You're squinting at a recipe that says 'a sufficient quantity' and 'cook until done' with no temperatures, half-detective and half-cook, trying to source verjuice or grind your own spices the way they meant.

Plenty of dishes come out gluey, bland, or genuinely strange to a modern tongue, and you eat them anyway to learn.

The payoff is uncanny: a forgotten flavor lands on your plate and you've tasted exactly what someone tasted four hundred years ago.