All Manner of Powders

Last Tuesday I posted a link on Facebook to Yonnie Travis' interpretation of Eyron en Poche (poached eggs in a sweet sauce), and one of the commenters asked about "Blawnche pouder" (i.e. "white powder"). Here's the original source of the recipe in question for context (emphasis added):

Cj - Eyron en poche. Take Eyroun, breke hem, an sethe hem in hot Water; than take hem Vppe as hole as thou may; than take flowre, an melle with Mylke, and caste ther-to Sugre or Hony, and a lytel pouder Gyngere, an boyle alle y-fere, and coloure with Safroun; an ley thin Eyroun in dysshys, and caste the Sewe a-boue, and caste on pouder y-now. Blawnche pouder ys best.  [Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books (England, 1430)]

 So just what the heck is this stuff supposed to be? Sugar? Flour? Cocaine?

Medieval Italian cocaine dealer ... ok, it's really a sugar merchant.Theatrum sanitatis, codice 4182 della R. Biblioteca Casanatense. Rome

In the glossary of Curye on Inglysch, Hieatt and Butler offer the following:

Blawnce Pouder - ginger ground with sugar; see also powdour douce

That seems a bit odd considering the recipe above already listed sugar and ginger separately before calling for blawnche pouder. I suspect their conclusion was based on recipes like the following (again, emphasis added):

.Cxxx. Peerus in confyt. Take perus & pare hem clene. take gode rede wyne & mulberyes. other saundres & seeth the peres ther inne. & whan they buth y sode take hem up. make a syryp of wyne creke other vernage with blaunche poudour. other whyte sugur & poudour of ginger. & do the peres ther inne. seeth hit a litul and messe hit forth.  [Fourme of Curye / Rylands MS 7 (England, 1390)]

In modern English that phrase would be "with white powder, or white sugar and powdered ginger". While the "or" there certainly could mean "or in other words", but it could also mean "or if you don't have any".  That's really not as helpful as I'd like it to be.

The problem with that definition is compounded by recipes like ...

Warduns in syruppe. Take wardens (pears), and pare hom clene, and scthe hom in red wyn with mulberryes, or saunders, tyl thai byn tendur, and then take hom up, and cut hom, and do hom in a pot; and do therto wyn crete, or vernage ||, or other gode swete -wyne, and blaunch pouder, and sugur, and pouder of gynger, and let hom boyle awhile, and then serve hit forth.  [Ancient Cookery / Arundel 334](England, 1425)]

While this recipe is related to the one for "Peerus in confyt" from Fourme of Curye, it seems to be calling for sugar and ginger in addition to the blaunch pouder.

Then I found this recipe:

l - A potage on fysshday. Take an Make a styf Poshote of Milke an Ale; than take and draw the croddys thorw a straynoure wyth whyte Swete Wyne, or ellys Rochelle Wyne, and make it sum-what rennyng an sum-what stondyng, and put Sugre a gode quantyte ther-to, or hony, but nowt to moche; than hete it a lytil, and serue it forth al a-brode in the dysshys; an straw on Canel, and Gyngere, and ȝif thou haue Blank powder, straw on and kepe it as whyte as yt may be, and than serue forth.  [Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books (England, 1430)]

... so it's already calling for sugar and ginger, and goes on to say "if you have blanche pouder". That kind of does it in for blawnche pouder being a mix of sugar and ginger. They already know you have both of those, so they wouldn't ask if you had them mixed, right?

At times like this I look and see what the French are up to (the words "blawnche pouder" are, after all, originally French, so why not?  In the glossary of his translation of The Viandier of Taillevent, Terence Scully cites the following entry from Cotgrave's 1611 French-English dictionary (silly, I should have thought to look there first):

Pouldre blanche - A powder compounded of Ginger, Cinnamon, and Nutmegs; much in use among Cookes.

Of course Cotgrave's was written over 150 years after the recipe from TFCCB that started this mess (the one way at the top of the page), so it's possible that the meaning had changed significantly by then ... or was just plain wrong.  It's also worth noting that Nutmeg doesn't really show up much in English cookbooks before the 1600s.

On a side note, Cotgrave's has a recipe for Powder Douce that doesn't quite mesh with the source recipes we have from the fifteenth century.

Pouldre de duc - A powder made of Sugar and Cinnamon, & having (sometimes) other Aromaticall simples added unto them.

So let's get back to what we know (or at least what we're pretty sure of).  Blawnche pouder is probably a mixture of sugar and other spices, possibly including ginger.

Also ... nope, that's pretty much it.

We can guess that the mix is light-colored. After all, the English translation of "blawnche pouder" is "white powder", so it wouldn't make much sense for the stuff to be dark brown or red. Of course annual "white sales" in the US include merchandise in all sorts of colors now (but originally included only white bed linens).

This is one of those situations where I will freely admit I just don't know for sure.  Until someone locates an actual recipe for blawnche pouder, I think I'll go with the sugar & ginger mix. Since it's often sprinkled on top of an otherwise finished dish, perhaps use powdered sugar? That would fit the description and keep it distinct from powder douce.

Thinking about "THINKING ABOUT FOOD IN FANTASY"

I was at a writer's retreat this weekend when one of my friends posted a link on Facebook for an article for writers about food in fantasy. I happily clicked through, expecting to see a nice bit of writing that would dispel the common myths about medieval European cooking - after all, there's so much more information available now, and all the old bunk about the middle-ages was debunked a decade ago, right?

Sadly, it was not to be. As the other writers around me can attest, I made all sorts of noises as I read the article, including gasps of disbelief and strangled cries of mental anguish. It was ok through the first five paragraphs, but after that it completely went off the rails.

