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Imagery of Empire: Merchantry and Folk Medicine on the Mastic Island

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By Tedi A. Pascarella

«BUONDELMONTI, Cristoforo, Liber Insularum Archipelagi [1420]» in Τόπος και Εικόνα, χαρακτικά ξένων περιηγητών για την Ελλάδα, από σπάνια βιβλία της Γενναδείου Βιβλιοθήκης, Μουσείου Μπενάκη, Ιδιωτικών Συλλογών [Space and image, engravings by foreign travellers to Greece from rare books of the Gennadius Library, the Benaki Museum and private collections], vol. I, Athens, Olkos, (Aikaterini Laskardis Foundation, 1978). http://eng.travelogues.gr/item.php?view=51701.

The island of Chios, located in the North Aegean region, is Greece’s fifth largest island, and the only place in the world that the mastic evergreen shrub, or Pistacia lentiscus, successfully produces its tears: crystalized resin that results from punctures in the bark. The island’s environmental history paints a rich tapestry that showcases Chios as mastic-centric—its tourism focusing on ecological wonders and local foodstuffs. Chios, for centuries, was a cornerstone of Ottoman, Genoese, and Chian mercantile exchange in the greater Mediterranean. The vestiges of occupation can be seen strongly even today: Christopher Columbus’s home in the medieval village of Pyrgi, minarets decorating the skyline, and images of Islamic floral motifs scattered among passersby of the bustling city center of Chios Town. From antiquity—through the Middle Ages and Renaissance (the peak of Genoese presence on the island)—and beyond, mastic (or mastiha) was a coveted commodity: gems monopolized by the sultans of the Ottoman hegemony, as well as an ingredient in folk dishes and medicines. Its properties and a pine-like taste offer today’s Instagram ‘food as medicine’ algorithm ‘back to nature’ and “antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, anti-ulcer, anti-diabetic, cardioprotective and anti-cancer” benefits.1 From bygone uses (Hypocrites suggesting mastiha for gastrointestinal inflammation) to spotlight features on British Bake Off, it is then no surprise there exist countless articles and blog posts with cheeky titles, like “Something Herbal to Chew on” and “Can This Ancient Greek Medicine Cure Humanity?” Powerful merchant families from Genoa occupied the island beginning in the early fourteenth century, culminating in Ottoman dominion from 1566 to 1912.2 While Chios existed as a lucrative point of interest for its trading ports between East and West, mastiha was valued as highly as gold.

This 1783 romantic painting commemorates a Genoese family and its connection to the island of Chios, as well as the virtues associated by Christianity. The use of the foreign is expressed here as the ‘exotic’ through the presence of trade in the Aegean (see Figure 5, below: the female personification of the island of Chios is dressed in flowing fabrics, complete with a turban-like headdress). Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, The Glorification of the Giustiniani Family, 1783, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437814.

         The famous ruling Giustiniani family, in addition to taxes, paid Sultan Mehmet II a hefty portion of mastiha after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. From a ground-up approach—cultivation of the plant and processing of the resin done by Chians—mastiha was made widely available, making Chios extraordinarily prized. The mastichochoria, or twenty-four buttressed hamlet villages, in southern Chios categorized life by the growth and production of mastiha. George Sidiropoulos writes, the design of the enclosed, fortress-like labyrinth of the Mesta village was a direct impact of the importance of mastiha, in which the “Byzantine Empire exploited this product as a monopoly,” the Genoese Maonacompany exploited farm workers for mastic production, and lastly, the Ottomans, in turn, introduced infrastructural organization, awarding some benefits for those living and working here, like protection from pirates and mercenaries.3

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s description: “This oil sketch is a precious record of a ceiling in Genoa’s ducal palace that was destroyed in the 1860s. Tiepolo’s composition can be compared with his father’s ceiling design for Würzburg, which Domenico helped to execute (see the oil sketch for that painting nearby). The younger Tiepolo depicted a Giustiniani family patriarch, Jacopo, at the top of a staircase, kneeling before a personification of the Ligurian Republic. At left is a female personification of the Aegean island of Chios, which the Giustiniani family ruled for two centuries. At right, figures in exotic dress allude to the family’s commercial enterprises in Asia Minor.”

