Supersizers Go ...

There's been some chatter on a couple of the mailing lists about this series being aired on BBC2 - "Supersizers Go.". Strangely, the BBC doesn't have a web page for it that I could find, however there's a very nice description on this website. The stars of the program(me) get dressed up to suit a particular time period and then experience the appropriate food.

One of the episodes shown recently was about the Elizabethan period, and seeing as that's at the tail-end of the middle ages (or just after the middle ages according to some, or about two hundred years into the Renaissance according to people who focus on Italian history, but don't get me started on this or I'll go on and on until you're blue in the face), I just had to see it.

On the whole, it was entertaining. The hosts were funny, but got a bit irritating at times. I think they meant to be that way, but I'm not sure. From time to time the show got a bit too focused on the topic of excretia - not necessarily a bad thing for a historical program(me), but really not what one would expect in a show about food.

The big question of course is, "Was it accurate?" The answer is: yes, reasonably so. It did a really decent job of appealing to the average viewer while not being total crap. I do have some nits to pick though (are you really surprised? I didn't think so), but since I'll have a lot to say about each nit, I'll save them for later posts.

Apropos of Nothing?

I love puzzles, mysteries, and secret codes. Quite a while back I made up a rather complex, multi-layer code thing and put it up on the web. I posted a link to it on a couple of the more geeky mailing lists I'm on just to see who'd try it out. To my surprise, only one person cracked it - James Prescott - and he did so in a fairly short amount of time.

What shouldn't be much of a surprise though is that he's about as much of a language nut as I am.

At any rate, the puzzle's still online. If I remember, I'll put a proper link to it on the main page of the website. If you think you can crack it, go ahead and try.

Chardwarden - Take 1

Sometimes interpreting a medieval recipe is easy - for example, I pretty much got the Peach Tart recipe right on the first try. Other times, like this one, it just doesn't go as expected.

The source recipe is the same one I used for Chardquynce, only I used pears so it would be chardwarden instead.

Chare de Wardone. Take peer Wardons, and seth hem in wine or water; And then take hem vppe, and grinde hem in a morter, and drawe hem thorgh a streynoure with the licour; And put hem in a potte with Sugur, or elle3 with clarefiede hony and canell ynowe, And lete hem boile; And then take hit from the fire, And lete kele, and caste there-to rawe yolkes of eyren, til hit be thik, and caste thereto powder of ginger ynowe; And serue hit forth in maner of Ryse. And if hit be in lenton tyme, leve the yolkes of eyren, And lete the remnaunt boyle so longe, til it be so thikk as though hit were y-tempered with yolkes of eyren, in maner as A man setheth charge de quyns; And then serue hit forth in maner of Rys.
[Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books, T. Austin (ed.)]

I peeled and cut up four good-sized pears and put them with two cups of white wine in a pot on the stove, and cooked them until they were soft (this seemed to take about 5 seconds, but really it was probably more like 15 minutes). Then I puréed them, added sugar, spices, and four egg yolks. I warmed it back up to a low boil ... and it was way too runny.

Huh. This is supposed to be char (i.e. flesh) of pears, not pottage (i.e. soup). I wound up adding 4 more egg yolks to thicken it up, and it worked to a degree but it the final product was still a bit thinner than applesauce. It tasted fantastic, but this was not what was looking for. So where did it go off track?

Pears seem to have a much higher moisture content than quince, so obviously I need to rethink the liquid content. Then there's a matter of an interesting difference between two medieval source recipes. In the recipe above (TFCCB #356) it says to draw the cooked pears through a strainer with the liquid they were cooked in. However, in the same cookbook there is another recipe for chardwarden (TFCCB #34) which is almost identical but says to strain the pears without the liquid. Originally I thought this was a copy error, but given the results of this experiment it may be that it depends on which fruit is being used.

Of course this means I need to try again. Oh, the pain, the horror, the tragedy. Apparently this sort of failure is quite good with a dollop of snowe on top.

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.

Dashed Hopes

One can imagine that when I saw this posting on the News for Medievalists blog, I nearly jumped out of my skin. The post talks about how the Bodleian Library has made over 25,000 images of medieval manuscripts in its collection available onine through ARTstor. Zowie! There are some little-seen cooking manuscripts in the Bodleian that I'd love to have access to. So it was with no small amount of expectation that I made arrangements with my apprentice (who has access to ARTstor) to spend some quality time doing geeky research.

