Rat (mock) on a stick - a soteltie

I created these "charming" creatures as an entry for an arts and sciences competition, the theme of which was rats and cats. 

I based them on the recipe for Herissons (hedgehogs) in Le Viandier de Taillevent (Vatican manuscript) which is from the first half of the 15th century.   

Prenez chair crue, hachiez la plus menue que faire se peult, puis fault roisin de Daingne, frommage de gain esmié, et tout meslez emsemble avec pouldre fine, puis ayez des caillettes de moutton, eschaudez et lavez très bien, et non pas en eaue trop chaude qu'ilz ne se retraient, et les emplez de ladicte chair hachiée, et puis les coudre d'unne petite brochette de boys. 

Take raw flesh, chop as finely as possible, then add raisins de Digne*, crumble harvest cheese, and mix everything together with fine powder, then have sheep intestines, scald and washed very well, and not in water too hot for them to shrink. And stuff them with the said minced flesh, and then sew them up with a small skewer.

I have to admit that I can't give you the quantities of ingredients as I have to admit that I just went with something between what I had, and what felt right. 

• 

  Just before going into the oven
  

  Pork minced then ground
• Feta crumbled finely
• Finely chopped sultanas
• Spice powder**
• pine nuts (for teeth)
• bacon rind for tails

I formed the mix into rats, skewered them, and used pine nuts to make teeth and a currant for an eye. 

I then endored*** them with a mixture of flour, saffron, egg yolks, sandalwood and water. Saffron was the most common colouring for endoring (being to make something look gold) but sandalwood was used in this period to give food a red colour. 

I was keen to see if I could get a colour that resembled the rats on a stick that you buy even now for sale in some countries. A single coat of endoring was ok, but a second coat of the endoring paste half way through ended up making a very effective but slightly disturbingly realistic 'skin'. 

I was really pleased at how the final rats looked. 

Double endored mock rat on a stick

  Notes: I spent/spend a lot of time trying to figure
  out what 15th century French "harvest cheese"
  might be.  Cheese ready to be eaten at harvest
  time? Cheese made from the milk drawn
  at harvest time?  That is a whole other post
  for another day. 

  The other question that I had to think about was
  whether the original recipe is indeed for making
  a soteltie... or is it a recipe for cooking hedgehog
  meat? Who knows?  The original recipe does not
  specify what meat it uses. 

Fresh out of the oven

* Raisins de Digne – Le Menagier de Paris (15th century) tells us what Raisins de Digne are : take two pounds of the raisins which be called raisins of Digne, to wit small ones, with no pips or seeds of any sort therein.

** Fine powder – from le Menagier de Paris : Ginger, cinnamon, cloves, grains of paradise, long pepper

*** Endoring : 15th century English recipe for cockentrice : ''endore them with yolkes of eggs, and poudre of gynger, and saffron, & ioiss of persely or malves, & draw them, and endore them a abowte in euery perty of him. ''

Cinnamon sticks

This dish is a wonderful and delicious soteltie which works well as a sort of renaissance breathmint.

The original recipe is from Ouverture de Cuisine by Lancelot de Casteau, published in 1604. The recipe is in French. I have provided a transcription of the French and a translation.

The recipe has two parts. The first is to make sugar paste and then in the second part you incorporate cinnamon and form cinnamon sticks.

The recipe 

Pour faire paste de succre.

Prennez du fin succre bien tamizé par vn fin tamier, puis ayez gomme d'aragante bien trempee en eau de rose passée par vn estamine aussi espes que vous le pouuez passer, puis mettez vostre gomme dedans vn mortier de cuiure ou autre & estampez bien vostre gomme, y mettant tousiours vn peu de succre tant que vous faictes vne paste maniable. Notez tant plus est il battu tant plus blanc deuient il: de ceste paste vous pouués former ce que voulez, comme faire en formes cauees, ou des trenchoirs, ou plats, ou tasses ce que vous voulez, & le mettez suer dedans vn four qui ne soit pas trop chaud, vous le pouuez aussi dorer aussi fort que les voulez auoir: gardez bien que le four ne soit point si chaud qu'il face leuer la paste par bontons, cela ne vaudroit rien, car il faut que la paste demeure ferme.
Pour faire Caneline.

Prennez vne libure de ceste paste & deux onces de canelle tamizee bien fine, & battez vostre paste dedans vn mortier tant & si longuement que le canelle soit bien encorporee avec le succre, puis vous ferez des couuertures bien tendres la largeur d'vn demy quartier, prennez adonc des bastons la grosseur d'vn doigt, & rollez la paste dessus comme on faict les galettes, puis estant vn peu ressuyé tirés le hors du baston, & le mettez sur le papier, & le mettez suyer dedans le four.

Translation

To make sugar paste.

Take fine sugar well sifted through a fine sieve, then take gum tragacanth well tempered with rose water passed through a strainer as thick as you want it to pass, then put your gum into a mortar of copper or other & grind well your gum, and put therein a little of the sugar until you make a workable paste. Note that the more it is beaten the whiter it will be: of this paste you can form that which you want, like to make in hollow molds, or trenchers, or plates or cups as you want, & put it into an oven that is not too hot, you can also gild it and make it as strong as you want to have: watch well that the oven is no longer so hot that it makes dough rise, that would be worthless, because it is necessary that the paste remains firm.

