewater directly, but everyone knew there was something more than pork happening.

This is exactly the sort of dish that makes Renaissance food so interesting. It is not strange for the sake of strangeness. It is rich, careful, elegant, and festive. A courtly sausage, if such a thing can be said without sounding ridiculous.

Why Bolognese?

The word “Bolognese” matters here. Bologna was already associated with fine pork products and sausage-making, and specifying Bolognese sausage likely signaled more than geography. It suggested a recognizable style: refined, carefully made, and worthy of a formal table.

Much as certain modern regional food names carry expectations of quality, “Bolognese” in a Renaissance feast menu may have told diners that these were not ordinary rustic sausages. They belonged to the world of urban craft, skilled butchery, and prestige foods. In one period-style description of Bolognese practice, the sausages are described as being made “for princes,” which is too wonderful a phrase to leave sitting quietly in the corner.

In other words, these are not merely pork tubes. These are pork tubes with credentials.

The Scappi Version: Courtly, Spiced, and Delicate

The main recipe used for this redaction comes from Bartolomeo Scappi’s Opera dell’arte del cucinare, Book II. Scappi’s sausage is not smoky or aggressively rustic. It is finely worked, warmly spiced, and softened with rosewater and, if desired, grated cheese. The cheese does not make the sausage taste cheesy. Instead, it gives depth, savoriness, and a richer mouthfeel.

The rosewater is especially interesting. Modern cooks often worry that rosewater will make savory food taste like perfume, but in this sausage it did not announce itself at all. I diluted the rosewater by half with plain water because modern rosewater can be strong. After the sausage mixture rested for a few days before cooking, no one could identify a floral flavor. My suspicion is that the rosewater functions partly as an aromatic liquid to help distribute the spices evenly through the meat.

📜 Period Italian and English Translation

Italian, Scappi, Opera, Book II	Faithful English Translation
Prendi carne magra di porco ben netta di nervi, & grassa buona nella sua proportione; pestala finemente con pepe, cannella, garofani, noce moscata, & un poco di zenzero; aggiungendovi sale quanto basta, & acqua rosata; et se vuoi farle più delicate, mettivi del formaggio grattugiato. Poi insaccale in budelli sottili, & falle cuocere in acqua, o rostirle alla graticola.	Take lean pork well cleaned of sinews, and good fat in proper proportion; pound it finely with pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and a little ginger; adding salt as needed, and rosewater. And if you wish to make them more delicate, add grated cheese. Then stuff them into thin casings, and cook them in water, or roast them on the grill.

A Bolognese Variant: Sausages for Princes

There is also a regional Bolognese-style sausage tradition that describes lean pork or veal, beaten very fine, seasoned with salt and pepper, stuffed into larger casings, made about the length of a hand, and dried in smoke. A richer immediate-use version could be made with half lean meat and half fat, with fennel added, though that version was not intended for keeping.

This distinction is useful. Scappi’s version is delicate and courtly, with rosewater, spice, and optional cheese. The Bolognese variant emphasizes regional practice, size, drying, and smoking. Together they suggest why “Bolognese” was worth naming on a feast menu: the word carried culinary weight.

📜 Period-Style Bolognese Reconstruction

Italian

English Translation

Salsicce bolognesi Se vuoi fare buone salsicce bolognesi, togli carne di porco o di vitello della coscia, senza nervi né grasso, et pestala quanto puoi. Aggiungi sale et pepe, et mescola bene. Poi togli budella grandi, nettale et lavale bene, et empile forte della carne, et falle lunghe quanto una mano, secondo l’uso di Bologna. Poi ponile ad asciugare al fumo. Et così le fanno per i principi. Et se vorrai, puoi farle più grasse con metà carne magra et metà grasso, et con buon finocchio, ma queste non sono da serbare.

Bolognese Sausages If you wish to make good Bolognese sausages, take pork or veal from the haunch, without sinew or fat, and beat it as much as you can. Add salt and pepper and mix well. Then take large intestines, clean and wash them well, and fill them firmly with the meat, making them the length of a hand, according to the custom of Bologna. Then set them to dry in smoke. Thus are they made for princes. And if you wish, you may make them fatter with half lean meat and half fat, adding good fennel, but those are not for keeping.

