600-Year-Old Cookbook Released Digitally

This Thanksgiving, try some 600-year-old recipes created by King Richard II's chefs.

By Kathryn Hawkins. Posted on September 23 2008

If you’re sick of having meatloaf for dinner, how about a meal of blank mang (a recipe including meat, milk, sugar, and almonds) and mortrews (ground spiced pork), with a warm glass of mead to wash it down?

You won’t find these recipes in Jamie Oliver’s latest cookbook –these dishes and more than 200 other rare recipes are part of a culinary compilation assembled by the master chefs for none other than King Richard II, back in 1390.

The book, Forme of Cury, is one of 40 rare ancient manuscripts about to get the digital treatment, thanks to the University of Manchester’s John Rylands University Library. Other notables in the collection include an early version of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and two epic poems by John Lydgate.

Though the manuscripts have been in the library’s collection for years, the physical texts “are inherently fragile, and until now access to them has been restricted by the lack of digital copies,” the library’s director, Jan Wilkinson, told the Telegraph. “Digitisation will make them available to everyone.”

So if you’re searching for dinner inspiration, why not go back about 600 years? If it was good enough for a king, it should be good enough for you –and after all, retro never goes out of fashion.

Filed under: Arts and Culture, History,

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