While it is true we know that mastiha was utilized by the ancients as remedy for upset stomachs and fresh breath, day-to-day cultural exchange resulted in traditional recipes and uses via word-of-mouth. Because of this, scholars have turned to not only official imperial records but local folk and village narratives to help adjust and add to the historical record, quite literally a ground-up approach. Folk costumes and modes of dress juxtaposed with architecture and village ethos in the artwork of award-winning photographer George Tatakis epitomizes, through visual art, mastic’s food science as well as the island’s ecological footprint, connecting cultural past, present, and future. Tatakis, capturing the mystic qualities of the island and its mastiha, writes, “legend has it that the mastic was a gift from Saint Isidore, who sought refuge near Mesta in 250 AD after being chased and injured by the Romans. Exhausted and unable to continue, he found solace under a mastic tree where it is said that the tree wept tears of the fragrant resin.”Tatakis captures the costume of Nenita, among other villages, including elaborate embroidery, linens, and headscarf, accompanied by rustic tools of the mastic warehouse, like the pans used to sort and clean the tears. While the horrors, complications, and interactions of a history of occupation is fraught in the island’s past, the opulence of lore abounds, as mastic remains a keystone ingredient of the identity recipe of Chios. 

Tedi A. Pascarella, MA History, is a world historian based in New Jersey. Her academic focuses include the early modern Mediterranean, environmental, textile histories, and their intersections. She has taught as an instructor at Monmouth University. A bibliography of her publications can be found at tediapascarella.com. 

  1. Vasiliki Pachi, et al. “Traditional Uses, Phtochemistry and Pharmacology of Chios Mastic Gum (Pistacia Lentiscus Var Chia, Anacardiaceae): A Review” in Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 2020. ↩︎
  2. A product of the mastic tree, pitch, distilled from turpentine, also had uses as caulking for the seams in ships and the waterproofing of slate roofing and tiles. And as Kenneth M. Setton stipulates, “Asiatic drugs and spices were transshipped from Chios to the chief ports of western Europe. Loss of the island was not to improve the economy of the home government, and was to destroy the last remnants of Genoese prestige in the East. Kenneth M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 1204-1571 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society Press, 1976), 324. ↩︎
  3. George Sidiropoulos, “The Development Status and Prospects of a Medieval Settlement in the Eastern Mediterranean in Journal of the Knowledge Economy (2016): 631-643. ↩︎
Experimentation, Food and Drink, Ingredients, Medieval, Posts, Winter 2024

Food for Thought: A Medieval Experiment with Ale Pastry

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By Florence Swan

Whilst digging through medieval English cookery collections for my thesis I came across a curious fifteenth-century recipe that suggests using ale to make pastry short and supple:

‘Yf ye will have your past short and sopill that ye bake with, knede hit with good ale and it will be short’.[1]

Intrigued by what appears at first to be an early English recipe for shortcrust pastry, I thought I’d give it a go. I am partnered with Blackfriars Restaurant in Newcastle for my PhD, working with their team of chefs to develop medieval culinary recipes with the hopes of better understanding their form, function, and taste balances. I discussed the recipe with Blackfriars’ pastry chef, who was hesitant about the extent to which ale would make pastry short, but wondered if it might leave a beery aftertaste.

Jug with Horseshoes, 13th century, orig. Derbyshire, England, 16x13 5/8 x 13 1/16 in., The Cloisters Collection, 2014.280, The Met.
Jug with Horseshoes [used for making and storing ale], 13th century, orig. Derbyshire, England, 16×13 5/8 x 13 1/16 in., The Cloisters Collection, 2014.280, The Met.

Before experimenting I therefore had to address some key questions: is this pastry simply ale and flour, or is it suggesting adding ale to enriched fatty pastry? What does it mean by short and supple? And why ale? Most medieval pastry was made from just flour and water, a simple case to contain looser fillings whilst they cooked, keep hands tidy whilst its contents were eaten, and often disposed.[2] There were more refined pastries for consumption such as Payne Puff which used fats like cream or egg yolks, rarely butter or lard, to enrich them, however we have limited recipes for both basic and refined pastry. Preparing pastry in large wealthy households was typically a separate job carried out by pastry chefs, not the senior cooks who appear to be the primary audience of culinary recipes, and it was such a basic function in the kitchen that, like bread, it appears to have been unnecessary to provide detailed recipes. In the late-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there emerged what we might consider shortcrust pastry recipes, that incorporated fats such as oil or butter to make ‘sotille’ pastry, as quoted from Libro per cuoco.[3] That the term supple or soft is used to refer to pastries with shortening in other collections might suggest the ale pastry recipe of interest is intended to be made with fat, however because it simply does not say, I made pastry both with and without shortening.