Humoral and Feast Context

These sausages make excellent sense in a first service. Pork is rich, fatty, and satisfying, but the warming spices transform it into something more refined. Pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and ginger all bring heat and digestive stimulation. In humoral terms, this is food meant to wake the appetite and prepare the stomach for the courses to come.

That richness is balanced by the rest of the Primo servitio. Bitter chicory, dressed citron, sharp capers, carrot salad, cold roasted bird, and savory meats all work together. The capers are especially important because they appear repeatedly throughout the larger feast. They are not just garnish. They are little salty, acidic punctuation marks that cut through fat and keep the table lively.

This is one of the things I love about reconstructing an entire service rather than an isolated dish. You begin to see the rhythm of the table. Romoli is not simply listing foods. He is building contrast.

At Our Table

These sausages were the clear favorite of the first service. They were warm, subtle, and delicious. The spice was present, but not loud. It did not taste like modern breakfast sausage, nor did it taste like a sweet sausage. Instead, the flavor was courtly and layered: familiar pork, softened by fat and cheese, lifted by warm spices, and rounded in a way that made people keep reaching for more.

Nobody realized there was cheese in the sausage. Nobody tasted roses. But everyone knew there was something more than pork. That hidden richness is likely why the dish worked so well. The cheese gave savoriness without becoming obvious. The rosewater, diluted with water, helped carry the spices without turning the dish floral.

For this reconstruction, I included fennel, following the richer non-keeping Bolognese tradition described in period sources. The result felt especially harmonious with the warm spice blend and likely contributed to the sausage’s broad appeal at the table.

By the end of the meal, there were leftover pieces of the cold crane-style chicken and some chicory salad. There were no leftover sausages. That says everything.

No Casings? A Modern Kitchen Solution

Traditional sausage casings are ideal if you have them, but I did not use casings for this feast. Instead, I shaped the sausage mixture in plastic wrap, twisting the ends tightly to form compact logs. I placed the wrapped sausages in a shallow pan and gently simmered them until set. After poaching, I unwrapped them and finished them in a pan with a little oil to brown the outside.

This is not a period technique, but it is a practical and effective modern adaptation. It lets the cook make historical sausage without needing special equipment, casings, or a sausage stuffer. The result held its shape, sliced well, and was good enough that the platter emptied.

Testa di Ruffolatto Fredda – Cold Pressed Young Boar in Gelée (Carnivale Feast)

Published: May 21, 2026

Testa di Ruffolatto Fredda - Cold Pressed Young Boar in Gelée (Carnivale Feast)

Testa di Ruffolatto Fredda, or cold young boar head meat, was one of the most surprising dishes served during the Carnivale Feast. It appeared on the table cold, sliced, and set in its own natural jelly. For many modern diners, the texture was unfamiliar at first. The flavor, however, won them over completely.

This was not a dish most of us eat regularly. Cold meat suspended in savory gelée can feel strange to modern palates accustomed to sliced deli meats, pâtés, or pulled pork. Yet by the end of the feast, there was none left. The turning point came when someone spread a slice onto warm bread, allowing the natural jelly to melt into it. Then someone else added capers. After that, everyone had to try it.

Testa di Ruffolatto Fredda served alongside caponi sopramenti pinwheels during the Carnivale Feast. Though unfamiliar in texture to many modern diners, the rich flavor quickly won people over.

The Original Source

This reconstruction draws on an Italian jelly-meat recipe from Libro di cucina / Libro per cuoco, a 14th/15th-century Italian culinary text translated by Louise Smithson. The recipe is not a modern head cheese recipe, but it gives us a clear period method for producing a meat jelly from collagen-rich cuts and spiced broth.

