Recipes of the Week 1

Initially posted about six weeks ago, this was the first installment of what's become an irregular but at least once a week thing for me. The modernized versions here are mine, all mine, and are heretofore unpublished. Feel free to share them without charge. If you'd like to print any of my recipes, email me and ask.


To make poor Knights
From:
The Queen's Closet Opened
Incomparable Secrets in physick, chyrurgery,
preserving and candying &c...
Printed for Nathaniel Brook
at the Angell in Cornhill, 1655

Cut two penny loaves in round slices dip them in half a pint of Cream or fair water, then lay them abroad in a dish and beat three Egs and grated Nutmegs and sugar, beat them with the Cream, then melt some butter in a frying pan, and wet the side of the toasts and lay them in on the wet side, then pour the rest upon them, and so fry them, serve them in with Rosewater, sugar and butter.

This recipe requires almost no translation. I find that three eggs and half a pint of cream (light) plus about a tablespoon of sugar and half a teaspoon of grated nutmeg does five or six slices of bread trimmed into circles (or untrimmed), though the instructions make our little modern pans too small to cook as directed. My remedy was to dip one side of each slice, lay aside on a tray gooey side down, then melt a tablespoon of butter and tuck as much bread into the skillet as you can and then pour over the proper percentage of liquid (eyeball it or use the tablespoon you measured the sugar with). Flip once and they'll brown very quickly. Repeat as needed and keep a decent amount of butter in the pan.
Experimenting with rosewater as a sprinkle I discovered that a teaspoon of sugar dissolved in a quarter cup of rosewater sprinkled over the hot Knights was wonderful. But I like rosewater and that ratio imparts a lot of rose flavor, so play with it to taste, but the rosewater really adds something to the final product.


A Tart of Ryce
From: The Good Huswifes Jewell, 1596

Boyle your Rice, and put in the yolkes of two or three Egges into the Rice, and when it is boyled, put it into a dish, and season it with Suger, Sinamon and Ginger, and butter, and the juyce of two or three Orenges, and set it on the fire againe.

Everyone has a version of this one, and they're all different, so why not me, too? Earlier rice dishes almost invariably called for the rice to be cooked in almond milk but by this period rice cooked in fayre water was cropping up, and with the addition of orange juice I figured that one should boyle your Rice in plain water. Awhile back I gave up on long-grain rice and medieval cooking. The results just don't seem right. I use medium grain, usually something like arborio bought in bulk at WinCo. Rice is easy - one part dry rice to two parts water, mix, bring to a boil, lid, turn the heat down and stay out of the pot for 20 minutes. Turn the heat off, remove the pot from the burner and leave for another five before taking the lid off. Or use the modern miracle called a rice cooker.

My version of the above recipe:
2 cups water
1 cup medium grain rice rice
three egg yolks
1/4 cup sugar (I like it sweet, no less than two tablespoons but
sweeten to your taste)
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon (like above, no less than 1/4 tsp. to taste if
you like less spice)
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1-2 tablespoons butter
juice of three oranges (that's about a cup for modern oranges but
we're thinking 16th century so no more than 3/4ths of a cup and more like 2/3rds)

Mix rice and water in a pan, bring to a boil, lid, reduce heat to simmer, and leave for 15-20 minutes. Remove from heat and mix in three egg yolks, slightly beaten, Here I flipped the cooked rice into a casserole dish and sprinkled the salt, cinnamon and ginger over it then poured the orange juice over that, dotted it with the butter like a pie, and stuck it into the oven (350 degrees) for about ten minutes until the orange juice had mostly disappeared from puddling at the bottom of the dish. Others have suggested mixing in the butter, sugar, spices and orange juice and simmering until the liquid was mostly absorbed.

Not having been able to get small, medievally bitter oranges I went with the sharpest unsweetened frozen concentrate I could get and mixed in a bit of lemon juice to tart it up some. Then I destroyed my efforts to make it tart with a lot of sugar. It was wonderful. I envision this served with pork roast and herbed carrots sometime. My batch didn't survive long enough to become part of a meal. This would probably also make a wonderful cold side dish - extremely refreshing.


Erbolates
From: Forme of Curye, 14th c.

Take parsel, myntes, sauerey, & sauge, tansey, veruayn, clarry, rewe, ditayn, fenel, southrenwode, hewe hem & grinde hem smale, medle hem up with Ayrenn. do butter in a trape. & do þe fars þerto. & bake it & messe it forth.

The odd characters in the above are where the letter thorn should be, which is the soft th in 'the' and 'thing'. Depending on your browser, you might even see the real thing.

