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.

Food Related Painting of the Week

Still-life with Parrot
Georg Flegel, ca. 1600

Still-life with Parrot
(from the Web Gallery of Art)

This week I've chosen a German painting full of sweets and such.

Like most still-life paintings, there's a bunch of interesting things scattered about. At the front and just to the right is a round wooden box that is filled with what's probably quince paste (cotignac or membrillo - like marmalade but much more firm, if you haven't tried this stuff then look at the local gourmet grocery, they usually have it near the imported cheeses like manchego - with which it goes exceptionally well!).

I'd be tempted to call the flat things in the lower right trenchers, but by the 1600s the use of trenchers had pretty much fallen out of fashion. They look more like biscotti (zweibaken? my German is not that good). Those things on top are either small pears or (more likely, I think) fresh figs.

The tall silver dish in the center is filled with sugar-covered things. I imagine the stick-shaped ones are strips of orange peel or maybe even horseradish root. I have no idea what the other things are, though the smaller, oval things might be almonds. Notice how nice and white the sugar coating is? I've ranted about the color of medieval sugar before. On a side note, the bumpiness of the sugared items is caused by having the sugar syrup too hot during the coating process. Around the dish of sweets is a plate of dried figs (maybe with some dates as well), a pomegranate, and a small (about 1/4 pound) loaf of bread.

On the left, near the spoons, is a beautiful prunted beaker - I have a set that look almost exactly like it. Behind and under the stack of plates is what looks like a wheel of cheese. I really hope the color of the paint has changed over the centuries, because that's not the color I like my cheese to have.

It wouldn't be that hard to re-create this setup, though I'd cover the table with a nice cloth. I'd also leave out the parrot - I'm sure it's a health code violation.

Sugar is sweet ...

Quite a while back I put some notes on the website about medieval sugar. They're all extracts from cookbooks and such detailing the types of sugar available - the color (white, brown, black) and the form (loaf, cone, powder). My main reason for digging up these references was in part to counter a statement I'd often heard that they didn't have powdered sugar in the middle ages.

Of course I couldn't directly prove that they did have powdered sugar - that seems to be an impossible task. What I could show is that they had something they referred to as powdered sugar, and that given the common kitchen tools and processes of the time it is trivial to grind sugar into a powdered form (interestingly enough, I did find an early 17th century source that says to add starch to powdered sugar to keep it from clumping - which is done modernly). While this isn't positive proof, it does make the case strongly enough to be reasonably certain.

One question about sugar that I couldn't answer this way was about its color. While they did referr to some sugar as being "white", there is no way to know if they really meant white, or if they just meant "light colored". Now to my rescue come a couple of illuminated manuscripts which actually depict sugar!

One comes from a book called Tacuinum Sanitatis - a sort of medieval book on health and wellness. It was originally an 11th century Arabic manuscript, and was translated and copied all over Europe throughout the middle ages. In the picture below from one edition from Italy in the late 14th century, there is a depiction of a sugar merchant selling white chunks.

 

Theatrum sanitatis, codice 4182 della R. Biblioteca Casanatense. Rome

Pretty conclusive, but it's nice to have a second opinion. So here is a market scene from a different manuscript. In the lower right is a spice merchant with a large white cone of sugar.

La rue marchande, Le Livre du gouvernement des princes

Paris, BnF, Arsenal, manuscrit 5062

Again, it seems pretty clear. The artists chose white paint for the sugar instead of just letting the beige background color to show through. If sugar were commonly brown or black or beige then they would have used those colors instead. Is this positive proof? Well ... no, these could be exceptions, but taken with the textual evidence it becomes very very compelling. Time to update my sugar notes.