To make Cinnamon Sticks.

Take a pound of this paste & two ounces of cinnamon ground well fine, & beat your paste in a mortar then & long enough that the cinnamon is well incorporated with the sugar, then make the covers well thin the size of a half quarter, take then sticks the size of a finger, & roll the paste like one makes little galettes (crepes), then once a little dry, slide off the end of the stick, & put it on the paper, & put it into the oven.

My version

250g icing sugar
1 teaspoon powdered gum tragacanth
3 teaspoons rosewater (add more if required)

I didn't want to make as much as a pound of paste, and was working in metric. I decided to use 250g of icing sugar, being the size that a packet of icing sugar comes in, in Australia. Sugar wouldn't have come in this form in the period, however the sugar that was available would have been ground until it was this fine.

There is no guidance as to how much gum tragacanth to use in the recipe. I looked at modern gum paste recipes to see if they would provide any guidance – a typical modern gum paste recipe might use gum tragacanth but with the addition of gelatin, egg whites or maybe corn or glucose syrup. That said I did find a recipe (Lindy's cakes in the UK) that simply said that she used 1tsp of gum tragacanth added to 250g sugar paste.

So I used a teaspoon of gum tragacanth powder, and added about three teaspoons of rosewater. I discovered that what happens when you add rosewater to gum powder is that the gum gels immediately into lumps, not easily dissolved by stirring.

But as the original recipe indicates, passing it through a strainer helped to turn it into an amorphous gel, which could then be mixed with the sifted icing sugar to make a paste.

For 250g of my newly made sugar paste, I kneaded in 31 grams of cinnamon (the proportion in the recipe is 1 pound of paste to 2 oz of cinnamon ie. one eighth). To add verisimilitude to the look, I added a few drops of brown food colouring (this is not in the original recipe – I have found that how dark the paste will be is dependant on the cinnamon – the quality of it, and how newly-ground it is).

Using a rod rolling pin, I rolled the mixture out into thin strips and then rolled them up over skewers, and once dry enough, slid them off on to a rack. Rather than curing in a low oven, I placed them in front of the heater to dry.

I also took the extra step of using some brown food colouring to paint the sticks just lightly to give them more texture and make them look more realistic.

I am delighted with the final look and flavour of the cinnamon sticks, and have served them at a feast where they were received with much pleasure (and some confusion as people thought they were real).

A medieval mustard

 This recipe for mustard comes from Le Menagier de Paris dated around 1393

The recipe is:

Item, et se vous la voulez faire bonne et à loisir, mettez le senevé tremper par une nuit en bon vinaigre, puis le faites bien broyer au moulin, et bien petit à petit destremper de vinaigre: et se vous avez des espices qui soient de remenant de gelée, de claré, d’ypocras on de saulces, si soient broyées avec, et après la laissier parer.

Translated that is:

Item: and if you want to make it good and at leisure, soak the mustard seeds overnight in good vinegar, then grind it well in the mill, and very little by little soak in vinegar: and if you have some remnants of spices from jelly, claré, hypocras or sauces, grind them with it, and then leave to rest.

I chose a white wine vinegar to soak the mustard in (honestly, because it is what I had). 

The next day, it was interesting to see the difference between soaked and unsoaked mustard seeds.

I then ground the mustard with a mortar and pestle. 

Grinding was a slow process

The final product: a quite spicy mustard

I had to make some hippocras!

Ypocras. Pour faire pouldre d’ypocras, prenez un quarteron de très fine canelle triée à la dent, et demy quarteron de fleur de canelle fine, une once de gingembre de mesche trié fin blanc et une once de graine de paradis, un sizain de noix muguettes et de garingal ensemble, et faites tout battre ensemble. Et quant vous vouldrez faire l’ypocras, prenez demye once largement et sur le plus de ceste pouldre et deux quarterons de succre, et les meslez ensemble, et une quarte de vin à la mesure de Paris.

Translation: 

Hippocras. To make hippocras powder, take a quarteron of very fine cinnamon, sorted by the tooth, and half a quarteron of fine cinnamon flower, an ounce of fine white sorted mesche ginger and an ounce of grains of paradise seed, a sixth of an ounce of nutmeg and galingale together, and beat everything together. And when you want to make the hypocras, take half an ounce and some more of this powder and two quarterons of sugar, and mix them together, and a quarte of wine to the measure of Paris.

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
-----------
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

----------

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

--------
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

--------------

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

Jance Sauce - du Fait de Cuisine and Le Menagier de Paris

Du Fait de Cuisine: 

2. A jance: and to give understanding to him who will make the said jance let him take a great quantity of fair and good fine white bread according to what he wants to make and make it into crumbs well and properly on a fair cloth; then let him take a fair, clear, and clean pot and pour in fat broth of beef and mutton, and let him check that it is not too salty; and then let him take eggs and mix them with the said bread and then put this gently into the said broth while stirring constantly with a fair wooden spoon; and also let him put in his spices, that is white ginger, grains of paradise, and a little pepper, and saffron to give it color, and let him flavor it with verjuice; and let him put all this to boil together and then dress it for serving.

