Iron Rations

One of my co-workers who knows I'm into medieval cooking sent me a link to a video about D&D iron rations and asked me what I thought (seeing as my day job is in the IT department it's not really surprising, I guess, to have people who are interested in Dungeons & Dragons and/or medieval cooking).

Anyways, since I took the time to re-watch the video (I'd seen it before) and jot down some quick notes about it, I thought I'd go ahead an post them here as well.  Here's the video ... go ahead and watch it ... I'll wait.

Ok, yes. It's all fun, and the guy in the video himself even noted that “Pemmican and mango and chain mail, they would never have been anywhere near each other historically.” It wasn't meant to be historically accurate. However I do get asked about D&D rations from time to time, and I've even done a couple of seminars on the subject at games conventions. So ...

Salted Fish & Meat

Salt has been used to preserve fish and meat since well before the middle ages.  It's reliable and relatively fool-proof. You bury the food in salt for a week or so, drain off any liquid that forms, maybe change out the salt, and you end up with something that the bugs and mold and bacteria don't want to mess with.

Of course you've also got something that is so salty that it's no longer fit for people to eat. The typical way to fix that was to boil it in fresh water for an hour or two, changing out the water once or twice. This gives you some edible meat and a lot of salty broth (most of which which will probably get thrown out).

Salted meat was often used by soldiers, even up to the civil war (I believe - correct me if I'm wrong), but for a group of fantasy adventurers going through a dungeon it wouldn't be very practical.

Pemmican

Pemmican was common among some of the North American tribes and was a decent way to preserve food for rough times. As the guy in the video mentioned, it can stay unspoiled (I hesitate to say "good to eat") for an exceptionally long time provided it's kept wrapped up and in cool conditions. The problem of course is that in warm or hot weather the fat in it can go rancid. Really, unless the adventurers are exploring the tundra, arctic, or great white north, I don't think it would be all that suitable for "iron rations".

Cheese

Wax sealed cheese is a relatively new thing (e.g. in the last hundred years or so). Most aged cheeses develop a hard rind on their own. While it means that you might lose some of the outer part of the cheese because it's too hard to eat, or even fuzzy in places, the rind protects the inside of the cheese. Wax is meant to do that as well, but wax was actually rather expensive (especially beeswax, which was most desirable for candles). Cheese can also go bad if stored under too warm conditions - that's why "cheese caves" are a thing.

Dried Fruit

Fruit is great. It's got lots of sugars and it keeps really well when dried. If it gets too dried out you can even boil it in water for a bit and it will soften right up. The problem in connection with iron rations is that dried fruit has also always been a bit expensive.

Parched Wheat

I'd never heard of this stuff before - strange, huh? I suppose it would work, but it sounds a bit hard on the teeth.

Wheat was available throughout medieval Europe, but the supply would vary by location and from season to season. It was considered the best kind of grain and was therefore much in demand for making the nice white bread favored by just about everyone who could afford it. Poorer folk would get bread made from mixed grains, so I imagine taking a bunch of wheat and roasting it just so Blogg the Barbarian can have something to nibble on while spelunking would be a bit ... rich.

What's more, why not just carry cracked wheat or other grains that can be used for other purposes like making bread or soup?

Crackers

Ok, crackers are pretty reasonable, but still more expensive and less versatile than a sack of cracked grain.

Chocolate

UGH!  Not only is chocolate a new world food, but chocolate before the 1700s was not sweet. Even worse, the war ration chocolate mentioned in the video that soldiers carried in their packs was waxy and not very good to eat - the soldiers preferred to give it away rather than eating it (which I believe was the actual intention of the US government).

Conclusion

A more accurate version of hard rations would be more like a sack of cracked mixed grain and another of dried meat. These would be used to make some kind of stew. Of course it wouldn't be practical in an actual dungeon, but then no cooking would be.