So, of course, I am compelled to post a rebuttal. Are you surprised? I didn't think so.

Sugar

Some of what the article says about sugar (the origins, the early use of other sweeteners-primarily honey, etc.) is essentially correct. But it implies that sugar in Europe was incredibly rare and expensive.

"Sugar was still a luxury in Europe and America until the 18th century, when demand led to the creation of sugar plantations in the New World, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and India, using slave and indentured labour."

"In a fantasy world similar to our Europe at any time up to the 18th century, sugar would most likely be a rare and expensive commodity." 

Based upon the prices in 15th century London (Prof. John H. Munro, University of Toronto), a craftsman's daily wages could buy a half pound of sugar. Yes, that's a lot of money, but it's also a half pound of freakin' sugar for a single day, which is about double the current level of US sugar consumption per capita.

This is not to say that they were eating that much sugar back then, but rather that (for the growing middle class and nobility) there was plenty of sugar to be had. If the characters in your fantasy world are poor then they'd probably have stuff sweetened with honey, otherwise they can probably get sugar.

Meat

The article clearly suggests that meat consumption was not what it is today.

"Without the large scale farming and production that we know today, meat would be less common and much more expensive."

The main reason that modern society requires modern levels of meat production is that we have a very small percentage of our population that actually produces food. Everyone else builds stuff, moves stuff, or pushes paper (or data) around. The few "farmers" we have must do a lot more work to feed everyone.

Yes, medieval agriculture did produce less meat, but they also had way fewer mouths to feed.

There have been a bunch of recent studies which tested the levels of carbon, nitrogen, and iodine in medieval skeletal remains to determine the relative consumption of meat, plants, and fish. They've all shown that medieval meat consumption wasn't out of line with that of the modern diet.

What's more, one study compared the level of meat consumption between the poor and the wealthy and concluded, "No convincing case for social variation in diet can nevertheless be made by comparing isotopic with archaeological and anthropological data."

It's also worth noting that documents from medieval prisons show that prisoners were fed up to two pounds of meat per week. If meat were as scarce as the article suggests then I expect there would have been long lines of people waiting to get thrown in jail.

One final criticism on the topic, the article says:

"Even if a poor family lives next to a wood full of game, they may not necessarily be able to hunt there."

This is technically true, but the poor family could easily raise chickens and pigs for their own consumption or to sell ... and they usually did.

Fruits and Vegetables

The article goes on to discuss the consumption levels of other foodstuffs, and starts off with a statement that is, at best, wildly inaccurate.

"Vegetables are probably going to make up the main bulk of a fantasy character’s diet in any period or setting, unless the character is very rich."

As shown in the section above, the poor got plenty of meat. Further, a huge amount of the daily caloric intake for all classes took the form of bread. The poor got bread from a mixed variety of grains (sometimes called "maslin bread") and the wealthy got fine, white bread (called "manchets" or "paindemain"). Workers in England's manoral system received one or two meals a day as part of their pay, and those meals were often documented to include a full pound of bread per person.

Yes, they ate lots of fruits and vegetables. Whatever was in season was going to be eaten (or preserved if possible), however they were not "the main bulk", regardless of social class. Further, there is plenty of documentation that shows the medieval nobility often had the same health issues related to a crappy diet that we have now: diabetes, obesity, and gout. So some of them (like some of us) didn't eat enough fruits and veggies.

Then there's this little snippet:

"Potatoes, conversely, are notorious for growing almost anywhere."

I think that sentence made me gag a few times.  Yes, potatoes grow everywhere ... except for anywhere outside of the Americas before the year 1500. Potatoes are a new-world plant. They didn't have them in medieval Europe. So, just ... no.

Spices

Go ahead and look at Professor Monroe's page again. Spices were expensive in medieval Europe, but they weren't that expensive. Meat pies sold to the working class in the local market would likely have some spice (probably cinnamon). Saffron, which currently is and always has been the most expensive spice in the world, is included in about half of the recipes in medieval cookbooks. Yes, those books were meant for nobles and the middle class, but they were still consuming an incredible amount of spices each year.

From rough calculations, I've figured that spices were about ten times as expensive then as they are now (based on "minimum wage"). That's pretty pricey, but not out of reach ... even for the working class.

Water

The paragraph on water is just plain wrong. Medieval Europeans drank plenty of water, and most of it was perfectly safe. The alcohol content in medieval wine and ale wasn't high enough to kill off parasites. Wells back then weren't any more polluted than they are now.

Conclusion

It can be very useful for writers to consider food for their settings, and adding food references to stories or games set in a medieval fantasy world can add a great amount of realism. Just be sure to get your information from a reliable source.

Alan Coxon and Alegar

One of the big news stories among the bunch of geeks into Medieval European cuisine is the puff piece that's going around online about a new product being launched by "celebrity chef" Alan Coxon.

"This passion is what led him to reinvent a classic and historically valuable recipe from Medieval England, which he has calls the Ale-Gar, putting him in the rare league of chefs who have invented food products of great value. A versatile and uniquely flavoured form of vinegar, to put it very broadly, Ale-Gar can be put to a variety of uses as well-known chefs in many restaurants in the West are attesting to."

Now what makes me cranky about this whole thing isn't that he has "reinvented" a medieval recipe, or even that he's marketing it (and himself) in such a painfully irritating way. No, what bugs me are some of the horribly incorrect and inaccurate things in the article and on Coxon's website.

