Caules Wyrtmete: Reconstructing an Anglo-Saxon Cabbage Salad from Medical Texts

Originally served at Ceilidh XVI on March 29, 2003. Updated and expanded with additional historical research in 2026.

Caules Wyrtmete: Reconstructing an Anglo-Saxon Cabbage Salad from Medical Texts

When I reconstructed the menu for Ceilidh XVI in 2003, one of the simplest dishes on the table was a cabbage salad called Caules Wyrtmete. Made with cabbage, peas, leeks, vinegar, oil, and cheese, it seemed a practical addition to an Anglo-Saxon feast. Yet revisiting the sources revealed something far more interesting: the strongest evidence for this dish was not a cookbook, but a medical manuscript.

Rather than a direct copy of a surviving Anglo-Saxon recipe, Caules Wyrtmete explores the space where food, medicine, garden produce, and feast reconstruction meet. The result is a dish that asks one of the most interesting questions in historical cookery: can a feast dish be responsibly reconstructed from a remedy?

What began as a simple cabbage salad eventually led through Anglo-Saxon medicine, Roman dietary theory, and a remedy for dysentery preserved in one of England's most important medical manuscripts. The deeper the investigation went, the less the dish resembled a salad at all.

Papyns: Medieval Comfort Food for Breakfast, Babies, and the Infirm

Papyns: Medieval Custard for Breakfast, Babies, and the Infirm

First published January 4, 2016. Updated June 19, 2026.

Papyns with bread, a soft milk-and-egg pottage from Harleian MS 279.

Papyns is medieval comfort food: soft, warm, mild, and easy to eat. Found in Harleian MS 279, this fifteenth-century dish combines milk, flour, egg yolks, sugar, and salt into a smooth custard-like pottage served “rennyng,” or flowing.

Modern readers may think of it as a cross between custard, cream of wheat, and breakfast cereal. It is not flashy feast food. It is gentle food: the kind of dish that makes sense for children, elders, the sick, or anyone needing nourishment that does not ask too much of the teeth or stomach.

That simplicity is exactly what makes Papyns important. It gives us a glimpse of medieval food beyond roasts, pies, and elaborate subtleties. This is the food of care, recovery, and ordinary comfort.

Why this recipe matters: Papyns shows how medieval cooks made soft, nourishing foods for people who needed gentle meals. Its smooth texture and mild ingredients made it suitable for breakfast, children, the elderly, and the infirm.

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.