Dinner in London, 1390 - The Spicekeeper's Almanac, Issue One

michel1492
5 hours ago
16 min read

From the private library of The Spicekeeper Oak City Spice Blends · History in Every Jar

The Year

In 1390, England was ruled by a young king with expensive taste. Richard II had taken the throne as a boy of ten, and by his early twenties had built one of the most lavish royal households Europe had seen, a court obsessed with ceremony, fashion, and the theater of display. Food was part of that theater. A royal meal wasn't just nourishment, it was a performance of wealth, taste, and political power, staged in front of an audience of nobles, ambassadors, and rivals.

It's almost certainly no accident that Forme of Cury, the manuscript at the center of this issue, was compiled by the master cooks of Richard II's own kitchen around this period. It survives as one of the earliest and most important collections of English recipes, written not for a curious public but as a working record for a kitchen staff numbering in the dozens, feeding a household that could run into the hundreds on a given day.

This issue sets a single dinner on that table: what was served, who was in the room, what they wore, and what it actually took, in trade, labor, and geography, to get a serving of cinnamon-spiced meat in front of a 14th century English diner.

The Table

This was not a peasant's supper. The dishes recorded in Forme of Cury reflect the upper tier of medieval English society, the royal household and the highest nobility, the only people who could afford the ingredients these recipes call for without a second thought.

Three things separated a noble table from everyone else's in 1390:

Imported spice. Pepper, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and saffron all had to travel thousands of miles by ship and caravan before reaching an English kitchen, and they were priced accordingly.
Sugar as seasoning. What we'd now call a baseline pantry sweetener was, in 1390, an imported luxury used more like a spice than a staple, often paired directly with meat rather than reserved for dessert.
Display over economy. Dishes were frequently colored, gilded, or shaped for visual effect. A recipe might call for saffron purely for its golden hue, regardless of whether it changed the flavor meaningfully.

A noble dinner in this period typically ran in courses, each one bringing out multiple dishes at once rather than a single plate per course, with diners served according to rank, the highest-status guests receiving the choicest cuts and the most elaborately spiced preparations first.

What the Women Wore

A woman arriving at this dinner carried her status in her clothing as plainly as the lord carried his at the head of the table, and the fashions of the 1390s were built to be read at a glance.

The foundation of her outfit was a linen chemise or smock worn next to the skin, invisible to everyone but herself. Over it came the kirtle, a fitted gown that by the late 1300s hugged the body closely through the bodice before falling into a full skirt, widened not at the waist but by triangular panels of fabric called gores set into the hem. Sleeves fit tightly to the wrist, sometimes extending over the knuckles, and the gown closed with buttons or lacing down the front or sides. A closely fitted version of this garment was known as the cotehardie.

Over the kirtle, a fashionable woman of 1390 would most likely wear the newest silhouette at court: the houppelande, a voluminous overgown with a high collar and wide, sweeping sleeves, often lined in fur and trimmed richly enough to advertise real wealth. It had become fashionable around 1380 and would dominate noble dress for the next several decades. The whole effect was one of deliberate abundance, fabric used lavishly because lavish fabric was the point.

Color and ornament did the rest of the talking. This was an age of brilliant, jewel-like color, and a noblewoman's gown might be deep scarlet, rich blue, or green, trimmed with braid, embroidery, or fur, and in the highest circles studded with pearls or gold. Queen Philippa, earlier in the century, was recorded appearing in a hood of dark cloth set with more than a hundred and fifty gold stars, each centered with a pearl. That is the world this fashion belonged to: one where a single garment could represent a small fortune, worn precisely so that everyone in the hall understood it.

On her head, a married noblewoman would wear her hair bound and covered rather than loose, often in a decorative net of gold or red thread called a fret or caul, sometimes beneath a veil. Loose, uncovered hair belonged to the young and unmarried, and so the headdress, like everything else, quietly told the room exactly who she was.

How a Lady Carried Her Knife

Here is the detail most people never picture: the elegant woman in the houppelande came to dinner armed, in a manner of speaking, with her own knife, just as every other diner did.

The key to it was the girdle. In medieval dress, the girdle was a belt worn at the waist or hips, and for a noblewoman it was rarely plain. Girdles were among the most decorative items a woman owned, often mounted with worked metal, sometimes silver or gilt, and they served as the anchor point for nearly everything she needed to carry. With no pockets sewn into medieval gowns, the girdle did the work pockets do now.

From it hung her purse, small household accessories, and her knife, tucked into a sheath and suspended from the belt by a cord or thong. When she sat down to dinner, she drew that knife to cut and spear her food, because the table set no knife out for her and forks were not yet part of an English meal. A personal knife was as ordinary and as essential as shoes. One simply did not leave home without it.

