Mead barm bread

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.

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An Examination of Coffins

(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.

Summary

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.

Introduction

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:

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On Food Research

I’m back from Tir Righ A&S.  My shortened research will be posted here later this week.  Suffice to say my coffins went over very well.  I’m not planning on any major competitions for a while now, but I have some minor things I’m trying out, including trying to make bread Read more…

Busy busy

I’ve been super busy with work and projects the last month and haven’t had a chance to post here. I’m currently working on a single entry for Tir Righ A&S this month.  It’s my return to coffins, this time I”m focusing on the coffin itself and am redacting some coffin Read more…

Studenting

At Tir Righ August Investiture I was taken as a student by Viscountess Safiye al-Konstantiniyye.  She has been helping me with my A&S for about six months now, and we agreed on the studenting at AT war this year.  She’s amazing at research, and focuses on Turkish clothing/accessories and metal Read more…

Sep 8&9 practice

Had a great two practices this week.  I’m sore and a bit bruised, but none the worse for wear.

The first practice was Lionsdale’s Wednesday practice.  It went really well.  It was our first day indoors, the hard packed dirt is amazing on the knees.  It lets you practice a bit harder without the knee pain that I get occasionally from lunging too much on concrete.  We started out with a bear-pit to warm up, as we’re all getting ready for the fall tournament season and shaking off the dust from war fighting.  I haven’t fought in a tourney since Sir Eddies, and I”m planning on fighting this weekend, so I needed the practice.

With the bear-pit I started working on the semi-refuse guard that we were taught a few weeks ago.  It seems to work well for defence and fits in perfectly with my current style.  It’s very aggressive while allowing me to defend quickly.  I was still having some issues with controlling my opponents blade, but not too much.

After warming up with just the three of us (Sebastian, Alejandro, and myself) a fourth person got there, Cion.  He’s working on getting authorized, so we decided to test him out on the basics.  We had him teach us how to stand, how to lunge, cut, and Parry.  He taught us how to use a dagger, a shield, and a baton.  We didn’t work on cloak, as we didn’t have one with us that day.  He’s doing pretty good.  Then we quizzed him about the rules for different things like engagement, holds, melee, and weapon requirements.  He’s got most of those down too.  That just left combat.  So we started a four man bear-pit to test him out.  He seems safe, though we haven’t tried unsafe activities against him yet, which is a major portion of the auth test, dealing with others mistakes.

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August 25

Had a great time at Fencing last night.  Wait, what?  This is a food blog now?  No, this is a fencing blog.  Hmmm…. to be fair my Laurel was at practice today, does that connect my interests enough?  Ok then.  Back to the blog. There were five fencers last night, Read more…