I have several medieval recipes for Lasagne. I'd have to check on their dating, but I think they were around long before Marco Polo.
I am pondering whether to use Dad in some form in my next work. It's in the rough draft for a toddler just learning to speak, but it may not make the final cut. We shall see. If it does make the final cut, then detailed explanations are going into the author's note!!!

thats really interesting about the term "dad" (my dad job is in lingustics so i always find stuff like this interesting). you are exactly right, although its accurate if i came across that term in HF it would pull me out of the storys mood instantly.
its really interesting to speculate on why certain words feel "modern" to us and other don't. an example i was thinking of was "sh*t". I remember reading in some book (maybe Holands jerusalum) and the usage of it reapeatedly really brought me out of the story completely. now im sure that sh*t has a long and storied history and was no doubt used in medivel times repeatedly, but it just feels "modern" and is therefore conterproductive for an author.
no doubt it has to do with the origins of words as to whether they come from an anglo-saxon background and often feel more "common" to us or a latinate background and feel more formal.
It would be interesting to compile a list of "modern sounding" words which are not modern at all.
im sure a lot of vulgar words come from medevil times, they just "feel" modern. as we know, medevil peasnts were often quite vulgar. Vienna has a short street which in olden days was known as "cow p*ssy street"
