Little Sugar Pies

(Maestre Robert "Libre del Coch" 1520, translation from "Original Mediterranean Cooking" B Santich) - redaction is my own.

Take a pound of almonds and blanch them. And grind them without adding either water or stock, so that they become very oily, and the oilier they are, the better. And take one and half pounds of white sugar, well pounded, and mix it with the almonds. And when these are mixed, if it is still a bit stiff, add a little rosewater. And season it with a little ginger, to your taste. Then take pastry made with flour and eggs and sweet oil, and fill the pastry with the sugar and the almonds. Then take oil and put it on the fire in a frying pan. And when it boils, put in the little pies, and cook them until they take on the colour of gold. And when you take them from the fire, pour over melted honey. And then sprinkle them with sugar and powdered cinnamon. 

You will see that I put less sugar in than the original recipe 

350g ground almonds 350g icing sugar 1 tsp rosewater 2 tsp ginger ½ cup wine ½ cup oil 1 egg flour; about 2 and ½ cups Caster sugar Cinnamon

Mix the almonds, icing sugar, rose water and ginger to make a firm paste like a marzipan.

While the original recipe for once does in fact give ingredients for the pastry, I played a little with it, and used a little wine in the pastry, as this gives it a wonderfully crisp texture. Mix the oil, wine and eggs, and gradually add the flour, to make a soft sticky dough. Sprinkle a board with flour, and lightly flour a rolling pin. Roll out the dough and cut out rounds. Place a little of the marzipan mixture on a round, fold in half and pinch closed (you may find that wetting the edges lightly with water will help them stick together) or run a fork around the edge.
Deep fry at 170 degrees until golden. Immediately after removing them from the oil, put them on a plate and drizzle honey over the top.
Move to drain on a draining rack (over a tray of some sort!) and then sprinkle with cinnamon and caster sugar.

Duke's powder, powder douce, powder forte - medieval spice mixtures

I thought I should type up some of the notes I have taken on this matter, rather than keeping them on a rather scrappy piece of paper.    This is simply a list of the spice blends from a number of medieval cookbooks, and will hopefully grow.  The first one from Le Menagier is one of my favourites.

Le Menagier de Paris 

14 oz cinnamon
1 oz ginger
1 oz grains of paradise
1/6 oz nutmeg
1/6 oz galingale
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1 oz and 1 drachma (1/8th of an oz) white ginger
1/4 oz cinnamon
1/8 oz grains of paradise
1/8 oz cloves
1/4 oz sugar

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Duke's powder

To make powdered hippocras, take a quarter of very fine cinnamon selected by tasting it, and half a quarter of fine flour of cinnamon, an ounce of selected string ginger, fine and white, and an ounce of grain of Paradise, a sixth of nutmegs and galingale together, and bray them all together. And when you would make your hippocras, take a good half ounce of this powder and two quarters of sugar and mix them with a quart of wine, by Paris measure. And note that the powder and the sugar mixed together is the Duke's powder.

Frati 15th century Italy

1/4 cloves
1 oz ginger
1 oz cinnamon
same quantity bay leaf

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Libro de Guisados:

Spices for common sauce

3 parts cinnamon
2 parts cloves
1 part ginnger
1 part sugar?? (I can't read my own notes there... must check)
and a little ground coriander and a little saffron

Spices for Clarea
3 parts cinnamon
2 parts cloves
1 part ginger

Dukes Powder
1/2 oz cinnamon
1/8 cloves
1 pound sugar
a  little ginger

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Powder Blanche (Haven of Health)
2 oz sugar
1/4 oz ginger
1/8 oz cinnamon

Doucettes - Honey and saffron tarts

Doucettes: From the Harlein collection in the British Library, manuscript 279 (which is 15th century), recipe XV in the "Vyaunde Furnez"/"Dyuerse Bake Metis" section. 

This recipe is one of the most classic and popular tarts ever served at medieval events, and for good reason - when made well they are glorious - lightly sweet and delicate honeyed tarts with a beautiful golden tint. In this recipe I am not going to get into the pie crust itself - that discussion is for another day, but am giving you a nice easy recipe for the contents.  Give it a try!  I use honey rather than sugar because I love that special flavour you get from honey, but you can make it with sugar instead. 

Doucettes -- Take Creme a gode cupfulle & put it on a straynoure; (th)anne take (y)olkys of Eyroun & put (th)er-to, & a lytel mylke; (th)en strayne it (th)orw a straynoure into a bolle; (th)en take Sugre y-now, & put (th)er-to, or ellys hony forde faute of Sugre, (th)an coloure it with Safroun; (th)an take (th)in cofyns, & put in (th)e ovens lere, & lat hem ben hardyd; (th)an take a dysshe y-fastenyd on (th) pelys ende; & pore (th)in comade in-to (th)e dyssche, & fro (th)e dyssche in-to (th)e cofyns; & when (th) don a-ryse wel, take hem out, & serue hem forth."

Doucettes decorated with almonds

Doucettes  -- Take a good cupful of cream and put it through a strainer, then take yolks of eggs and add them to it, and a little milk, then strain it through a strainer  into a bowl. Then take enough sugar, and add it, or honey in stead of sugar, then color it with saffron; then take your coffins(crusts), and put them in the oven empty, and let them harden, then take a dish fastened to the end of your baking peel and pour your filling into the dish, and from the dish into the coffins, and when they rise well, take them out, and serve them forth.