XXXI - Jelly of whatever meat. If you want to make a good jelly of any meat: of meat of pork of the woods (boar), take ears and feet and each thing, and capons and partridge, and thrush, and hare, and roebuck (venison), and pheasant, take these things and put these to the fire in part water and part vinegar and when they are boiled and well skimmed, put spices and pepper and cinnamon and ginger and saffron not beaten together, that you choose is enough with the meat. And when the meat it is enough cooked pull it out, until remains the ears and the feet until it is of enough substance. When it is pulled all these things from, pulverize all the meat and spices, and take the jelly from the fire and let it stand, and take saffron and temper with jelly and place the meat into a vessel that you want that is lined with bay leaves and put over this jelly and strain the jelly and saffron with wool (through a cloth). When it is strained over the meat, take sweet spices and mix with this same jelly and pour it above, it should be colored and good yellow, and put with to boil from that which is come together, and it will be a good jelly.

The method is wonderfully practical: cook collagen-rich meats in water and vinegar, skim carefully, season with spices, strain the broth, arrange the meat in a vessel, and allow the natural jelly to set. The result is a cold, sliceable meat dish suitable for display and service.

What Is a Ruffolatto?

At first, the word ruffolatto raised questions. It can look obscure to a modern reader, and it is easy to confuse this dish with other animal-head preparations from the same feast. However, the Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana identifies rufalotto, ruffolatto, and rufolatto as a young wild boar, specifically a cinghiale di pochi mesi, or a wild boar of only a few months.

This matters. The dish is not goat. It is associated with young wild boar, a prestigious game animal and an appropriate choice for a lavish Carnival banquet before the restrictions of Lent. Young boar would have offered tender meat, rich flavor, and excellent natural gelatin.

Because young wild boar is difficult to source for a modern kitchen, this feast reconstruction used country-style pork ribs. They were inexpensive, available, flavorful, and, most importantly, produced an excellent natural jelly without added gelatin.

A Cold Dish for a Banquet Table

Modern diners often imagine historical feasts as a parade of hot dishes brought steaming from the kitchen. In reality, many Renaissance banquet foods were served cool, cold, or temperate. Salads, preserved fruits, sliced meats, cured meats, jellied preparations, and composed dishes could be prepared ahead, arranged carefully, and served from the sideboard or brought to the table as part of a larger service.

Testa di Ruffolatto Fredda fits that logic beautifully. It was not a hurried dish. It required time, patience, careful skimming, cooling, and setting. Once prepared, it could be sliced and arranged neatly for the table, making it ideal for a feast with many dishes served together.

Nose-to-Tail Cooking and Banquet Luxury

To modern ears, head meat and jellied pork may sound humble or even intimidating. In historical kitchens, however, collagen-rich cuts were valuable. Feet, ears, heads, skin, bones, and joints were not waste. They were the source of texture, body, richness, and natural gelée.

This was not merely survival food. In an elite context, a well-made meat jelly showed skill. The broth needed to be skimmed cleanly, the meat cooked until tender, the seasoning balanced, and the final dish set firmly enough to slice. It was thrift and luxury at the same time, the sort of kitchen alchemy historical cooks understood deeply.

Why All the Skimming?

One of the least glamorous but most important parts of the process was skimming the pot during the first stage of cooking. As the pork slowly heated, foam rose to the surface. This is normal. It is made up of coagulated proteins and impurities released from the meat.

Removing that foam helped produce a cleaner broth and a clearer finished jelly. The original recipe specifically calls for the meat to be “well skimmed,” and this turned out to be excellent advice. For a cold sliced dish, appearance matters. A well-skimmed broth gives the finished gelée a cleaner flavor and a better look.

Why It Set Without Gelatin

One of the surprises of this reconstruction was that no added gelatin was needed. The country-style ribs produced enough natural collagen to set the broth firmly on their own.

The process was simple but slow. The pork was cooked low and slow until the meat fell from the bones. The meat was strained from the broth, then the broth was allowed to rest overnight so the fat could rise and harden. Once the fat cap was removed, the broth was reheated until it melted, poured over the shredded meat in a loaf pan, and chilled until firm.

This is the heart of traditional aspic cookery: collagen, time, and cooling. No packet of gelatin. No modern shortcut. Just patient cooking and a broth rich enough to become its own structure.

The French Connection

If you have eaten French charcuterie, this dish may feel more familiar than it first sounds. It belongs to the same broad family as fromage de tête, English brawn, German Sülze, and other European jellied or pressed meats. These dishes differ by region and seasoning, but they share the same essential idea: tender cooked meat held together by a savory natural gel.

