London - If you tuck in to roast lamb with mint sauce, you will be eating the same meal as people enjoyed more than 850 years ago.
Recently discovered recipes dating from the 12th Century show that our taste in food has hardly changed – with traditional combinations including beef and mustard as popular then as they are now.
The recipes were found on a fragile parchment from Durham Cathedral Priory dating back to 1140.
Their author is not known, but they were used by monks to entertain members of the aristocracy.
The “cooking book” is the oldest found in Britain and predates by 150 years the previous earliest known culinary guide – the Forme Of Cury, written by chefs to Richard II in 1390.
Written in Latin, it lists the right way to make sauces to accompany mutton, chicken, duck, pork and beef. But there are hardly any instructions about quantities of ingredients or number of servings.
One note suggests a sauce for mutton, which includes costmary, a member of the mint family.
Cooks are also advised to serve pork or beef with mustard slaked with vinegar.
Food historian Caroline Yeldham said: “Mustard as we know it didn’t exist then. But mustard seeds were common and would have been pounded and mixed with vinegar to form an early type of sauce.”
Historian Dr Giles Gasper added: “There’s even a chicken recipe charmingly called ‘hen in winter’. We believe this recipe is simply a seasonal variation, using ingredients available in the colder months and specifying ‘hen’ rather than ‘chicken’, meaning it was an older bird as it would be by that time of the year.”
Pepper is mentioned frequently but was then a rare luxury.
Meanwhile spices such as ginger, clove and cinnamon from far-flung trading places were used only by the very rich. - Mail On Sunday