Subjects: language arts, social studies
Based on: pages in It's Disgusting titled "A Royal Feast" and "Eat Yourself Sick, Your Highness" (pages 20-21, page numbers not marked)
Purpose: to learn how to play with language, developing creativity

Information for Teacher: Here's what the foods in the activity above really are (reveal these only after the students write their poems or recipes):

Furmenty: wheat boiled in milk—often served with such items as porpoise meat.
White Worts: "Worts" is an ancient word for "herbs," surviving in plant names today like "Saint John's Wort." "White worts" were nothing more than herbs boiled in almond milk.
Cockatrice: No medieval feast was complete without roast cockatrice, a mythical beast that the cooks faked by sewing the front half of a pig to the back half of a rooster (Click on the word "cockatrice" to see a 500-year-old recipe for roast cockatrice)
Tripe of turbot: fish guts! (A turbot is a kind of fish.)
Spynye: sweet soup made with hawthorn flowers
Eels in Gauncelye: a soup made from bread and eels
Murreye: dark red soup often colored with mulberries
Blamanger: a pudding that could contain anything from capons to fish—the ancestor of the modern French pudding called "blancmange"
Crustades of Fish: Fish custard
Hanoney: Scrambled eggs with onions
Haggis: sheep guts boiled in the sheep's stomach
Garbage: giblet soup, made with birds' heads, feet, gizzards, etc.

Feast of the Century--The Sixteenth Century!

Recess Makes Me Queasy (a game)

Other Activities