The best laid plans of mice, and all that.

Roadblock 1
First let me note that ARTstor's user interface was obviously designed by a demented chimpanzee who was suffering from ADHD and short-term memory problems. In all seriousness, I can't imagine that it was made this way by accident - someone had to work awfully hard to make it so bad.

Roadblock 2
After figuring out how to get any kind of information out of ARTstor, we spent about an hour searching, only to find that: 1. only manuscript pages with artwork on them are included, and 2. apparently none of the pages from medieval cooking manuscripts have artwork on them.

To add insult to injury, there were a bunch of pages which had illumination on only part of the page, and of course the text-only part of the page was cropped out. It's almost enough to bring a medieval cooking/word geek to tears.

Wandering in the Big Gray Zone

A few days back, the New York Times posted an article on their website about "Recipe Deal Breakers" - the things that cooks might read in a recipe that would cause them to skip it. This got me thinking in general about the foods people will and won't eat, and about how that affects medieval cooking geeks like myself.

See, here's the crux of the matter: there's no point in my making 30 pounds of blood sausage to serve to 100 people at a feast if only 3 people are even going to try it. On the other hand, the tastes of the people are not uniform. Instead of a nice, clear line that I could walk right up to and threaten to cross from time to time, I find myself standing in the middle of a vast, gray plain that isn't steadily shaded, but instead is mottled with varying degrees of will and won't. So here's what I've noticed so far about the food preferences of the people.

Meats
In general, people like meat (e.g. beef, pork, chicken). There are some vegetarians, but they're enough used to living in an omnivore world that most of them will be very happy with the slightest accommodation. Offering sauces to go with the meats is good, but it's best to serve the sauce on the side since a substantial number of the carnivores want their meat plain.

Some meats are considered a little unusual or exotic, but are generally acceptable (e.g. duck, venison, quail, rabbit). These can be served, but the serving size can be notably smaller than for the "normal meats"

There are meats that are considered strange enough that if you put them on the table, people will look at you funny (e.g. squirrel, hedgehog). If you know someone who likes these then make a special dish just for them, but don't bother making huge quantities.

Then there are the parts of the animals that are (in the US) often thrown away (e.g. brains, entrails, organs, feet, snouts, ears, tongues, genitals). Getting 1% of the people to eat any of these is nearly impossible. Even the most commonly eaten organ meat, liver, would generally fare badly here (a pity too, 'cause I've got a nice recipe for chopped liver).

Fish
Maybe it's different in other parts of the US, but here in the Midwest fish can be difficult. Something like salmon will go over OK, but just about anything else isn't worth it. The "weird" fish (e.g. eel) are even harder to get them to eat, and if you leave the head and tail on then you might as well forget it.

Frogs? No, not really. No.

Vegetables
What is it with trying to get Americans to eat vegetables? It seems that about half of the population is offended if anything green gets anywhere near their plate. They'll accept a salad as long as it has enough meat and cheese added to it. Starchy vegetables will be eaten if smothered in cheese (e.g. turnips) or glazed with honey (e.g. carrots), but offer them cooked spinach or beets and they'll act like you'd just insulted their mother.

I did have one surprise once on this. I'd made a turnip soup for one feast, scaling it back a little because I figured not everyone would like it, and we ran out. That was a rare exception though.

Fruit
This is an odd one. People will generally eat fruit prepared in just about any way, but they rarely will ask for it. Stewed apples or pears, fruit sauces, baked fruit, all are good. Maybe they don't know what to do with fruit (other than eat it raw) and therefore they just don't think about it.

Other Foods
Mushrooms are iffy. Some people will devour them, others will run screaming.

The same goes for spicy or sour foods.

Eggs and egg-based dishes go over pretty well. You can even serve pies made from eggs and herbs or whatever - just don't call it quiche or a small number of men will suddenly decide not to eat it.

Starchy foods like bread or pasta are almost as widely accepted as the "normal" meats. The no-carb diet fad put a bit of a crimp in this, but it seems to have died down.