For a woman of rank, the knife and its sheath were not merely practical but part of the outfit's display, decorated to match the quality of the girdle they hung from. The same object that cut her meat also signaled her standing, hanging in plain view at her waist throughout the meal. It is a small thing, easy to miss, but it captures something true about this entire world: even the way a woman carried a dinner knife was shaped by wealth, fashion, and the constant, quiet work of showing rank.

Behind the Meal

A royal dinner didn't begin at the table. It began hours earlier, in rooms most diners never saw, with tools, hands, and storerooms that shaped the meal just as much as any recipe did.

The Knife Every Guest Brought Themselves

There was no set of cutlery waiting at each place. In 1390, a diner brought their own knife to the table, carried in a sheath on the belt, the way a modern person carries keys or a phone. Showing up without one meant borrowing from another guest or finding the meal considerably more awkward.

These knives were forged from iron, sometimes an early form of carbon steel, by a cutler, a specialized smith whose trade was knives alone. The blade was straight-backed with a sharp point, built as much for spearing food and carrying it to the mouth as for cutting, since forks were essentially unknown at an English table in this period. Handles were carved from bone, horn, or wood, and a well-made knife was as much a personal accessory as a tool, often the kind of object a person was buried with.

At a noble feast, the diners' own knives handled the cutting at the table, but the first and heaviest cuts, breaking down a roasted boar or carving a swan, belonged to a dedicated carver, a role prestigious enough to be its own formal office within a great household.

Who Washed the Dishes

The lowest-ranked worker in a medieval kitchen was the scullion, usually a boy between roughly ten and fourteen years old. Scullions were responsible for cleaning every pot, pan, and dish that came out of the kitchen, scouring them in the scullery, a dedicated room kept separate from the cooking fires to keep dirty water and refuse away from the food. They were also the first to rise each morning, tasked with lighting the kitchen fires and heating water before the rest of the staff began work.

The position was considered so menial that it became something of a political joke. In 1386, just a few years before this issue's setting, Parliament pressed Richard II to dismiss several of his ministers, and the king reportedly answered that he would not remove so much as a scullion from his kitchen at Parliament's request, using the lowest job in the royal household as a deliberate jab at how small he considered the demand.

At the table itself, a separate servant called a laverer carried a basin of water, often brass or copper, for guests to wash their hands between courses, since most food was eaten directly with fingers, knife, and bread rather than a full set of utensils.

Where Things Were Kept

A great household kitchen didn't stand alone. It connected to a cluster of named storerooms, each with its own purpose and its own staff. The pantry, from the French pain for bread, held bread and dry perishables, overseen by a pantler. The buttery stored ale and wine, run by a butler, whose original job was simply to keep the household's drink in order and the cups clean. A separate larder held meat and fish, often hung from beams to stay clear of vermin and lightly preserved by the smoke of the kitchen fires below. The scullery, where the scullions worked, stored and cleaned the serving vessels themselves.

The kitchens of a royal household like Richard II's could employ staff numbering in the dozens, pantlers, bakers, larderers, butchers, carvers, and scullions among them, all coordinated to feed a household that might run into the hundreds on a given day.

When They Ate

A noble household in 1390 typically ate two main meals a day rather than three. Dinner, the larger and more formal meal, was usually served mid-to-late morning, often somewhere between ten o'clock and noon. Supper followed in the early evening, generally lighter than dinner, though still substantial by modern standards at a wealthy table. Breakfast, in the modern sense, barely existed as a formal meal for adults of this class; a small bite to break an early fast was common, but the day's real eating began with dinner.

This rhythm shaped the whole household's schedule. Kitchen staff were often at work well before dawn to have dinner ready by mid-morning, which is part of why the scullion's job of lighting the first fires fell to whoever rose earliest.

The Hall

By the time the first dish left the kitchen, the hall itself had already been arranged to make a very specific point: not everyone present that night was equal, and the room said so before a single word was spoken.

How the Tables Were Set

Furniture in a great hall wasn't permanent. Long boards were set on trestle frames, the medieval equivalent of folding tables, and arranged in an open U-shape so the room could be cleared and used for other purposes once the meal ended. The lord's table sat on a raised platform, the dais, at the closed end of the U, set apart and visibly above the rest of the hall.

Tables were dressed with fine white linen cloths, often replaced between courses to keep the high table looking immaculate throughout a long meal. In front of each diner sat a trencher, a thick slab of slightly stale bread used as a plate, which soaked up sauces and could be given to the poor or to dogs once the meal ended rather than eaten itself. A shared bowl for sloppier dishes was typically set between every few diners, along with a cup, since cups and pitchers, not individual glasses, were the norm.

The single most important object on the high table was the salt cellar, often an elaborate piece of silver or gilt metalwork positioned near the head of the table. Salt was costly enough that its placement became a literal marker of social standing, giving rise to the phrase still used today: the most honored guests sat "above the salt," within easy reach of it, while everyone else sat "below the salt," further down the table and further down the household's pecking order.

