We will only poison our own people, we do not poison the public or anyone out side of the public.

People love food.

People love cooking.

And it's a great way to get people interested in history,.

Its called Cubeb and it looks like pepper.

I love it.

But many people have never seen cooking like this.

Theyve... We have people who've never seen a whole chicken dismembered.

The area that we're portraying, the little town of Trotten.

So who do you guys cook for?

Just the village here.

We are a tavern.

And a tavern is where the local people would come and have a meal or, you know, have a chat or whatever.

Travelers such as yourself would go to an inn.

The health department says, yeah, this is really great for 1388, but, doesn't quite meet our sanitary standards.

There are people who come up and look and go, are you cooking hamburgers or something?

Or is that real food?

These are examples of, some of the common misconceptions with medieval food.

That everybody ate gruel, porridge and and no meat or anything like that.

I think the thing that's changed the most between then and now is just the amount of tools that you have.

You have mixers in Cuisinarts and knives of every design and everything and they sell for cooks anymore they're not really useful.

They just look cool.

So it's kind of fun to just peel everything back and get down to the basics of cooking.

The Medieval Cuisinart.

We start cooking about 8:30 in the morning.

Chopping and getting things started.

We have about 40 to 60 people in our group every day that we're feeding.

We do cold breakfast.

And then we do three hot meals, usually three different versions of protein.

Usually a chicken or duck, something large and roast beast like, and then something a little bit more stewed and soupy.

The original recipes never have quantities.

Like there's a recipe.

This is a quarter cup of of cinnamon.

Whos cup?

Yeah.

The King's cup or my cup or my daughter's cup.

Some of the recipes are funny because they're not written down originally by cooks.

They were written down by monks or people who did not know cooking.

Climate change has affected cooking.

We're not allowed to have fire anymore.

So we're cooking medieval food on modern day barbecues, which is.

But we try to keep it as as medieval as possible.

It's just charcoal on the grill with cast iron.

This was the time of the Mini Ice Age, and so temperatures were very much cooler.

I think being in Alaska, it makes it a little bit easier to prepare medieval cuisine, because the temperatures, I think are closer here to what medieval England would have been like than if we were, say, down south somewhere.

And it was 100 degrees outside every day.

Oh my God.

Everything is a lot of physical labor.

Because we don't cook anything pre-made or prepackaged.

It's all, whole spices that have to be ground.

It's all, fresh vegetables that need to be cut and chopped and washed.

Looks like lentil soup with crispy prosciutto with vegetables.

People don't understand where their food comes from anymore.

And thats one of the things we're trying to teach people is this is how your ancestors lived.

And this is, you know, you can do this too, and you can eat really good food that doesn't go in a microwave.