Meat jelly? I really don't think they'll eat much of it ... but I'm going to try anyway. Sometimes you've got to break the rules.

Chardquynce - Part 2

The quince had been peeled, cored, cut up, and cooked (baked) for 2 hours at 350°F. The pieces were soft enough to smush easily with a spoon. All that was left was to figure out what to do with it. After re-reading all the source recipes, I decided to work primarily from this one:

Chare de Wardone. Take peer Wardons, and seth hem in wine or water; And then take hem vppe, and grinde hem in a morter, and drawe hem thorgh a streynoure with the licour; And put hem in a potte with Sugur, or elle3 with clarefiede hony and canell ynowe, And lete hem boile; And then take hit from the fire, And lete kele, and caste there-to rawe yolkes of eyren, til hit be thik, and caste thereto powder of ginger ynowe; And serue hit forth in maner of Ryse. And if hit be in lenton tyme, leve the yolkes of eyren, And lete the remnaunt boyle so longe, til it be so thikk as though hit were y-tempered with yolkes of eyren, in maner as A man setheth charge de quyns; And then serue hit forth in maner of Rys.
[Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books, T. Austin (ed.)]

Being the impatient sort, I used a food processor instead of a mortar and pestle to grind up the fruit (having experimented in the past, I've found that the final result is pretty much the same). I then added sugar, egg yolks, and spices, and then cooked it over medium heat until it started doing the bubbling-oatmeal thing. Here's how it looked when it was done:

mMMmmmm ... quince!

Spicing is always an issue when working from medieval sources - it's rare that a medieval recipe specifies quantities for anything. When I tasted this stuff during cooking, it seemed too bland, so I wound up putting in more ginger. When it was done it tasted great to me, and my wife liked it too. However it received a less than positive reception from a couple of people who don't normally eat medieval foods. I suspect it has a bit more ginger than the general population cares for.

I'll have to try out the same recipe using pears, possibly with less ginger and more cinnamon.

Chardquynce

Interpreting out a medieval recipe can be a challenge sometimes. The one I'm currently working on is a good example.

I got some fresh quince (mmMMMmm ... quince) at Jungle Jim's and was looking for something new to make with them, when I came across the following recipe:

To mak chard wardene tak wardens and bak them in an oven then tak them out and paire them and grind them in a mortair and streyne them smothe throwghe a streyner then put them in an erthene pot and put ther to sugur till they be douced as ye think best and put ther to pouder of notmeggs guinger and granes and let the pouder be farcede put ther to powder of sanders tille it be coloured and stirr it with a pot stik and set yt on a soft fyere and let it boile till yt be stiff as leche lombard and ye put amydon or rise it is bettere and when it is cold lay it fair abrod in the coffyn and let it stond ij dais and ye liste strawe senymom upon it and a day aftur the bred is out of the ovene then set it ther in and it shalle en be hard and then ye shall mak chardquynce. [A Noble Boke off Cookry (England, 1468)]

This is a recipe for pears, but what caught my eye was (of course) the word chardquynce. The last half of the word is obviously a reference to quince (and in case you didn't know, "wardens" are a type of pears). The first half doesn't mean burned though, but is a Middle-English word meaning "meat" or "flesh", so this recipe is for the cooked flesh of pears but it also mentions quince.

A quick search turned up several recipes for chardwarden, but only a single one that specifically called for quince. Weird. Looking at these recipes further, I discovered a bit of variation.

Chared coneys, or chardwardon is a mix of quince and pears, peeled and cored, cooked until soft, mashed, mixed with honey and spices, and cooked until very thick. I suspect the end result would be somewhat like marmalade or jelly.

Chardewardon and Chare de Wardone - recipes very similar to the one given in full above - is a recipe for cooked pears which references chardquince at the end. The pears are boiled, ground up, strained, mixed with sugar and spices, and them mixed with egg yolks and cooked until thick. This would be more like a fruit pudding.

Now I could just go ahead and make the marmalade-like recipe, but I'm in the mood to try something different. So my current plan is to hybridize these recipes into a stereotypical Chardquynce.  I've already got the quince peeled, cored, and cooked until soft, so tonight I'll mix them with the sugar and spices, and then add egg yolks and cook the stuff until it is pudding-like.  Tomorrow I'll post about how it turns out.

