Open a medieval cookery book for the first time and you may discover something rather startling: the recipe appears to have forgotten to be a recipe.
There may be no ingredient quantities. No oven temperature. No cooking time. Ingredients may have unfamiliar names, familiar words may mean something quite different, and the instructions may consist of a short paragraph that seems to assume you already know exactly what you are doing.
In many ways, that is because the text does assume knowledge on the part of its reader.
Reconstructing a medieval recipe therefore involves considerably more than replacing Middle English words with modern ones. It means reading the culinary instructions in context, identifying what the text actually tells us, recognizing what it leaves unstated, researching unfamiliar ingredients and techniques, comparing related evidence, and finally making a series of informed decisions in the kitchen.
Those decisions are where interpretation becomes reconstruction.