For a dungeon crawl set in an early medieval European setting, I would expect the party to be eating perishable food for the first two or three days (fresh fruit, bread, fresh meat) and maybe beef jerky and cracker-like breads for another day or two after that. If they're stuck in a dungeon for longer than that with no source of fresh food, and have no way to cook grain and salted meat, then they're pretty much screwed.

The Bard's Tale

If you're at all interested in fiction, I've just set up a Kickstarter project for a new anthology - The Bard's Tale.  It's a collection of short stories and recipes by a great group of authors, edited by yours truly.

Not all the recipes in it are medieval, which is only fitting because not all of the stories are set in a traditional medieval fantasy setting.  Still, it should be a fun book for readers who like to cook.

Food Porn - Molecular Gastronomy

The whole Molecular Gastronomy movement has always made me a bit uneasy, and I wasn't exactly sure why.

For a while I thought it might be the reliance on technology that it encourages.  After all, having spent the last decade or so with my head stuck in the techniques of pre-16th century cooking must have conditioned me towards a more low-tech approach.  But then again, aside from being a medieval food geek, I'm also a science-fiction geek.  I love futuristic stuff, and that includes the depictions of food in movies and novels about possible (or impossible) futures.

More recently I began to suspect it had something to do with the chefs.  They tend to be flamboyant and egotistical, with an attitude that seems to be screaming "THIS IS MY ART, AND AS SUCH IT IS BEYOND CONTESTATION!"  However I have spent an awful lot of time around the highbrow artsy crowd, and I'm pretty comfortable with the fact that art can be quirky, controversial, impractical, and sometimes even downright incomprehensible, and as the art goes so does the artist.

Then a friend (Hi Broom!) posted a link to this video, and another possibility occurred to me.  Go ahead and watch it - it's a bit long (over 8 minutes) but it's fascinating and the music is soothing and pretty.

What I realized is that in this particular ... food product, and pretty much in all of the Molecular Gastronomy movement, it's all about the art.  The cook's cleverness, the use of unusual tools and technology, and unconventional form are all so important that the fact that it's food is almost irrelevant.  There seems to be no concern about whether it will taste nice or be pleasant to eat, or if it has any nutritional value whatsoever.

Compare this to another cooking tradition from the same country: sushi.

Here the presentation is very important, but the food aspects (flavor, nutrition, etc.) are still at the center.  Novelty is desirable, but it's not the only thing that is being supplied.

Really, it's the old argument of form and function.  Function without form is utilitarian, ugly, and dull.  Form without function is just fluff, pointless and useless.

To tie this back to medieval cooking, I feel it's worth remembering that artful food can be produced with surprisingly little in the way of technology.  Throughout most of history, cooks used very simple tools to produce surprisingly complicated and elegant works of art.

In the 17th century painting above, there are two pies that are beautiful examples of the cook's art.  The smaller one, just to the lower left of center, is a traditional straight-walled pie, carefully prepared and filled with all sorts of good things to eat.  In the background on the left is a huge turkey pie, it's sides covered with intricate fine detail, and topped with the stuffed skin of the turkey.

Perhaps I'd feel better about Molecular Gastronomy if I stopped thinking about it as food entirely and reframed it in my mind as only being art - edible art, but art nonetheless.  After all, they did have non-edible food art in medieval Europe.  Medieval cooks would often sculpt plates and goblets out of sugar paste, and then decorate them with limner's paints that were known at the time to be toxic.

The more things change ...

Dwarven Cookbook now available!

It took a bit longer than expected, but the book is now available online. The proof copies looked really nice and Stephanie and I are happy with the way it turned out.

A Dwarven Cookbook: Recipes from the Kingdom of Kathaldûm
Stephanie Drummonds and Daniel Myers

Paperback: 132 pages
ISBN-10: 0615549616
ISBN-13: 978-0615549613
Price: $8.95

We're going to take a bit of time to work on other projects, but we've already got plans for a follow-up cookbook of halfling recipes.

The Crimson Pact

[a brief digression from the usual medieval fare.]

"In just twenty-four hours I’d killed two people,
one of them twice."

