How this started
For the past few years we have been recovering the practical skills medieval Europeans used to feed themselves, keep their food through winter, and heat a house without a bill. What began as one video about why medieval bread did not make people sick has grown into a channel watched by more than 167,000 subscribers, over eleven million times.
For months the same question sat under every bread video: where is the full recipe, where is the step-by-step? A twenty minute film can show you that a thing worked. It cannot hand you the weights, the temperatures and the timings. That gap is the reason these books exist.
How the books are made
Every recipe is baked, cooked or built before it is written down, in an ordinary kitchen with an ordinary oven. If it did not work, it did not go in.
Every claim is traced to a named study, a monastery record, an archaeological report or a surviving text. Not “historians say” — the study, by name. Where the sources disagree, the book says so instead of picking the tidier version. Where a traditional practice does not survive contact with a modern kitchen or a modern airtight house, that is named too.
And the numbers are real numbers: grams, percentages, temperatures, times. Not handfuls and hunches. That is the whole difference between a book you read once and a book that stays on the counter.
What we will not do
We do not promise you a percentage you will save, a health outcome, or a result we cannot stand behind. Where a method has a limit — and in the preservation book some of them are limits that matter a great deal — the book states the limit rather than romanticising the method.
The shelf
- The Medieval Bakery — ten medieval loaves, the rye starter, and where the grain actually comes from
- The Medieval Larder — twelve ways to keep food without a fridge, and twenty-four recipes for what comes back out
- The Medieval Home — thirty-five ways households stayed warm, lit and stocked before the meter
- The Medieval Garden — being written now
Where to find us
The films are on YouTube at @MedievalWay. If you want to reach a person, the contact page has the address and we answer it ourselves.