My boyfriend and I are talking about doing some reenactment markeds – at some point in the future. We are talking about the possibility of going as spiced wine merchants. In the past I have made a spiced white wine, Lutendranck, which is really tasty. So when I had two liter of red wine sitting around and ran into a recipe for hypocras I of course had to try it.
Title: Middelaldermad, Kulturhistorie, kilder og 99 opskrifter
Author: Bi Skaarup, Henrik Jacobsen
Genre: Historical cookbook, middel ages, medieval
Middeladermad starts with a thirty introduction about medieval food and cooking. Followed by 99 recipes for medieval food with sources. The introduction has great infomation, is well researched and is very readable as well. It takes some time to disspell a few myths about medieval food and cooking.
The recipes are well written and easy to follow. They all have source material from the period, mainly from three-four period sources. I have made a few of the dishes and they are easy to work with. So I want to own this one.
Last night I made lamb culotte with baked root vegetables (I can not recommend baked turnip) and this kale salad. The rest of the meal wasn’t very historical inspired but the salad was based of one I found in one of my books about medieval cooking. I thought I would share it with you because it turned out to be pretty yummy.
Frumenty is kind of a wheat pottage made from boiled wheat with the addition of eggs, broth or milk.
Traditionally frumenty is made with wheat, but we didn’t have any and I like barley better so I made it with pearl barley instead which of course changed things a bit. But I find it quite plausible that people would have made it like this as well. I based my version on the one you find on medievalcookery.com. I also left out the safran on the bases that it wouldn’t have been added in my poor man’s version and it’s really just colouring. I also had to reheat the porridge to thicken it, which the original recipe doesn’t do.
As always I was craving sweet this afternoon so I decided to make something sweet after dinner out of the fruit that was sitting around. I had two grumpy pears and a few grumpy apples sitting around as well as some puff pastry in the fridge – which of course meant that I had to do a version of a medieval or early modern pear postej/pie. As fare as I know puff pastry is not really medieval but more of a early modern thing. So lets call it a renaissance pear pie. Yeah that sounds nice. I decided to use a medieval recipe for the filling though. But Denmark was renowned for having old fashioned food tastes, I will call it plausible. Also I really like the taste of powder douce. The renaissance pear pie recipe I was looking at used only ginger and cinnamon though. If I had my postej pastry out of the freezer I would have mead a more medieval pie.
Title: En kulinarisk rejse gennem tiderne. En kogebog med opskrifter fra stenalder til middelalder
Author: Sabine Karg, Regula Steinhauser-Zimmerman, Irmgard Bauer
Genre: Historical cookbook, Neolithic, Paleolithic, roman iron age, bronze age, medieval Europe
I use the Danish word postej to describe this dish but in the English medieval literature they are tend to be called “pye”. What we today would call a pie. Sometimes they are also called a Pâté.
A postej is meat, fish or fruit dish that is inside a container of dough, what in the English medieval kitchen would be called a “coffin” of dough. It was baked in the oven or in a postej-oven which is pretty much a Dutch oven. The dough can be edible or inedible as you please. The postejs I have baked so fare are baked with an edible dough – because anything else seems wasteful to me.
My sister visited my parents’ summer house this week with her new baby and I of course had to come as well. On Tuesday a lot of the family came to visit so we were eight grownups for dinner and a three weeks old baby (who is adorable). I offered to cook for everyone because hey test subjects!
I had had my eyes on trying out more postej1 recipes. After looking in my recipes books and my time frame I set my eyes on a pork and chicken postej2, which is a 1300’s recipe. I also decided to make my game pie as it uses the same crust doughs – and I had made it before and it was good. This time I made it with beef and more grapes which worked really well.
Pebernødder are the perfect Christmas cookie to make with children as they are very easy and the shaping works very well with small grabby hands. I know one of my friends had her two year old “help” when making a batch a few years ago.
The cookies are probably one of the most made Danish Christmas cookies, because they are so easy and because the ones you buy tend to be really borring. I have this recipe from my mother, but I don’t know where she has it from – it could be from her family or from a magazine.