Searching the Middle English Dictionary confirmed that the recipe is alluding to a crumbly pastry because ‘short’ is defined as meaning crumbly or friable, and ‘sopill’, or supple, as soft or pliable. Supple is also defined in the MED as meaning ‘a mixture containing eggs’, however I am not convinced by this definition and would be wary of suggesting this alone implies the use of eggs in this recipe.

Finally, why ale? My first thought was that is it used for its yeast content, a leavening agent creating a flakier pastry as is the case with Danish pastries or croissants. The question then follows, why not just use yeast? Although it is possible that the ‘good ale’ means use yeast derived from ale, I believe it is referring to the beverage because yeast is typically directly called for in medieval recipes, such as in Bastons in Yale Beinecke 163, which says add ‘a lytll yest of new ale’.[4] In their recreation of a seventeenth-century biscuit recipe that also uses ale, Elisa Tersigni and Jack Bouchard note that ale was historically more yeasty as it was not pasteurised (compared to modern ale that is typically pasteurised), thus it was likely to act as a leavening agent.[5] Furthermore, using ale instead of just yeast was probably efficient for making large quantities of pastry as it was readily available and meant they would not have to use another liquid to wet it, but it might also suggest the ale’s alcohol is important, as it might evaporate whilst cooking to create a crumbly pastry. Most medieval ale was made using a mixture of grains, however hops were used in its production in the late fifteenth century, from which the ale pastry recipe dates.[6] Furthermore, that the recipe calls for good ale suggests it is not a small ale with low alcohol but has a reasonable ABV. Hence, there are a multitude of factors in play when considering the nature and purpose of the ale. In this initial experiment I used a modern local brewery’s hopped ale, however I will continue to experiment with different types of ale in the future.

I first tried a lard shortcrust to see how the ale worked with a pastry I am familiar with – lard, butter, flour, salt, and a little ale. It was thoroughly tasty, crumbly and soft with a slight hint of a beery, yeast flavour. I then made two simpler pastries, one containing flour, salt, liquid, and egg yolks and one with just flour, salt, and liquid, of which I made water-based versions to serve as a control, and then ale-based variables to compare (four total). Prior to baking I found the ale-based pastries more pliable and easier to work with. After baking there was no dramatic difference between the water and ale pastries, however the ale versions were slightly crumblier. Where I noticed the greatest difference was in taste. The eggless ale pastry had a noticeable yeasty bread taste, and the pastries made with egg yolks had a rich egg flavour that was enhanced and more complex with ale, both of which I believe was the result of the beverage’s yeast. Yeast has a fermented umami flavour that complements egg, and this yeasty flavour is synonymous with bread, which is what I believe I could detect in the eggless ale pastry.

The results were not dramatic, but ale pastry is certainly easier to work with, crumbly, and the ale imparts a yeast flavour well suited to pastry, so the recipe’s advice holds true. I will continue to experiment and use ale with higher yeast content, which, I anticipate, will yield crumblier pastry. Ale appears to complement fats in pastry which might suggest it is to be used in conjunction with them to enhance the shortness of the pastry, but the recipe appears quite open and applicable to whatever ‘your past’ might be. But what is most pertinent is the culinary creativity and knowhow exhibited by the use of ale to achieve shortened pastry, and the apparent desire to make a commonplace and typically disposable foodstuff tasty; food for thought for my thesis and for those interested in medieval taste. Modern cooks are advised to take the recipe’s advice and add some ale when they next make pastry for a flavoursome result!

Florence Swan is currently studying at Durham University, where she is working on her PhD titled ‘The Transmission of Taste’, which examines food, recipes, and taste in England c.1200-c.1400. Collaborating with Blackfriars Restaurant in Newcastle, her archival research is complimented with the practical knowledge of culinary science and recipe development from the restaurant. Although a food historian, her research interests encompass a variety of topics from medieval horticulture to London urban life in the twelfth to sixteenth centuries.  

