[.ca] Pleyn Delit: Medieval Cookery for Modern Cooks (ISBN 0802076327)

Useable book:
This book has some good background info, and the recipes are tested, and they work well. I used the roasted carrot recipe for a feast put on by a local group. Other recipes that I have tried in here have worked good as well. This is one to add to your feast book collection.

Pleyn Delit has been a hit with adults and teenagers.:
Pleyn Delit offers a great variety of simple to medium hard recipes that can be adapted to your current menu or replace it if the ambition is there. The recipes are tasty and well-explained. Some ingredients are hard to find but for the most part replacement items are named. With this book, I've concocted complete medieval meals as well as odds and ends for special occasions while increasing the depth of my family's usual menus.

Good information, but hard to follow:
Several years ago, due to have an abiding interest in both cooking and the Middle Ages, I was given this book. I already had To The King's Taste and Fabulous Feasts. Of the three, I recommend Fabulous Feast above all. Pleyn Delit is a decent cookbook, but several of the recipes are poorly written and must be read three or four times before you get an inkling of what order you must do things in. Some of my friends have become amused with time as each of us created one or another dish independently from each other to wildly varying results. The support material is decent, but not as extensive as Fabulous Feasts. The recipes are numerous enough and some are quite tasty; sometimes even "period" versions appear for you to compare to the modernized recipe. This book was written first by historians, secondly by cooks. That being said, you can have a lot of fun with this book, just be very, VERY careful when ready the recipes or you may well end up with soup instead of pie filling.

Excellent resource for those interested in medieval food..:
This was my very first medieval-food book. To my amazement, it actually works well as a "mundane" cookbook too. The recipes are presented with the primary source they come from first (translated if the source isn't in at least somewhat-recognizable English), with a redaction following. Not all the redactions are easy to work with, and sometimes the results are.. well.. uneven (watch out for the sage sauce one that calls for chopped boiled eggs). I suspect that three people making the same recipe would come out with three different dishes. That said, some recipes are just mouthwatering -- a thickened wine sauce for meats went over well at one feast I helped with, and most of the vegetable recipes are tasty and easy to prepare. A decent bibliography is included with the work, as well as an analysis of period spices and spice mixes. I'd recommend this to anybody interested in medieval cooking -- it dispels a lot of myths and presents a number of dishes that prove that we haven't changed all that much.

Actually Period:
Admittedly, this cookbook is not always for the novice. It doesn't tell you how long to cook a roast, for instance. However, if you are into a reenactment hobby (e.g. SCA), definitely get this book and do not get Fabulous Feasts. This book actually gives the source of each recipe so that you can do your own redacting. One of the better easily accessible sources for planning a feast.