Food

Here are some recipes and food ideas. Some are medieval, and are featured in my books. Others are favourites you might like to try.

For the last few years I have been experimenting with wood-fired ovens. I have found that they are cheap and easy to build, and fun to use, though they can be unpredictable. They used to be common before the days of electricity and gas, and they can still be found attached to old houses in rural France, and elsewhere.

An oven can be very simple: just a dome-shaped cavity that can be filled with wood and fired, then used for cooking when the fire has burned out. It could be improvised from an old oil drum, quickly built from clay, or elaborately constructed from fire-proof bricks. You can buy kits, which look rather like ceramic igloos, or ready-made oven domes, either of fired clay or synthetic insulating material.

If it is to work well, the oven dome should be surrounded by heat-retaining material, such as sand, clay, earth, brick or rubble. The more you use, the longer the oven retains its heat, and the more cooking you will be able to do on one firing.

Contents