Instagram: transmissionoftaste       
Twitter: @florence_swan

[1] London, Society of Antiquaries, MS 287, f. 99v, printed in Constance Hieatt, A Gathering of Medieval English Recipes (Prospect Books, 2009), p. 136.

[2] Peter Brears, Cooking and Dining in Medieval England (Totnes: Prospect Books, 2008), p. 125.

[3] Barbara Santich, ‘The Evolution of Culinary Techniques in the Medieval Era’ in Food in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays, ed. by Melitta Weiss Adamson (London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1995), pp. 61-81 (p. 72).

[4] New Haven, Yale University Library, Beinecke MS 163, f. 69v <https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/2003060> [accessed 19/01/2024].

[5] Elisa Tersigni and Jack Bouchard, ‘Savory biscuits from a 17th-century recipe’, 2018 https://www.folger.edu/blogs/shakespeare-and-beyond/savory-biscuits-from-a-17th-century-recipe/?_ga=2.80100119.1212766997.1707746077-1857904347.1660288475 [accessed 14 February 2024].

[6] Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 9.

Medieval, Posts, Series: Recipes at Play

Playing with Language in Medieval Satirical Recipes

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By Chelsea Silva

The anonymous Scots poem “Lord Fergus’s Gaist” instructs its reader in summoning a spirit. It calls for a range of ingredients, some of which are unusual but obtainable, such as horse teeth, the tails of toads, and bundles of withered grass—just the kind of vaguely spooky materials we might expect to use in a conjuration. The coherence of the recipe’s instructions stops there, however; the summoner must sit within a circle and sprinkle holy water “w[ith] pater noster patter patter,” an action that transforms the Pater Noster, or Lord’s Prayer, into a collection of well-worn syllables spoken rapidly and insincerely, or perhaps into the sound of the small footsteps of the poem’s titular “littel gaist.”[1]

I’m interested in moments like this, where the expected text, form, or action of a recipe breaks down into nonsense. Many joke recipes take aim at the objectives of their “serious” counterparts. Robert Henryson’s “Sum Practysis of Medecyne,” for example, survives in the Bannatyne manuscript with “Lord Fergus’s Gaist,” and uses disgusting or ill-advised ingredients to satirize medical pretensions to knowledge—something about which Julie Orlemanski has written extensively.[2] Another example is provided by a verse recipe written into a copy of Caxton’s 1481 Mirrour of the World, which claims to restore a woman’s virginity using a variety of impossible or immaterial ingredients, such as seven miles of moonlight caught up in a bladder or the creak of a cart-wheel.[3] 

Poems like “Sum Practysis” and the recipe for revirgination rely on the kinds of internal logic that structure recipes, even as they subvert readers’ expectations of that logic. The kind of nonsense that occurs in “Lord Fergus’s Gaist,” however, is especially fascinating to me because it points playfully and specifically to the constructed—and therefore deconstructable—nature of language itself. The dismantling of a Latin prayer to its composite sounds underscores meaning as made of sound, the raw material of language, able to be recombined and remixed into a new product like any other ingredient. 

Fig. 1 – London, BL MS Sloane 4, fol. 105r. Photo by Chelsea Silva, reproduced with permission of the British Library.

BL MS Sloane 4 (figure 1), a household miscellany produced in England between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, provides an especially intriguing example of the recipe’s capacity for semantic breakdown and reconstruction. The wide-ranging manuscript includes instructions in English, French, Dutch, and Latin for products ranging from perfumes and sauces to remedies and angling bait, as well as a number of more fantastical ones, including recipes for turning ale to wine and making water burn like oil. I’ve been fascinated by one seemingly unrelated scribble ever since I came across it a few years ago. On one folio at the very end of the book, opposite a page strewn with overlapping pen trials and signatures, are the following lines: 

Is thy pott enty cole lent I: Gote eate yvy:

            mare eate ootys Is thy Cocke lyke owrs

            [Is thy pot empty? Coal lent I. Goat[s] eat ivy;

Mare[s] eat oats. Is thy cock like ours?]

