On Baking Rice

One of the neat tricks I've learned from talking with caterers and the like is that when you're cooking rice for a lot of people (e.g. 120) you can bake rice instead of boiling it. The rice goes into a steamer pan with the same amount of water that you'd use to boil it, and then it's covered tightly and put into an oven for an hour. This method has the benefit of being less time-sensitive than boiling, and you don't have to worry about it burning on the bottom as the stuff in 30 quart stockpots often do.

A couple of days back I decided to try cooking frumenty this way. Frumenty is essentially a thick cracked-wheat porridge. I've tried making it at a feast once or twice and it always gave me trouble. Sometimes it just took too long to cook, other times it burned. The wheat is boiled in the same way as rice, so it seemed like a perfect candidate for baking.

I put a cup of cracked-wheat into a deep glass baking pan along with two cups of water, covered it with aluminum foil, and popped it into a 350°F oven. An hour later I took it out to check on it - huh ... too soupy and the grains were still a bit too crunchy. Back into the oven it went. I checked it another hour later and it was perfect. So frumenty can be cooked this way, and it is a lot easier, but it takes longer. Not a bad trade-off. I'll have to remember to update my recipe for frumenty to reflect this.

Days later the thought occurs to me: did they ever bake grain in the middle-ages instead of boiling it? This can be a hard sort of question to answer for certain, but I can look for evidence in the medieval cookbooks. There are lots of medieval recipes for rice, and at least a couple from each country. I start reading through them and after a while things begin to blur - they all sound about the same. Wash the rice, put in a pot with some liquid (e.g. water, broth, milk), and boil. Some add other things like meat or rice-flour or almond milk. Some add saffron or other spices. All of them say to boil it.

I didn't find a single recipe for rice or wheat that said to put it in a pot with liquid, cover it, and bake it. Ugh.

So then I'm forced to ask myself why? This is a cooking method that is perfectly suited to medieval European cuisine. The dish will turn out perfectly for a huge range of time and temperature. Why wouldn't they cook it this way? I don't have an answer for this, but I will veer off into speculation for a moment here.

The setup of the medieval kitchen, and especially the oven, was functionally different in a couple of significant ways. The ovens were usually heated up early in the morning by filling them with wood and sealing them up. When the oven was hot enough (around 500°F) the ashes were shovelled out, the floor of the oven was wiped out, and the bread baking began.

Interestingly enough, the ovens were often in a separate room from the kitchen. Sometimes they were in a completely different building. In small towns you could take your bread dough to the baker to bake it in their oven. While boiling rice is easy enough over a fire, and baking it is easy in a modern kitchen, it would be much more awkward to do if the oven were elsewhere. Not impossible, mind you, just more awkward.

I suspect that it just never occurred to any medieval cook that they could bake rice. Heck, it didn't occur to me, and I've got an oven right in my kitchen that heats to a consistent temperature at the push of a button. We modern cooks also use our ovens for a larger variety of foods - we "roast" meats there instead of over an open fire, and we bake vegetables like potatoes or turnips. In the middle ages, ovens were generally used for bread and pies - things made of or enclosed in dough.

So it looks to me like baking rice is one of those thinks like the sandwich. They could have done it - they had all the stuff to do it - but they just never had the idea, and so they didn't.

Of course I could be wrong, and I'd be overjoyed if someone found a recipe for baking grain instead of boiling it.

Thoughts on Pepper

The other night I was cooking dinner, and as I was seasoning whatever it was, a thought occurred to me. Why pepper? On just about every dinner table here in the US, on almost every restaurant table as well, are two spice containers: salt and pepper.

The salt I can understand. There's a biological need for salt, and since it was hard to come by in human pre-history, an innate desire for salt has developed. But what about the pepper? Pepper has no function in human biology, so there's no built-in drive to eat it. The only reason we put it on our food is for taste, and that's no different from any number of other spices. So why has pepper become more common than ginger or cinnamon or mint?

My first thought is that it might be a carry-over from earlier habits. Salt is one of the most commonly used spices in medieval cookbooks. Perhaps pepper was too, and since cooks sometimes do not put enough spice into a dish, maybe it became the practice to have the two most common spices set out on the table to allow the diner to suppliment a dish's flavor. As a quick check for this, I looked to see how often pepper shows up in medieval recipes.

I have some statistics from medieval cookbooks already compiled ... Unh. Not very conclusive. Below is a list of the four most common spices from various cookbooks.

Enseignements (France, 1300): Pepper - 50%, Ginger - 35%, Cinnamon - 28%, Mustard - 26%

Forme of Cury (England, 1390): Salt - 47%, Saffron - 39%, Ginger - 23%, Pepper - 14%,

Du fait de cuisine (France, 1420): Salt - 81%, Ginger - 70%, Grains of Paradise - 62%, Pepper - 41%

Liber cure cocorum (England, 1430): Saffron - 34%, Salt - 31%, Pepper - 27%, Ginger - 20%

Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books (England, 1450): Salt - 56%, Ginger - 42%, Saffron - 41%, Pepper - 31%

A Proper newe Booke of Cokerye (England, 1550): Salt - 36%, Cinnamon - 30%, Ginger - 22%, Mace - 18%

The Good Housewife's Jewell (England, 1596): Ginger - 40%, Pepper - 40%, Salt - 40%, Cinnamon - 35%

At a glance, we can probably leave out the grains of paradise and the mace - they both only make the top four of a single book. Salt makes the top four of 6 books, and is the number 1 spot for 3 of them. Pepper also shows up in 6, but is the top spot for only 1. Ginger is in the top four of all 7 books, and is in the top spot for 1. Also, ginger ranks higer than pepper for 5 of the books. Why don't we have a ginger shaker on the table then?

