(translated by u/ralfv)
New to these? Read the introduction first: it explains what is left out on purpose and what the yeast of the time could do.
Source: Le Ménagier de Paris, household book of a wealthy Paris burgher, c. 1393.
Language: Middle French
Style: Bochet (caramelized honey), optionally spiced
Bochet. To make six sextiers of bochet, take six pints of very sweet honey and put it in a cauldron on the fire. Boil it and stir it so long that it stops rising, and you see it throwing up bubbles like little orines (?) which burst, and in bursting give off a little smoke that is almost black. Then stir it, and then add seven sextiers of water and boil it until it comes back to six sextiers, stirring all the time.
Then put it in a tub to cool until it is lukewarm; then strain it through a sieve; then put it in a cask and add a chopine of ale yeast (for that is what makes it sharp; whoever used bread leaven would have as good a taste, but the colour would be paler), and cover it well and warmly so that it works.
And if you want to make it very good, add an ounce of ginger, and of long pepper, grains of paradise and cloves, as much of one as of the other, except the cloves, of which there shall be the least; put them in a linen bag and throw it in. And when it has been in there two or three days, and the bochet tastes enough of the spices and is sharp enough, take out the bag and squeeze it out, and put it in the next barrel you make. So this powder will serve you well three or four times.
Item, another bochet that keeps four years. One can make a queue of it at a time, or more or less, as one likes. Take three parts water and the fourth of honey, boil and skim until it has lost a tenth, and then pour it into a vessel. Then fill your cauldron again and do as before, until you have enough. Then let it cool and fill your queue. Then your bochet will throw out [foam] like must that is working; so you must always keep it full, so that it throws out.
And after six weeks or seven months, one should draw off all the bochet down to the lees and put it in a tub or other vessel; then knock the head out of the cask it was in, remove the lees, scald it, wash it, put the head back in, fill it with what is left, and keep it; and it does not matter if it is not full. And then take four and a half ounces of cloves and one of grains [of paradise], crushed and put in a linen bag, and hang it on a little cord through the bunghole.
Note that of the scum that is skimmed off, take twelve pots of water for every pot of it, and boil them together; and that will be good bochet for the servants. Item, from other honey than scum it is made in the same proportion.
Translation: fyndling.de (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). It was made from the original-language text as transcribed by Base de Français Médiéval, ENS Lyon (Etalab Open License). That transcription is not reproduced on this page; you can read it next to the manuscript scan via the link below.
Original scan and transcription: fyndling.de/rezepte/men-299. German-language site; Google Translate works well for reading it.