First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

'Food in Medieval England' draws on research across different disciplines to present a picture of the English diet from the early Saxon period up to 1540. It uses a range of sources, from the historical records of medieval farms, abbeys, & households both great & small, to animal bones, human remains, & plants from archaeological sites.

New light is shed on everyday life in the middle ages in Great Britain and continental Europe through this unique survey of its food culture. Students and other readers will learn about the common foodstuffs available, how and what they cooked, ate, and drank, what the regional cuisines were like, how the different classes entertained and celebrated, and what restrictions they followed for health and faith reasons. Fascinating information is provided, such as on imitation food, kitchen humor, and medical ideas. Many period recipes and quotations flesh out the narrative.

Provides an overview of food, hunting, and cooking in the Middle Ages.

Topics examined include not just the personal eating habits of kings, queens, and nobles but also those of the peasants, monks, and other social groups not generally considered in medieval food studies."--BOOK JACKET.

Celebrate all year long with recipes that your family & friends will love! Filled with tasty and easy-to-fix recipes for every holiday to help you celebrate every memorable season. The book is divided by the seasons: Fall (Family get-togethers & game-day, Halloween and, of course, Thanksgiving), Winter Celebrations (Christmas to Valentine's Day and best-loved winter recipes), Spring (Easter, Mother's Day and more) and Summer (Memorial Day to Labor Day and County fairs in between). 245 Recipes.

This is a completely revised edition of the classic cookbook that makes genuine medieval meals available to modern cooks. Using the best recipes from the first edition as a base, Constance Hieatt and Brenda Hosington have added many new recipes from more countries to add depth and flavour to our understanding of medieval cookery. All recipes have been carefully adapted for use in modern kitchens, thoroughly tested, and represent a wide range of foods, from appetizers and soups, to desserts and spice wine. They come largely from English and French manuscripts, but some recipes are from sources in Arabia, Catalonia and Italy. The recipes will appeal to cordon-bleus and less experienced cooks, and feature dishes for both bold and timourous palates. The approach to cooking is entirely practical. The emphasis of the book is on making medieval cookery accessible by enabling today's cooks to produce authentic medieval dishes with as much fidelity as possible. All the ingredients are readily available; where some might prove difficult to find, suitable substitutes are suggested. While modern ingredients which did not exist in the Middle Ages have been excluded (corn starch, for example), modern time and energy saving appliances have not. Authenticity of composition, taste, and appearance are the book's main concern. Unlike any other published book of medieval recipes, Pleyn Delit is based on manuscript readings verified by the authors. When this was not possible, as in the case of the Arabic recipes, the best available scholarly editions were used. The introduction provides a clear explanation of the medieval menu and related matters to bring the latest medieval scholarship to the kitchen of any home. Pleyn Delit is a recipe book dedicated to pure delight - a delight in cooking and good food.

In his new history of food, acclaimed historian Massimo Montanari traces the development of medieval tastes—both culinary and cultural—from raw materials to market and captures their reflections in today's food trends. Tying the ingredients of our diet evolution to the growth of human civilization, he immerses readers in the passionate debates and bold inventions that transformed food from a simple staple to a potent factor in health and a symbol of social and ideological standing. Montanari returns to the prestigious Salerno school of medicine, the "mother of all medical schools," to plot the theory of food that took shape in the twelfth century. He reviews the influence of the Near Eastern spice routes, which introduced new flavors and cooking techniques to European kitchens, and reads Europe's earliest cookbooks, which took cues from old Roman practices that valued artifice and mixed flavors. Dishes were largely low-fat, and meats and fish were seasoned with vinegar, citrus juices, and wine. He highlights other dishes, habits, and battles that mirror contemporary culinary identity, including the refinement of pasta, polenta, bread, and other flour-based foods; the transition to more advanced cooking tools and formal dining implements; the controversy over cooking with oil, lard, or butter; dietary regimens; and the consumption and cultural meaning of water and wine. As people became more cognizant of their physicality, individuality, and place in the cosmos, Montanari shows, they adopted a new attitude toward food, investing as much in its pleasure and possibilities as in its acquisition.

So close geographically, how could France and England be so enormously far apart gastronomically? Not just in different recipes and ways of cooking, but in their underlying attitudes toward the enjoyment of eating and its place in social life. In a new afterword that draws the United States and other European countries into the food fight, Stephen Mennell also addresses the rise of Asian influence and "multicultural" cuisine. Debunking myths along the way, All Manners of Food is a sweeping look at how social and political development has helped to shape different culinary cultures. Food and almost everything to do with food, fasting and gluttony, cookbooks, women's magazines, chefs and cooks, types of foods, the influential difference between "court" and "country" food are comprehensively explored and tastefully presented in a dish that will linger in the memory long after the plates have been cleared.

Barbara A. Hanawalt's richly detailed account offers an intimate view of everyday life in Medieval England that seems at once surprisingly familiar and yet at odds with what many experts have told us. She argues that the biological needs served by the family do not change and that the ways fourteenth- and fifteenth-century peasants coped with such problems as providing for the newborn and the aged, controlling premarital sex, and alleviating the harshness of their material environment in many ways correspond with our twentieth-century solutions. Using a remarkable array of sources, including over 3,000 coroners' inquests into accidental deaths, Hanawalt emphasizes the continuity of the nuclear family from the middle ages into the modern period by exploring the reasons that families served as the basic unit of society and the economy. Providing such fascinating details as a citation of an incantation against rats, evidence of the hierarchy of bread consumption, and descriptions of the games people played, her study illustrates the flexibility of the family and its capacity to adapt to radical changes in society. She notes that even the terrible population reduction that resulted from the Black Death did not substantially alter the basic nature of the family.