Making a Medieval Field Kitchen - Part 3

The thought of a proper medieval kitchen is always lurking somewhere in the back of my mind (oddly accompanied by music from George Harrison), so when I spent Memorial Day at the house of a skilled carpenter and he showed me his reproduction of a medieval table I think I showed remarkable restraint in that I did not scream "WANT" at the top of my lungs, nor did I drool upon it.

What Conal (the woodworker) made was a beautiful copy of a sawhorse table. Sadly, I don't have a picture (yet) of the one he made, but I did find a couple of examples online.

Image from Tacuinum Sanitatis, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek

(note: count the legs on each sawhorse)

I've seen several images of this sort of table in various medieval sources. The really nice thing about them is that they can be broken down into their component parts for transport. Conal said the one he made takes up surprisingly little space. That being said, these tables are remarkably stable.

Here's another picture I found online of a similar table:

Detail of a table made by a

member of the Company of the Golden Lyon

So Conal said either he'd make two of these tables for me, or at least he'd help me make them. The plan is to use maple if I can get it cheaply enough. I'll document the whole process with pictures and such.

Science in the Middle Ages

Yesterday morning I picked up a book a friend of mine was reading to give it a brief look. The title sounded interesting enough, and I thought I'd check it out - if it's decent then maybe I'd pick up a copy. As often happens with me, I got caught by a chapter and had a hard time putting the book down.

Yes, this is what I'd call light reading.

This time the chapter that snagged me was on medieval cosmology. I've been really interested in this lately, and the part of this book dealing with it is awesome. Lindberg clearly details the major cosmological beliefs in play in medieval Europe, ties them back to their origins in Aristotle's works, briefly compares them to what's being done in the middle-east, and talks about the style of medieval European scholarly works (with a very nice bit on the sort of questions scholars asked and debated), and all the while his writing style is clear and very readable.

So the verdict comes back: Yes, this is one for my bookshelf.

Endangered Foods

Yesterday evening I caught part of a radio broadcast of The World which was titled 10 Foods to Eat Before They Die. It was an interview with Simon Preston about his planned 10 course dinner in Newcastle upon Tyne and Gateshead, England. 

Aside from a substantial amount of gustatorial interest (how could anyone with functioning taste buds and a good imagination not be interested in a discussion about Lancashire asparagus, Herat raisins Saxon village preserves, etc...), I found Mr. Preston's passion for disappearing foodways resonated with my own. While he is highlighting rare foods and food production methods that are falling out of practice, I am researching and re-creating foods that have lain dormant for centuries. I think both of us are somewhat driven by a love of food and a desire not to forget the old in the race to find the new.

For those in the area, the gala dinner, Ten Things to EAT! Before They Die is tonight at 7pm at the Marriott Hotel, Gosforth Park (£85 including wine). I know it's short notice for those in the UK ( sorry, I'll try to learn about these things sooner), but if anyone gets to it I'd love to hear a first-hand account.

Very Small Fruit

A quick update on a very important topic: my quince tree.

The petals have all dropped off now, and the base of the flower has started to swell. Each of the five or six fruit (it was hard to count them because of the wind) is about a half inch in diameter - a bit smaller than a grape. As can be seen in the photo below, they're also already starting to turn yellow.

awww, they're so cute when they're little

(click to embiggen)

I believe the fruit above is from the flower pictured in my last post on the topic. The stamen look rather eldritch to me. Hopefully that will scare off the deer.

I Love / Hate the BBC

Several weeks back I learned about a program about medieval cooking that was to be broadcast on the BBC. Clarissa and the King's Cookbook was hosted by Clarissa Dickson Wright (of Two Fat Ladies fame). The show deals with the fourteenth century cookbook, Forme of Cury. Obviously this is a program I want to watch.

And therein lies the problem. I want to see this show - I need to see this show - but I don't live in the UK. BBC America? Not anytime soon. Buy it from the BBC? It's not for sale anywhere that I can find. Download an illegal copy? Apparently medieval cooking doesn't have the tech-geek following of other BBC shows (like Doctor Who), as no one has uploaded pirate copies. Move to England? Tempting, but not feasible in the near future.

