Cracked Cauldron Spillings

The recipes have been chosen for the cookbook we will present at the OU Medieval Faire on April 1, 2, and 3rd.

We've already made and photographed a few of them, and will do more this weekend.

One caveat - the Fire Breathing Peacock isn't really a peacock, but a large chicken in peacock feathers. It will, however, breathe fire. It's not as difficult as it looks, and is a very spectacular centerpiece dish to serve at a fancy feast of any sort. The fire part doesn't photograph well, though, so I'm not sure we'll get a good picture of it.

Where the dishes have a medieval provenance, we've included the original recipe from its original source.

The stick foods - sausage on a stick, steak on a stake, cheesecake on a stick, monkey tails, and the assorted kebabs - are not included in this cookbook. It's too simple to put the foods on a stick and grill them or, for the monkey tails, cheesecakes, and fruit kebabs, to just stick them on the skewers and eat them.

There's more than just recipes in here, though. After more than 25 years of attending assorted Medieval and Renaissance Faires, we have lots of food related anecdotes to share.

If you've attended a lot of Faires, you'll recognize some of these foods. Now, you'll get a chance to see them from the other side of the booth.

In no particular order, here are the names of the recipes we will have in The Cauldron Crack'd:

Spinach Pie
Fryed Cheese
Scottish Eggs
Baklava
Apple Dumplings
Rogue’s Sandwich
Fry Bread
Indian Tacos
Turkey Legs
Flat Pies (pizzas)
King’s Nuts – the toasted cinnamon almonds!
Jumbo Pretzels
Salad in a Bread Bowl
Dragonlet Wings (spicy turkey wings)
Five Cheese Pie
Dragontails
Gingerbread
Hedgehogs
Daryoles (an egg tart)
Fryed Hattes – meat filled pastries that look like Robin Hood Hats
Shell Bread
Fyne Cakes
Fire Breathing Peacocks
Soup Cauldrons
Makerouns – Medieval style macaroni and cheese
Char du Crabb – Apple and Anise Pie
Buttered Wortes
Apfel Muse – apple sauce
Fruays (apple bread pudding)
Frytours – Battered fried vegetables with an almond cream sauce
Mete Ryall – Royal Meat Pie
Raphioles – meatball pie
Oyle Sops – onion and ale soup over bread
Koulibiaca – a salmon and rice pie

And it wouldn't be complete without a few beverages:

Soft Mead
Mulled Cider
Pyrate’s Brew
Hot Bastarde
Syllabubs
Hippocras (Ypocras)

We'll make the book available for sale near the end of March - via Lulu.com, most likely (there'll be a link to click on the sidebar), and keep the link up until the middle of April.

And if any of you reading this have a chance to visit the OU Medieval faire - it's a crush of people (last year, we had over 300,000 visitors in 3 days!), but we'll be thrilled to see you!