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There is an Indian bread (p. 126) and two Islamic pastries, Murakkaba (p. 121) and
Musammana (p. 121) which are made in a frying pan rather than an oven, and are therefore easy
to make on site. There are also recipes for fritters and funnel cakes (pp 55-58), many of which are
suitable for camping events.
There are many other possibilities for non-perishable period dishes. They include recipes
using lentils and other dried beans (pp. 17-18, 99-100). They also include one very familiar dish–
macaroni and cheese, known in the Middle Ages as Macrows (p. 70) or Losyns (p. 68).
If you have fresh meat available, there are many possible recipes; Meat Roasted Over Coals
(p. 110) is good and very straightforward. If you roast a large amount of meat for one evening’s
dinner, A Roast of Meat (p. 98) is a good way of using up leftover roast meat for the next meal.
Creative Medieval Cooking
It is sometimes claimed that the dishes served at an SCA feast are medieval even though they
do not come from any period cookbook. The idea is that the cook is producing original creations
in a medieval style. After all, there is no reason to assume that all, or even very many, medieval
cooks used cookbooks.
In principle, this is a legitimate argument–if it is made by an experienced medieval cook.
Since we do not have the option of living in the Middle Ages, the only practical way to become
an experienced medieval cook is by cooking from medieval cookbooks. In my experience,
however, the people who make this argument have rarely done much, if any, cooking from period
sources; their “original medieval creations” are usually either modern ethnic dishes or modified
versions of standard modern recipes.
Even if “creative medieval cookery” is done by taking period recipes and modifying them, it is
a risky business. Unless the cook has extensive experience cooking medieval recipes in their
original form, he is likely to modify them in the direction of modern tastes–in order to make them
fit better his ideas of what they should be like. But one of the attractions of medieval cooking is
that it lets us discover things we do not expect–combinations of spices, or ways of preparing
dishes, that seem strange to modern tastes yet turn out to be surprisingly good.
I would therefore advise anyone interested in medieval cooking to try to keep as closely as
possible to the original recipe. There may, of course, be practical difficulties that prevent you
from following the recipe exactly–ingredients you cannot obtain, cooking methods you cannot
use (“hang it in a chimney where a fire is kept all the year”), or the like. But I do not think it is
ever desirable, when first cooking a dish, to change it merely because you suspect that if you
follow the recipe you will not like the result. The people who wrote the recipes down knew a
great deal more about period cookery than we do; it is our job to be their students, not their
teachers.
Period, Ethnic, and Traditional
There is some tendency for people in the Society to assume that all ethnic food is period.
Thus, for example, “oriental” feasts often consist of dishes that one would find in a modern
Chinese or Japanese restaurant and traditional or “peasant” cooking is sometimes included in
feasts, even when there is no evidence that the particular dishes were made in period.
The assumption is a dangerous one; America is not the only place where things change over
time. The fact that a dish was made by your grandmother, or even that she says she got it from her
grandmother, may be evidence that the dish is a hundred years old; it is not evidence that it dates
from before 1600. While traditional societies may appear very old-fashioned to us, there is ample
evidence that such societies in general, and their cooking in particular, change over time. Potatoes