First, let me make a note about the name of your product: "Ale-Gar". The word alegar is the Middle English term for ale vinegar or malt vinegar. Given that you talk about your product being "infused" with flavors and that it would be a good substitute for balsamic vinegar, you're not making alegar. Instead of giving it such a misleading name, I suggest you change it to something else. "Medieval Themed Vinegar", perhaps. As long as you call it "Ale-Gar", food historians will need to keep reminding the public that "Ale-Gar" isn't alegar.

If a medieval recipe calls for alegar, use this stuff.

"I am proud to be the creator of a historic food range and the globally unique Medieval Old English Ale-Gar – a product that has all but disappeared from our culinary repertoire for over 300 years. After ten years of painstaking research and development, I have managed to bring it back for the world to enjoy."

No, Alan. You are not the creator of a historic food range (whatever that means). You are the creator of a line of products with a historic theme. There's a big difference. Further, malt vinegar has been widely available for the past 300 years, and can easily be found on the shelves of common grocery stores. Any research you've done over the past 10 years had nothing to do with understanding medieval production of alegar. You didn't bring anything back.  You've been doing modern product development, that's all.

"How is Ale-Gar made? Without giving too much away, it is made using a 15th-century Medieval Old English recipe that took me ten years to recreate. The mixture is then placed in acidulation tanks, infused and matured."

I've read the available 15th century recipes for making alegar (one of them is reproduced below). Now maybe you've got access to a source I haven't heard of (possible, but I doubt it), but from what I can tell, the alegar produced back then wasn't that much different from the malt vinegar of today. It didn't take you 10 years to recreate alegar. It took you 10 years to work out something like balsamic vinegar that you thought you could market.

To torne Wyne to Vyneagyr or Ale to Aleger or syder to Aysell. Take a pott and fyll hit Full of wyne Asell or gode Ale And stoppe well the mowth that no thyng cum yn nor owte And do hit in A vessell full of water and set the vessell on the fyre And let the pot of wyne boyle in the same A long while tyll hit be turnyd. [MS Pepys 1047, (England, ca. 1500)]

Oh, and just so you know, the phrase "Medieval Old English" is nonsense. Old English was spoken by the Anglo-Saxons from around 450 to 1066. Middle English was spoken in England from around 1100 to 1500. Pick one. Given that you keep talking about the 15th century, I suggest Middle English.

"In Mediaeval England, wine was limited to Royalty and nobility, ..."

A minor quibble, but this is plain wrong. While it is true that there was less consumption of wine in England by the working class, it wasn't limited to "Royalty and nobility". The growing merchant class imported significant amounts of wine from France, and England had its own (declining) wine-making industry throughout the middle ages.

"For my Ale-Gar, I have used a traditional mediaeval ale recipe, but I have incorporated Chocolate Stout Malt, to tantalise today's more sophisticated and adventurous palate."

So you use a traditional medieval ale recipe, but you add completely non-medieval ingredients to it to make it taste different, which means you don't use a traditional medieval ale recipe. Right. Please also note that any talk about the modern palate being "more sophisticated and adventurous" is complete marketing BS and has no basis in reality.

One last note from the article:

"Of his school life, Alan says he wasn’t a remarkably bright child as he preferred to be engaged in athletics."

It shows.

Similar, but Different

Yesterday I wanted to make a pie for dinner to celebrate Pi day, and being the sort of geek I am, I thought I'd try out something medieval.

The Medieval Cookbook Search turned up a bunch of recipes for meat pies, and I picked out one that seemed pretty straightforward - Pyes of Pairis from A Noble Boke off Cookry.

It turned out pretty well, so I wrote it up and went to post it on the website, and that's when I realized I'd had it before. Well ... sort of.

I'd never made it before, but if I'd taken a few minutes to look at my own website I would have seen the link to Kristen Wright's version of the recipe. D'oh! This made me consider not posting it after all - I don't want to seem like I'm stepping on her recipes or anything.

However, there's something interesting to be seen from comparing her interpretation to mine. Even with such a simple recipe (cook meat, add eggs and spices, bake in pie), we ended up with substantially different results. What's more, I think that both interpretations are equally valid.

This is something I've come across many times while re-creating medieval cuisine. Because of the way the recipes are written, and because our cooking culture is so much different now from what it was then, there is a lot of uncertainty packed into even the shortest and most direct recipes.

In some ways it can be frustrating, but in other ways it makes it just that much more fun.

Excuses, excuses...

Before getting into the subject of this rant, here's a warning about what triggered it:

Yes, I've been watching The Tudors

From what I've been told by people who research various aspects of medieval life (clothing, painting, religion, history, etc.) this program is filled with all sorts of wild inaccuracies, so why should cooking and food be treated any differently?

Surprisingly, for a television series that is so lavish with costumes and settings, food is almost ignored (well, maybe that's not too surprising - very few shows or films deal much with food, probably because it's a very hard thing to film well). Where the show does touch on the topic, they seem to invariably go way wrong.

At the end of the second season, King Henry is presented with a swan pie. Awesome! The thing is the right shape, and they even decorated it with the head and wings of the swan. Then Henry breaks the top crust and starts eating the contents with his fingers. This is a minor quibble, I know, but he would have used a spoon. They had spoons in medieval times. They even have spoons at Medieval Times ("Would you like a refill on that Pepsi?").

Then there are the grapes. In almost every scene depicting a dinner or banquet there are grapes on the table - even in the scenes set in winter. Somehow they've got grapes ready for harvest year round in England. That, or they've managed to work out overnight transport from the southern hemisphere.

What really set my teeth on edge though was something in the episode I watched last night. Henry holds up a piece of fruit and tells Suffolk that it comes from the New World. That would have been Ok, but it was a starfruit, which aren't native to anywhere in the New World but instead come from Indonesia.