That comparison helped me understand the dish at table. The sliced testa was not strange once treated as charcuterie. It wanted bread. It wanted something sharp. It wanted the capers that were already part of the first service.

The Surprise of the Table

I will admit that I was surprised by how well this dish was received. This is not something most of us normally eat, and the mouthfeel was unfamiliar to several diners. Served cold, the gelée gives the meat a texture somewhere between terrine, aspic, and rich pork spread.

The flavor, however, was excellent: deeply porky, gently spiced, savory, and comforting. Once someone spread it on warm bread and the gel melted into the crumb, the dish suddenly made sense. Then someone added capers, bringing salt and acidity to the rich pork, and everyone wanted to try it.

Bread had been baked for the sops beneath the crane, represented at feast by chicken, rather than specifically for the testa. Serving warm bread with the cold meat was not the strictest interpretation of the original service. Still, fresh bread had been baked, and refusing to serve it while its ghost lingered through the hall would have been a very naughty thing indeed.

By the end of the feast, there was none left. For a dish many diners approached with caution, that felt like high praise.

How Would This Have Been Eaten?

A dish like this would most likely have been served cold and sliced, as it was at the feast. Diners could cut small portions with a knife and eat them alongside other dishes from the same service. In a banquet setting, foods were not always experienced in isolation. A bite of rich meat might be followed by capers, bitter greens, preserved citron, bread, or another contrasting flavor from the table.

The capers were not written into the testa recipe, but they were present in the same service and made excellent sense. Sharp, salty, acidic foods balance rich meats beautifully. In that sense, the diners who added capers were participating in the same flavor logic that made Renaissance banquet tables so compelling.

Humoral Notes

In humoral thinking, rich meats and gelatinous broths were often associated with nourishment and strength. A dish like this would have been substantial, warming, and sustaining, especially when made from a young animal and served as part of a lavish pre-Lenten feast.

The vinegar in the cooking liquid and the sharpness of accompaniments such as capers helped balance the richness of the meat. That balance between fat and acid, rich and sharp, soft and bright, is part of why the dish worked so well for modern diners too.

Insalata di Carote – Roasted Renaissance Carrot Salad (Primo Servitio)

Published: May 21, 2026

Insalata di Carote – Roasted Renaissance Carrot Salad (Primo Servitio)

Insalata di Carote, or carrot salad, appears as part of the Primo servitio posto in tavola, the first service placed upon the table, in the Carnivale Feast menu inspired by Domenico Romoli’s sixteenth-century Italian banquet tradition.

At first glance, this seems like one of the humbler dishes on the table. It appears beside chicory salad, shredded prosciutto, cold pressed head meat, citron dressed with rose vinegar, cold roasted crane, capers, capons, and Bolognese sausages. Yet this simple roasted carrot dish became one of the quiet successes of the feast. The carrots were sweet, almost parsnip-like, and the bright oil-and-vinegar dressing brought them beautifully into balance. By the end of the meal, not a single carrot remained.

Insalata di Carote served feast-style with hand-torn prosciutto. The original menu lists carrot salad and shredded prosciutto separately, but they paired beautifully on the same platter.

The Original Menu Context

Primo servitio posto in tavola

Insalata di cicoria bianca, insalata di carote, prosciutto sfilato, testa di ruffolatto fredda, fette di cedro condite con aceto rosato, zuccaro & cannella, grue arrosta fredda, capperini, capponi salpamentati & salsiccioni bolognesi.

Translation: White chicory salad, carrot salad, shredded prosciutto, cold pressed head meat, slices of citron dressed with rose vinegar, sugar, and cinnamon, cold roasted crane, capers, capons salpamentati, and Bolognese sausages.

This carrot salad belongs to the same opening service as Insalata di Cicoria Bianca con Uva Passera e Scalognetti, another light salad dish from the Carnivale Feast. Together, these dishes helped create contrast at the beginning of the meal: bitter greens, sweet roots, sharp vinegar, salty cured meat, preserved fruit, and rich cold meats.

What Was the Primo Servitio?

In Renaissance Italian dining, a servitio was not simply a modern course in the plated sense. It was a structured presentation of several dishes placed before the diners, often emphasizing variety, abundance, and contrast. The primo servitio posto in tavola, or first service placed on the table, acted as the opening movement of the banquet.