That's a line from my short story, "Shell of a Man", one of 26 stories by various authors in volume 1 of The Crimson Pact. In it I tell the tale of a junior-grade detective in 1935 who takes on his first case, only to end up facing the undead.

The anthology is now available as an ebook for the Kindle, NOOK, and many other platforms. See the Crimson Pact website for more details.

Thanksgiving in Perspective

The Thanksgiving holiday is approaching for those of us here in the US - one that is pretty much all about the food. The menu for this year is pretty much like the ones I posted back in 2007 and 2008 (I went to visit my parents last year, and therefore didn't have much control over what was cooked).

I've been putting together the shopping list and planning what to cook when, and it stuck me that it all seems too easy. It should be complicated and stressful and a big deal, but it isn't. Then I figured out why.

When you've cooked for around 100 people, sometimes without proper kitchen facilities, and managed to serve multiple course meals with upwards of 20 different dishes, a fancy home dinner for 8 seems pretty simple. After all, I have a full day to do most of the cooking, and a decent kitchen to work with.

Happy Thanksgiving! May your turkeys be juicy and your gravy be lump-free.

(I'm trying out a medieval recipe tonight and will post about it soon)

GenCon 2010 Update

My preparations for the convention are going well. I've got my notes all ready and the menu set for the workshop. I do have one bit of news though: I am now officially a published author!

The group that puts on the Writer's Symposium panels at GenCon have put together a collection of short stories called "Stalking the Wild Hare", and in it is my story "Critical Violation".

It's a nice little story about zombie rats invading the cafeteria at a government laboratory. See? It's even food related!

There are also twenty or so stories by some of the other Writer's Symposium authors - they're a great bunch of people and I'm honored to be included in their midst. The publisher says it'll be available from Amazon.com in a couple of weeks (I'll update this post with a link at that time).

A busy time without much to show for it...

The last couple of months went by in a blur, but apparently very little of what I did was related to medieval food.

The holiday insanity of course started with Thanksgiving. This year we spent it at my parents' house, which limited my cooking a bit. Still, the food was good. I've posted before on what I cook for Thanksgiving - the short version is that I focus on all new-world foods, and not medieval at all (a fun sort of cognitive reversal for me).

I did do a little bit of medieval cooking in December though. For our regular solstice dinner I used the Sauce Madame recipe from Forme of Cury to go with a roast turkey (the last time I cooked a goose - which was good, but not good enough to merit the extra cost). I think I'll have to look into other types of stuffing for next year, just for the sake of something different.

I also made a batch of Cameline Sauce for Christmas Eve dinner with the in-laws. It went really well with the beef tenderloin and duxelles (just learned about duxelles this year - Oh my! - why didn't anyone tell me about them before? Wikipedia says they go back to La Varenne, but I'll have to look and see if there's anything similar in the medieval sources).

There are some neat things in the works for 2010. I hope to teach a couple of cooking classes, which will be a bit of a new thing for me. I've also got one transcription project and a couple of other bits for the web site that I hope to have done soon. I'll be trying out the odd recipe here and there - Kristen told me yesterday that she got some more deer kidneys. Then there's helping others nearby to cook medieval feasts, and in my copious free time I'll finish writing a novel.

I get the feeling that 2010 might be a blur too.

What's wrong with this Picture?

Ok, take a good look at the image below ...

Now let's think about how people really use refrigerators - assuming of course that we're talking about people who cook rather than those who open and heat. No, I'm not talking about how freakin' empty this fridge is, or how clean it is, or even the lack of mysterious containers of food leftover from some forgotten meal in a previous decade. What really stinks my cheese here is how the clueless engineers intended the fridge to be used.

Let me give you a hint. You're going to make beef stroganoff, or maybe grill steaks, or Thai curried chicken, or whatever, so you get the meat out of the freezer to thaw overnight in the fridge. Where do you put it?

Do you see the problem now?