[Aside: I suppose they could have used a pawpaw, but given their short shelf life that wouldn't have been much better (maybe they were brought over on the same express flight as the grapes). Tomato? No, they were known but considered poisonous. A potato then, or maybe a peanut. Heck, how about tobacco?]

Now some might say that this kind of criticism is misplaced. The show's creator, Michael Hirst, dismissed complaints of inaccuracy by stating "Showtime commissioned me to write an entertainment, a soap opera, and not history ... And we wanted people to watch it."

That's just bunk.

Hirst is spinning his departures from reality as being artistic deviation, changes to make the story more interesting. I'll buy that for the bit with Henry eating the swan pie, but for the other errors it's just an excuse for laziness. Hirst simply doesn't care enough to expend the minuscule amount of effort to even get vaguely close to right (like on the same continent).

In the meanwhile, I keep watching. It is entertaining, after all, and it helps me to keep up with the nonsense that people learn from Hollywood about medieval Europe.

Some Thoughts About Sauces

My son (age 10) learned a lesson about sauces this morning, specifically that when you allow a sauce containing dairy to boil, it breaks.

He was making biscuits and sausage gravy for breakfast and got distracted watching his older brother (age 13) play computer games, and the sausage gravy boiled until it looked all grainy.  We strained it to keep the sausage bits and remade the gravy and breakfast was saved, but that got me thinking about sauces.

There are very few milk-based sauces in medieval European cuisine.  Off hand only one comes to mind - Gauncile, which is a garlic flavored cream sauce.  Even Jance, which looks like a dairy-based sauce, uses almond milk.

In the sauce recipes found in medieval English and French cookbooks, the vast majority of them are made with an acid (vinegar, verjuice, or wine) as the base and bread crumbs as the thickener.  This makes sense considering that they had limited control of temperature while cooking over open flame or coals, and this combination of ingredients makes for a sauce that is almost impossible to ruin.

Really, I've tried.  I've many times left a pot of medieval sauce on the heat while distracted by something else (hmm... I think I see where my son gets it from), and even when it's come to a furious boil a little stirring and maybe some water sets it to right again.

Contrast this to many of the modern sauces.  The dairy based ones will break, and the ones thickened with flour or eggs will form lumps if not made correctly.  Medieval sauces just aren't prone to these problems.  This is the reason I frequently say that medieval European cuisine is perfect for new cooks or those who just can't seem to get the hang of working in a kitchen.

... about that Solstice Dinner

Last night we had our Solstice dinner, celebrating the long night with the kids and a couple of (newlywed) friends (Hi Kristen & Shane!). I posted the menu a couple of days ago, and I thought I'd make a couple of notes about how it went.

Roast Capon - I'd never cooked a capon before, so I wasn't sure what to expect.  Both before and after cooking it really looked just like a chubby chicken.  I made the stuffing as per the directions (but using whole hard-boiled eggs instead of just the yolks), and cooked it in the oven for two and a half hours.

The result was ... a chubby chicken.  The meat had a very nice flavor, and was moist to the point of being buttery.  The stuffing was loaded with flavor, and went really well with the capon.  What did surprise me was the amount of fat in the capon.  Even after cooking there were still layers of fat here and there.  Yummy, but this is not a diet bird.

Roasted Turnips - This is an old standby now.  It's almost as much a custard as it is a turnip dish - add some sugar and it could just about pass for a dessert.  However, with all the eggs, butter, and cheese - this one is also not diet friendly.

Brussels sprouts (steamed, plain and simple) - I made about four tons of sprouts for this dinner and there were no leftovers. None.  Aren't these supposed to be one of the least liked vegetables?  I didn't even smother them with cheese or cream sauce.  I didn't add bacon.  I didn't add sugar.  Just plain old sprouts.  Either the world isn't like I've been lead to believe, or I have a weird family and friends.

Applemoyse (with snowe) - Ok, this is now officially my favorite medieval recipe.  Not only is it incredibly quick and easy to make, but everyone seems to love it (including me).  I made it properly this time (which adds the oh-so-difficult-and-tedious step of separating three eggs), kept it warm until serving, and topped it with snowe that I'd made ahead of time and kept in the fridge.  I think I'll make some more for dessert tonight.

All that's left for my holiday season is the dinner on Christmas Eve.  There's some extended-family drama that may complicate things, but we'll see how it goes.

Solstice Menu

Barring last minute changes, I think I've got the menu set for dinner tomorrow.  Here's what we'll be having:

Roast Capon

Roasted Turnips

Brussels sprouts

Applemoyse (with snowe)

The capon and applemoyse recipes are English (15th and 17th centuries), and the turnips are 17th c. French.  I'm going to keep the sprouts simple - steam and butter, and maybe a bit of garnish or spice, don't know for sure.

The capon recipe will be new, so I'll need to keep track and write things down.  I'll also try to get pictures of the capon and the turnips (which is a recipe I've had for quite some time, but haven't managed to take a photograph for it).

A Capon Recipe for the Solstice?

I've got two "big" dinners to cook next weeks.  The first is a solstice dinner for my immediate family and a couple friends (Hi Kristen & Shane!), and the second is Christmas eve dinner for the family and in-laws.  This means that right now I spend a good amount of time musing over potential menus.

While I focus almost entirely on traditional new-world foods for thanksgiving dinner, I've tended towards medieval English foods for the solstice (and Christmas eve dinner ends up being an attempt at more fancy foods).

For the solstice dinner this year, I think I'd like to roast a capon.  But which recipe should I choose?