Who Sat Where

Seating was never left to chance. The lord sat at the center of the high table, his most honored guest to one side, his household's senior officers arranged around him in strict order of rank. Lower-ranking household members and guests filled side tables running the length of the hall, seated in descending order of importance the further they sat from the dais, much like a modern formal dinner where placement near the host signals standing.

Rank didn't just determine where you sat, it determined what reached your table at all. The high table received the widest selection of dishes from each course, often six or more choices, while a middle table might see four and the lowest tables only one or two, and a smaller portion at that. This is precisely the gap Forme of Cury's recipes were written to serve: a single feast might be remembered by history as one meal, while in practice it was several different meals happening simultaneously, graded by status, in the same room.

Who Served the Meal

Getting a dish from the kitchen to the right mouth involved more coordinated staff than most modern restaurants employ. Pages and junior servers carried dishes from the kitchen through to the hall in a steady, choreographed procession. An officer called the sewer oversaw the entire operation, deciding the order dishes were brought out and, in households cautious enough to worry about poison, formally tasting a portion of each dish before it reached the table, a practice recorded in detail at English noble banquets of this period.

Before anyone sat down, guests washed their hands, water poured over their fingers by the laverer from a basin, often brass or decorated metal, since the meal ahead would be eaten largely by hand. Ushers controlled who was allowed to enter the hall at all and guided guests to their assigned places, making sure the room's careful hierarchy held from the moment the doors opened until the last dish was cleared.

A Word About the Word "Course"

It is worth pausing on a single word, because it tells you something about the language being spoken at this table. A diner in 1390 would not have called these stages of the meal a "remove." That term is a later invention, borrowed from the French relevé and arriving in English only around 1700, where it meant a single dish swapped out mid-meal, not a whole stage of the dinner.

Using it for a medieval feast is a common and understandable mistake, since the word simply sounds old, but it postdates this dinner by roughly three centuries.

The word they actually used was cours, the direct Middle English ancestor of our modern "course." And this is the right place to clear up a common assumption: the English of 1390 was not Old English, the distant language of Beowulf, which had given way some 250 years earlier. This was Middle English, the language of Geoffrey Chaucer, who was writing The Canterbury Tales in London at this very moment. It is difficult for a modern reader but not impossible, and it was already full of French-derived words like cours that had entered English after the Norman Conquest.

We can watch the word at work in the period itself. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a poem composed at almost exactly this time, a noble feast is described with the line: "Þen þe first cors come with crakkyng of trumpes," which reads, once you know that the letter þ ("thorn") simply means "th," as "Then the first course came in with a blare of trumpets." That single line captures both the word and the spectacle: the grand dishes of a great household were not merely carried in, they were announced, processed into the hall to the sound of trumpets, so that the whole room turned to watch the kitchen's work arrive.

The Courses

Below are three dishes in the style and structure of recipes recorded in Forme of Cury, presented as they might have appeared across a noble dinner's courses, each with a plain-English translation.

Editor's Note: The following recipe passages are modern reconstructions written in the style of Forme of Cury. They are not direct manuscript transcriptions but are based on ingredients, techniques, and recipe structures found in the source material.

First Course: A Pottage of Herbs

Take parcel, sawge, and other gode herbes, and hac hem smale. Seeth hem in broth with oynouns. Cast thereto poudre douce, and lat it boyle togidre.

Translation: Take parsley, sage, and other good herbs, and chop them finely. Simmer them in broth with onions. Add a sweet spice blend, and let it boil together. A simple, herb-forward opening dish, meant to ease into the richer courses ahead.

Second Course: Cynamon-Spiced Capon

Take a capoun, and roost him on a spit. Tempre poudre of canel with wyne, and baste him therewith. Strawe on sugur, and serve him forth.

Translation: Take a capon and roast it on a spit. Mix ground cinnamon with wine, and baste the bird with it as it cooks. Sprinkle with sugar, and serve. The pairing of meat with sugar and cinnamon together, rather than sugar reserved for sweets, is one of the clearest markers of medieval noble cooking versus modern habit.

Third Course: A Gilded Sauce

Grynde almaundes, and tempre hem up with broth. Cast in safroun for to make it gold, and poudre of gynger. Lat it boyle, and serve it with the fish.

Translation: Grind almonds and thin them with broth to make almond milk. Add saffron to color it gold, and ground ginger. Let it boil, and serve it alongside fish. Saffron here is doing as much visual work as flavor work, gold being a color closely tied to wealth and status at a 14th century table.