The trap is, of course, a pie dish, which in period would have been made of a stiff pastry which existed as much to hold the ingredients together as to eat. Frequently I find instructions to make the trap (or coffin) nice and sturdy in period recipes, and pie lids were often beautifully decorated and apparently re-used, as the proper way to deal with a pie with a top crust was to lift the crust off and scoop out the interior and serve rather than slice in wedges as we modern folks do. Since I can't make a decent short pie crust to save my skin, I totally appreciate this method and treatment of the pastry.

I've found that taking two pie crusts and doubling them, that is pressing one in atop the other that's already in the dish, makes a fairly sturdy but still edible 'trap'. It also looks interesting if you lift your crusts into a square dish and bake in that instead of the slant-edged pie tins that are so annoyingly modern. One lady I've known used a springform pan and popped the rim off to leave a rather vertical side to her tarte which again, I appreciated very much. I love a well-crafted pie or tarte but the aluminum Plush Pippin pan beneath shakes me out of my medieval frame of mind enough that I find myself drawn toward inedible, but cool-looking crusts.

I've said it before: I can't make short crust, so I rely on frozen, and for this I doubled, tilting the second pan and then laying the crust in on top of the other before filling, having brushed the lower with a bit of water to stick them together. This results in something tough but you can peel the pie tin right off it and serve it on a plate and that looks pretty nifty.

You can also make this without any crust at all and it sets nicely. I prefer it that way. The eggs will hold their shape just fine out of the pie plate and if made in glass, slide right out. I highly suggest using the 'trap' as nothing more than something in which to cook the erbolates, meaning no crust.

My version of Erbolates:
crust for two 9" deep-dish pies, or thick crust lining a 8" square (seriously optional)
cake pan (you need depth here) is using crust, pie tin if not
six eggs, beaten
2 tablespoons butter
enough herbs to make about 1/2 cup chopped. The recipe calls for:
- parsley
- mint (always peppermint, never spearmint)
- savory
- sage
- tansy
- vervain
- clary (clary sage)
- rue
- dittany
- fennel leaves
- southernwood (Artemisia abrotanum - this stuff's pretty awful)
so pick what you can find or like - I found a few dried at the herbal remedies place, of all things, and found many of them terribly bitter so suggest you taste and balance out with parsley and savory and a bit of mint to taste. Dried herbs work fine here but are, naturally, concentrated so balance with fresh parsley (did I mention go with flat-leaved because it's better than garnish parsley?) and fennel leaves for bulk. You shouldn't need more than a teaspoon of any one sort of dried herb.
(I also made a half-size once in a small iron skillet using entirely dried herbs, just a mixture of what I had on hand with only a nod to the list above. At about a tablespoonful of dried bits I was hitting the limit of how much should be included and they rose in the baking process and turned the top a funny dark green, but the taste was fine.)

Wash, dry and chop the herbs then mix into the beaten eggs. Melt the butter in your baking dish in the oven, or into the bottom of the unbaked pie crust, also in the oven. Pull the pan out and fill with egg and herb mixture, return and bake at 325 degrees for 30-40 minutes or until nicely set (longer without a crust, up to 45 minutes). Salt lovers will need to sprinkle liberally on the finished product but I highly suggest you add none before baking to give the punch of the herbs a chance to shine without the addition.

How to Re-Create a Recipe

First, if I may, a bit of semantics. To redact something is to write it out, write it down, edit it for publication or revise text. Certainly sometimes recipes are redacted by researchers of historic cookery, but we are usually re-creating or interpreting a recipe instead, particularly when experimenting with measurements and weird or obscure ingredients.

Now, when tackling a recipe that lists a bunch of ingredients, implies that the reader knows what 'appropriate spices' and such are, and otherwise is intended as a guide for someone who has done this before in an instruction period with their master or mother, I rely on my 'master' and mother. My 'master' is the collection of cookery books (modern and period) which I have accumulated and used in my lifetime, and my 'mother' is usually grandmother because as soon as I could reliably stir my mother pretty much stopped cooking because she hated it. My grandmother, however, raised five kids during the Depression, and trust me, the cooking education I got from someone who was rationed four pounds of meat a week for six people (she lost her eldest at age 5 in 1931) was invaluable for this sort of cooking.

I've come to the point where I try to ignore the 'modern' version supplied in a great many collections of period recipes. The book writer took liberties with the original. How they can translate 'sugar a grete deal' to one teaspoon is beyond me, and they sometimes seem to think we're too stupid to find out what certain ingredients are and find them or acceptable substitutes. I work from the original words, perhaps brought into modern English, and using the occasional help in figuring out what certain terms are (the online Middle English Dictionary and Anglo-Norman Dictionary are very helpful) so I can start by being as accurate as possible. Remember that what fails can meet up with a can of cream of something soup and become casserole or a batch of vanilla pudding or ice cream and become dessert, so don't worry about a lack of success. You won't waste any food.