It looks like I need to do more digging ...

Humbles of Venison

Several months back I was looking for venison recipes and came across a recipe in "The Good Housewife's Jewell" (England, 16th c.) titled "To bake the humbles of a Deere." I didn't have any deer kidneys on hand, so I tried it out with ground venison instead. It was ok, but nothing to make a fuss over, and something seemed a bit strange with it. So I took a closer look at the source and did a bit of digging.

The first thing that I found was that the two different editions I had of the source were not in total agreement. One edition called for dates where the other (which I'd used) called for oats (spelled "oates"). A bit of a discrepancy there. Which one was right? I checked with an authority on the source (Hi, Johnnae!) and learned that in the microfilm version the word is clearly dates.

But this left me without much of a binder for what I'd initially assumed was something like meatloaf (yes, a faulty assumption - even I do this from time to time). A quick look at the adjacent recipes in the text and it was fairly clear that the recipe was most likely a pie. No problem. I'll make it as a pie then and see how it turns out, only this time I figured I'd get some deer kidneys and do it right.

Hence the delay. Apparently deer kidneys aren't something that can be purchased in one-pound packages at the local supermarket. Neither are they available at the butcher shop, or even (gasp!) at that mecca of food-enthusiasts, Jungle Jim's. I asked some hunters I knew and learned that they usually discard the kidneys along with the rest of a deer's innards. So I asked those same hunters if maybe, please, pretty-pretty-please, if they get the chance would they save the kidneys from their next deer for me? I got more than a few weird looks and some hesitant "Ok"s, and then I waited.

At the point when I'd all but forgotten what I wanted them fore, my apprentice presented me with two deer kidneys that had formerly belonged to a deer which had been shot by her uncle (Kristen's uncle, not the deer's). They were smaller than I'd expected, and were slightly disturbing to hold - they felt kind of like a small bag filled with jello.

deer kidneys

At last we had real deer kidneys, so of course we had to cook them. I dug up the (corrected) recipe again and looked it over.

Source [The Good Housewife's Jewell, T. Dawson]: To bake the humbles of a Deere. Mince them verie small, and season them with pepper, Sinamom and ginger, and suger if you will, and cloues & mace, and dates, and currants, and if you will, mince Almonds, and put unto them, and when it is baked, you may put in fine fat, and put in suger, sinamom and ginger, and let it boile, and when it is minced, put them together.

The first question that sprang to mind was whether the kidneys should be cooked before using them - I vaguely remember a hunter joking about needing to "boil the piss out of them". We did a quick check of the other medieval recipes for deer kidneys and found that most of them did indeed specify boiling as the first step of the recipe. So I popped them into a small pot of water and let them boil. It was a bit creepy, really, because I could see a thin trail of blood streaming out of the kidneys as they boiled. Once this stream stopped I figured they were cooked well enough.

boiled deer kidneys

They'd shrunk a bit - we were obviously going to have just enough for a small pie. They also felt like they'd bounce pretty high if dropped. More like a superball than cooked meat. The recipe starts with mincing them "verie small", so I got out the chef's knife and did just that. Tedious, but not difficult. The rest of the recipe was quick and easy, we mixed everything all up, put the filling into a pastry-lined ramekin, covered it, and popped it into the oven for a half hour or so. When the crust looked done, I melted some butter, added the spices, and poured as much into the pie as I could (it overflowed a bit).

very small pie

Of course the proof of the pudding (and apparently the pie) is in the eating. The apprentice and I looked at each other for a moment. People have been eating kidneys for a long time, probably as long as there have been people, so it has to be ok to eat. It's meat, it's well cooked, and it has all sorts of good-tasting stuff in it. With a bit of a mental shrug, we passed around the forks and cut the pie.

very small pie, opened

Not bad at all, really. I don't know what I expected - maybe more of a liver sort of taste. It's basically a mincemeat pie. The flavors of the spices, fruit, and butter pretty much drowned out everything else. The meat was a bit chewy in spite of being minced, but it wasn't bad enough to put me off kidneys. In the future I'll probably be making this with venison steaks or ground meat, as it's a lot easier to get and it won't have any substantial effect on the flavor.

An Interview

Ohio State University's Center for Medieval and Rennaissance Studies interviewed me for their monthly newsletter, Nouvelles/Nouvelles - the current issue (with the interview) is on their website as a PDF document. This is way cool! Since they're only an hour and a half drive for me, I'm hoping we can set up some kind of cooking demonstration/talk thing for this spring or later this year.

Gas vs. Electric

While considering the potential renovation of our home kitchen the issue of choosing a gas or electric cooktop came up, and a strange thought occurred to me (big surprise, I know - me having a strange thought - you'd think I was used to it by now).

The most common preference among cooking enthusiasts is gas, which allows you to quickly adjust the amount of heat being applied. Not so for electric, where the heating element takes long enough to cool down that it adds a significant challenge to making temperature-sensitive recipes (like many modern French sauces). In spite of being plumbed for gas, we have an electric cooktop.

In fact, I've been cooking on electric stoves for the past 24 years. You get used to it, really. You learn to move the pan around a lot, have it hang halfway off the element as it cools down, or lifting it up an inch or so for a minute. This makes my cooking style a bit funky when I'm working on the nice new gas stove at my mom's.