How Almond Milk Was Actually Made

Almond milk wasn't a substitute ingredient in 1390, it was a staple, and one of the most labor-intensive items a kitchen produced. The process started with whole almonds, pounded by hand in a mortar until fine, often with a splash of water added partway through to keep the oils from separating out into almond paste instead of a workable powder.

The ground almonds were then steeped in liquid, water for a plain version, broth for a savory dish like the sauce above, or wine for a richer one, and left to soften before being forced through a straining cloth, squeezed by hand to extract every drop. What remained in the cloth wasn't wasted; cooks often resoaked the spent almond meal in a second batch of liquid to produce a weaker secondary milk, used in less important dishes rather than thrown away.

The result mattered most during Lent and other fasting periods, when the church forbade meat, eggs, and dairy on dozens of days throughout the year. Almond milk let a kitchen recreate the body of a cream sauce or custard without breaking the fast, which is exactly why Forme of Cury, written for a royal household that observed these fasts seriously, leans on it so heavily. Dishes like blancmange, a thick almond-milk pudding bound with rice and sometimes shredded poultry, were a centerpiece of this style of cooking, prized as much for the labor visibly invested in them as for the flavor itself.

What It Took to Get Here

Every spiced dish on this table represents the end of an enormous supply chain. Cinnamon and pepper grew in South and Southeast Asia. Saffron came primarily from the eastern Mediterranean. None of it moved directly from source to London. It passed through a long relay of Arab, Indian, and Mediterranean traders before reaching Venetian and Genoese merchants, who controlled European access to the eastern spice trade and sold it onward at steep markup, first to other European ports, then inland to cities like London.

By the time a pinch of cinnamon reached an English kitchen, it had likely changed hands many times, crossed multiple seas, and accumulated cost at every stage, tariffs, shipping risk, middlemen's margins. This is part of why spice functioned as a status marker rather than a basic ingredient: the price tag itself was carrying centuries of trade infrastructure most diners never thought about, they just knew it was expensive, and that was the point.

It's worth sitting with the distance for a moment. A 14th century London diner eating cinnamon-spiced capon was, in a very real sense, tasting the end point of one of the longest and most complex trade networks in the medieval world, several thousand miles of ocean, desert, and mountain pass condensed into a single spoonful.

Cook It Tonight

Two modern versions of dishes from this table, built around Oak City blends that echo the same flavor logic as the originals.

Cinnamon-Spiced Roast Chicken

Inspired by the Second Course of Dinner in London, 1390

Ingredients

1 whole chicken, 4 to 5 lb (1.8 to 2.3 kg)
3 Tbsp Oak City Spice Blends 14th Century Poudre Douce (24 g)
1 Tbsp honey (21 g)
2 Tbsp butter, melted (28 g)
1/2 cup dry white wine (120 ml)

Method

Preheat oven to 425°F (220°C).
In a small bowl, whisk together the Poudre Douce, honey, melted butter, and wine until combined.
Pat the chicken dry with paper towels. Carefully loosen the skin over the breast and thighs and rub about one-third of the mixture under the skin and over the exterior of the bird.
Place the chicken in a roasting pan and roast for 60 to 75 minutes, depending on size.
Baste the chicken with the remaining glaze every 20 minutes during roasting.
Continue roasting until the thickest part of the thigh reaches 165°F (74°C).
Remove from the oven and let rest for 10 minutes before carving.

Historical Note

Poudre Douce already contains the traditional combination of cinnamon, ginger, clove, nutmeg, and sugar found in many medieval preparations. The honey provides body for the glaze, while the wine echoes the sweet-spiced flavor pairings favored in fourteenth-century English kitchens.

Golden Almond Sauce

Inspired by the Third Course of Dinner in London, 1390

Ingredients

1 cup unsweetened almond milk (240 ml)
1 Tbsp Oak City Spice Blends 14th Century Poudre Douce (8 g)
Pinch saffron threads (0.1 g)
Salt, to taste (1 g)

Method

Pour the almond milk into a small saucepan and warm gently over low heat. Do not boil.
Add the saffron threads and allow them to steep for 5 minutes until the milk takes on a pale golden color.
Whisk in the Poudre Douce and season lightly with salt.
Simmer gently for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally, until slightly thickened.
Serve warm over roasted fish, poultry, root vegetables, or simple boiled vegetables.

Historical Note

Almond milk appeared throughout medieval English cookery and was especially valued during religious fasting periods. The sugar already present in Poudre Douce provides the subtle sweetness called for in many period recipes, while saffron contributes the prized golden color associated with wealth and refinement.

A Note from The Spicekeeper

Thirty years into reading manuscripts like this one, I still find it strange and a little moving to hold a 600-year-old recipe and realize someone, in an actual working kitchen, wrote it down because they needed to remember it, not because they thought anyone centuries later would care. That ordinariness is what I love most about this work. I hope this issue brings a little of that feeling to your own table.