Egg uses in the 1400’s

Published 30 September 2020

According to an early English translation of the didactic fourteenth-century Latin poem Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum, or “The Salernitan Rule of Health,” poached eggs are best. They’re easy to digest, nourishing, and most important they “engender bloud,” which is why “they be exceeding good for such as be recovered from sicknesse, for aged folke, and for weake persons, and specially the yolke.” Poached eggs are better than “Egges roasted, hard or rere.” (Rere meant partly boiled eggs, or in the subject of physics “rarefied” or “diffused.”)

Rere roasted eggs have their virtues, since they are also easy to digest, but they’re nowhere near as nourishing as poached eggs. Hardboiled eggs should be avoided: They are difficult to digest, “descending slowly to the stomacke, and slowly they enter therein.”