30. 31.
An Appetizer from Le Menagier de Paris
I did this a a quick redaction for the Montengarde Culinary Group, I’ve added in the extra information I didn’t have space on my short documentation to include.
Here is the full recipe from Le Menagier de Paris as translated by Janet Hinson:
Update April 2018: I went back and reworked the entirety of this entry for Kingdom A&S. You can see the documentation here:Stew on Ship and photos here.
28. 29.
At Lionsdale’s Winters Tourney this year I entered the Arts and Sciences competition and won. The theme of
the competition was the chorus of “The Ship Called Lionsdale” which is a filk some of our local members wrote a few years ago. In that theme I decided to make a meal that could have been eaten on that ship. For this I used naval regulations, food preservation, and other, journals, information on the recovered Mary Rose and cookbooks from the 16th century to work out a potential meal.
27.
Well after making this three times in the last year I should probably post it here.
Today’s comes from “The Good Huswifes Jewell” published in 1596. As far as I can tell the Turkey came back to Spain very early after discovering the New World; and by the 1530s it was common enough in England to be anecdotaly one of the king’s favorite meals. By the 1590s it begins appearing in cookery books.
25. 26.
This past weekend my wife and I went to July Coronation. It was a very long court for me to have forgotten my chair, but some very well deserving people were recognized.
After court we went back to Mistress Safiye’s sunshade and got out the brazier, filled it with charcoal, and got to work. It was flatbread day. I’d been planning this one for a while, so I’m very happy with how it turned out.
I did two different versions. One standard flatbread and one desert flatbread.
The first was translated in Medieval cuisine of the Islamic World by Lilia Zaouali (p72). It’s originally from Ibin Razin’s Andalusian cookbook Kitab Fadalat al-khiwan fi tayyibat al-ta’am wa-l-awan (Book of the Excellent Table Composed of the Best Food and the Best Dishes)
Take semolina and moisten it, energetically mixing with a little water and salt. Divide the dough into pieces and knead each piece with clarified butter. Roll it out, first by hand and then with a rolling pin, fold it, add clarified butter, and roll it out again to obtain a very thin layer. For this purpose use a shaubak, which is a piece of carved wood, thick in the center and thin at the extremities. Small lumps of dough can be rolled out three at a time, placing one on top of the other with clarified butter between each layer.
Heat an iron skillet or one of unglazed clay. Take a piece of the rolled out dough and heat it until it has become white and lost all its moisture, at which point remove it from the fire and beat it with the hands in order to separate the layers.
24.
I know I was going to do ale barm bread, but a friend of mine gave me some mead barm at Tir Righ Arts and Sciences back in October. I decided to use that… in November… yeah, this post’s been on the back burner a while.
Mead barm is easy to keep alive, just add honey and water and it will keep growing for a long time. I made three batches of it. I just used my basic medieval bread recipe and used the mead barm instead of the yeast. Because of this I didn’t need to add as much water to make it similar, but more on that in a moment.
First, mead barm does not have as much leavening power as modern bread yeast. Not a big surprise there. I treated it like sourdough and didn’t punch down the dough, as I figured it wouldn’t have a second rise. My first attempt turned out rather flat. I suspect this was because the bread stuck to the bowl it was rising in, and because of that when I took it out I killed a lot of the leaven. Mead barm does not create a very strong leaven. I suspect one of the issues was that there was a very low yeast to liquid content in the barm. I’ll have to try to fix that when I do ale barm.
(Note Sep 6, 2016: I have done more research on various types of coffins and you can see it here)
22. 23.
As promised a month ago, here is my documentation for late 14th and late 16th century coffins.
An examination of pastry coffins from the ends of the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. I am making coffins from two cookery books, one from 1390 (Fourme of Curye) and one from 1597 (The The Second part of the good Hus-wiues Jewell).
My goal here is to compare and contrast the earliest and the latest coffin recipes I have found and to see if their similarities will allow me to assume that they function as a baseline from which to measure other coffin recipes.
When I began this project it was because I had read in too many places[1] that there weren’t any coffin recipes in existence, while others say that there aren’t any from before the latter part of the sixteenth century.[2] I felt that as coffins are a key part of English cookery there had to be a few recipes somewhere. I examined fifteen Middle English and Early Modern English cookery books from 1390 CE to 1597 CE and found references to coffins in eleven of them. Of those eleven, six of them had actual recipes. In total I found fourteen separate coffin recipes.
Although there are a number of general similarities they are exceptional for how often they are not followed. Most of the coffin recipes seem to be prebaked, though there is the occasional exception[3], and some are baked half way, removed, filled and baked again.[4] Most of them seem to have lids, though there is the occasional recipe without a lid.[5] Many of them have the lid raised up by blowing into it. Some have the lid prebaked and a hole cut in it so a gelling agent (like eggs) can be poured into it.[6] Some of the coffin recipes seem to be designed to be eaten, containing sugar or other flavorings,[7] [8] some would probably taste very bad and so do not seem to be designed to be eaten.[9] Most are baked, but some are fried.[10] They seem to be used for all sorts of menu items including desserts. The biggest similarities I could find were: a coffin is a pastry case designed to hold other food for baking or frying, it is often prebaked, it often has a lid. The term “coffin” in this context means a chest, case or box,[11] so I suspect it has more to do with the shape than anything else. Because of this I will use the term “coffin” to mean: a pastry case which has a bottom, sides and a top (with exceptions where referred to in the recipe) and that it will be at least partially prebaked so as to hold its shape.
For this entry I decided to compare the earliest and the latest coffin recipes; I will examine and redact the recipes from Fourme of Curye and The Second part of the good Hus-wiues Jewell and compare them.
More after the break:
21. part 2
Hmmm… I think I should start giving these posts better names. Like Rolof.
Anyway. The next part of my mission is accomplished. I made bread this week that seems to fit the descriptions.
It is thick, and hard to kneed, and has a tight enough crumb that I can easily see the stale version being good for trenchers. It’s also whiteish. Although I haven’t done my flour experiments yet, I imagine that this bread would not be dissimilar in colour to what was eaten in the 16th century.
I kinda winged it this time round. Here is the recipe that I used (created retroactivly):
21.
Ok, so I made the first batch of bread yesterday, and learned a lot.
In kneeding it was definatly “as hard as ye can handle it”, as I had to wet my hands twice while working it for it to kneed properly. The sponge was a bit disapointing. The yeast culture seemed to separate from the water and slow down. This must be why people recomend that you stir the yeast every few hours when doing a low yeast content sponge. Also, I’ve read that if you let the yeast sit in water too long that it exhausts the yeast, but I suspect that’s if you’re not adding the flour for the yeast to eat. I think I’m going to bump the amount of yeast back up to where I had it before. I’m also going to decrease the length of time I let the sponge sit, as with a full ammount of yeast I just have to wake it up, rather than trying to breed it.