Rather than immediately overwhelming diners with the richest foods, the first service often included dishes that awakened the appetite: salads, dressed vegetables, cured meats, preserved fruits, capers, and cold or temperate preparations. These foods offered brightness, acidity, salt, sweetness, and texture before the heavier dishes of the meal appeared.

That makes a carrot salad more important than it first appears. It is not merely a side dish. It is part of the architecture of the table.

Italian Food, French-Style Service

For this modern recreation, the Carnivale Feast was served in a French-style manner, with multiple dishes available at once for diners to sample. This is a practical and familiar way to serve a historical feast today, especially when cooking for a group without the army of servers, carvers, and attendants available to elite households of the past.

Sixteenth-century Italian banquet service had its own logic. Dishes were organized into services, and many foods passed through the credenza, or sideboard, where they could be arranged, sliced, dressed, garnished, or otherwise finished before appearing at table. Cool and temperate dishes such as salads, cured meats, preserved fruits, and dressed vegetables were especially suited to this kind of preparation.

In the original menu, insalata di carote and prosciutto sfilato are listed as separate dishes. At feast, because serving dishes were limited and because the flavors worked so well together, the hand-torn prosciutto was placed over the roasted carrots. This should be understood as a feast presentation choice rather than a claim that the original dish required prosciutto. Happily, the pairing was delicious.

Reconstructing a Missing Recipe

No direct prescriptive recipe for insalata di carote has yet been identified in the Italian culinary sources consulted for this project. This is not unusual. Historical menus often preserve the names of dishes without explaining how they were prepared, especially when the preparation may have been familiar to contemporary cooks.

For this reconstruction, I consulted Platina’s De honesta voluptate et valetudine, Maestro Martino’s Libro de arte coquinaria, Bartolomeo Scappi’s Opera dell’arte del cucinare, and Domenico Romoli’s La singolare dottrina. While these sources do not appear to provide a direct carrot salad recipe, they do support a broader culinary pattern: vegetables could be cooked, cooled or served temperate, and dressed with oil, vinegar, salt, and sometimes spices.

The method used here follows that logic. The carrots were cooked until tender, cooled, and dressed simply with olive oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper. A small touch of honey was added for modern taste, softening the acidity of the vinegar and echoing the sweet-sour balance beloved in Renaissance cooking.

A Comparative Early Modern Sallet

Although the Italian recipe remains elusive, a later English example helps show that cooked root vegetables could indeed be treated as salads in early modern cuisine. Robert May’s The Accomplisht Cook includes a “Diverse Sallet Otherways” made with boiled parsnips arranged with small salad greens, watercress, lettuce, alexander buds, oil, and vinegar. In a modern redaction of that dish, carrots and parsnips are often paired together.

This does not prove that Romoli’s insalata di carote was prepared in the same way. It does, however, support the broader idea that cooked roots dressed with oil and vinegar belonged comfortably within the early modern salad tradition.

A Humble Vegetable at a Noble Table

Carrots have a long and colorful history. The cultivated carrot likely originated in the region of Central Asia and Persia, especially around modern Iran and Afghanistan, before traveling west through trade, agriculture, and Mediterranean exchange. By the medieval and Renaissance periods, carrots were known in Europe, though they were not necessarily the bright orange supermarket carrots most familiar today.

Sixteenth-century Italian cooks may have encountered carrots in several colors, including white, yellow, purple, red, or reddish-orange forms. The standardized sweet orange carrot became more dominant later, especially through Dutch cultivation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For this recreation, I used modern orange carrots because they were readily available.

That practical substitution is worth noting, but not apologizing for. Modern orange carrots are sweeter and more uniform than many historical varieties, and roasting intensified that sweetness beautifully. In this dish, they became almost parsnip-like, which made them especially pleasing against the sharpness of vinegar and the saltiness of prosciutto.

Humoral Notes

In Renaissance dietary thinking, raw foods were often approached with caution, while cooked vegetables were generally considered easier to digest. Root vegetables such as carrots were associated with warmth and nourishment, especially when cooked. Serving them dressed with oil and vinegar in the first service made sense within the broader logic of the meal: they were gentle, appetizing, and helped prepare the stomach for richer foods to come.

