To the King's Taste Richard II's Feasts and Recipes

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Description: All but a few of the recipes in this book are from the Forme of Cury (Manner of Cookery), one of the earliest extant collections of manuscript recipes in Middle English. It was written about 1390 at the request of King Richard II, "the best and royallest viander of all Christian kings."1 Many of the recipes in the Forme of Cury reveal the lust for grandeur and exoticism characteristic of Richard's court. Contemporary chroniclers report that the king feasted with more than ten thousand guests daily and employed three hundred cooks to prepare the royal repasts. 

Richard's chefs were culinary artists. Some were sculptors, shaping enormous sotelties of colored marzipan to depict guests being honored at the feast. Others were architects, erecting towering castles of dough whose crenelated walls were actually the crusts of deep, stuffed pies: 

Take and make a foyle [leaf] of gode past with a roller, of a foot brode, and lynger by cumpas [in proportion]. Make foure coffyngs [pie crusts] of the self [same] past uppon the rolleres, the gretnesse of the smale of thyn arme, of six ynohe deepnesse. Make the gretust in the myddel. Fasten the foile in the mouth upwarde, and fasten thee other foure in every side. Kerve out kyntlich [quaintly] kyrnels [crenelations] above in the manner of bataiwyng [embattlements] and drye hem harde in an ovene, other [or] in the sune. In the myddle coffyn do a fars [stuffing) of pork, with gode pork and ayren [eggs] rawe with salt, and color it with safron, and do in another creme of almandes, and helde [cast] it in another creme of cowe mylke with ayren. Color it with sandres [sandal- wood]. 

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Condition: Good condition.