Katherine A. McIver explores kitchens, cooking, food, and eating in medieval Italy by focusing her study on different sources (cookbooks, literary sources, and household inventories). She allows the reader to enter, understand, and appreciate food culture and history, which is not as easy or simple as one might think. Thanks to the richness and variety of the documentation, chapter by chapter the reader can imagine daily kitchen scenes, at whatever social and economic level: the hard work of the cook and his staff, the kitchen equipment, the preparation of meals and their ingredients, the idea of setting up feasts and banquets.

The author describes the Datinis’ way of life as a model of a real Italian family of the fourteenth and fifteenth century and analyzes several letters between Francesco and his wife, Margherita, as well as the family's inventories. They represent a corpus of documents that the author compares with medieval cookbooks, poems, novellas, and images, such as the images of the Tacuina sanitatis. The method of analysis used by McIver is well suited to a field of research that needs an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating written sources as well as iconographic ones. It is then a perspective of research including a reflection on common people's style of life, from the highest social, cultural, and economic levels to the poorest ones.

In chapter 1, the author examines some important cookbooks such as the Angevins’ Liber de coquina, the Venetians’ Libro per cuoco, Maino de Maineri's health text—that is, the Opusculum de Saporibus—and, finally, Johannes Bockenheim's Il registro di cucina di Papa Martino V. The first two books have been written by anonymous authors (a characteristic of medieval texts in general). Recipes are conceived in a variety of ways, and, as the author stresses, it is interesting to analyze how and for whom they have been drawn up. In this regard, she mentions the well-known recipe of Torta parmeggiana and its variations. McIver devotes a paragraph to women who cook following the example of Margherita Datini in her letters to her husband, Francesco: one can consider her recipes and her thoughts about food to be important testimonies of practical medieval cooking.

Chapter 2 concerns the cook and his staff. There was a very strict hierarchy in the kitchen of a noble household: at the top of it there was the housemaster, who oversaw all the activities in the palace and hired the cook. The cook, in turn, was responsible for those working under him: one or more staff members who helped him to prepare meals; those who saw to the kitchen's cleanliness; and those who ensured that foodstuffs, fuel, and utensils were always in adequate supply. Some elite households had more than one cook: Ludovico il Moro, the Duke of Milan, had four; Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, employed many stewards and had a carver, a credenziero, and other staff to attend to his table. Chapter 3 is about the kitchen equipment, such as hearths, gridirons, ladles, crockery, linens, and ovens. Iconography, such as the Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi, and household inventories are rich sources for this kind of investigation, providing valuable information on cooking food. Chapter 4 deals with ingredients and methods for food preservation—a crucial activity in the medieval kitchen. Finally, in chapter 5, McIver explains how medieval feasts and banquets were conceived, organized, and served: displaying culinary refinement and sharing meals with influential people was a typical custom of the upper classes.