Bah! The unfairness of it all!

Awesome!

Take a look at the book cover below. Go ahead, enjoy ...

freakin' cool book

It's still not available from Amazon.com (you can pre-order it), but my wife managed to get a copy for me while she was at the International Congress on Medieval Studies (in Kalamazoo, MI).

I've only read a chapter so far. Actually, I opened it up at random to somewhere in the middle, intending only to skim a page or two to whet my appetite, and somehow got sucked in and couldn't stop reading before the chapter's end. Then I took a moment (read: half an hour) to flip through the rest of the book.

This has got to be Brears' best work to date, and it's absolutely incredible. Aside from his very readable prose, he has filled this monster of a book with hundreds of clear illustrations on things like setting out tablecloths and carving pies. The little bit he had in Boke of Keruynge was just a speck of dust on a drop in a bucket compared to what's in here. There are also recipes, and serving instructions, and descriptions of medieval English daily life - all of it backed up with documentation from primary sources. Absitively beautimus!

While this book is a bit pricey, it is way more than worth it in quantity. If the rest of the chapters are even close to being as good as the one I read (and I have every reason to think they are) then this book is perfect for someone who wants a single, detailed text that delivers the distilled general knowledge of medieval cooking in England. It's also good for medieval food geeks like me who want to jump into a vat of knowledge and splash around for hours on end.

Cooking & Dining in Medieval England
Peter Brears
Prospect Books
ISBN: 1913018555

Jelly!

At first you don't succeed ...

What I did was to take a 2 pound piece of pork loin and and put it in a covered baking dish with 1 cup of (cheap) white wine and a little salt (maybe a quarter of a teaspoon). This was put into a 350°F oven for a bit over 2 hours - the pork was tender enough to tear apart with a fork.

it's really difficult to make a photo of meat jelly visually interesting

Tasting this stuff was an interesting experience. A part of me kept expecting sweet fruit flavors, so completely un-subtle flavor of meat came as a shock with every single bite. I also had trouble reconciling the coolness of the jelly with the taste. The thing is, it wasn't at all an unpleasant experience - it actually tastes quite nice - it was just surprising. I suppose one gets used to it after a while.

The color comes from the pork, and maybe from sugars in the wine caramelizing (is there enough sugar in wine to do that?). Some of the medieval recipes for meat jelly say to make it all sorts of colors using various substances, so there must be some way to make less colorful jelly as a base. Perhaps a different type or cut of meat (medieval recipes suggest things like cow feet or sheep's feet or even veal bones) or maybe a different type of wine or adding vinegar would work better.

Anyway, now that I know I can intentionally make meat jelly, I'll keep experimenting and see how close I can get to one of the actual medieval recipes. I doubt I'll be able to get a lot of people to eat it - even if it is nicely presented, colored yellow or red or blue, and with some pieces of meat mixed in, but it shows up in medieval cookbooks often enough that I just have to know.

Flower Power!

Back in the late summer of 2006, I ordered a quince tree from a nursery in California. I'd never planted a fruit tree before, but I'd read plenty on the topic, and dreamed about it for years, and finally managed to get my wife to reluctantly agree to getting one. So did a lot of searching and researching, and picked Cydonia oblongata as the variety I wanted. The tree was delivered by UPS in a big (and heavy) cardboard box. I followed the included instructions and watched it grow for the next year and a half. Nothing much happened of course (except for a couple attacks by bugs). It didn't blossom or fruit the first year, but that was expected since quince flower from the ends of new growth.

This year is apparently a different story though. When I went back to check on it last Thursday (and make sure the bugs hadn't attacked again), I saw little rosy-salmony-colored flower buds at the end of each branch. It's going to flower this year, neat! So I checked again yesterday and here's what I found:

so that's what quince blossoms look like

(click for huge image)

This means that with any luck I'll have home-grown quince sometime around October, and home-grown quince leads to home-made quince marmalade!

Why is that so exciting? You've never had quince marmalade, have you? Let me try to explain ...