Food safety guidelines have stated for the past million years that raw meats should NEVER be stored above ready-to-eat foods. Yet the bottom of the fridge is specifically set up with bins for fruit and vegetables (my fridge at home helpfully has the bins labeled, with a special little sliding lever to switch from "Fruits" to "Vegetables" - one's vented, the other isn't, I can't remember which is which though). So the frozen meat is set on the lowest open shelf where it can drip bacteria-laden grossness all over those nice grapes or apples or salad greens (my fridge at home helpfully has that little sliding lever and vent to allow the meat juice better access to the produce). I suppose you could rinse the produce with bleach before consuming, but that doesn't sound like a very safe idea either.

Here's a model from a different manufacturer:

This isn't an isolated thing. I can't remember ever having a fridge that didn't have produce drawers at the bottom. Are the people who design these things completely clueless, or do they just not think? Maybe they're all vegetarians?

As to the cause of this rant, suffice it to say that I had to sanitize the bottom of my fridge and pitch all sorts of leftovers that I'd been saving for the next nuclear apocalypse. Time to re-organize, re-purpose, and re-label.

NOT The Medieval Diet™

Got a lot I'm up to (more on that later this week) so I haven't posted much lately, but a friend just sent pointed out a website that I must comment on.

I've talked about the Medieval Diet™ before. It's a very rich and complex topic, and there's a lot we can learn from medieval Europe about healthy eating. This site however has nothing to do with medieval Europe.

Apparently the site was designed (if you can call it that) by one of those sad individuals who think that liberally sprinkling words like "ye" and "verily" through a text make it sound more medieval. There are no medieval recipes in their medieval diet and no information on what was eaten in medieval Europe. I'm surprised they didn't spell it "mid-evil".

Oh, and from what I can tell the advice given isn't all that good from a dietary viewpoint either. Sad. Just plain sad.

Modern Mystery

I've got all sorts of medieval things in the works ... but none of them are ready for the light of day. So as a diversion, I present you with a modern mystery object.

I really don't know what this thing is - my best (and obviously inaccurate) guess is that it's a cow-lip-stretcher.

It's about 6" long, appears to be cast stainless steel, and was manufactured in the early-to-mid 1900s. It has no identifying markings. It may have been farm-related (our family had a farm in the distant past, and I think that's where my dad got it).

My brother thinks it was used for skinning animals. I like the cow-lip-stretcher idea better.

My apologies for the poor quality of the images - I took them with my cell phone camera in poor light.

Anyone out there seen one of these before?

On Leaving One's Comfort Zone

Towards the end of last month, we took a family car trip to Florida. About a third of the way into the sixteen-hour return trip we stopped briefly at a gas station/convenience store, and while I was waiting for various family members to be ready to continue the trip I wound up staring at a rack of commercial baked goods with Spanish labels. While I'll freely admit to being an adventurous eater, I found the names and visible contents to be somewhat dubious. I mean, I don't like Twinkies or most store-bought cookies, and here was an array of factory made "food" that apparently is geared to patrons of Mexican gas stations.

So I bought some.

I picked out the most unusual and oddly named items I could find and thus begins the tale of the trying of three products: Pingüinos, Gansitos, and the ever-appetizingly-named ¡Sponch! Into the grocery bag they go, and into the car, and down the road for ten interminable hours, and once we were home I shoved the bag into the back of the pantry to save them for later without worry since they had an expiration date that was sometime in the later half of the 32nd century.

Thus when Avelyn, my apprentice, came over for dinner on Sunday (broiled steak seasoned with coriander and ginger, rice steamed with coconut milk and currants, and fresh asparagus), I was ready with something truly educational for dessert. We cleared the dinner dishes away, got out the grocery bag of dread, and started dividing things up.

Penguins are good, right?

The first thing we tried were the Pingüinos, and they were a bit of a disappointment. In appearance they're indistinguishable from hostess cupcakes - right down to the loops of icing on the top and the plastic tray. That's about where the similarity ends though, for Pingüinos have all the chocolaty flavor goodness of potting soil and a moisture content like that of dryer lint. Of the five people at the dining table, only the nine-year-old child liked them.