A search of the online medieval cookbooks finds heaps of poultry recipes, dozens of which are for capons.  However, the majority of the capon recipes are boiled rather than roasted.  I sifted through a bunch of the more interesting ones and came across two likely candidates.

Capon or goos roste. To rost capon or gose tak and drawe his leuer and his guttes at the vent and his grece at the gorge and tak the leef of grece parsly ysope rosmarye and ij lengs of saige and put to the grece and hew it smale and hew yolks of eggs cromed raissins of corans good poudurs saffron and salt melled to gedure and fers the capon there withe and broche hym and let hym be stanche at the vent and at the gorge that the stuffur go not out and rost hym long with a soking fyere and kep the grece that fallithe to baist hym and kepe hym moist till ye serue hym and sauce hym with wyne and guingere as capons be.  [A Noble Boke off Cookry (England, 1468)]

Capoun in Salome. Take a Capoun and skalde hym, Roste hym, then take thikke Almaunde mylke, temper it wyth wyne Whyte other Red, take a lytyl Saunderys and a lytyl Safroun, and make it a marbyl coloure, and so atte the dressoure throw on hym in ye kychoun, and throw the Mylke a-boue, and that is most commelyche, and serue forth.  [Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books (England, 1430)]

Both of these sound interesting, though I'm leaning towards the first one as the herb and currant stuffing sounds more holiday-like to me.

For side dishes, I may go with some "garnished" or roasted turnips, or maybe compost (pickled root vegetables).  I'll want something green as well - maybe Brussels sprouts (they're the traditional holiday vegetable in England, aren't they?).

Starting Points

When I first started researching medieval cooking - back in the dark ages before the invention of the internet - there were few resources available to anyone who didn't live close to an academic library. The few good sources of information were either people you had to go find, or texts that been copied and re-copied so many times that they were almost unreadable. Now there are so many resources that the beginner is likely to be overwhelmed.

Even on my own page of recommended books I've got an awful lot of titles listed, and for people who are just beginning to study medieval European cuisine, or those who just want to touch on the subject lightly, it can be difficult to figure out where to start.

So I thought I'd take a moment here to list a handful of what I see as basic works - books that provide an easy point of entry to the subject.

For an overview of medieval European cuisine, I'd recommend the following:

The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages by Terence Scully

Cooking in Europe, 1250-1650 by Ken Albala

Both of these books are well written in a very approachable style. They provide the general context of medieval cooking as clearly and simply as possible.


If you want to try and cook medieval foods however, you'll need recipes. There are a handful of websites out there which have recipes worked out already, but there are many medival cookbooks widely available, and working from the original source is really cool and very educational. Below are a few that I feel are good, basic sources, broken down by region. The best part is that most of them are available online for free.


England

Forme of Cury
(included in "Curye on Inglish" - in Middle English)
(free online version - in Middle English)

Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books
(in Middle English)
(free online version - in Middle English)


France

Le Méenagier de Paris
(English translation, as "The Goodman of Paris")
(free online version -in French)
(free online version - English translation)

The Viandier of Taillevent
(in French, inlcludes English translation)
(free online version - English translation)


Germany

Das Buch von guter Speise
(free online version - in German)
(free online version - in German with English translation)


Italy

The Neapolitan Recipe Collection
(in Italian with English translation)

Libro di cucina / Libro per cuoco
(free online version - in Italian)
(free online version - English translation)

Ceilidh Feast 2010 - Menu

I've been asked to cook the feast for an upcoming SCA event here in southwest Ohio, and I thought this would be a good chance to document the whole process I go through in running these things.

The first step for me is working out the menu. In this particular case I don't have much time to try out new dishes or do a lot of research, so I decided to stick with dishes I know reasonably well. Also, since I seem to have been having trouble getting my act together lately, I figured it'd be best to choose more simple, straightforward dishes - less to go wrong. I knew I wanted the whole thing to be primarily English because their feasts were much less structured than those of the French (and therefore, simpler). After a couple of days I took the time to sit down and - with Kristen's input - settled on the following menu:

A Supper for a Meat Day

On Table:
manchet bread
soft cheese
fruit preserves

First Course:
Pegions Stewed (stewed chicken)
Onion and Parsley Salad
Chervis (carrots and parsnips)

Second Course:
Cormarye (roast pork)
Wortes (cabbage)
Rice Lombard

Third Course:
Apple Muse (with Snowe)
Wafers
Walnuts

Ok, so right off the bat I'll point out one major factual error. The title, "A Supper for a Meat Day", is in all truth incorrect. In the medieval religious calendar, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays were meatless days, so properly I should have a fish-based menu. However the problems with doing so are numerous, but the biggest ones are that a lot of people around here don't like fish and that they really like meat. If I did an all-fish feast I would probably be feeding 20 instead of 120.

The bread, cheese, and preserves are all pretty dull and straightforward. For this event I've got someone else to make the bread (thanks Amari!), so that's one less thing for me to do ahead of time.

Pegions Stewed is a simple recipe. I'll be using chicken legs and thighs instead of using pigeons both to save costs and because they're more acceptable to the locals. Of course once I've got that on the menu then the onion and parsley salad is a natural accompaniment.

Chervis is essentially a variation and simplification of a recipe from Menagier de Paris. Really it's just cooked carrots and parsnips with spices.

Cormarye is an old standby for me. Pork is plentiful and inexpensive here - sometimes cheaper than chicken, and this is one of those recipes that is really hard to mess up. If things go well then I'll thicken the juices from the roasting pans with some bread to make a sauce.

The recipe for Wortes is one of Kristen's. One of the VIPs apparently has an intense dislike for cabbage, so I'll have to do a separate dish for head table.

