Gen Con Seminar Schedule

In just over two weeks (and three days after I get home from Pennsic), I will be Participating in the Writer's Symposium seminars at Gen Con. I've gone to this convention for several years, and given talks on medieval cooking for the past three or four (I'm losing count).

On Thursday evening at 8:00 p.m. I'll be giving a 2 hour talk about medieval cooking ("Getting Medieval with Food"). This will be a sort of general overview, geared towards fantasy authors and game designers who want to make the food in their work more realistic. Here's the description from the Gen Con events catalog:

SEM0903050 - Getting Medieval with Food
Fantasy games and novels are commonly set in a society based on medieval Europe - except for the food, which is commonly way wrong. Learn how medieval English and French cuisine worked as a system. Topics will include medieval ingredients and preparation methods, the structure of medieval feasts, finding medieval recipes (or making them up), and common myths about medieval foods. 08/13/2009, 8:00 PM - Marriott : Indiana Bllrm D

I'm also very likely to ramble a bit, allow myself to be side-tracked by questions, and maybe even rant.

I'll also be part of the following panel discussions:

SEM0902995 - Food for Thought
A key ingredient to believable characters and stories is food. Heroes, villains, and the supporting cast have to eat from time to time. How can you enrich your writing by adding a dining experience or two? What does food say about the world you've crafted? 08/15/2009, 12:00 PM - Marriott : Lincoln

SEM0903002 - Hunting Dragons
Why has going after dragons been so popular in fiction? Our panelists discuss classic dragon hunters like Beowulf, Saint George, and Bilbo Baggins, in addition to how the hunt has changed over the years. Learn how to shape the classic story into something fresh and exciting. 08/15/2009, 3:00 PM - Marriott : Santa Fe

SEM0903003 - Stealing History
Why recreate the wheel each time you create a story, character, or world? Yes, you can build your knighthood or priesthood or religion or society from scratch, but taking what's historically known and warping it might fit the proverbial bill and depth and believability. Join our panelists for a discussion on how we can mine our own rich history for characters, backgrounds, worlds, cosmology, scenery, and more. 08/15/2009, 4:00 PM - Marriott : Santa Fe

On the whole, I expect it to be lots of fun.

What a Difference a Word Makes

I've been spending a good amount of time lately looking at the John Rylands University images of their copy of Forme of Cury (I know, what a surprise) and comparing it to other versions. There are lots of differences, but they're usually minor changes in spelling, with the occasional dropped or added word here and there. Sometimes those dropped words can have a huge impact on a recipe.

A perfect example is the recipe for Payne ragoun. The Rylands manuscript has the following:

Tak hony suger cypres & clarifye it to gider & boyle it with esye fyre & kepe it wel from brennyng & whan hit hath y boyled a whyle tak up a drope ther of with thy fynger & do hit in a litul water & loke yf it hong to gider & tak hit fro the fyre & do therto pynes the thryddendel & poudour ginger, & stere it to gyder tyl hit bigyne to thyk and cast it on a wete table, lesche hit & serve hit forth with fryed mete, on flesch day or on fysch dayes.

Compare this to the version transcribed by Samuel Pegge in 1780:

Take hony suger and clarifie it togydre. and boile it with esy fyre, and kepe it wel fro brennyng and whan it hath yboiled a while; take up a drope therof with thy fyngur and do it in a litel water and loke if it hong togydre. and take it fro the fyre and do therto the thriddendele an powdour gyngener and stere it togyder til it bigynne to thik and cast it on a wete table. lesh it and serue it forth with fryed mete on flessh dayes or on fysshe dayes.

Weird spelling and ampersands aside, there's not a huge amount of difference between the two ... except for one word. The Pegge edition leaves out the word "pynes". The omission of this one word turns the recipe from pine-nut brittle into spice candy, and hides any connection to similar recipes for "Pynade" in both Forme of Cury and Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books.

Interestingly, the word "pynes" is included in the edition of Forme of Cury that appears in Hieatt & Butler's Curye on Inglish (I haven't had a chance to check which manuscript that transcription was based upon), so a correct version of this recipe has been available for quite some time. Still, I'd hazard a guess that the Pegge edition is the one most often consulted (because it is available online for free).

