Charlet a-forcyd ryally: Royal Enriched Pork Charlet from Harleian MS 279 (c. 1430)

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Charlet a-forcyd ryally: Royal Enriched Pork Charlet from Harleian MS 279

Charlet a-forcyd ryally reconstructed from Harleian MS 279. Original 2017 kitchen photograph.

This is the second of two charlet recipes that appear one after the other in Harleian MS 279, and it is much more elaborate than the first. The simpler Charlette cooks pork or veal in milk with eggs, saffron, and ale, lets the mixture curdle, presses it lightly, and serves it with broth. Charlet a-forcyd ryally takes that basic idea and dresses it for company.

Here the cook uses almond milk instead of cow’s milk, grinds the pork fine, mixes it with strained eggs, adds wine, saffron, ginger, galingale, and sugar, presses the curd twice, slices it, and serves it beneath a saffron-colored almond-milk-and-broth sauce finished with mace and still more sugar.

I first reconstructed this dish in January 2017. It worked mechanically: the almond milk and wine produced a fine-grained curd that could be pressed and sliced. It was also, by a comfortable margin, one of the least popular dishes with my taste testers.

Returning to the manuscript now gives me reason to reconsider that verdict. The old reconstruction got the essential idea right—curd, drain, press, slice, sauce—but it moved the ginger, galingale, and sugar into the egg mixture instead of seasoning the curd after the first pressing; it pressed the curd only once; and its sauce omitted both the fresh broth and the sugar specified by the manuscript. In other words, the dish we disliked in 2017 was not quite the dish the manuscript describes.

Why You Will Love This Recipe

• It preserves a genuinely unusual medieval technique: meat and egg transformed into a sliceable pressed curd.
• The manuscript gives us a clear comparison between an ordinary Charlette and an explicitly “royal” enriched version.
• The dish combines savory pork with saffron, wine, ginger, galingale, mace, sugar, almond milk, and broth.
• The double pressing is explicit and is easy to miss in a quick reading.
• It offers a perfect example of why historical reconstruction should remain revisable when a closer source reading changes the method.

Jump to the Recipe

Historical Integrity: Harleian MS 279 explicitly gives good almond milk, tender pork, eggs, salt, saffron, wine, ginger, galingale, sugar, fresh broth, mace, and a second quantity of almond milk for the sauce. It explicitly instructs the cook to grind the pork, mix it with strained eggs, cook the mixture with almond milk, add wine, press the curd, break it apart and season it, press it again, slice it, sauce it, and finish it with mace and sugar. The manuscript gives no quantities, pressing times, pork-to-liquid ratio, wine type, or exact broth. The 2026 recipe below preserves the successful 2017 proportions where possible while correcting the order and steps to follow the manuscript more closely. The corrected version has not yet been separately taste-tested.

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.