Underneath, a different hand has scrawled a partial echo: Is thy potte empti; below that, the words fracture further, into “colle” and “ll.”[4]

The modern English translation above shows the lines to be almost semantically meaningless. It is the sound of the Middle English words that presumably interested their writer; spoken quickly, they sound similar to Latin (“is thy pott enty” a soundalike for “isti potenti,” maybe?) or French (“cocke lyke owrs” perhaps providing “coq” and “liqueurs”). 

These lines represents the earliest known attestation of the nonsense phrase that became one of the most recognizable refrains from 1940s music. The song “Mairzy Doats,” perhaps best known in its performance by the Andrews Sisters, transfigures familiar words (“mares eat oats, and does eat oats, and little lambs eat ivy / a kid’ll eat ivy too, wouldn’t you?”) into non-lexical vocables, syllable units without semantic meaning (“mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey / a kiddley divey too, wouldn’t you?”). Sometime between the production of Sloane 4 and the nineteenth century, part of the passage was apparently incorporated into a different pseudo-Latin verse: 

In fir tar is,

In oak none is,

In mud ells are,

In clay none are.

Goat eat ivy;

Mare eat oats.[5]

From there, presumably, it found its way into the popular music of the 1940s and 50s, having lost the Latin-esque sounds of phrases like “in fir tar is” (“infirtaris,” meaningless, but Latin-sounding) but retaining the English lines. The result was something so defamiliarized and uncanny that the song eventually became the soundtrack for cinematic depictions of abnormal, uncomfortable behavior—Leland Palmer (played by Ray Wise) bursts into a jazzy and unsettling rendition of “Mairzy Doats” in Twin Peaks (1990), for example, and Radio Days (1987) uses the Merry Macs performance of the song as the backing track for an absurdist scene in which Mr. Zipsky, played by Joel Eidelsberg, runs up and down the street brandishing a cleaver at passersby. 

This may seem like a digression from the satirical recipes about which I’ve been writing and thinking. But the presence of “mares eat oats” in Sloane 4—a recipe collection that evinces the transformative, productive potential of breaking down and recombining familiar elements—demonstrates the particular resonance between practical recipes and language, both of which enabled their users to transform everyday material into something new.

[1] The poem survives in Bannatyne MS (Edinburgh, NLS Advocates MS 1.1.6), fols. 114r-115r, and is published in Early Popular Poetry of Scotland and the Northern Border, vol. 1, ed. David Laing (London: Reeves and Turner, 1895), pp. 284-288.

[2] See Orlemanski’s Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

[3] The recipe is reproduced in Reliquiae antiquae: Scraps from Ancient Manuscripts, ed. Thomas Wright and James Orchard Halliwell (London: J. R. Smith, 1845), pp. 250-251.

[4] Fol. 105r, transcription mine; the same lines (without the later echo) are also reproduced in Reliquiae antiquae, p. 324. 

[5] This likelihood is discussed briefly in the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, ed. Iona and Peter Opie (Oxford: OsUP, 1951), pp. 222-23.

Medicine, Medieval, Series: Recipes at Play

Publication Highlight

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An Interview with Hannah Bower, author of Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play (Oxford University Press, 2022)

This month, we have the pleasure of highlighting the work of Hannah Bower, author of Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 1375-1500, published by Oxford University Press in 2022.  Dr Bower is a Junior Research Fellow in the Faculty of English at Churchill College, University of Cambridge. Find out more about her research and interests here.  Below is an edited conversation between Elizabeth Hunter, Recipes at Play Series Editor, and Hannah Bower.

Available as Open Access through Oxford Academic. 

Elizabeth Hunter: Hannah, so glad you could chat with us!  Your expertise is in medieval English Literature.  How did you come to study recipe books?  Can you explain that journey? 

Hannah Bower: I first came to study recipe books during my master’s degree. I was looking for some texts that had not been closely examined in their manuscript contexts and our course leader, Daniel Wakelin, suggested that recipes would be a good place to start. As soon as I started looking at a few collections in the Bodleian Library, I was hooked! The collections appealed to me because of their strange mix of the formulaic and the whimsical, the predictable and the eccentric. On the one hand, many of the recipes contained the same structural features (lists of ingredients, imperatives, promises of efficacy) but, on the other hand, the recipes could be combined with one another in different ways, copied into large recipe collections or alone on a spare flyleaf, rubricated or left plain, amended and added to, annotated, or struck out. I was keen to pay them closer attention by analysing in detail the choices that different scribes, writers, and compilers made. To me, then, their textual and material forms invited a kind of close reading that had many parallels with the close reading techniques of literary criticism.   