So what's it all mean in the grand scheme of things? Probably that one should always check multiple sources whenever possible.

Kalendarium Hortense - July

The Kalendarium Hortense was published by John Evelyn in 1683. It contains instructions for what a gardener should do throughout the year. The excerpt below is the section titled "Fruits in Prime, or yet lasting" for the month of July.

Apples.
Deux-ans, Pepins, Winter Russeting, Andrew Apples, Cinnamon Apple, red and white Juneting, the Margaret Apple, &c.

Pears.
The Primat, Russet Pears, Summer Pears, green Chesil Pears, Pearl Pear, &c.

Cherries.
Carnations, Morella, Great-bearer, Morocco Cherry, the Egriot, Bigarreaux, &c.

Peaches.
Nutmeg, Isabella, Persian, Newington, Violet muscat, Rambouilet.

Plums, &c.
Primordial, Myrobalan, the red, blew, and amber Violet, Damasc. Denny Damasc. Pear-Plum, Damasc. Violet, or Cheson-Plum, Abricot-plum, Cinnamon-plum, the King's-plum, Spanish, Morocco-plum, Lady Eliz. plum, Tawny, Damascene, &c.

Rasberries, Gooseberries, Corinths, Strawberries, Melons, &c.

Even More on "Forme of Cury"

On Monday I griped a bit about the lack of a way to link directly to the John Rylands University Library images of "Forme of Cury". There are some things that I can't just leave alone, and seeing as I'm somewhat of a web geek, I did what I could to correct the situation.

I put together a web page of links to the manuscript images. That way others can have some place to link to that provides clear and simple access. Note that the images are still hosted on the John Rylands University Library's servers (I'm not violating their copyright). This means that they could easily fiddle with their servers or add some kind of authorization process that would break the links, so I don't know how long this page will be useful.

More on "Forme of Cury"

So the latest big news in medieval cuisine is that the John Rylands University Library in Manchester has made images of their copy of "Forme of Cury" online.

One oddity though about the BBC news story on this event is that there is no link provided to the images. There is a link in the sidebar to John Rylands University Library (and their "Medieval Collection") though, so perhaps it's there.

Nope.

The images are indeed there, and can be viewed free of charge - so I guess I really shouldn't complain - but the university has them (and all their images of other beautiful manuscripts) tucked away behind some clunky code. There is no clear and simple way to link directly to them (it apparently can be done - folio 4, verso - but it's not clear and simple). Instead you need to go to the Rylands Medieval Collection website, click on the link for the Insight Browser (the page says you can use the username 'uman' password 'est1824'), and then find the manuscript (it's reference number English MS 7). Then you can look at each page, one by one.

Really, I'm very happy that they've gone to the effort of digitizing this manuscript and putting it online with FREE access. What keeps echoing in my mind though is the bit from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where the demolition orders were on display in the cellar in the back of an unmarked filing cabinet, stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard".

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.

Medieval Catering

So here's the fun news: on Tuesday I cooked for the OSU Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

They did an interview with me last year for their newsletter (Nouvelles/Nouvelles) and I'd been in contact with them off and on.

So when they asked if I could prepare some medieval dishes for their end of year get-together I was thrilled. I planned out a menu that would have a good number of dishes so they'd be able to get a sense of medieval French and English cuisine. Here's what I selected:

Twisted Bread of Milk and Sugar
Marmelade of Quinces
Pumpes
Spinach Tart
Rysschews of Fruit
Pegions Stewed (actually chicken)
Compost
Stuffed Eggs
Breny
Gyngerbrede
Sugared Walnuts
Snowe
Wafers
Hypocras

Kristen was kind enough to make some of the dishes (the bread, wafers, and breny) and also take a day off from work to go to Columbus with me and serve. Things wouldn't have gone nearly as smoothly without her help (especially as my dishwasher died on Sunday in the middle of preparations). She drove down to Cincinnati in the morning, and we loaded up the van and left just after noon for Columbus. It's a two hour drive, with nothing but flat farmland on both sides, ending in a twisting route through OSU's campus. We found the building where the party was going to be held about 45 minutes ahead of schedule. Then it was unload, park, and get to work. We were just getting the last dishes plated and out onto the buffet table when the guests started showing up.