The oil softened the dish, the vinegar sharpened it, and the small touch of honey rounded the dressing. This balance of sweet, sour, salty, and rich flavors is one of the reasons Renaissance food can feel surprisingly modern when handled with restraint.

Lucanicae – Ancient Roman Sausages Recipe

This dish was served as part of the Push for Pennsic 2004 – Early Roman Feast.

Originally published: June 29, 2025 at 3:44 PM | Updated: June 5, 2026

Updated 6/5/2026: This post has been expanded to current Give It Forth standards with additional historical context, Roman feast placement, Pennsic and camp cooking guidance, an appetizer-sized recipe for eight, dietary notes, FAQ, internal links to the full Roman feast menu, and structured recipe data.

What are Lucanicae? Lucanicae were seasoned sausages associated by Roman writers with Lucania in southern Italy. This version is inspired by Roman sausage traditions and the flavors of Apicius: minced meat, pepper, pine nuts, and liquamen or fish sauce, shaped small for feast service and grilled or gently cooked before finishing.

Lucanicae – Grilled Roman Sausages

Course: Gustum (Appetizer)
Origin: Ancient Rome
Served: Warm or Room Temperature
Event: Push for Pennsic 2004 – Early Roman Feast

Lucanicae are exactly the kind of dish that makes a Roman feast feel generous from the first course. Small, savory, highly seasoned sausages sit beautifully beside flatbread, olives, cucumbers, herbed cheese, cabbage, and chickpeas. They are rich enough to feel substantial, but when made small they remain appropriate for the gustum, the appetizer course meant to wake the appetite rather than exhaust it.

For modern feast cooks, they are also practical little flavor engines. The mixture can be prepared ahead, shaped small, chilled, transported, and cooked quickly on a grill or skillet. That makes Lucanicae especially useful for Pennsic-style service, primitive sites, and SCA dayboards where food needs to be flavorful, sturdy, and manageable without a full modern kitchen.

Historical Background

Lucanicae, the seasoned sausages of Roman origin, were named after the region of Lucania in southern Italy. Roman writers connect them with the Lucanians, and the name survived into later sausage traditions such as Italian luganega and Spanish longaniza.

Did You Know?
The Roman author Varro explains Lucanicae as sausages named from Lucania, describing the practice of stuffing minced meat into casings with seasonings. Whether read as food history, etymology, or both, the passage shows that Romans associated this style of sausage with a specific regional tradition.

For more on ancient Roman cookery, see the digitized Latin and English text of Apicius – De Re Coquinaria.

The surviving Roman cookery tradition does not give us a modern sausage recipe with neat measurements, temperatures, and timing. Instead, it gives us a flavor-world: pepper, liquamen, herbs, nuts, wine, vinegar, smoke, roasting, and meats prepared for household tables, taverns, military travel, and feasts. This redaction is therefore not a claim of exact reconstruction. It is a practical, feast-tested interpretation designed for SCA service, camp conditions, and modern food safety.

This is the useful place where historical cooking meets real-world feast work. A cook has to ask not only “what did the source say?” but also “how do I serve this safely, attractively, and generously to a table of modern diners?” For Lucanicae, the answer is to preserve the Roman flavor profile while making the shape and cooking method flexible.

Lucania, Soldiers, and Sausage-Making

The Roman explanation for lucanicae ties the sausage to Lucania, a region of southern Italy. Whether the Roman army truly learned the technique there or later writers preserved a convenient food etymology, the association matters. Sausages are portable, efficient, flavorful, and well suited to feeding groups. Minced meat mixed with salt, spice, and fat can stretch ingredients, cook quickly, and serve neatly in small portions.

That practicality explains why sausage belongs so comfortably on a Roman-inspired feast table. It is not merely meat in a casing. It is preserved knowledge: how to season meat strongly, how to divide it into portions, how to make it easy to cook, and how to carry rich flavor into a meal without requiring a large roast or elaborate carving.