So my initial reaction was to go with a gas stove. After all, you can't get more medieval than cooking over fire, right?

Then I thought back to last summer, when I did a bit of cooking over a real fire using an earthenware pot. I had Helewyse de Birkestad (Louise Smithson) with me to show me the basics, and the first thing I learned is that I wasn't going to be cooking over flame. Instead we had the pot on a grill over coals. This gives a much more constant and even heat. So here's the kicker: how did we control the amount of heat applied to the pot? By moving it around. As the coals cooled down the pot got moved closer in. If it boiled a bit too much it got moved away - or was raised up a bit.

So maybe the past 24 years of electric cooktops was good training.

My Shopping List

There are a number of books on my shopping list right now, so I thought I'd mention a few of them (in no particular order).

Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition
C. M. Woolgar
This book sounds like it combines information from a diverse range of fields. Woolgar's previous works are wonderfully detailed and supported, so this one sounds really promising.

The Book of Sent Soví: Medieval recipes from Catalonia
Joan Santanach (Editor), Robin Vogelzang (Translator)
I'm mostly into English and French cooking history, so why this? Catalan borders on France, of course, and there's almost nothing out there on medieval Catalonian cooking. How much does it resemble that of its neighbors? What ingredients are similar? What are the differences. I just gotta know!

Cooking and Dining in Medieval England
Peter Brears
Brears is one of those authors that, when they put out a new book, I pay attention. The combination of the subject with Brears' usual level of scholarship sounds very promising.

Researching Medieval Recipes

Physicists sometimes refer to "The Arrow of Time" - the apparent directionality of how time flows. Apparently there are some sub-fields of physics where this is a big thing. To those of us outside of that academic world, this seems like a "Duh!" kind of thing, and one wouldn't think it is worth considering in the area of historic research.

It is.

When people look at medieval cookbooks, there seems to be a strong desire to ignore the inherent directionality. I think it's part of a built in human need to generalize - to make sense of something that does not fit in with the current world-view.

Ok, that's a bit too philosophical. Let's try some examples.

Let's say you've got this recipe that's been in your family for many generations. One day while serving it to some family or friends the thought hits you that all the ingredients in it were available in medieval Europe. "This might be medieval," you think, and decide to look into it. You then spend months digging through the cookbooks, trying to find recipes with the same ingredients, where similar methods were used, and where the end result sounds similar to the dish you know and love. If you're really really lucky you find an exact match. More likely though is that you find a few "kind-a, sort-a" recipes from widely varying times and places, and then you give up in frustration and tell people that researching medieval recipes is hard.

It's not, really. It only seemed hard because you ignored the directionality of time. You latched on to a piece of modern information and tried to push it some 500 years into the past. You assumed that because all of the ingredients were available in the middle ages, that there must be a cook somewhere back then that made this recipe. [This kind of reasoning is proven invalid by recipes like mayonnaise - all of its ingredients were present back to ancient times, but it wasn't invented until 1756.]

The easier way to research medieval recipes is to keep the information flowing from the past to the present. Pick up (or download) a medieval cookbook and treat it like you would any other cookbook. Read through it, skipping here and there, looking for something interesting, something that sounds tasty or different or that you have all the ingredients called for. If you can't read Middle French or German then use someone else's translation. If you can't read Middle English, borrow (or download) a dictionary and practice - it's mostly funny spelling and a handful of archaic words.

So you've picked out a recipe. Now gather the ingredients and follow the instructions. It may take a couple of tries (or three, or four) before you get the quantities balanced so the flavor and consistency are so you like it - most medieval recipes inconveniently leave out any measurements). You may even find some recipes that sound good but turn out just plain nasty (I've done this, but I've also found such recipes in modern cookbooks). Once you've found a good recipe though, then you've got a truly authentic medieval dish, and you've also got the original source it came from - documenting it becomes a trivial matter.

Of course every now and then, while browsing through a medieval cookbook, you're reading a recipe and the realization hits you, "That's grandma's recipe!" - and you find out that in medieval times they put raisins in it.

It's really not that hard ... Part 2

So ... I'm going through the calendar, trying to figure out which medieval re-creation events I'll be going to for the next few months, and I take a look at the feast menus, and I find that some of them don't even give a hand-waive towards history. Yes, there are some nice, medieval (or at least reasonably so) feasts here and there across the Midwestern US, but they appear to be decreasing in proportion to the others.

I'll pause here to note that I've been in the SCA (a US-based medieval "re-creation" group) for many years, and I've been cooking for much of that time. I'm the first to admit that the feasts I cooked way back when were crap as far as historical accuracy goes, but then there weren't the resources available back then that there are now.

I know I'm a food snob, that I'm fanatical and bordering on dangerously obsessed, but I don't think I'm asking too much here. All I want is a reasonable attempt at medieval food. I don't expect a six course meal, with four or five dishes per course, all exotic and unusual and documented to have been served to a duke in Calais in the year 1432 (I wouldn't complain, mind you, but I really don't expect it). However it really isn't that hard to come up with a filling meal consisting of a few dishes that are reasonable approximations of what might have been served to someone - anyone - between the years 600 and 1700.

Really, it's not that hard. Let's say that - for whatever reason - you've got to cook a medieval dinner. Can a reasonable attempt be made assuming no prior knowledge of medieval European cuisine, no ability to read a language other than modern English, no local library with texts on the subject, and no fancy cooking skills? Yes. All it takes is Internet access (or a friend with Internet access).