¿Eh?

After the Pingüinos we decided to jump right in and try the scariest looking thing here - ¡Sponch! It was obvious right off the bat that this wasn't like any snack cake I'd encountered before. It consists of a square shortbread cookie (imprinted on the bottom with the word ¡Sponch!) topped with four mounds of alleged marshmallow, with a bit of jelly at the center and the whole thing sprinkled with coconut. Apparently ¡Sponch! comes in a variety of flavors. I had purchased a package of "strawberry" (hereafter referred to as PINK) and "grape" (hereafter referred to as PURPLE).

By far, ¡Sponch! received the most reaction from our intrepid team (actually, I think we were all very trepid). Avelyn said the PURPLE flavored ¡Sponch! tasted like chewable vitamins. The eleven-year-old said it tasted like children's chewable Tylenol. The nine-year-old took the tiniest of nibbles from the PINK flavored one and then (wisely) refused to eat it. For some strange reason nobody wanted the PURPLE flavored one that he didn't touch. The general comment upon tasting was something like "Um ... urgh ... ghah!".

How can you go wrong with something called "Little Goose"

Gansitos were by far the best of the lot. They were small (somewhat stale) yellow cakes topped with a strip of jelly, topped in turn with a strip of white fluffy stuff, then coated in chocolate and sprinkled with "chocolate" sprinkles (the shape of which had disturbing connotations when connected with the phrase "Little Goose"). The eleven-year-old said he liked them (but didn't want the extras), the nine-year-old tasted it and decided he was done. I thought the jelly had an odd, acidic, almost alcoholic taste to it. LU Biscuits makes a kind of cookie (PIMS) that are vaguely similar in flavor (but a whole lot nicer).

On the whole, it was a fun thing to do for dessert, and while some things tasted strange (¡Sponch!) none of us got sick or anything.

What does this have to do with Medieval Cooking? Not a heck of a lot. But part of researching culinary history means trying foods that look strange and/or have weird ingredients. You have to be willing to go beyond what is normal for your culture, and you find yourself asking things like "Do people really like this sort of thing? If so, why?" and "What flavor were they trying to get here?"

Hmm ... maybe I need to make another trip to the international section of Jungle Jim's International Market soon. They've got some really weird stuff there!

Kokbok för Husmödrar

I am filled with geeky excitement! I just received a neat book in the mail. It was found by an acquaintance's mother (thanks to Laureen and her mom!) at a rummage sale - and of all things, it's a late 19th century Swedish cookbook. Here's what the first page says:

Gustafva Björklunds

Kokbok för Husmödrar

innehållande beskrifningar öfver

mer än 2000 anrättningar.

(Jemte 100 anvisningar för tillredning af Svamprätter.)

Med 106 gravyrer.

Obviously this isn't medieval (misses the mark by a scant 400 years or so), but still it's filled with awesome - in fact, 512 pages of Swedish awesome. The last recipe (Tätmjölk) is numbered 2081!  I plan on transcribing the book to text (or more likely HTML given the number of letters like å and ö) and eventually translating it to English.

Oh, as best I can tell the text on the title page translates to something like:
Gustafva Björklund's Cookbook for Housemothers, containing observations and more than 2000 recipes. (Plus 100 instructions for making Mushroom dishes.) With 106 engravings.

Welcome to the New World

[I'm a bit busy this week - big surprise - so my regular posting schedule is on hold. The painting of the week and all will be back next week.]

Once again, Thanksgiving draws near - at least for those of us in the United States. It is the one dinner where I intentionally focus on foods that are native to the Americas. My planned menu isn't very different from last year, but I thought I might make a few comments on some of the dishes (historical and otherwise).