The food was very well received, with a couple of surprises. The stuffed eggs always do well, as do the pumpes, but I'm not used to people being that excited about the compost. The average American just doesn't seem to go for pickled root vegetables. Maybe academics have more adventurous palates than lesser mortals. Maybe the vegetarian students were really hungry. Whatever the reason, they ate more of it than I expected.

Oddly, the big winner was the hypocras. I'd never worked up a proper recipe for it before (don't ask me why), but they'd requested some kind of medieval beverage, and hypocras was the easiest of the alternatives. Because the party was held on campus, I had to make it a non-alcoholic version - essentially grape juice and powder douce with a little vinegar added to make it taste more like wine.

The only glitch in the whole thing was that there was waaay too much food, which made it all cost more than it should. This was due to a combination of things, including an overestimate of the number of guests (50 instead of the 30 that showed up) and my typical tendency to overfeed people. Got to watch that for future events.

And there's the good news: the CMRS director, Richard Firth Green, seemed very happy with how things turned out and asked if I'd be willing to do similar events in the future. I, of course, said "Yes!"

Kalendarium Hortense - June

The Kalendarium Hortense was published by John Evelyn in 1683. It contains instructions for what a gardener should do throughout the year. The excerpt below is the list of what is to be done in the "Orchard and Olitory¹ Garden" for the month of June.

Sow Lettuce, Chervil, Radish, &c. to have young and tender Salleting.

About the midst of June you may inoculate Peaches, Abricots, Cherries, Plums, Apples, Pears, &c.

You may now also (or in May before) cleanse Vines or exuberant Branches and Tendrels, cropping (not cutting) and stopping the second Joynt immediately before the Fruit, and some of the under branches which bear no fruit; especially in young Vineyards when they first begin to bear, and thence forwards; binding up the rest to Props.

Gather Herbs in the Full to keep dry; they keep and retain their vertue and sweet smell, better dryed in the shade than Sun, whatever some pretend.

Now is your season to distill Aromatic Plants, &c.

Water lately planted Trees, and put moist and half rotten Fearn, &c. about the foot of their stems, having first clear'd them of weeds and a little stirred the earth.

Look to your Bees for Swarms and Casts; and begin to destroy Insects with Hoofs, Canes, and tempting Baits, &c. Gather Snails after Rain, &c.

¹ - Olitory: of or pertaining to, or produced in, a kitchen garden.

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?

Hitting the Sauce Again

Yesterday evening I put the recipe for Sauce for Stekys on the website. This was the indirect result of a puff-piece in the New York Times about "new" cuts of beef.

The Times article essentially talked about a marketing push by the US beef industry to sell inexpensive cuts of beef. While most (all?) of these cuts have been around for a while, they were rarely used in the US. So the beef industry renamed them and is presenting them as the next new thing.

Marketing antics aside, money is tight nowadays, so a cheap but still decent cut of beef sounds like a good idea to me. That's why when I was shopping for groceries last week, and came across a "Flatiron Steak" (sometimes referred to as a "butler's steak" in Europe), I went ahead and bought the thing without any idea of what I'd do with it.

According to the instructions on the package, it was suitable for broiling or grilling, and then should be cut across the grain. No problem. I decided to brush on some olive oil, salt, and pepper and broil it, and serve it with asparagus and herbed pasta.

Of course I can't leave it at that. I worked out any new recipes in a while, so how about a nice medieval English sauce to go with it? A quick search of recipes in "Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books" had me settled on this recipe:

xxxj - To make Stekys of venson or bef. Take Venyson or Bef, and leche and gredyl it vp broun; then take Vynegre and a litel verious, and a lytil Wyne, and putte pouder perpir ther-on y-now, and pouder Gyngere; and atte the dressoure straw on pouder Canelle y-now, that the stekys be al y-helid ther-wyth, and but a litel Sawce; and than serue it forth.

