Chef Gordon Ramsay is very sceptical about historical recipes – he just doesn’t believe they actually work! Ever Wondered sent him to find out more at a 15th century farmstead, a part of the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum near Chichester…

Richard Fitch is a professional freelance food historian, currently involved in the Victorian cookery projects for the National Trust and Tudor cookery for the Weald and Downland Museum

Gordon: Richard – do these recipes work?

Richard Fitch: They certainly do, and there’s plenty to be learned from medieval and Tudor recipes, even for a modern chef such as yourself. The first dish we’re going to make is beef pottage.

BEEF POTTAGE WITH WHOLE HERBS

2 lb joint of beef
4 oz each of the whole leaves of spinach, endive and white cabbage or cauliflower
1-2 tsp salt
4 tbsp wine vinegar
2 oz fine or medium oatmeal
3 English onions, sliced
Small squares or triangles of white bread

Half fill a large cooking pot with water, bring it to the boil, plunge in the meat, and remove the scum as it rises. Then reduce the heat to a gentle simmer.

Mix the oatmeal with 1/2 pint of cold water, and stir it into the pot.

Add the vegetables, and continue simmering for 1 1/2 hours, until the meat is tender. Then add the salt and wine vinegar.

Lift the meat out on to a dish, lift out the vegetables with a skimmer, lay them on top, and decorate the edges with the pieces of bread. Then keep them warm until the remaining stock has been served first as a pottage.

Richard Fitch: There’s no stated cooking time – the beef is basically poached until it’s done. The dish that comes out is boiled beef. Served sliced and accompanied by a thickened vegetable stew like a broth, but a little bit thinner. In modern terms it’s two courses in one pot.

Gordon: Do you season it before cooking?

Richard Fitch: No. The thing you have to realise is the limited quantity and availability of seasoning at the time. A small amount of salt, a very expensive commodity then, would have been added toward the end of the cooking process. The most common seasoning in Britain in the Middle Ages was mustard. Pepper was also used, but to give you an idea of how precious it was, in a household of 20 staff consumption of pepper would have been less than a quarter of a teaspoon per person per week!

Gordon: Unbelievable! What about vegetables….surely they can’t have changed very much over 400 years?

Richard Fitch: No. Basic vegetables are basic vegetables. The kind of things they didn’t have would have been imports from the New World and the Americas. In the 15th century and earlier, vegetables were seen as the preserve of the poor. The rich, if they did cook vegetables, would have boiled them to death and thrown away the water, losing all their goodness.

What we also find 400 years ago is that we were very reliant on what we’d stored over the winter. The household would have smoked a large amount of meat – slaughtering the pigs in the autumn, keeping a little bit of fresh meat, but preserving as much as possible as it had to last all the way through until the next year.

Though the meat is very tender Gordon finds the taste and texture pretty disgusting – like cold porridge with a slight seasoning of salt! In the hopes of finding something more suitable to the modern palate he moves on to find out about mid-17th century puddings…

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