Turkey - The turkey has an odd quirk in its history. While it was native to the Americas, it was domesticated in England. Wild turkeys were brought back to England in the early 16th century, where they were carefully bread for meat production and such. There they quickly supplanted the bustard as the common large bird at the dining table. The domestic turkey was then imported back to the Americas (re-imported? back-ported?).

Gravy - Technically, gravy is one of the four "mother sauces" of French cuisine (i.e. velouté), and while there is at least one medieval sauce recipe that is thickened with flour, the technique didn't really become common until the 19th century.

Stuffing - I suppose this could be considered "old world" and medieval, seeing as there are medieval recipes for a farsure (Middle English for "stuffing") made of bread to stuff into meat, but serving stuffing is a strong tradition in my family, and I'm not going to risk a holiday revolt. I do add dried cranberries to the mix, along with sage, and I usually use a mix of white bread and pumpernickel.

Mashed Potatoes - The potato is thought to have originated in South America. It was introduced to Europe in the early 16th century, and quickly became well established there.

Green Beans - There is some confusion over the history of these beans, mostly due to the use of the word "haricots". From what I understand, that name was used in reference to other varieties of beans before Columbus' voyages, and all members of the genus Phaseolus are new-world plants. This year I'm going to try serving freshly steamed green beans with Mornay sauce and home made pumpernickel croutons.

Cranberry Sauce - Cranberries are related to blueberries and the like, but are very different from their European cousins. I like to make cranberry chutney each year (which includes a little capsicum pepper - also a new world food). It's one of my favorite recipes, and is well liked by the family. I also make a homemade jellied cranberry sauce for my step-father. One of these years I'm going to use a can to mold the jellied stuff so it has the "cutting lines".

Corn Relish - This is something new I'm trying this year. It felt strange to cook a dinner featuring new-world foods that didn't include corn and tomatoes. These are two of the most successful plants in the culinary world. So I'm going to make up a small dish using baby corn and sun-dried tomatoes. If it turns out well then I'll post the recipe.

Pumpkin Pie - Pumpkins, like the other species of squash, originated in North America, though the word "pumpkin" itself appears to have come from France (by way of England). Pumpkins were apparently accepted into European cuisine fairly quickly.

Apple Pie - Ok, I admit that this one is not at all "new world". There are plenty of recipes for apple pies dating back to before the 14th century. Add to that the fact that apples weren't native to North America, and suddenly the phrase "As American as apple pie" is more than a bit ironic. This is another one of those cases where tradition outweighs geekiness though. If I didn't serve apple pie at Thanksgiving, I'd be cast out from the family.

This is what American food is really all about. It's not all cheeseburgers and french fries. It's a mix of traditional European dishes made with new world foods. Happy Thanksgiving!

Food Related Painting of the Week

Still-life with Turkey-Pie
Pieter Claesz, 1627

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

Ok, so I'm way out of the medieval period with this one, but there's still a lot of neat stuff to look at.

The big draw is, of course, the turkey. Turkeys originated in the Americas and were therefore unknown in Europe before the late 1490s. Obviously the cooks of Europe had figured out what to do with them by 1627. Here, the neck and head, and the wings of the turkey are decorating the top of a large pie that presumably was made from the meat. This was a fairly common practice in the late middle-ages. Pies were decorated to show what was in them. Sometimes the pie was shaped like the animal, sometimes (as here) parts of the animal were used. Funky, huh? One other interesting bit about the turkey pie, notice the decorations on the sides? I'm still trying to figure out how they did that, but I'm pretty sure they used a mold of some sort (Elise probably has more info on that).

See the smaller pie to the left of the turkey pie? Notice the shape? It's a beautifully cylindrical pie like the one I pointed out in an earlier post. This time we get to see what's inside - it looks like a slice of lemon, a date or large raisin, currants, and probably finely chopped meat.

Aside from the pies though, I just love the packet of spice on the lower right. It's a cone of recycled paper with a twist at the bottom. Fresh from the spice merchant and still in its medieval wrapper. Salt. Pepper? Cinnamon maybe? I should start taking ground spices to feasts that way.