Wine, vinegar, verjuice and spices - nice and straightforward. No verjuice on hand, so I'd have to use a little lemon juice. Hmm. Likely to be runny too - there's nothing in the recipe that acts as a thickener, and cinnamon in unthickened sauces sometimes makes them turn out kind of strange - almost stringy. Ok, so I'll thicken it. I could use wheat starch or rice flour or even eggs as a thickener, but my favorite medieval thickening method is to use bread.

This has to be the coolest trick in the medieval cook's repertoire. You soak the bread in a liquid like broth or wine for a while, strain out the solids, and then cook the liquid with the desired spices until it thickens. Need it to be thicker? Use more bread. The neat part is that while flour or starch thickeners can cause lumps, and eggs can cause the sauce to curdle if overcooked, using bread like this is amazingly tolerant of adverse cooking situations (like cooking in a large pot over a fire with no temperature control). It simply doesn't make lumps or curdle.

So that's what I did. The flatiron steak turned out perfectly, with a convenient gradation of doneness from medium-rare to medium-well. It wasn't as nice as a fillet mignon, but it was certainly better than some cheap steaks I've had. The Steky Sauce? Cindy proclaimed it to be "Yummy" and the kids both liked it. I'd call that a win.

Kalendarium Hortense - May

The Kalendarium Hortense was published by John Evelyn in 1683. It contains instructions for what a gardener should do throughout the year. The excerpt below is the list of what is to be done in the "Orchard and Olitory¹ Garden" for the month of May.

Sow sweet marjoram, Basil, Thyme, hot and Aromatic Herbs and Plants which are the most tender.

Sow Purslan, to have young: Lettuce, large-sided Cabbage, painted Beans, &c.

Look carefully to your Melons; and towards the end of this Month forbear to cover them any longer on Ridges wither with Straw or Matrasses, &c.

Ply the Laboratory, and distill Plants for Waters, Spirits, &c.

Continue Weeding before they run to Seeds.

Now set your Bees at full liberty, look out often, and expect Swarms, &c.

¹ - Olitory: of or pertaining to, or produced in, a kitchen garden.

Food Related Painting of the Week

January: A Kitchen
Antonio Tempesta (Italy, Florence, 1555 - 1630)

January: A Kitchen
(from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

It's been a while since I babbled on about a painting, so it's about time for another.

A few days ago, someone (thanks, Johnnae!) posted a link to this etching to one of the mailing lists I follow. There was a brief discussion about the items and equipment being used and the thread died down. Basically it centered around the spigots at the sink on the left, and the women nearby apparently plucking poultry. Those aren't what first caught my interest in this image.

The first thing I saw was the stark division of the kitchen.

The table in the center splits the kitchen in half, and separates the functions of cooking and service. It also serves to keep servers, dishwashers, and other non-cooks out of the way of the cooks (and vice-versa). This is surprisingly similar to my preferred setup for cooking medieval feasts (and how many - most? - modern restaurant kitchens work as well).

The second thing I saw was that the dining setup wasn't what I expected.

I'm used to seeing either a U-shaped arrangement of tables with the feasters sitting around the outside, or (in smaller or less formal settings) a single table with the feasters sitting around it. Here the tables are set out as one very long table, and it's hard to be sure but I think the feasters are seated only on the side at the far right. On the left side, opposite the table, is what I believe to be a side-board. It has big serving platters on display, and would probably also have an array of sweets or the like set out during the feast.

After these I started looking at smaller details.

Various pots and pans are being stored on high shelves over the sink. Presumably this would help keep them clean and out of the way. Similarly, there are a couple of cooking implements being stored on the hood over the fire.

The food on the plates (bowls? they look kind of deep to be plates) about to be served is covered with another plate. Is it to keep stuff from falling into the food? I don't think so, because the food on the flatter plates isn't similarly covered. Perhaps it's to keep wetter foods from sloshing, or maybe to help keep the food warm until it reaches the feasters.

