A&S 50

Spinach Tart

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I was doing the prep work on January’s Culinary Group and I realized I never posted the Spinach Tart. Now this is an easy dish we usually use for potlucks. It’s fast, takes very little time to make, and everyone loves it. We’ve done it as a big tart, we’ve done it as individual tarts, we’ve even done it gluten free.

We originally found the recipe at Medievalcookery.com and went back to the source then worked from there, but we have also made it the way Daniel Myers described and it’s just as good.

The recipe is from one of my go-to cook books Le Menagier de Paris as translated by Janet Hinson.

TO MAKE A TART, take four handfuls of beet-leaves, two handfuls of parsley, one handful of chervil, a bit of turnip-top and two handfuls of spinach, and clean them and wash them in cold water, then chop very small: then grate two kinds of cheese, that is one mild and one medium, and then put eggs with it, yolk and white, and grate them in with the cheese; then put the herbs in the mortar and grind them up together, and also add to that some powdered spices. Or in place of this have first ground up in the mortar two pieces of ginger, and over this grate your cheeses, eggs and herbs, and then throw in some grated old pressed cheese or some other such on to the herbs, and carry to the oven, and then make it into a tart and eat it hot.

 

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By Tomas de Courcy, ago

A Meal Onboard Ship in the 16th Century

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.

 

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At Lionsdale’s Winters Tourney this year I entered the Arts and Sciences competition and won.  The theme of

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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.

 

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By Tomas de Courcy, ago

Roast Turkey

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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.

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By Tomas de Courcy, ago

Flatbread

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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.

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By Tomas de Courcy, ago

Mead barm bread

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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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By Tomas de Courcy, ago

Medieval Style Bread Part 3

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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.

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By Tomas de Courcy, ago
Apicius text New York Academy of Medicine

The Food of the Late Roman Legion

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This was my entry for Avacal/Tir Righ War, which is a war between neighboring principalities.  I was thankful to get to use a friends full camping kitchen to prepare these dishes instead of ours.  The dishes aren’t very complicated, but with four dishes that all had to be ready about the same time it was tough.  The judges loved the taste of all of the dishes, which I was surprised about, I wasn’t expecting them all to taste as good as they did.  I lost some points by not using period cooking vessles or heat source, though I did use period cooking methods.  But I gained points by making my own liquamen and using spelt instead of a more modern grain.

I’ll be doing more research into period grains in the future.  It was something that I did at the last minute for this entry, but I can’t imagine how bad the biscuts would have been had they been made with bread flour instead of cracked and lightly ground spelt.

Summary

Roman legionary food from the fourth century.  The recipes I have created are adapted from recipes in The Roman Cookery Book: a Critical Translation of The Art of Cooking by Apicus. Which is a translation of a fourth century Roman cookbook.  The originals of the recipes I’ve adapted are later in the documentation.

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By Tomas de Courcy, ago