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred

This list was posted to the Very Good Taste blog recently, and seems to be taking on a life of its own. Since it relates to trying new foods I figured I'd post my results - not too bad really (62, unless I miscounted).  There is only 1 item on the list that I won't consider.

Here’s what I want you to do:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.

2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.

3) Cross out (I put them in red) any items that you would never consider eating.

4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred

1. Venison

2. Nettle tea

3. Huevos rancheros

4. Steak tartare

5. Crocodile

6. Black pudding

7. Cheese fondue

8. Carp

9. Borscht

10. Baba ghanoush

11. Calamari

12. Pho

13. PB&J sandwich

14. Aloo gobi

15. Hot dog from a street cart

16. Epoisses

17. Black truffle

18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes

19. Steamed pork buns

20. Pistachio ice cream

21. Heirloom tomatoes

22. Fresh wild berries

23. Foie gras

24. Rice and beans

25. Brawn, or head cheese

26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper

27. Dulce de leche

28. Oysters

29. Baklava

30. Bagna cauda

31. Wasabi peas

32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl

33. Salted lassi

34. Sauerkraut

35. Root beer float

36. Cognac with a fat cigar

37. Clotted cream tea

38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O

39. Gumbo

40. Oxtail

41. Curried goat

42. Whole insects

43. Phaal

44. Goat’s milk

45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more

46. Fugu

47. Chicken tikka masala

48. Eel

49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut

50. Sea urchin

51. Prickly pear

52. Umeboshi

53. Abalone

54. Paneer

55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal

56. Spaetzle

57. Dirty gin martini

58. Beer above 8% ABV

59. Poutine

60. Carob chips

61. S’mores

62. Sweetbreads

63. Kaolin

64. Currywurst

65. Durian

66. Frogs’ legs

67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake

68. Haggis

69. Fried plantain

70. Chitterlings, or andouillette

71. Gazpacho

72. Caviar and blini

73. Louche absinthe

74. Gjetost, or brunost

75. Roadkill

76. Baijiu

77. Hostess Fruit Pie

78. Snail

79. Lapsang souchong

80. Bellini

81. Tom yum

82. Eggs Benedict

83. Pocky

84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.

85. Kobe beef

86. Hare

87. Goulash

88. Flowers

89. Horse

90. Criollo chocolate

91. Spam

92. Soft shell crab

93. Rose harissa

94. Catfish

95. Mole poblano

96. Bagel and lox

97. Lobster Thermidor

98. Polenta

99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee

100. Snake

Goblins and Fairies

This isn't related at all to medieval cooking, but what the heck. It may not be much of a surprise, but I'm a long-time Doctor Who fan. I was watching last Saturday's episode and was surprised to catch the reference to Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market".

One of the characters in the program recited the lines ...

We must not look at goblin men
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?

... and then (as I said to myself, "That sounds like Goblin Market") the Doctor identified the author as Rossetti.

I've always thought that fairy and goblin folklore was really cool, and there are a few stories and poems I've come across that (at least in part) express what I think is at the very heart of goblinness (goblinity?). The Goblin Market is one of them. Another is William Allingham's poem "The Fairies", which starts:

Up the airy mountain
Down the rushy glen,
We daren't go a-hunting,
For fear of little men;

Of course this now has me wondering about medieval fairy folklore. Yet one more thing added to my "Must look into this sometime" folder.

Incidentally, the full text of Goblin Market is available free online at the Project Gutenberg website.

Discworld Cake

Ok, this isn't at all medieval - even back then they knew the world was round - but this has to be one of the most incredible cakes I've ever seen.

Of course they did use marzipan and sugar paste to make edible sculptures in the middle ages. Such sculptures were often referred to as "sotlties" or "entrements". Unfortunately I've seen very few attempts by medieval re-creationists that approach this level of intricacy or artistic skill (and the tree of butterflies I made some time back out of sugar paste pales in comparison).

I am so in awe of this artist.