Pleyn Delit: Medieval Cookery for Modern Cooks Book

Pleyn Delit is the original reputable medieval recreation cookery book. It is an absolute improvement over most, in fact all, of its predecessors.

Most of its recipes are now established standards, leading me to complain "there are only 12 ember days in the year, we need not eat ember day tart every weekend!" Nevertheless, I treasure my copy as I recreated my first medieval recipe, Armored Turnips, from the recipe described on its pages.

For medievalists interested in trying a few recipes, it is fine. For serious historical cooks, it must be used with care, as the state of the field has progressed since the text was written. In particular, Hieatt sometimes combines several recipes in creating her redaction, not always the likeliest-- for instance, using dried fruit in her cameline recipe while most of the extant recipes do not. She also advocates using allspice in cookery, presumably because it was more available to her, but allspice is in fact the 'pimento' that Colombus brought back from the West Indies, but it wasn't used in cooking until much later. Pair it with Redon's Medieval Kitchen for a more balanced approach.