Read the recipe. Then go take a shower or something so you can think about it a bit. Relate it to what you know about cooking, how to handle the various ingredients, dishes that use similar ones. Go back to the recipe later and read it again, noting whatever you missed the first time. Reconsider what's modern and similar. You'll begin to formulate an idea or proportions and measures. If necessary, look up a few recipes in modern books to help. Put the modern books back down, they're only for ideas.

Read the recipe again and begin assembling ingredients. Get half again more than you think you'll need of pretty much everything (you can always make a half-batch later or put it into a frittata, but not having enough will stop you cold.). Start playing with your food. Handle the packaging, read the ingredients list if they have one, look at it. Feel it, learn its texture, mass, scent. Get out utensils and pretty much every measuring thing you have, and lots and lots and lots of bowls. You'll maybe use half of them but if you want to dump two tablespoons of rice flour without adding it to the mix a clean bowl nearby is very handy.

Read the recipe again. Measure. Ballpark it, don't worry about leveling and all the minutiae of distressingly accurate modern cooking, just dump what seems right into separate bowls. Use what you know of cooking, your experience, and that little voice in your ear that whines, "that's too much salt" or "oh, come on, you like dates, add more!" or your 'mother' saying, "Too much liquid, it will never set at this rate." Check a modern cookbook for a similar recipe to decide what heat settings to use. Put the cookbook away again.

Make something. Whole batch, half-batch, whatever you feel comfortable with. While you're adding ingredients, watch it. If it looks too scant, add more. If it seems to be right and you still have half a cup, consider it right. Play with your food. If it's safe, taste it while you're working. Add all flavor-adding ingredients to suit your own taste. Don't omit a listed ingredient, but feel free to make it a token amount. Cook it.

Taste the finished product. Have friends in, SCA or modern (but warn them that it's 'foreign' so their palates won't get stuck on 'ewww' and negate the help), for a critique. Have stuff on hand to fix anything that's awful. Dead cakes make good syllabub and you can do amazing things with cream soup and a casserole dish with meat that's just not right. Figure out what you need more of, less of, none of, might consider adding.

Now you're ready to do an educated re-creation of that period recipe. Get more ingredients, learn from your previous experience, and make it again with alterations. I'll bet you it comes out good. Then write it down (redact it!) to save the information you've discovered.

It can take hours, days, or a week, but when you're done you've just taught yourself to cook in a period manner. And have one dish that's your own. And, hopefully, gotten over the worry that you'll be unable to achieve culinary pleasure for yourself and others.

I scared many of my kitchen crew by not listing measurements on spices and other augmentations used in the recipes for the Chateau feast. And the one dish that came out badly? The one I cooked all by myself without help from a set recipe. I burned the blancmange. Everyone who had to 'season to taste' and 'add until it looks/smells right' instructions came out with wonderful dishes that were met with pleasure and delight from the feasters.

Don't be afraid of your food. It and you are partners in life, and there is quite literally no 'wrong' way to re-create a period dish using the original ingredients. (Like all period cooks went to the CIA? Suuure.) And you'll end up having fun, too.

Author/Book Report - Ken Albala

The author actually has a blog on this same system. He might find this and read it sometime. I hope so; it would be wonderful to be in touch with him.

This is a loose opinion piece on two books by Ken Albala. I have not completely read either book, and so it will be by nature slightly loose and cannot be considered a thorough study of either book. I have not had the opportunity to read any of his other works. There, all the caveats.

I also just discovered that the author has a blog called Ken Albala's Food Rant. I recommend it, if only for the image on the latest (September) page of the pipkin cooking in his fireplace full of a 16th century rabbit recipe. He has a nice, personal, insight into food and food culture, so far.

Now, on to the books. From the my local library system I got two of his works:
Food in Early Modern Europe, by Ken Albala. 260 pages.
Greenwood Press, 2003. ISBN: 0313319626
Cooking in Europe, 1250-1650, by Ken Albala. 153 pages.
Greenwood Press, 2006. ISBN: 0313330964
(I am apparently the first person to ever check these books out, as some of the pages weren't thoroughly trimmed and I've had to gently separate them at the edges.)

The first is a treatise on the subject. The second is a cookbook of sorts. I'll deal with each volume separately.

Food in Early Modern Europe
His historic scope seems to be 1492 with the discovery of the New World to 1800+, which makes much of the book post-period. It doesn't suffer any for this, however, and is still a resource for the SCA's time period.

I respect the author for his interest in food and culinary history, but would not recommend this book as more than a casual source. Unlike other books in this genre, the author opines on various subjects without giving sources for his information, and I have caught at least one serious factual inaccuracy. I also find myself a bit dismayed at the lack of actual bibliography, the scarcity of notes, and the conspicuous absence of certain well-established sources from his Further Readings list.