Web Search

A Google search on "medieval recipe" returns 224,000 hits - I'm only going to look at the first two.

The first link, titled Medieval Feasts, has 11 recipes. Among them I find:

• chicken with orange and lemon
  
• spinach tart
  
• frumenty, a cracked wheat side dish for meats
  
• cherry pottage
  

That's a meat dish, a vegetable, a starch, and a dessert. Add bread and butter and it sounds like a really nice meal. All of these have complete recipes with detailed instructions and even a reference to the original source - and it took me a whopping two minutes to put together.

The second link is to a site I know pretty well - it's my own Medieval Recipes page. It lists over 90 recipes, each with detailed instructions and a reference to the original source.

What's more, there's a big button at the bottom of the page that says "Menus". This leads to another page with links to both menus from medieval sources, and menus from the feasts of re-enactment groups.

Obviously digging through this site could chew up more than a couple of minutes, but it also offers a lot of choices (now that I think about it though, I'll be adding a "Quick and Easy Medieval Feasts" page soon).

Let me say that again: Two Minutes

Two minutes got me a reasonable attempt at a medieval dinner, and there were lots of other options with just a few more clicks. I didn't have to go to a library. I didn't have to open a book. I didn't have to try to read a different language. I didn't have to work out a recipe on my own.

Don't try to tell me that it takes too much work to do it right.

Making a Medieval Field Kitchen - Part 2

Foods for Medieval Field Kitchen

In my first post I talked about the furniture and equipment I'd need. Here I'll be looking at the foods. Come to think of it, this is probably my computer science background showing through - first I speced out the hardware, now I'm doing the software.

Italian Kitchen from "Il Cuoco Segreto Di Papa Pio V",

Bartolomeo Scappi, Venice, 1570

As a source of raw data, I used lists of foods I'd pulled out of medieval English and French cookbooks for the section of my website on Statistics from Medieval Cookbooks. Since I know which foods appear most often in the cookbooks I work from, I can ensure that I have the majority of ingredients I might possibly need.

These foods seem (to me) to divide themselves into four categories: Spices, Staples, Fruits and Vegetables, and Fresh Foods.

The Spices

This category is pretty simple to deal with. They don't take up much space, so I should be able to keep them all in a "spice chest" the size of a shoebox. As long as I keep them dry, I don't have to worry about them. The spices are: cinnamon, cloves, cubebs, cumin, ginger, galingale, grains of paradise, hyssop, mace, marjoram, mint, mustard, nutmeg, parsely, pepper, saffron, sage, salt, sandalwood, and savory.

The Staples

These are the foods that I'll need in larger quantities than the spices, but like the spices they'll be fine as long as I keep them dry (or for the liquids, in suitable containers). The staples are: almonds, amidon (wheat starch), cooking oil, flour, lard, nuts, oatmeal, peas (dried), pine nuts, rice, rosewater, sugar, vinegar, wine, and yeast.

Hmm... suitable containers - there's a whole new problem. I really can't have an authentic medieval field kitchen if I have a plastic bottle of olive oil and commercial spice tins sitting out on the table, can I? Obviously I'll need to look into medieval food containers - but that can wait until later on.

Fruits and Vegetables

This is a bit of a mixed bag. Most of these will keep reasonably well for several days (assuming good weather). A few (e.g. apples, onions) have a high enough moisture content that I'll need to keep an eye on them to make sure they don't go all green and fuzzy on me. They are: apples, currants (zante raisins), dates, figs, garlic, onions, oranges, prunes, and raisins.

Fresh Foods

These are the troublemakers. The fruits and vegetables on this list won't keep as well as those on the list above, and some of these foods will quickly become unsafe if kept at room temperature. They are: cabbage, cream, grapes, leeks, mushrooms, pears, radishes, spinach, strawberries, turnips, butter, eggs, cheese, meat, and milk.

Most of these will need to be purchased on the day they're to be used. There are some medieval preservation techniques that could help - especially with the meat - but again, that would be (and will be) a whole separate topic.

Making a Medieval Field Kitchen

A while back I came across the picture below, and of course it got me thinking. "Field kitchen? I could really use a proper medieval field kitchen."

Field Kitchen from "Il Cuoco Segreto Di Papa Pio V",

Bartolomeo Scappi, Venice, 1570

You see, every now and then (at least once a year - and it should be much more often) I go to a medieval camping thing. In the past I've avoided doing any serious cooking (kind of embarrassing to admit), which I usually attribute to lack of equipment and not wanting to cook over a fire on hot days. But seeing this picture has made me realize that the equipment needed for a proper medieval camp kitchen might not be all that hard to put together at a reasonable cost. I'd still have to be cooking over a fire on hot days, but I suppose I should just accept that as part of the whole medieval experience, eh?

So ... just what do I need for a properly working - and safe - kitchen?  In terms of furniture, I don't need an awful lot as long as I'm not trying to be too fancy.

• two saw-horse tables
  
• a roasting rack
  
• a sun / rain awning
  
• some shelves to keep stored items off the ground
  
• boxes and baskets for food storage

That's pretty encouraging, especially since I already have the roasting rack - it doesn't even look too different from the one in the picture.  The list for kitchen equipment is quite a but longer though.

• two or three earthenware pots
  
• tripods / trivets
  
• mortar and pestle
  
• wooden spoons
  
• a meat hook
  
• a cauldron or large kettle
  
• an S hook
  
• a griddle
  
• a wafer / waffle iron
  
• pitchers
  
• wooden bowls
  
• serving platter
  
• knives
  
• hand towels
  
• dish towels
  
• tablecloths

I think I have about half of these, and some of the remaining could get pretty expensive (have you priced large wooden bowls lately?  The real ones, not the cheap salad things).  Then there's a list of things I need for the sake of food safety and cleanliness.

