While it may have taken the Eighth Armored Division to cook (and eat) this grotesque quantity of food, preparation could be quite simple. Take, for example, your average recipe for porpoise pudding.

"Thake the blood of him and the grease of himself and oatmeal and salt and peper and ginger, and mix these well together, and then put this in the gut of the porpoise and let it seethe easily, and not hard, a good while. Then take him up and broil him a little, and then serve forth."

But for those occasions, like Christmas, that required some thing a little more festive, the medieval kitchen changed from geing a simple blast furnace for the roasting of large animals into a combination P-3 lab and hardhat-only construction site.

Aside from the roasts and baked pies, nearly every dish was what my grandmother used to call hassenpfeffer--a mess, tossed together from mangled remnants of carcasses hidden underneath a spicy sauce that would ideally completely obscure the bastard origins (or incipient rot) of the ingredients heaped on the platter. The feast, rather than the ordinary run of the mill pigout, required hundreds of these "made" dishes, for which most valued praise the cook could receive was if the satisfied diner could not tell what had gone into the original concoction. At a feast given by Henry VIII in 1519, 260 such delightful melanges were served.

The awesome complexity of producing these early attempts to recombine genetically disparate elements aside, the medieval entertainer forever put the seal on his claim to the ultimate glutton's prize with works of construction that were nothing short of awesome. Moderns who contemplate eating themselves to death should consider that all the revelers at Philip Good's holiday celebration survived. It was 1453, and the renaiscance was still just a twinkle in a Florentine's eye:

There were three tables in the hall. On the chief table was a well built ship with sails spread, and before it sway a silver swan drawing the ship with a silver chair. At one end of the ship was richly built castle. Among the numerous ornaments was a church with cross, chimes and four singers. There was besides a beautiful fountain surrounded with cliffs of sapphire and other rare stones. Twenty living musicians played inside a huge pastry--a castle in the form of that of Lusignan. In an uninhabited desert a lifelike tiger fought with a great serpant. The third table showed a forest in India with rare beasts that moved about."

At another celebration--this one a marriage--thirty gold-flecked trees filled with fruits and baked meats stood strough the nine day exercise in forced-draft obesity.

Even though the market is a little short on swans this year, and seals are out of season, there are some people out there desperately striving to recapture the idyllic existence of iron age humanity.

Boston's own Medieval Manor caters to the unreconstructed Viking in all of us, emphasizing the use of fingers to deal with its almost appropriately scaled repasts. But for those who want to make some attempt to recreast a Plantegenet's Christmas dinner, the past few years have brought more and more cookbooks featuring the recipes, and the dedication to excess, of our more steadfast ancestors. This year's big seller was The Medieval Cookbook by Madelaine Cosman.

These books are somewhat scaled down--after all not many kitchens feature ovens large enough to roast whole oxen, nor do many now wish to nosh on "gizzards, livers, and heart of swan." But one can always seek the true spirit of Christmas in an eleven course meal, featuring, as one author suggested, "Friters of Parsnips, Funges, Aquapatys (boiled garlic) and the like, finishing of course with as much Hippocras (spiced wine) as the body could tolerate."

In any case, when, (if) any snow ever falls, and this year's model December 25th rolls around, the sins of past debauches will be long buried. And as people gather to celebate the birthday of a two thousand year gone heretical Jew, we can easily salve any conscience recoiling from yet another helping of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. After all, at least we're avoiding that spirit of Christmas' past that would demand the consumption of "broke broune, longe flouteurs and payne puff" as but one tenth of our Christmas cheer.

Bon Appetit.