To say that quince is a close relative of the apple doesn't quite put it in perspective. The quince is everything the apple has ever wanted to be but just can't. It has an incredible fragrance, and because of it's high natural pectin content, it is perfect for making preserves. In fact in the 18th and 19th centuries, there were quince trees in just about every farm yard just because of its usefulness. The quince isn't perfect though. It's kind of funny looking. It's also usually to hard and astringent to eat raw, and therefore needs to be cooked before eating.

And therein lies the big problem. The vast majority of people in the US nowadays don't cook. They want ready-to-eat food. This makes quince unlikely to be a big seller at the corner grocery, if it's stocked there at all.

Things are looking up though. Quince can often be found in ethnic groceries, and I've even started to see them from time to time in the big chain stores. Take a look next time you're in amongst the produce. If you find some, take them home, cut them up, and cook them. From that point on an apple will never be able to look you in the eye again.

Not Jelly

A couple of weeks back I posted about a batch of cormary I made up where the broth unexpectedly turned into jelly.  Of course, being of the geek persuasion, I had to try to make meat jelly the same way ... but intentionally this time.  Naturally, it didn't work.

What I did was to put a 4 pound pork loin into the slow-cooker with 4 cups of white wine, and cooked it all until the meat fell apart. I think I put in a bit of salt too. I thought that this was the same proportions of meat-to-wine as I used in the aforementioned incident.

What I ended up with (aside from the meat which was used for barbecued pork sandwiches) was a quart of really nice soup stock. Excellent flavor, nice body, beautiful color and clarity, but still not jelly.

Bother!

So now I need to figure out what went wrong and try again (and again ... and again). It could be that I misremembered the proportions and got too much wine in there - diluting the jelly to the point where it won't ... um ... jelly. It might also be an issue of having used white wine instead of red. Lastly, I used the slow-cooker this time instead of a covered dish in the oven.

I think I'll try using less wine and baking the pork in the oven - that'll take less time and materials, if nothing else. I hate it when an experiment fails! Good think I'm not a TV chef. I can just hear the hushed voice-over, "Now chef Myers is dumping the contents down the garbage disposal and starting all over again."

Waffle! Waffle! Waffle!

My family and I spent the week after Easter on vacation, and the house we stayed in had full cable. This of course led me to watch many many hours of Food Network programming, including several episodes of Good Eats. Now I like this show - it's entertaining and educational, and most of all it's about food. How cool is that?

However, every now and then Alton Brown's food historian would let loose with some bit of absolute, unsupportable nonsense. 

For example in the episode on waffles, the food historian stated something to the effect that waffles developed from the sacramental wafers of the middle ages. This caused me to pass root beer out my nose and to say something rude to the television.  Let's just say that didn't sound right to me.  So now I'm compelled to look into the history of waffles.

I'll start off with a nice painting ...

waffles, ca. 1567

Click on the link and take a closer look. See those things in the lower-left corner? Waffles. Very modern looking waffles for that matter.

There are a handful of medieval recipes for things called "waffles", "wafers", and even "guaffres", but they all describe something that sounds like the thing above. Some of them call for a slice of cheese to be encased in the batter before waffling, others have ground-up fish parts mixed into the batter ("Mmmm ... fish waffles").

There is one reference in Menager de Paris (France, 15th c.) that describes something less waffle-like, but it sounds more like a pizzelle than a wafer, and another from The English Housewife (England, 17th c.) that is definitely a pizzelle. Neither really supports the claim that waffles came from wafers though.

medieval waffle iron

(looks like a pizzelle maker to me)

What about medieval sacramental wafers? Well in medieval England and France sacramental wafers were called "obleys", not "wafers" (the word "obley" comes from the same source as "obligation"). So it appears at the time that waffles (by any name) and sacramental wafers were already two distinctly different things.  

Interestingly, Mayhew and Skeat's Concise Dictionary of Middle English defines "wafer" as "a thin small cake" and notes that it comes from the Old High German "waba" meaning "honey-comb".

So I'll accept that the terms "waffle" and "wafer" were used indiscriminately throughout much of the middle ages, and even that sometime in the late middle ages the meaning of "wafer" evolved to include sacramental wafers. But saying that one of these two items is derived from the other is bunk.

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.