For a feast cook, that ancient practicality still applies. A platter of small, bite-sized sausages looks abundant, serves cleanly, and works beautifully in an appetizer course. At Push for Pennsic, these are best treated as a gustum: a savory opening bite served with other small Roman-inspired dishes rather than as a large modern entree.

🏛️ Feast-cook note: A mound of small, meatball-sized sausages is pleasing to the eye and gives a generous impression while keeping portions appropriate for an appetizer course. About 1 tablespoon of meat mixture per sausage gives two or three bites, and 1 pound of meat makes roughly 30 small sausages.

Modern Interpretation

This simplified grilled version uses bulgur to approximate the grainy texture of some Roman-style forcemeats and mixes pork and beef for richness. Pine nuts add a distinctly Roman touch, and liquamen, or modern fish sauce, gives the meat its salty, savory backbone.

Historically, sausage could be stuffed into casings, but feast conditions are not always generous. This version may be shaped into small patties, rolled into bite-sized sausage logs, stuffed into casings, or gently poached in plastic wrap when casings are unavailable. The goal is not to make a modern deli sausage, but to create a flavorful Roman-inspired bite that can survive real event conditions.

The flavor should be peppery, savory, and slightly rich from the pine nuts. The fish sauce should not make the sausage taste fishy. It should deepen the meat, much as Roman liquamen does throughout Apicius-style cooking. If your fish sauce is very strong or salty, use a little less and add more only after cooking a test piece.

Why These Ingredients?

• Ground meat: Pork is especially appropriate for Roman cookery, though a pork and beef blend gives a rich, accessible modern texture.
• Bulgur: This is a modern practical choice that gives texture and helps the mixture hold together. It also echoes the use of grains and fillers in historic forcemeat traditions.
• Liquamen / fish sauce: Roman cookery used fermented fish sauces extensively. Modern fish sauce is the easiest substitute.
• Pine nuts: Pine nuts appear frequently in Roman recipes and add richness, texture, and a distinctly ancient Mediterranean character.
• Pepper: Black pepper was a prized imported spice and appears often in Apicius-style seasoning.

⚖️ Humoral note: Later medieval dietary theory often treated pork and beef as heavy meats that benefited from warming spices, salt, vinegar, mustard, or sharp sauces. While this recipe is Roman rather than medieval, the flavor logic still makes sense at table: pepper, fermented fish sauce, and accompaniments such as mustard, olives, herbs, or wine help cut the richness of the meat.

Pork Custard (Charlette) – Medieval Meat-and-Milk Dish from Harleian MS. 279 (c.1430)

“.lvj. Charlette” – Pork Custard, Harleian MS. 279 (c.1430)Photo: Give It Forth

Originally published 1/16/2017 Updated 10/31/2025

Among the most puzzling entries in Harleian MS. 279 is “.lvj. Charlette” — a firm, sliceable custard of milk, pork or veal, eggs, and ale. It sits at the edge of pudding, cheese, and meat pie: a now-rare style sometimes dubbed a “hard custard.”

The name is often glossed as “meat-milk” (with char “flesh/meat” and –lette “milk”), and similar “milk-meat” recipes turn up in The Forme of Cury and A Noble Boke off Cookry. Medieval diners would have found it robust and nourishing; to modern eyes it can look… challenging. But as a piece of culinary archaeology, it’s priceless.

🥕 Dietary notes: contains meat & dairy; not vegetarian. Gluten-free if using GF ale. Try a mushroom variant for testing.

Lost Techniques Spotlight: Curds-by-Ale & the “Hard Custard” Family

• Ale-curdling, not sweet-setting: Here, hot milk is curdled by adding beaten eggs and a little ale as the acid; the eggs help bind fine curds around minced meat.
• Kin to egg-cheese & posset: The method sits between fresh cheese (acid + heat) and early egg-thickened drinks (posset). Pressing the curds overnight makes a sliceable loaf.
• Savory custards fade: By the 16th–17th c., European tastes shift toward sweet, cream-based, gently baked custards. Savory “hard custards” like charlette mostly vanish.
• Service tip: Medieval directions say to press the loaf and reheat slices in hot broth. This keeps texture tender and adds flavor.

Feast planning: Make a day ahead so it presses and chills fully. Slice cold; reheat in beef or capon broth at service.