This is served as the appetizer at the Bors Hede medieval restaurant I mentioned in my post about medieval meat pies (www.camlann.org/), and the recipe appears in that same cookbook, available from the restaurant. This is actually a REALLY EASY dish (despite the long instructions), and very tasty, though I could use some advice on a couple of things (see my notes at the bottom of the recipe). The original instructions look much longer because it calls for making the bread yourself, whereas the adaptation uses a store-bought loaf.

I'm not going to try to type the original Middle English on this one, because it's really long and pretty much unintelligible! I will include the modern English translation and the source, however, as well as the usual practical, converted instructions following.

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RASTONS (Stuffed Bread Loaf)
From: Harleian MS. 279, dated 1430-40; Middle English transcribed by Thomas Austin, _Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books_ (London: Early English Text Society, 1888; repr. 1964,

"Take good flour, egg whites, and a little egg yolk; then take warm yeast and put all this together and beat them together with your hand until it is crumbly and thick enough, add enough sugar and then let it rest a while. Then put it in a good place in the oven and let it bake till it is done. Then with a knife cut around the top like a crown and keep the crust that you cut off. Then remove all the crumbs from inside and chop them up with a knife, keeping the sides and all the outside crust whole. Then add clarified butter and mix inside the crumbs and butter together and cover it again with the crust you cut off. Then put it in the oven again for a little while, then take it out and serve it."

1 medium-sized round bread loaf
2 tablespoons butter, melted

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Cut off the top third of the bread in a zigzag pattern (like cutting a jack-o-lantern), making sure you keep the lid whole. Remove the soft bread from the lid and inside the loaf. Make sure the walls of the loaf are thick enough so that the loaf remains sturdy. Tear the soft bread into medium-sized pieces and toss it with the melted butter. Replace the bread pieces in the hollowed-out loaf. Bake the loaf and lid at 350 degrees F for about 10 minutes, or until bread is warmed through. Replace the lid before serving, so that that the loaf looks as if it has been uncut.

*Bors Hede restaurant note: We use a sourdough loaf in the inne and add a few currants, and some poppy and fennel seeds to the stuffing mixture.

MY NOTES: This would make a great appetizer or side/bread dish for a holiday table. It is meant to be eaten with the hands, but if your guests are squeamish (it is a bit messy with the butter), you could serve it with spoons. I made it for a vegetarian Thanksgiving potluck, and not much got eaten; I'm guessing because people really didn't know what to make of it. So I think it would be better at a sit-down meal where you could explain the dish and pass it around. You could easily make it vegan by substituting a non-dairy spread or oil for the butter.

Okay, actual cooking notes! I bought a standard round sourdough loaf from Safeway. I failed miserably at cutting out the top in a crown shape. It still worked fine, just didn't look so good. Try it if you're artistic, but it'd be easier to just cut it off in a straight line. The two tablespoons of melted butter seemed far too little to me, in comparison to how I remembered it in the restaurant (very buttery--yum!). Perhaps my loaf was unusually big (which I doubt), or more likely, perhaps I scraped out more of the bread innards than I should have. Regardless, adjust the butter according to your taste, of course. I added quite a lot of the currants, poppy seeds, and fennel seeds--the more the merrier, in my opinion! But I could not get them to stick to the bread. When I mixed it all together, the currants and seeds kept falling to the bottom. Any suggestions? Maybe I just needed even more butter to get them to stick? Or maybe I should have used day-old bread, or toasted the innards, rather than using fresh?