Albala states that table manners were invented in the early modern timeperiod, without any reference to where he got his information. [1] This would likely come as a surprise to Thomasin of Zerclaere, an Italian from Trieste who in about 1215 wrote Der Wälsche Gast (The Italian Guest) for a German audience in which a great many table manners were outlined [2]. Although Albala couldn't have listed Strong (my source) in his Suggested Further Readings as it postdates his book, he does list Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massino Montinari's Food: A Culinary History which states specifically, "Numerous normative texts devoted to good manners began to appear at the beginning of the twelfth century." [3] Honestly, I find this a bit annoying.

Another point of interest factually is his insistence that bowls were for soup from an early period. While this might be so, he doesn't give any sources for this claim, and everything else I've read thus far has indicated that bowls were for drinking and that pottages and other runny foods were sopped with bread from the trencher. If there is evidence for bowls for runny foods early on it would have been a good thing to provide the source information; as it is I find myself wondering if he's over-generalizing or misinterpreting sources.

However, I do like this book, even if I recommend using caution and comparison to information from other writings in the food history genre. For one thing, there is a nice listing of ingredients and another of cooking methods. Both are pleasant additions to a book like this, though again I find myself bemoaning the lack of footnotes or source links and appearance of personal speculation over interpretation of information. And second, Albala cares about what he's presenting. He has obviously dabbled in actually preparing food from primary sources, and in fact states that he will not interpret nor present 'modern' versions of recipes for the reader, instead giving us the original text in a readable-by-modern-English-speaking-persons format. I respect that.

He also lays out modern food culture and those things which have caused great changes even in the last century in contrast to how things were in history with insight I find myself thoroughly appreciating. This man recognizes how things have changed and wants the reader to, also. Over-generalized, perhaps, but touched on in a manner I haven't seen so plainly addressed before.

In summary, read the book and enjoy but be aware that his facts might or might not be accurate. I highly recommend checking anything he says (yes, anything - in my eyes one or two mistakes potentially taint the whole thing) against other works. But do trust him to present recipes in as close to the original format as is feasible for the scope of his book.


Cooking in Europe 1250-1650
I want this book! This volume is part of a series, Daily Life Through History, and concentrates entirely upon recipes from primary sources. Unlike Food in Early Modern Europe it is both well-annotated and has a fine, fine bibliography. And like that other book, he hasn't given any modern version of any recipe, not even measurements. The contents are arranged by time period, broken down into the middle ages, Renaissance, and late Renaissance/Elizabethan eras, but he has also (joy!) given us lists of recipes by country (modern, period geographical region), type, and listed recipes for special occasions (including food for the sick). And if that's not fine enough, the index is by subject including ingredient. You can look up onions and get page numbers for every recipe which includes onions.

Every recipe has a bit of information beneath it. Sometimes this is insight from Albala's personal knowledge as a historic cook, sometimes it's factual information about ingredients or other intricacies of cooking. And each and every recipe is presented in as close to the original format as can be while translating it into modern English. He doesn't omit ingredients, he doesn't act as though his readers are
too dumb to go out and find verjuice if they need it. He respects his readers and writes for those of us interested in food history rather than making it 'seem medieval' using whatever we can get at Albertson's.

This is a later volume than the other book and I think Albala is shaping up well as a food writer for we in the SCA interested in truly cooking period food. The book is probably somewhat overpriced at $40.51 (alibris .com) to $53.50 (powells.com) but I still want it.

- Teceangl

[1] Albala, Ken, Food in Early Modern Europe, p. xv: "Even such
apparently commonplace things as forks and table manners were first
introduced in this period."
[2] Strong, Roy, Feast, ppg. 68-69 referencing William Michael Rossetti, Italian Courtesy Books.
[3] Flandrin, Jean-Louis and Massino Montinari, ed., Food: A Culinary History, in the article 'Mind Your Manners: Etiquette at Table' by Daniela Romangnoli, pg. 330.

First post

I was never going to have a blog. What's the point? If anyone cares about what I have to say, they can ask me directly. Or so I thought until I started posting my musings, commentary and recipes to mailing lists and it struck me that a place where everything could be archived, and I could put crossover information, would be a good idea.

I will likely be casual and unscheduled and use this space as an archive as much as anything. The look of things will change periodically and it might get slightly chaotic. I'll forget to add stuff. Feel free to email me if you think something should be here, want something here, can't find something, whatever.

Now, why a blog? Well, I'm in the Society for Creative Anachronism and in the SCA I do many things. Everyone in the SCA does many things. It's the ultimate dabbler's organization. Right now my two concentrations of interest are heraldry and food lore, specifically cooking. So I've created this space as a repository for whatever I have to say about pre-1650 food lore and recipes and whatever else comes to mind that's related. So here it is, for whatever it's worth, and I hope that it proves useful and informative.