I initially thought that the things sticking out of the meats being roasted over the fire were the small skewers that help keep the meat from sliding around and to turn when the spit turns, but it looks like they're still on the meat that the cook is putting onto the table to be served. So I suspect those are pieces of fat inserted into the meat to help keep it moist (a process called larding).

Finally, an odd little detail: on the table in the lower right corner of the image is a small round thing that looks like a drawer knob. Is that really a drawer? I don't think I've seen drawers in medieval artwork before, but then again that's not something I've been paying attention to - up until now.

It Must Be Spring!

Looking out the kitchen window this morning, I noticed something looked odd with my quince tree.

Yes, those beautiful pink blossoms are blooming! (Ok, so the picture above is one I took last year - I didn't have enough time this morning to take a new one. I'll try to take some new ones soon).

There are a lot more blossoms this year than last - which only makes sense given that the tree is about two feet taller than it was last spring. Hopefully I'll have better luck and actually get a couple quince from it this year.

More Thoughts on "The Medieval Diet"™

It's been far too long since I posted last. Things got a bit nuts for a while there - a royalty lunch to cook, a feast to help with, taxes, vacation, minor illness, yadda yadda yadda. It's amazing how life can get in the way of the important things in life. Anyways, I thought I'd give a short update on this dietary experiment I've been toying with.

A while back I posted about the similarities between the diet in medieval Europe, the "Flexitarian" diet, and the advice of modern nutritionists. For the past couple of months I've had my family eating roughly according to the following guidelines.

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

Note that I used the word "roughly" above. There were occasions where we swapped the menus for a couple days of the week - usually due to having stuff in the fridge that needed to be cooked before it spoiled. However overall we had more meatless days than the required 3 out of 7 per week (vacationing on the Carolina coast was a bonus - it was more like 5 out of 7 days without meat).

The seasonal vegetables part has actually been kind of fun. I end up buying what's cheaper and having to be a bit creative with it to keep things from getting dull. Of course every now and then I need to resort to frozen veggies out of expediency. Mind you, it's spring. Living on seasonal produce will likely be much harder in the winter.

Was the produce locally grown? Probably not. I just don't have time to go to the farmers markets and such, which leaves me with what's available at the grocery. It probably was all trucked in from hundreds of miles away.

The biggest problem of course is having lunch be the main meal of the day. This has been a total failure so far. The kids are in school and I'm working a traditional 9-5, so we can't get together for a big, home cooked dinner in the middle of the day. I suppose I could pack a larger lunch and go light on supper, but somehow that just doesn't click with me.

Still, we're eating a better balance of foods overall with less red meat, and I'm losing weight (veeeery sloooowly). I guess it's one of those cases of incremental improvement, so I'll keep working at it.

Kalendarium Hortense - April

The Kalendarium Hortense was published by John Evelyn in 1683. It contains instructions for what a gardener should do throughout the year. The excerpt below is the list of what is to be done in the "Orchard and Olitory¹ Garden" for the month of April.

Sow sweet Marjoram, Hyssop, Basil, Thyme, Winter Savory, Scurvey-grass², and all fine and tender Seeds that require the Hot-bed.

Sow also Lettice, Purslian, Caully-flower, Raddish, &c.

Plant Artichoke-slips, &c.

Set French Beans, &c. And sow Turneps to have them early.

You may yet slip Lavender, Thyme, Peneroyal, Sage, Rosemary, &c.

Towards the middle of this Month begin to plant forth your Melons and Cucumbers, and so to the later end; your Ridges well prepared.

Gather up Worms and Snails, after evening showers; continue this after all Summer rains.

Open now your Bee-hives, for now they hatch; look carefully to them, and prepare your Hives, &c.

¹ - Olitory: of or pertaining to, or produced in, a kitchen garden.

² - Scurvey-grass: Cochlearia species; a.k.a. Scurvy grass, Scurvygrass, or Spoonwort.

Searching through the Searches

Apparently I need to be more clear on the functionality of the Medieval Cookbook Search.

