Reviews:
-A rich, fun survey of early cooking methods and recipes for modern readers and librarians interested in culinary history.
—Midwest Book Review
-This book ventures beyond literature and cookery into history, etymology, and sciences....Thorough, exemplary, logical, and unflinchingly authentic, the volume is a labor of love and thoughtful scholarship. Offering 189 recipes (some delicious), the book features a 67-page introduction on period ideology, dietary theory, law, pharmacology, etiquette, and economics. There are four appendixes, including Hard to Find Ingredients (substitutions/sources for hyssop, isinglass, verjuice, etc.) and Wages and Prices....The recipes are irresistible to read, if not always to cook--baked porpoise, swan's-blood pudding, and an aphrodisiac tart with sparrows' brains (the authors suggest substituting a teaspoon of Spam). In the fully quoted and cited original recipes, the authors note details that might escape readers' attention, e.g., carving breast meat from a live chicken....This wonderful book joins such titles as Francine Segan's Shakespeare's Kitchen: Renaissance Recipes for the Contemporary Cook (2003). Highly Recommended.
—Choice