Redaction by Kiriel (for one disposable pie tray)

2 large egg yolks
125mls cream
75ml milk
2 tsp honey
3 strands of saffron

Pre-bake a pie shell. Stir the egg yolks,cream, milk and honey till well blended (don't whisk or beat). Grind your saffron in a mortar and pestle (adding just a quarter of a teaspoon of milk into the pestle can help extract the colour) and add the powder to the liquid ingredients. 

Pour into the hot pie shell and bake in a moderate oven for about 20 minutes to half an hour, until the mixture is set.  If you are unsure about the set, give the tart a very gentle shake - it should wobble just a little. This isn't a very sweet tart, and if you like things to be sweet, you could up the honey a touch. *

What to do with the 2 egg whites? I make macaroons or marzipans!

* ps I am told these freeze and defrost perfectly!

Picnics and Potluck feasts... what to bring?

Well, a first rule of thumb for picnics and potlucks is don't bring any dish containing: corn, tomatoes, potatoes, capsicum, peanuts or chocolate. That is because all of these ingredients are “new world” foods and, although they may have made it back to Europe within the SCA's period, in general they just were not eaten.

Super easy and inexpensive dishes to make:

Compound Salat

Leek Soup

Pease Pies

Rice pudding

Mushrooms and leeks

Fartes of Portingale

Eggs in mustard sauce

Macaroons aka French Bisket Bread

Apple pie

Pears in Red Wine (Pears in Confyt)

Offella (Italian cheesecake pastries)

Cheese fritters

Mushroom pasties

Easy but fancier dishes to make:

Honey and saffron tart (Doucettes)

Brie tart

Veal stew

Salmon poached in beer

Duck pies

Roast meat (note, generally in period meat was boiled then roasted)

Hedgehogs

Ravioli 

Sugar Pies

Bizcochos (Spanish Biscotti)

Marzipans for invalids (if you are feeling brave)

Slightly more complex dishes

Oranges of Xativa (Spanish donuts)

Dishes you can buy to bring:

A cheese platter

Antipasto (see rule of thumb)

Meat pie

Nuts (see rule of thumb)

Pork pie

Dolmades

Cold meats

Strapped for cash?:

Bread

an apple pie

Fresh fruit

Salad ingredients (see rule of thumb)

peas

beans

Roast chicken

Of possible period crackers

I am half cross posting this from a discussion on the Medieval and Renaissance cooking and recipes group on Fbook, partly so I will remember to actually give it a try soon. Someone asked about medieval crackers, which turned into a discussion about bread, which turned into a discussion on toast and whether toasted bread would have been served to an English lord in the Saxon period. 

This discussion got me hunting and I found a recipe for "A grilled cake with chicken filling".  This provided me with a lovely opportunity for my favourite hobbyhorse... critical thinking and questioning assumptions.

So let me share the story with you as it happened, because well, I just found the whole discussion fascinating and exciting.


The recipe is from Manuscript W (1213 - from the Herzog August Biobliothek of Wolfenbuttel, Germany) of the collection of manuscripts dubbed by Grewe and Hiatt as the Libellus de arte coquinaria (from the 2001 publicationof the book).

The recipe is for making a thin dough of eggs and flour, frying it and topping it with chicken. Pretty straight forward eh?  

So here is my conversation on it:

Me:  The original text says "Item, nym eigere unde mel; werke daraff eynen dunnen dech. Sette dat uppe eyn iseren unde sla eigere myt mele unde gutdarin". The translation offered by Grewe and Hieatt is "Next, take eggs and flour. Make it into a thin dough: onto a gridiron pour [the] eggs beaten with flour". 
I don't have a word of medieval Low German vocabulary, but I would love to have clarification on the translation of the word 'pour' and whether it could be translated in a different slant, if you think of the dough as being less of a pancake dough and more like a bread dough.... anyone out there have Low German?

Response: sounds like a crepe.

Me: It does indeed, if you pour.. but if you think of the words 'thin dough' as being less a batter and more along the lines of thinly rolled dough (for example pasta dough is just flour and eggs), you can see why the word translated as 'pour' makes such a difference. Is the word 'pour' or is it 'set it' or 'place it' or 'put it', and the context of thinking of it as a batter made the translator translate it as pour? Looking at the original text, I think maybe the word 'Sette' is the relevant word, and the online low medieval German dictionary I found translates that as 'setzen', which is modern German for 'set'. Which gives the possibility of it being a much thicker dough. See what I mean?

Response (from someone is a native German speaker): Kiriel you are very likely right that "sette" is to set it upon the irons, Like waffles.

Me: Thanks. See now this is one of the things that excites me about medieval cookery! We may well be the first people in 800 years to look at this recipe and see the possibility that it could be cooked this particular and different way. How we experience our own lives affects our vision of these recipes. Someone from say America might see a recipe for something that uses a wafer iron and interpret the content as being a batter, where someone from Belgium might interpret it as a dough (as waffles in Belgium are made from a yeast dough). The key is to try and see all the possibilities and make choices knowingly. Sorry, I am waffling on (pun intended), but I really do get excited by this stuff!

Response: Belgian waffles are risen with yeast, but are still poured

Me: Not in Brussels they aren't - at the street stalls making them they have balls of dough, and you watch them grab a ball and put it on the iron. Definitely NOT poured.

Response:  Hmmm..  If lets say they don't pour the dough and are using a thin dough- and rolled it thin, or spread it thin, or griddled it- it would be a cracker! 

Me: Not necessarily but quite possibly - we should properly check the translation, and you will have to try and cook it and see what comes out - but certainly it looks like the possibility is there! See, isn't that exciting? 

 The next step will be, of course, to try making variations and see what we get.  Watch this space for more on that front soon!  I would love to hear from you if you have had a go at this recipe, or if you want to join me in some experimentation.