• three wash tubs
  
• dish soap
  
• dish sanitizer
  
• water dispenser for washing hands
  
• bucket for waste water
  

That's a lot of stuff, but really it's not too bad.  Notice something though?  I didn't list any food, and I didn't list anything for keeping foods fresh.  That's a whole topic on its own, and I'll cover it in the next post.

Mystery Objects

As a food-geek, I often find myself looking at the wrong part of a painting. Presented with a medieval scene depicting Joseph and Mary on their way to Bethlehem, I'm ignoring the figures in the foreground and instead stare at some small plant in the background mumbling something like, "Is that a carrot?" Occasionally I'm even quite annoyed at the subjects in the foreground for being in the way.

To the rescue come the late-medieval Flemish artists, who decided that the setting was much more fun to paint and therefore relegated the action of the painting to the background. The resulting still-life paintings often contain all sorts of interesting food-related items, and the main characters don't get in the way. A fine example is the painting by Pieter Aertsen commonly called "The Butcher Stall" - though apparently it's meant to be "The Flight into Egypt."

Butcher's Stall (1551)
Pieter Aertsen

There are all sorts of neat things in here, and most are easily identified: sausages, fish, animal parts, bowl of broth with a layer of hard fat on the top, even pretzels. Oh, and if you look carefully, in the background, just to the left of the pig head some people are fleeing to Egypt or something.

But wait ... what in the world are those things next to the pig feet, just in front of the cow head?

Weird Things

It's a butcher's stall, so they're most likely meat-related. Cheese? If so, then I don't think I want to try any of the brown ones. Maybe the brown ones are congealed blood. Are the cream-colored ones suet then? Dunno. Then there's this thing ...

Another Weird Thing

Again, I'm really not sure what this is. Butter, maybe?

I guess my point here is that even when a painting of medieval foodstuffs was obviously meant to be a realistic depiction, it's not always clear just what everything is. Such paintings have sparked long debates, and many items in them will probably remain mysterious - even though their identity was most likely obvious to the painter.

Of course, if anyone out ther has any idea what these things are, I'd love to hear it!

The Learning Process

Let's face it, being proven wrong is embarrassing.

I try to view it all as a valuable learning experience - something that builds character and provides new insights and all that - but the truth is that it's still a bite in the butt.  The thing is, in order to make any kind of impact, in order to do any kind of worthwhile research, it is absolutely necessary to make some assumptions.  That means putting your butt on the line, and that means it's just waiting to get bitten.  Ok, enough of that metaphor.  How about some examples?

At some point on a cooking mailing list I noted the immense variability of Brasica oleracea (the species that includes broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage), and stated that since cauliflower was a corruption of cole flower, medieval cauliflower probably wasn't anything like the modern stuff.  Of course about 5 milliseconds later someone posted a link to a medieval painting of cauliflower that showed it to be very modern looking, and also showed me to be completely wrong.

Detail from "Market Woman with Vegetable Stall"

Pieter Aertsen, 1567.

Need another example?  A few years back in the medieval cooking re-creation community (read: geeks) it was pretty well established that there was no evidence to support the eating of bread spread with butter (other than a strange line in one medieval English text about how strange it was that those weird Huguenots ate butter on their bread), and since bread and butter never appeared on any of the available medieval menus then it probably wasn't eaten.  This statement was made on one of the cooking mailing lists (maybe by me, maybe not - I don't remember).  The result?  Yup.  About 3 milliseconds later someone responded with the results of a quick search of medieval documents showing many many such references.  People in the middle ages did eat bread and butter, they just didn't put it on the menu and apparently didn't need a recipe to make it.

Recently, a person I greatly admire posted to the same freakin' cooking mailing list that she didn't think the (modern-style) fruit preserves commonly represented as being medieval were anything like what was served in the middle ages.  This one really hurt.  I regularly make quince marmalade - incredibly yummy stuff, and very popular - and I've been promoting it as being medieval (which I thought it was).  There was much discussion and the general consensus was (is?) that the modern-looking fruit preserves probably came about in the 17 century.  The stuff before that was either whole fruits in sugar syrup, or something more like Turkish delight.

Oh bother.

I'm finally coming to terms with this.  I'll have to make a couple of changes to the recipe I have online, and make it clear whenever I serve the quince marmalade that it's late medieval at best.

The bigger problem though was that I'd never made the Turkish-delight-like stuff.  However, over the holidays I managed to correct this serious omission.  The result was a plate of diamond shaped slices of very firm quince jelly.  It still had that wonderful quince flavor, and now had the added bonus of being finger food!  It also wasn't any harder to make than quince marmalade (though it doesn't last nearly as long).

Yummy Medieval Quince Stuff

The lesson?  Well, one possible lesson is "Stay away from the cooking mailing lists!"  More importantly though, I'm reminded that researching medieval cooking is a process of successive approximation.  We make the best guess we can, and when new (or old) information comes along we improve upon that guess, even if it means letting go of some dearly held belief.

Why Plum Pudding Isn't Medieval

For the past few years I've been making a traditional plum pudding at Christmastime. The recipe I use is a sort of average of the one from the Better Homes cookbook, and several that I found online. This year, as I was mixing it up and putting it into the pudding mold, I was musing over how medieval the recipe seemed.