Every now and then I like to look through the various log files generated by my web hosts. This allows me to find out if someone like the BBC recently linked to the site, or if some recipe is surprisingly popular, or if there's something wrong with the HTML code, etc.

I've recently become aware that a number of people are entering things into the Medieval Cookbook Search that aren't going to return much in the way of useful information. I originally set the search engine up to find recipes in various medieval sources which contain a particular ingredient. It incorporates a sort of "translation" feature that copes with the wild spelling variations of Middle English. A couple of years later I added the capability of searching for multiple ingredients at the same time (which turned out to be a lot easier than I thought it would be).

What I didn't anticipate when building the indexes though was that some people would enter the name of a recipe. I can add this, but it'll take some time.

I also didn't expect people to enter such things as "food" and "cookery". Just what do they expect to find with those keywords in a bunch of medieval cookbooks? Even stranger, if they mistakenly thought it was a search for the entire website, what did they expect it to return given that the whole website is about "food" and "cookery"?

I can rig up some code so that if nothing is found in the cookbooks, it'll offer a generic search for the whole website (thanks be to Google), which will help with terms like "white", "mousse", and "cookie".

Which brings me to search terms like "Moo Moo". That is just plain silly, and I won't write special code for it (though I suppose I could ...).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bah!

QED

Anyone who has talked to me long enough is probably aware that I am an ardent proponent of digitizing old and out-of-copyright documents and making them publicly available on the Internet. I can provide any number of reasons for doing this, such as the distribution of information to facilitate and promote research, but just this week the world was given a startling example of why we shouldn't keep all of our historical texts in one metaphorical basket.

On Tuesday, the six story building housing the Cologne City Archives collapsed. This building housed many medieval documents, charters, and such, some of which were probably destroyed and all were most likely severely damaged. There was almost no notice that anything was wrong, which means there was no time to get anything out of the building.

Throughout history texts have been lost in this general sort of way. Fires, wars, floods, or just plain age and decay take their toll. The information in newer books isn't as likely to be lost since there are usually multiple copies in various locations, but older documents are typically the only copy, so if we lose that one then the information in it is gone forever.

What makes this particularly sad is that with the current state of technology, the cost of digitizing such documents and widely distributing them (thereby potentially protecting them forever) is almost nothing. Yes, there are some cases where any kind of touch is going to destroy a document, so the digitization process needs to be ultra-high resolution blah blah blah 'cause we're only going to get one chance and we have to do it right, but for the vast majority of books and manuscripts out there this isn't the way it is.

All it takes is a volunteer with a cheap digital camera (which can even be borrowed). They can go into a library and photograph the document. Then the images can be uploaded to public sites like Wikimedia Commons. Others can then stitch the images together and convert them to a PDF file suitable for the Internet Archive's Text Archive, or transcribe them to text for Project Gutenberg. Each time this is done - no matter how small or insignificant the text - it's a gift to the world.

Of course, key in this process is the library that owns the document in question. Some libraries are more than willing to accommodate such amateur archivists. The Indianapolis Public Library for example allowed me to photograph and transcribe A Noble Boke off Cookry. Other libraries though see their rare books as a rare asset, and that the fewer people allowed access to their rare books, the higher the status of their rare books collection (you can imagine how I feel about that). Sometimes libraries have their own digitization process, usually high quality, which since it is usually expensive is therefore subject to budgets and funding cuts and the like - a case of making the best the enemy of the good (and sometimes they only make their digitized collection available to very few, or sell distribution rights to companies like Proquest who charge large subscription fees - again, you can imagine how I feel about that).

Still this is one of the areas where the little guy can make a difference. If you have access to a digital camera and a copyright-free text that isn't publicly available, photograph it (with the owner's permission) and upload it. If you're not sure what text to digitize or how to go about it, I'll be happy to offer suggestions. Heck, even if it's just some obscure Victorian pamphlet on apiaries, I'm sure someone in the future doing research on late 19th century English references to bees will thank you. [Ok, even that sounds interesting to me - I'm such a geek]

On Breakfast

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

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

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

---

Tymes in the day concernynge meales. Cap. 27.

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

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