In an interview on Historic Cooking

Let’s talk about Peter Brears’s book.

Cooking and Dining in Medieval England is really his masterwork. It is a book that is very important – it acts as a foundation for any further research in British food history. He has looked at the period after the Norman Conquest through to the rise of the Tudors in a way which no one else has ever done. He’s done his own investigations of medieval castles and manor houses, where he’s scratched around and found many forgotten and overlooked domestic features. His revelations are so extraordinary that they actually mean that some of the investigations of military historians, who’ve looked at castles from a defensive point of view, are often mistaken. Things they assumed were places for storing gunpowder and cannon balls turned out to be places where the malt was made for beer. Most of the time these buildings were not actually in a state of conflict – there were long uneventful decades where people were living in them just leading everyday lives, and they had to be fed and they needed something to drink. So he looks at that culture – and it’s a remarkable book. He deserved to get the André Simon award for the extraordinary research that it’s based on.