Plum Pudding

(Not Medieval)

First, it's a holiday recipe that contains lots of dried fruits and spices. This is typical of a lot of medieval dishes, where imported fruits and spices served both to excite the palate and to blatantly advertise how wealthy the host was. Also, the general form of the dish - a boiled pudding - is in itself very typical of the middle ages. A prime example is Wastels Yfarced, a recipe where a bread crust is hollowed out, the crumb is mixed with eggs, currants, and spices, is put back into the crust, and then the whole thing is boiled. Add to this dishes like haggis, and some "sausages" where often little or no meat is used, and the filling is stuffed into an animal stomach or intestines and boiled.

So plum pudding is probably medieval too, right? Sadly, no. Oddly, I've found very few medieval recipes for boiled puddings that are desserts - almost all of them are savory dishes. The really big clue though is the inclusion of baking powder or baking soda. This makes the pudding turn out something more like modern cake, and neither baking powder or baking soda were used in cooking until after the sixteenth century. My guess is that somewhere in England in the late seventeenth century, a cook decided to experiment and crossed a medieval-style pudding with a new cake recipe. That, or they put the baking soda in by accident (it happens). Either way, whoever that cook was, I am forever in their debt.

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Rumballs and Gyngerbrede

While looking through Christmas cookie recipes last year, I came across a couple for rumballs. I probably would have skipped right over them, but I thought I remembered that my grandmother used to make them once upon a time, so I took a closer look. Immediately I was struck by how similar the recipe was to many of the medieval Gyngerbrede recipes. I've made gyngerbrede before, so how hard could this be? Things got busy though, as they frequently do during the holiday season, and I just didn't get around to trying it out.

The though did stick in my mind though, and either I'm way ahead this year or I'm way behind and haven't figured it out yet, because I managed to have time to make a batch this evening. The results? Well ...

Let me start with a small rant. One of the worst things a person can do - something that in my book guarantees them a place in the 5th circle of culinary hell - is to intentionally give out a bad recipe. I'm not talking about vague recipes, where they say "keep adding flour until it's thick." I'm not talking about typos or stupid oversights. I'm talking about when they tell you the wrong amount of flour, or leave the cinnamon out, or any number of tricks, just so they can be sure no one will be able to make the dish as good as they can. It's a form of lying and it's just plain evil. If you don't want to share a recipe, that's fine, but have the guts to say so. Don't pretend you're sharing. Ok, I'm done now.

I'm not sure that the recipes I'd found are examples of this, but there are aspects of each that make me suspect something. From my experience with the gyngerbrede, all of them looked like there was too much liquid and not enough solids - they'd end up really gooey.

So I made a chocolate cake (from mix), crumbled it up, added less rum than the recipes called for (1/2 cup), added less sticky liquid (chocolate & karo syrups) than they called for (3/4 cup), added the same amount of ground pecans, and mixed it up.

They ended up really gooey.

So to try and salvage the goo ('cause it tasted good), I took a trick from the gyngerbrede recipe and started adding bread crumbs until it was too thick to stir. Fifteen slices of bread later and it was workable. I rolled a bazillion bite-sized balls and rolled each one in ground pecans. The wife and kids thought they were ok. I think they could be a lot better. So here's what I'm going to do next time:

1. Make two (2) cakes, and let them sit out overnight. I don't want them to be too stale (that'll make the final product too grainy), but I really should have let the cake dry out more. I figure with double the cake I may not need any bread.


2. Add rum flavoring. I could just barely taste the rum, and using more would probably make it gooier (gooeier? gooeyer? is that even a word?).

All that being said, I've still eaten too many of the blasted things and am about 15 minutes away from a food coma, so they can't be that bad.

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It's really not that hard ...

I'm more than a little conflicted when it comes to "Medieval Times" - no, not the period of history but the chain of theme restaurants.  On the one hand, it generates interest in medieval European history.  However they present a version of the middle-ages that is notably less accurate.

One of the areas where they stumble rather badly is the food (no surprise that I latch onto this aspect, eh?).  On their website they have this to say about their dinner. 

With clockwork precision, legions of serving wenches and serfs deliver four courses to hungry guests in minutes. The meal begins with savory garlic bread and a steaming hot vegetable soup ladled into pewter bowls: then come roasted chicken, spare rib, a seasoned potato and pastry of the Castle. Two rounds of beverages are included with the feast. Cash bar service is also available throughout the show. To the special delight of the guests, the feast is served "medieval style" - without silverware, but with plenty of extra napkins.

Let's go over this point by point:

1. Describing this as a four course meal is really silly when a typical course in a medieval feast contained four to six dishes - and that didn't include bread.  


2. The vegetable soup might be ok, depending on what exactly is in it.


3. Seasoned potato?  Potatoes are new-world ... hello!


4. What the heck is a pastry of the castle?  Ah, another site lists it as an apple pastry. Apples are good, pastry is good, the name is dumb.


5. Medieval style means no silverware?
   "There were no utensils in medieval times, thus, there are no utensils at Medieval Times. Would you like a refill on that Pepsi?"

So how could they fix this to make it more authentic, while still appealing to the masses?  It wouldn't take much in terms of time or money.

The first step is to go through their menu and recipes and get rid of all the new-world ingredients.  Tomatoes, potatoes, green beans, chocolate, vanilla, tea and coffee are the ones that most often sneak into a pseudo-medieval menu.

