Medieval Cookery
Blomæth Høns – Chicken Dressed As Chicken
Neither chicken, nor something disguised as chicken, it’s chicken disguised as something disguised as chicken; a sort of entremet for the third estate.
Quail Stuffed Grape Leaves
Game birds are more difficult to find for a reasonable price than you’d like – makes you think about buying a shotgun – but I turned up some lovely frozen quail at my local market (The Roslindale Fish Market for those in the Boston area) and did them up with a sort of composite recipe [...]
Mukaffan – Almond Candy from Baghdad
From A Baghdad Cookery Book translated by Charles Perry from Kitab al-Ṭabīḫ, “The Book of Dishes” by Muḥammad bin al-Ḥasan bin Muḥammad bin al-Karīm al-Baghdadi, mid 13th century.
Take a pound of sugar and a third of a pound of almonds or pistachios [we used almonds] and pound everything finely. Knead it hard with [...]
Octopus is a vile fish of little worth – Martino di Como
People have been eating octopus for at least the better part of 4000 years. At some point the popularity of the dish waned outside of the Mediterranean and Africa (or, as in the U.S., never caught on), leaving it as bit of a curiosity in Northern Europe and the Americas. It’s an important [...]
Chevreaux Nouveaux
The Viandier of Taillevent (see bibliography for details) is a collection of manuscript cookbooks spanning the 13th to 15th centuries grouped by convention under the banner of Tirel de Taillevent, a 14th century cook to Charles V. It’s a classic of medieval cookery, less famous but more cookable than The Forme of Cury.
Chevreaux, metez [...]
Crudifest, March 2010
Images from crudifest 2010 – in the excitement we seem to have missed taking any pictures of some lovely 1654 apple pyes, but so be it. I’ll give a blow by blow of the recipes and methods soon – the “wild yeast bread” was left overnight to attract wild yeasts to leaven it, but [...]
Couscous Instructional Video
Preparing the couscous for steaming:
Ancient pasta month continues with ravioli [and rauioles and rafioules]
Ravioli appears to pre-date most of its close relatives – the dumplings, perogis and other stuffed pastas that are found all over Europe. This delicious morsel makes a somewhat surprising early appearance in the late 14th century English cookbook, Forme of Cury, written by “the chief Master Cooks of King Richard II”. Although [...]
Apple Fritters, Eden, and Ale Batter
It’s basically a beer batter with apples – I used a bit of saffron for color and added a touch of active dry yeast to a 1/4 cup of warmed beer to make sure that it would rise enough. You can also make the batter the night before and it will usually rise a [...]
Psychoactive Fritters? If only.
Continuing a month of fritters with Martino di Como’s Sage Fritters:
Simply, sage leaves dredged in a mixture of flour, eggs, sugar, cinnamon, and saffron. Due to a combination of viscosity problems and the unforeseen characteristics of fritter batter/sage leaf adhesion, the results look more like bug fritters than sage fritters. Trying to rectify [...]
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