Food preparation in the Tudor Kitchens at Cowdray.
Picture by David Farquhar.

Tudor Food & Recipes
by Roney MacDonald

Here are two recipes taken from ‘The Accomplisht Cook’ by Robert May who was employed as cook to Cowdray Castle at the beginning of the 17^th century.

These two recipes for salads show the variety of foods available at that time, the diligence to cleanliness, and their love of pattern and colour in their dishes.

(Read s for f and it will all make fenfe!)

Other Grand Sallets

Take green purflain and pick it leaf by leaf, wafh it and fwing it in a napkin, then being difht in a fair, clean difh, and finely piled up in a heap in the midft of it lay round about the centre of the fallet pickled capers, currans, and raifins of the fun, wafhed, pickled, mingled, and laid round it: about them fome carved cucumbers in flices or halves, and laid round alfo. Then garnifh the difh brims with borage, or clove jelly-flowers. Or otherways with jagged cucumber-peels, olives, capers, and reifins of the fun, then the beft fallet-oyl and wine-vinegar.

Another Grand Sallet

Take fmall fallet of all good fallet herbs, then mince fome white cabbage leaves, or ftriked cole-worts, mingle them among the fmall fallet, or fome lilly-flowers flit with a pin; then firft lay some minced cabbage in a clean fcowred difh, and the minced fallet round about it; then fome well wafhed and pickled capers, currans, olives, or none; then about the reft, a round of boild red beets, oranges, or lemons carved. For the garnifh of the brim of the difh, boild colliflowers, carved lemons, beets, and capers.

 

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