I suspect that this would effect the soup.  If so, then find a new recipe that is actually medieval.  There are hundreds of medieval soup recipes out there, many are quite good, and almost all of them are cheap to make.  Pick one or two.

Replace the potato with the old-world equivalent - the turnip.  They're just as easy to cook, and there are medieval turnip recipes that just about anyone would like.

Beverages are pretty easy too.  Serve the kids grape juice, and give the adults the added option of beer, wine or mead.

Finally, for Pete's sake give them spoons and knives!  The medieval serving manuals clearly state that all diners should be furnished with spoons and knives.  We're talking the middle-ages here, not the stone-ages.

Do I actually expect Medieval Times to do this?  No, not really.  I can dream though. It's not like I want them to do a proper four or five course feast with around 30 different dishes, complete with different menus for meat and meatless days. I just want them to get a few very basic things right. Kind of like how people expect a documentary about Pearl Harbor to be set in Hawaii instead of Des Moines, Iowa.

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So why do I do this again?

I came across a phrase on another website about medieval cooking.  It basically stated that the recipes were adapted for modern cooks.  For some reason the word "adapted" bothered me, which meant that it kept bouncing around in the back of my mind, using up precious processor cycles and forcing its way into my attention.  I will therefore analyze my reaction and the thoughts around it so I can stop thinking about them.

Adapted ... That means the recipes were changed to suit modern tastes, equipment, supplies, etc.

From an academic viewpoint, this is a bad thing.  It hides the information and experience of what was really done and pastes over it a veneer of what is done now.

But I do an awful lot of adapting on my website.  All of my recipes have changes of one sort or another - at the very least, I cook them in a modern kitchen.  Crap.

This leads me to question my motivations.  Why do I make recipes from medieval sources?  Why do I publish the adapted recipes?  Is my website doing a disservice to academia?  Let's take these one at a time:

Why do I make recipes from medieval sources?

This is a pretty easy question to answer.  I like food in general, and I like foods from many different cuisines.  The cuisine of medieval England and France is as unique as any modern style of cooking.  I like the flavors, and it's easy and very forgiving for the novice cook.  Add to this that I can make a contribution to the cuisine without going to culinary school - I already have all the tools and information I need.

Why do I publish the adapted recipes?

I don't do it for the fame - neither Food Network or CNN have called.  I certainly don't do it for the money - running the website is a cheaper hobby than golf, but it still costs me.  I guess I do it because I love the cuisine and want to advance it.  The more overall interest in medieval cooking, then the more other people there are out there who are also researching it, and therefore the more help I have in the research overall.  I put the recipes in a form that's easy for modern cooks to understand, which hopefully draws in people who are new to the field.

Is my website doing a disservice to academia?

Great googly-moogly, I hope not.  While I do make changes to the original recipes, I always include the primary source so that others can look at what I've done and where I may have gone astray.  I try to go back and correct mistakes I discover as I learn new things.  When people ask questions, I try to find the answers.  When I can't find one, I make my best guess - but I try to remember to always make it clear that my best guess is still just a guess.  So, on the whole, I think that MedievalCookery.com is a good example of the scientific method.  I formulate theories based on the available information, research for new information, test the theories, and correct or discard them as appropriate.

So why do I do this?  For the food, of course.  It's all about the food.

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Out with the old and in with the new!

Thanksgiving is a funny kind of holiday for me. I'm so normally focused on the foods of the Old World (specifically, medieval Europe) that New World foodstuffs are relegated to the back burner. Of course this changes around Thanksgiving, when I spend quite a bit of time doing this odd mental dance. I want to celebrate the foods of the New World and find interesting new ways to serve them, but still keep true to the (young) traditions of the Thanksgiving meal.

Here's what I made this year:

Turkey - The only big surprise here is that the turkey was huge! We wanted a fresh turkey and ended up with a choice between one that was too small and one that ... wasn't. The 22 pound bird just barely fit into the roasting pan, and was lightly seasoned with salt, pepper, and tarragon.

Stuffing - Cooked inside the turkey, I used a mix of white bread and pumpernickel, with onion, sage, thyme, celery seed, and dried cranberries.

Mashed Potatoes - Yes, potatoes and stuffing. My family has always operated on the principle that there is no such thing as too much starch.

Gravy - Made from butter, flour, and the drippings from the roasting pan. Gravy is one of the four food groups.

Green Beans - I wanted this to be a little fancier than just plan green beans, but didn't want to stray too far from traditional Thanksgiving fare. What I ended up doing was to steam them and serve them with a cream sauce with tarragon, and top them with some home-made croutons.

Cranberry Chutney - This is great stuff, sweet and tart, with a little extra zip. I keep the recipe here so I don't lose it.

Cranberry Sauce - Some of the family prefer the jellied cranberry sauce from a can to the chutney recipe above. Fortunately I've found that this kind of sauce is very easy to make with fresh cranberries. Put two cups cranberries (washed and cut in half) into a saucepan with one cup water and one cup sugar. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer until it thickens (about 20 minutes - a drop of the juice should gel when put on a cold plate). Strain through a fine sieve and chill.

Pumpkin Pie - served with fresh whipped cream.

Apple Pie - a crumb-topped pie, my wife's family recipe.

All of these, with the exception of the apple pie, are New World dishes (had to make the apple pie though, or the family would revolt). I'd like to have a corn-based dish for next year, so I'll have to look for something suitable. Anyways, I think it's time for another slice of pie before returning to the food coma.

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Hello Tallow!