“Recipes taught readers to prepare healing treatments but they could, this study argues, also act as nexus points for the intersection (and playful redefinition) of different written and spoken styles, spaces, and identities”

Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 2.

EH: The title of this series is ‘Recipes at Play’, and play is also in the title of your book.  What did the term play imply in this period and how important was it in the recipe form? 

HB:  Play had a wide range of meanings, including merriment, pleasure, entertainment, theatrical performance, spectacle, game, music-making, jest, joke, and trick. Of course, these are not normally things that you would associate with recipes for broken bones and pus-filled boils! But there are some surprising connections. For instance, medical recipes can contain a lot of sound play: alliteration, rhyme, and puns all recur. Sometimes these devices may have made the recipe easier to remember by heart; sometimes they might have convinced readers that the recipe carried an occult power supplementary to its ingredients; at other times, these embellishments may suggest pride or pleasure in the copying of the recipe. Interestingly, this patterning does not normally appear in every recipe in a collection or even in all parts of a recipe: it is one example of the sporadic and whimsical aspect that I was mentioning a moment ago that contrasts and coexists with the genre’s more formulaic aspects. This opens up further parallels with play as formulated by the cultural historian John Huizinga: like recipes, play has boundaries, rules, and repetitive structures but it is also flexible and adaptable. Writers and readers of recipes could experiment (or ‘play’) with the text before them, adapting or adding to its instructions as they enacted it (like a theatrical performance or ‘play’).

“[R]ecipes can be activated or translated into action like instruments are played; they can be connected, ordered, and rearranged by imaginations in play; and they can be mischievous, comic, or playful in content”

Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 26.

EH: What were you hoping to find when you first began your research?  What surprised you along the way? 

HB: When I began, I wasn’t sure what I was going to find; I just wanted to sit and read texts that often hadn’t been read closely in a long time and weren’t normally considered to contain any literary potential! What surprised me was the care that could be invested by writers, scribes, and readers in the copying, embellishment, and preservation of the recipes. Some scribes copied hundreds of recipes and some—though not all!—invested a lot of time trying to make those recipes navigable and usable. I was also surprised by the way that the language deployed in recipes and related medical texts could tap into commonplace images also used in literary and devotional writings. We might deride such commonplaces as trite and jaded, but they clearly had great explanatory purchase and could—I think—not only be deployed to make bodily afflictions easier to identify but also to make those bodily afflictions less offensive and gruesome to think about. For instance, urinary texts sometimes copied alongside medical recipes sometimes compare sediment in urine to specks of dust in the sunlight…quite a beautiful image! 

EH: In the book you cover a number of genres of imaginative literature, including Chaucer, romances and fabliaux.  How important do you think the imagination is in the reading and writing medieval recipes? 

HB: Very important! Many readers were probably persuaded to translate a recipe into practice because they could imagine themselves—or the person they were treating—becoming healthy through it. To embark upon the task in hand, they must also have been able to imagine themselves acquiring, collecting, and preparing all of the ingredients in the correct order.

What I found particularly interesting, though, was the way that some medieval writers seem to use echoes of the recipe form in their writing to encourage readers to imagine their bodies in different ways. For instance, in the book, I discuss an example from Thomas Malory’s romance Le Morte d’Arthur where recipe discourse is used to situate the bodies of two knights in several different time schemes simultaneously. Readers are encouraged to connect the knights’ bodies at once to life and death, earth and heaven, sickness and health.  It is ironic that recipes—a form we normally associate with linear sequences of action (‘do this…do that…do this…’) instead work in that text to stimulate temporal and imaginative flexibility.

[W]riters of remedies and writers of more consistently literary or imaginative texts influenced one another in more precise ways than have hitherto been acknowledged, and both groups partook in shared cultural modes of creative expression. Tracing possible connections and overlaps will allow us to arrive at a more nuanced, holistic understanding of what ‘practical’, ‘careful’, ‘imaginative’, and ‘playful’ might have meant for late medieval writers and readers.

Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 3-4.