Accidental Jelly

A good while back, Kristen (my apprentice) managed to get a hold of some cow's feet and tried making meat jelly.  She used a recipe from Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books (included at the end of this article), however her project never quite ... well ... gelled.  That is, it didn't set.  What she ended up with was a large amount of cow-foot soup.

Fast-forward to last Friday when I was preparing food for a royalty lunch.  One of the recipes I made was Cormarye - a sort of marinated, roast pork.  I had a lot of dishes to make, so I cut a few corners, tweaked the recipe a bit, and stuffed it into the oven for a couple of hours.  It smelled absolutely yummy when it came out, so I let it cool, sliced it up, and put it in a sealed container in the fridge overnight.

The next morning I discovered something weird had happened.  As it sat overnight, the wine broth that the pork cooked in had turned to a dark red jelly. Funky. It hasn't done that before. So what had I done differently this time? This is something that I need to figure out if I'm going to intentionally make meat jelly.

The key was in the short cut I took. I used a 4 pound pork loin in a roasting pan that was just big enough to hold the pork and the wine - and therefore left out the broth. I'd figured there was enough liquid to keep it from burning and keep things moist, so what the heck.

Wine is often used when cooking meats since it helps break down connective tissues, and thus makes the meat more tender. This same connective tissue is one of the sources of gelatin (along with bones, hooves, cartilage, hides, and all sorts of other parts that the corporations who sell fruit-flavored gelatin don't want you to think about). Now normally when I make Cormarye I add in some broth. I hadn't realized it, but that broth dilutes the gelatin and keeps it from setting properly. This time when I left it out the gelatin remained un-diluted and could set. Neat.

So all that remains now is to see if I can duplicate this process using white wine instead of the red (which will allow me to color it bright yellow with saffron) and to leave out the seasonings used in Cormarye (so I can flavor it as desired). If so, then I'll have an easy way to consistently make medieval meat jelly and won't need to resort to unflavored gelatin packets - or for that matter cow feet (yeah, you try to find cow feet at the corner grocery).

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Medieval Jelly Recipe 

from Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books

Cix - Gelye de chare. Take caluys fete, and skalde hem in fayre water, an make hem alle the whyte. Also take howhys of Vele, and ley hem on water to soke out the blode; then take hem vppe, an lay hem on a fayre lynen clothe, and lat the water rennyn out of hem; than Skore a potte, and putte the Fete and the Howhys ther-on; than take Whyte Wyne that wolle hold coloure, and cast ther-to a porcyon, an non other lycoure, that the Fleysshe be ouer-wewyd withalle, and sette it on the fyre, and boyle it, and Skeme it clene; an whan it is tendyr and boylid y-now, take vppe the Fleyshe in-to a fayre bolle, and saue the lycoure wyl; and loke that thow haue fayre sydys of Pyggys, and fayre smal Chykenys wyl and clene skladdyd and drawe, and lat the leggys an the fete on, an waysshe hem in fayre water, and caste hem in the fyrste brothe, an sethe it a-3en ouer the fyre, and skeme it clene; lat a man euermore kepe it, an blow of the grauy. An in cas the lycoure wast a-way, caste more of the same wyne ther-to, and put thin honde ther-on; and 3if thin hond waxe clammy, it is a syne of godenesse, an let not the Fleyshe be moche sothe, that it may bere kyttyng; than take it vppe, and ley it on a fayre clothe, and sette owt the lycoure fro the fyre, and put a few colys vnder-nethe the vesselle that the lycoure is yn; than take pouder of Pepir, a gode quantyte, and Safron, that it haue a fayre Laumbere coloure, and a gode quantyte of Vynegre, and loke that it be sauery of Salt and of Vynegre, fayre of coloure of Safroun, and putte it on fayre lynen clothe, and sette it vndernethe a fayre pewter dysshe, and lat it renne thorw the clothe so ofte tylle it renne clere: kytte fayre Rybbys of the syde of the Pygge, and lay ham on a dysshe, an pulle of the lemys of the Chykenys, eche fro other, and do a-way the Skynne, and ley sum in a dysshe fayre y-chowchyd, and pore thin gelye ther-on, and lay Almaundys ther-on, an Clowys, and paryd Gyngere, and serue forth.