Rice Lombard is a new dish for me, but it's really just rice cooked in meat broth with spices.

Finally in the last course are wafers, walnuts (which will be sugared if there's time), and apple muse topped with snowe.

The apple muse gave me pause though. The most common recipes for it call for almond milk and honey, which adds a lot of effort and expense for such a simple dish - especially when cooking for so many. What I'd like to have is something more like Chardwarden, which is thickened with egg yolks and sweetened with sugar. After some serious digging, I did find a couple medieval variants of the recipe that did call for eggs and sugar, so that's what I'm going to use. Apparently I'm incapable of doing even a simple feast without researching at least one new recipe.

With the menu settled, the next step will be to work out the shopping list.

Forme of Cury Transcription

Photograph: University of Manchester John Rylands University Library

I've recently added a transcription of Forme of Cury to the website. This transcription (based on John Rylands University Library, English MS 7) is not really a huge contribution to the field of food history. After all, John Rylands University already has put the images of the manuscript online, and Pegge's edition of Forme of Cury is already available online as a PDF of the printed book, and as plain text.

Still, as I noted in an earlier post, there are some differences between this manuscript and the Pegge edition, so having the information in a form that's easy to work with should be beneficial to the serious medieval food geek.

I'll be indexing the text and adding it to the Medieval Cookbook Search soon, and in a week or so (with luck) will cross-reference the recipes with those in the Pegge edition.

"If it's bad then we'll order a pizza."

I experiment on my family, and while even the kids are willing to try strange looking new foods, sometimes the recipes don't turn out. Our rule is simply that everyone tries it out, and if it's no good then we call Domino's. As it turns out, we've very rarely had to resort to pizza. This is partly due to my getting better at figuring out what will or won't work ahead of time, but mostly it's because I don't usually have the whole meal depend on a single, experimental dish.

For example, I tried out a new fish recipe recently (you knew this was coming, didn't you) and the results were less than encouraging. Sometimes medieval recipes don't work out because of translation or interpretation issues and sometimes there was an error back when they were writing down the recipe in the first place. Occasionally though, the problem is that the modern palate just isn't used to certain flavor combinations. I suspect this is the case with this recipe.

The dish in question comes from "the Second part of the Good Huswiues Jewell" (England, 1597).

To dresse a carpe.
Take your carpe and scale it, and splet
it, and cut off his heade, & take out all
the bones from him cleane, then take the
fish and mince it fine, being raw, with the
yolkes of foure or fiue hard egges minced
with it, so doone put it into an earthen pot,
with two dishes of butter & a pint of whit
wine, a handfull of proynes, two yolks of
hard egges cut in foure quarters, and
season it with one nutmeg not small bea-
ten, Salt, Sinamon and Ginger, and in
the boyling of it you must stirre it that it
burne not to the pot bottome, and when it
is enough then take your minced meat, &
lay it in the dish, making the proportion of
the body, setting his head at the vpper end
and his taile at the lower end, which head
and taile must be sodden by themselues in
a vessell with water and salt.

You may vse a Pike thus in al points,
so that you do not take the proines, but for
them take Dates and small raisons, and
when you haue seasoned it as your Carpe
is, and when you do serue it put the refect
into the pikes mouth gaping, and so serue
it foorth."

Ok, it doesn't look all that complex. It's chopped fish, hard-boiled egg yolks, butter, salt, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and dried fruit. I picked out some fish (no carp or pike were available, so I chose flounder on the grounds that it was a white, lightly flavored fish) and got to work. I didn't have prunes, but did have dates and raisins.

The resulting dish smelled good, but here's the problem: it didn't smell like dinner. In fact, it smelled like breakfast. The combination of spices made it smell almost exactly like cinnamon-spice oatmeal. To make matters worse looked like cinnamon-spice oatmeal too, complete with raisins. Worrisome.

I had the forethought to cook a full regular dinner and have the new dish on the side, so no one was worried that we'd have to wait for the pizza man. Everyone sat down, dished up the food, and started eating.

Complete silence at the table can be a good sign, but not in combination with confused facial expressions.

Everyone agreed (even the kids) that while it tasted ok, and wasn't exactly bad, it still didn't taste ... right. Honestly, it tasted exactly like lightly fish-flavored cinnamon-spice oatmeal. This is not the sort of thing you want to eat at dinner, and probably not a good bet for breakfast either.

There was a lot of talk around the table about what made it not right. It could be I used too much of the spices, or the wrong type of fish, or wrong balance of spices, but really I think this is one of those rare occasions where medieval people were eating something that modern people just aren't going to like (even if they like new and different foods). So I'll shelve this one and maybe look at it again in a few months and see if anything occurs to me.

Bah!

On Breakfast

I've posted before about breakfast, noting the general uncertainty of whether or not the people of medieval Europe did or didn't eat a morning meal. Now I've found another interesting passage of text on the subject.

This one comes from The Castel of Helth by Thomas Elyot (1541). I'd found this book many months back when I was reading up on food and humoral theory, but I hadn't read through the whole thing. Much to my surprise, buried within a section on what's appropriate to eat at various times of the year is the passage quoted below. It's rather long but in essence it says that people under the age of 40 can eat breakfast, and that (given the climate of England) not doing so might harm their health.

Sir Elyot doesn't say anything specific about people over the age of 40 though, which leaves me to conclude that I'm personally allowed at least six meals a day.

---

Tymes in the day concernynge meales. Cap. 27.