A few months back I bought half a cow. I'd done this previously - if you have the money up front and enough freezer space then it's an incredibly economical way to buy beef. This time I did something a bit different though. Instead of throwing away all the odd parts that Americans generally don't eat, I had the processor pack them up as well (which is why I have that well publicized cow tongue ... got do do something with that thing). This means that along with some really great beef I've got a lot of suet and "soup bones".

So late last week I took a package of bones out of the freezer to let them thaw, and on Sunday I put them in a big pot with lots of water (and onions, salt,  pepper, and rosemary) to make beef broth.  Everything went well and I now have the broth frozen in one cup portions for quick, easy use.

All pretty boring, really.

The interesting part started when I was disposing of the used bones and gristle.  I'd dumped the dregs in the sink and made my first discovery:  one of the large pieces of bone had a huge chunk of marrow in it.

Of course I was heartbroken.  I've got recipes that call for marrow, and here I'd let some go to waste.  I poked out the piece of cooked marrow and smooshed it and marveled at the quantity of soft fat still in it.  Neat, in a gross kind of way - or is it gross, in a neat kind of way?

Next I gave the pieces of bone a quick scrub and set them out to dry (I think a couple of people I know have been experimenting with bone carving.  If not then I can just pitch them later).  Back to boring ... until the next time I checked the sink, which is when I found that what I thought to be globs of fat that would easily be washed down the drain were in reality globs of tallow that had now cooled and cemented themselves to the sink.

I know they made candles out of tallow in the middle ages (they're supposed to smell like beef when lit), but I've never seen tallow.  I'd always imagined something about the consistency of beeswax.  Nope, this stuff is hard!  They should make toys out of this stuff, or maybe car bumpers.  It's a hard, brittle, yellow, plastic-like substance.  Softer than most plastics, but harder than candle wax.

So now I've got two things to watch for the next time I thaw out a package of bones.  Remove the marrow before cooking, and collect the tallow after.

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But it could have happened!

The second most annoying thing in researching medieval cooking - the first of course being the myth that medieval cooks used spice to cover the taste of spoiled meat - is what I usually refer to as a cheeseburger argument.  This is usually an attempt to justify a modern dish as being "possibly" medieval, and generally takes the following form:

"They had beef in the middle ages, right?  And they sometimes ground meat, right?  And they sometimes cooked meat on a grill and they had cheese and bread, right?  So they had all the things they needed to make a cheeseburger.  Therefore the odds are that someone somewhere made one in the 500 years between 1000 and 1500."

Um ... no.

Sure, it sounds reasonable, but aside from being research in the wrong direction (choosing something modern and looking for it in the past, instead of looking at what there was and trying to make sense of it) the argument contains a number of logical flaws.

One of the flaws is called "Post hoc ergo propter hoc" (literally "After this, therefore because of this").  To make a cheeseburger you need to have all the ingredients (true), so having the ingredients will inevitably lead to making a cheeseburger (false).  Thousands of people in the US have raw fish and lye in their houses, and the vast majority of them will never make lutefisk.

This could also be a form of an "appeal to probability" (I still can't find the fancy Latin term for this), where it is assumed that because something can happen, it eventually will happen.

Another flaw present is a "fallacy of composition" (again, no cool Latin ... I'll keep looking), which assumes that if something is true for the parts then it's true for the whole.

So, while medieval cooks had all the stuff they needed to make a cheeseburger, and while it was possible that someone would make one, the concept of a cheeseburger (or any kind of sandwich for that matter) simply isn't one a medieval cook had.  Eventually someone did come up with the idea of a sandwich (most historians think it was sometime in the 18th century) and I'm sure a cheeseburger appeared shortly thereafter, so I suppose that given all of human history it was inevitable, but it wasn't in the middle ages.

Sometimes those making a cheeseburger argument tack on a short addendum when challenged, something along the lines of "You don't think they made cheeseburgers?  Prove they didn't."  In terms of classical logic this is called "Argumentam ad ignorantiam" (argument from ignorance), where the only "proof" that a premise is true is that it hasn't been proven false.  If this is allowed than almost anything can be "proven" - Henry the Fifth was actually a female orangutan!  Don't think so?  Prove he wasn't.  See?

Still it's soooo tempting. There's a particularly appealing modern dish, and a recipe or two from the 14th century that has a couple ingredients in common, and maybe even a hint at a method that kind of sort of matches, or maybe just a name that's spelled in a similar way.  That's why we need to practice CONSTANT VIGILANCE!

I'm going to go have a cheeseburger now.

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Medieval Cooking Symposium

Just a quick post today.  I spent the weekend at the Middle Kingdom Cook's Symposium - a small gathering of professional and amateur cooks and historians in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

I had an absolutely fantastic time, which included attending a class on medieval meat preservation methods (which I intend to try out as soon as possible - text and photos will be posted), and tasting many many (way too many - I ate until my stomach hurt) dishes I'd never tried before.  

Two of the more notable foods encountered were some sauteed cow tongue[1] made by Helewyse de Birkestad (a.k.a. Louise Smithson) and an incredible gingerbread dessert made by Hauviette d’Anjou (a.k.a. Channon Mondoux).

On the whole, it was a wonderful way to spend a Saturday - learning, schmoozing, and just being historically geeky all around - and it was well worth the 5 hour drive to get there.

[1]  The cow tongue was notable not so much because of its flavor, but more because I'd never had it before and I've still got that whole tongue in my freezer.  It wasn't at all bad or unpleasant, but I think I'll look for a recipe with a little more spice to it.