Besydes the tymes of the yere and ages, there
be also other tymes of eatinge and drinkinge
to be remembred, as the sundry tymes in the day,
whiche we call meales, which are in number and
distance, accordinge to the temperature of the coun
trey and person: As where the country is colde,
and the person lusty, and of a strong nature, there
may mo meales be vsed, or the lasse distaunce of
tyme betwene them. Contrarywise in contrary coun-
trais and personages, the cause is afore rehersed.
Where I haue spoken of the diete of the tymes of
the yere, not withstandinge here must be also con-
sideration of exercise and rest, which do augment
or appaire the naturall disposition of bodyes, as
shalbe more delclared hereafter in the chapiter of
exercise. But concernynge the generall csage of
countreis, and admitting the bodies to be in per-
fite state of healthe, I suppose, that in Englande,
yong men, vntil they come to the age of .xl. yeres,
may well eate thre meales in one day, as at breke-
fast, dyner, and supper, so that betwene brekefast,
and diner, be the space of foure houres at the lest,
betwene diner and supper .vi. houres, & the breke
fast lasse than the diner and the dyner moderate,
that is to say, lasse than sacietie or fulnesse of bea-
ly, and the drynke thervnto mesurable, according
to the drynesse or moystnes of the meate. For mo-
che abundance of drynke at meale, drowneth the
meate eaten, and not only letteth conuenient con-
coction in the stomake, but also causeth it to passe
faster than nature requireth, and therfore ingen-
dreth moche fleume, and consequently reumes, &
crudenes in the vaynes, debilitie and slyppernes
of the stomacke, contynuall fluxe, and many o-
ther inconueniences to the body and members.

But to retourne to meales, I thynke breakefa-
stes necessary in this realme, as well for the cau-
ses before rehersed, as also forasmoch as coler be-
inge feruent in the stomacke, sendeth vp fumiosi-
ties vnto the brayne, and causeth head ache, and
sometyme becommeth aduste, and smouldreth in
the stomake, wherby happeneth peryllous sycke-
nes, and somtyme sodayne deathe, if the heate in-
closed in the stomake haue nat other conueniente
matter to work on: this dayly experience proueth,
and naturalle reason confirmeth. Therfore men
and women not aged, hauynge their stomackes
cleane without putrified matter, slepynge mode-
rately and soundly in the nyght, and felinge them
selfe lyght in the morninge, and swete brethed, let
them on goddis name breake their fast: Colerike
men with grosse meate, men of other complexions
with lyghter meate.

A Medieval Diet?

Last week I came across a post on Lifehacker in which the blogger in question described his change to a flexitarian diet and how he'd been able to lose substantial weight with a few relatively easy modifications to his eating habits. Seeing as I've been getting decidedly Pooh-shaped lately, and remembering that many years back we'd gone semi-vegetarian and didn't die from meat withdrawal, I've come to think that this may be a good thing to try.

Then the thought occurred to me that this sort of semi-vegetarian thing was a major part of the Church-dictated medieval European diet. On three days each week - Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays - meat from land animals was off the menu. They were replaced with fish, leguminous vegetables, and the like. Of course things were much more restricted during lent (no dairy or eggs allowed either, making it a sort of pisco-vegan diet). Interesting, but I'm not quite ready for 40 days of that.

So what would a modern, healthy version of "The Medieval Diet"™ be like? Let's see ...

1. No meat (other than fish) on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays
2. Lunch is the main meal, dinner is smaller
3. Meat portions are small (~4 oz.) with the bulk of the caloric intake coming from other foods
4. Seasonal, locally grown fruits and vegetables
5. Carbohydrates from a variety of grains and tubers
6. Reduced intake of sugars

Mind you, this isn't how people actually ate in most of medieval Europe. Most food historians now think that the average worker was consuming around 3000 calories a day (not counting times of famine) and burning it all off with hard work, and the wealthy were eating a diet full of fats, sugars, and protein (and paying the price in terms of diet-related diseases just like we are today). Still, it's a diet that has a basis in medieval practices, and is surprisingly close to what a lot of modern nutritionists advocate.

We'll have to see how well it works.

Haggis

There was a recent post on slashfood about haggis, which included a link to an interesting YouTube video. Of course this got me thinking. I've come across medieval recipes for haggis before, but I hadn't compared them to modern recipes. How different was medieval haggis?

The recipe in the program seemed pretty simple: onion, suet, sheep's offal, cracked wheat, and spices, all stuffed into a casing (traditionally a sheep's stomach, but in this case beef intestines) and boiled.

After a brief search I found a recipe in Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books (England, 1430) titled Hagws of a schepe. It calls for sheep's offal, suet, spices, bread, egg yolks, and cream. All mixed, stuffed into the sheep's stomach, and boiled. That's very close - even the name is similar - all that's missing is the onion.

Here's the part that surprised me. After looking further, I didn't find any other recipes like this one. Nothing earlier from England, and nothing from any other country. This suggests that haggis is not only a very English dish, but it also hasn't changed in over 500 years.

Now the remaining question is: can I get my family to eat it? The kids maybe, but my wife hates the taste of liver. Maybe I can make a pseudo-haggis using ground lamb ...

Solstice Dinner

For the past couple of years I've cooked a big dinner on December 21st to celebrate the winter solstice. Partly it's a traditional way to observe the changing seasons of the year, and another special thing to enjoy over the holidays. The biggest reason though is so I can cook a fancy holiday dinner the way I want without making any additional fuss and mess on Christmas eve or Christmas day.

The menu hasn't settled down yet, but this year I decided it should be a counterpoint to Thanksgiving. I've selected mostly medieval English dishes and the focus is on old-world foods. Here's what I've got so far:

Roast Goose with Sauce Madame - The goose is stuffed with fruit and herbs. After roasting, the stuffing is removed and used to make a fruit sauce. This is my first time making this recipe (and for that matter, my first time cooking goose), so we'll see how it goes.

Wastels y-Farced - Since the goose isn't going to have a bread-based stuffing, I thought I'd make this old favorite. It's essentially a steamed, savory bread pudding.

Plum Pudding - While plum puddings aren't at all medieval, I've become quite addicted to this particular English tradition. The holidays just wouldn't be complete without it.

The only thing I still can't decide on is a vegetable. I've thought about Brussels sprouts, but somehow they just don't click. I'll have to make up my mind soon.

If I have time, I'm going to make some gyngerbrede too. Not for dinner or dessert, but as a treat for during the day and with mulled cider later that evening.

Medieval Cooking Demonstration

There's a post at News for Medievalists about an upcoming demonstration of medieval cooking at the Lichfield Garrick on September 5th. Since this council-run theatre is in Lichfield (Staffordshire, UK), and since I'm cooking a feast in Dayton (Ohio, US) the very next day I doubt that I'll be able to attend.

Here's the description from the Garrick's website:

Join Prof Roland Rotherham the 'Ancient Foodie' himself and Chef Simon Smith as they give you a selection of recipes spanning from ancient Egypt, pigeon breasts with dried apricots, to Tudor times with Spatchcock Pheasant in beer sauce and berries, plus many more to delight your palate.

The show starts at 12.00pm, with prices of £8 and £6. If you get a chance to attend, send me a note and let me know how it went.

Harvest Days 2008

I'm now in the middle of preparations for the Harvest Days event. I've got a substantial - all English - feast planned, with some new dishes (OK, the recipes are actually some 500 years old, but they're new to the re-enactors of this region).

The feast is going to be held on September 6th, so naturally I'm going a bit nuts right now. Therefore it seems like a good idea if I add to that workload and start posting bits and pieces about what I'm doing.

The Menu
All was good with the menu until a couple of months back when I realized that the current Prince (and future King) of the Midrealm is allergic to pork - which of course appeared liberally throughout the feast. So I scrapped a half-dozen dishes and added three or four different ones. Then I heard from my local huntsman and game-keeper (Hi James!) that the pigeons weren't breeding fast enough and kept dropping dead for no reason. There goes another dish (bother! I was so looking forward to serving everyone squab. Oh well, there's always next time).

So now as it stands I've got a menu consisting of 3 courses and 16 dishes (give or take, depending on what you count as a dish. Medieval menus are pretty flaky about the number of dishes claimed for a feast, so I see no reason to me more accurate than they were).

Sotlties
I've also got at least three sotlties (entertaining/amusing bits for during the feast - in France they were called entrements) planned that should go over reasonably well. I can't tell you more about them though as it would spoil the surprise.

The Kitchen
My apprentice visited the site yesterday evening and reported back that the kitchen is the size of a small country. There's also an outdoor barbecue pit (which is good because one of the dishes - pommes dorreys - works best when cooked over an open fire).

That's enough on things for now. Sometime in the next few days I'll probably post some pictures of the kitchen with comments, instructions and examples of making a Brain Book™, and various notes about food and prep-cooking.

Pickled Meat Pies

I was looking through some of the recipes in The Good Housewife's Jewell (England, 1596) and came across the recipe below.

To make fillets of beefe or clods instead of red Deare.
First take your Beefe, and Larde it very thicke, and then season it with pepper, and Salt, Sinamon and ginger, Cloues, and Mace good store, with a greate deale more quantitie of pepper and Salte, then you would a peece of Venison, and put it in couered Paste, and when it is baked, take vineger and suger, Sinamon and Ginger,  and put in, and shake the Pastie, and stope it close, and let it stande almonst a fortnyght before you cut it vp.

What makes this interesting is that it clearly states that the pie is to be kept for two weeks before eating it.  From what I've read recently, the spices called for have anti-bacterial properties (especially the cinnamon), which when combined with the vinegar may kill off any existing bacteria and prevent new growth (I'm still trying to find out just how well spices can do this).

The only other recipe I'd found before like this one is from a similar source, The Good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchen (England, c. 1588).  It has a similar step of pouring vinegar into the baked pie, but only states that the pie can be kept "a great while."

To make a pie to keep long.
You must first perboile your flesh + press it, + when it is pressed, season it with pepper and salt whilest it is hot, then lard it, make your paste of rie flower, it must be very thick, or else it wil not holde, when it is seasoned + larded, lay it in your pie, then cast on it before you close it, a good deale of cloves and Mace beaten small, and lay upon that a good deale of Butter, and so close it up: but you must leave a hole in the top of the lid, + when it hath stood two houres in the Oven, you must fill it as full of vinigar as you can, and then stop the hole as close as you can with paste, and then set it in the Oven again: your Oven must bee verie hot at the first, and then your pies will keep a great while: the longer you keepe them the better wil they be: and when ye have taken them out of the oven, and that they be almost cold, you must shake them betweene your hands, and set them into the Oven, be well ware that one pie touch not another by more than ones hand bredth: Remember also to let them stand in the Oven after the Vinigar be in, two houres and more.

The common aspects of the recipes appear to be seasoned meat and fat, placed into a crust and baked, and vinegar poured in afterwards.  It's also interesting to note that both recipes instruct the cook to shake the pie, assumedly to distribute the vinegar.

This of course leads me to wonder how such a pie would taste, and just how safe (or unsafe) would it be to eat?  I'm tempted to make one and see if I can find a lab to test for bacterial levels after two weeks.