As with all such recipes, as many questions were raised as answered as we attempted to cook this sauce.  The "we" in this case is myself, my squire and his wise and lovely wife.

We ended up creating four different sauces from this recipe, one of which ended up being vegetarian as we used a vegetarian "beef" stockcube for stock (as my squire is vegetarian).

Right at the beginning, a number of basic questions/choices needed to be dealt with.  These included:

- how white was white bread?
- how runny is this sauce meant to be?
- how big were eggs?
- were the breadcrumbs toasted?
- would the bread be fresh or stale?
- how fine would the breadcrumbs be?  Does it make a difference?
- do you use the crusts?
- how much spice to use?
- fresh or dried ginger

Some of these questions were answered by the cooking experience itself, and others by research and experience.

I had both modern white white bread, and also a light wholemeal bread, which is probably a pretty close equivalent to decent quality medieval white bread - having ground flour with grinding stones myself, I know that you can actually get very fine flour by medieval means.

Ginger in period was grown in Europe in pots in period, so it was entirely possible that the ginger could have been fresh or dried.  In this case we used dried ground ginger. 


Here are the four recipes, with some comments after testing, some of which surprised us.

Sauce Jance 1 (dubbed "white Jance")

350ml stock (2/3 beef 1/3 mutton)
1/3 cup toasted white breadcrumbs
1/4 tsp grains of paradise
1 tsp white ginger
1-2 pinches pepper
10 strands of saffron
1 tablspoon verjuice
1 egg


Sauce Jance 2 (dubbed "wholebread Jance")

350ml stock (2/3 beef 1/3 mutton)
2/3 cup (150g) fresh light wholemeal breadcrumbs
 1/4 tsp grains of paradise
1 tsp white ginger
2 pinches pepper
10 strands of saffron
1 tablespooon verjuice
1 egg

This was spicier with a distinct taste of grains of paradise.

Sauce Jance 3 (dubbed "Vege Jance")

250ml water
1 vegetarian beef stockcube
1/3 cup fresh white breadcrumbs (no crusts)
1 pinch grains of paradise
1 tsp ground ginger
2 pinches ground pepper
10 strands of saffron
1 1/2 tablespoons verjuice
1 egg

This sauce was very balanced, with nothing really standing out

Sauce Jance 4 (dubbed "Strong Jance")

250ml strong stock (1/2 mutton 1/2 beef)
1 cup toasted wholemeal breadcrumbs
125mg/pinch grains of paradise
125mg/pinch white ginger
50mg/1/2 pinch black pepper
12 strands ground saffron
1 tablespoon verjuice
1 egg


We judged that we could happily eat it just as soup! This was particularly delicious served on pork.

General conclusions

• Whether we used white or wholemeal bread made no real difference to the final sauce. 
• These would be even better if pushed through a sieve or given some other form of further blending.
• Grains of paradise are "more like a taste you can smell"
• My squire said he would add more grains of paradise to the vegetarian version
• My squire's wife said she would add more ginger to all of them. 

Take the time to play with this recipe and see what you think!

Sauce piquant for conies - 3 period sauces from the one recipe

Sauce piquant to put on conies

3 period sauces from the one recipe

“Du fait de cuisine” was written by Master Chiquart on the behest of the Duke of Savoy in 1420. In it Chiquart outlines all his knowledge about creating banquets for the 15^th century French nobility. The recipes are often on a huge scale – for example, the book starts by listing the amount of meat to order, starting with 100 cattle, 130 sheep, 120 pigs plus 100 piglets for each day and 60 salted pigs for larding and making soups.

So when reading the recipes, one must consider that they are for feasts on a grand scale, and take this into consideration when devising a much more reasonable quantity.

The recipe I have chosen to make is the 14^th in the manuscript. Unfortunately the only original French version I have obtained so far is just that – the original manuscript and I have not managed to decypher the writing yet. So I have used the translation by Elizabeth Cook, who's translations have proven in my experience to be reasonably accurate. Here is her translation:

To make sauce piquant to put on conies, according to the quantity of it which one is making take onions and chop them fine, and take fair pork lard and melt it and sauté your onions, and so that they do not burn in sautéing put a little broth in; and then put in a great deal of white wine according to the quantity of sauce piquant which you want to make for the said conies; and take your spices, good ginger, grains of paradise, a little pepper which is not at all too much, and saffron to give it color; and season it with vinegar in such proportion that it is neither too much poignant nor too little; with salt also.

There are thousands of variations that can be made from any one original recipe. As I am ever curious about medieval cuisine and frequently make 10-20 versions of any medieval recipe, I decided to do three sauces from the one recipe, varying the type of wine, amounts, and the amounts of spices and onions. For the first two, I have made sauces that are quite thin. However with the third, I made the decision to make something that would be thicker and with a lot more onion, almost a spicy relish rather than what we would classically think of as a sauce.

The methodology was the pretty much the same for all three sauces, so I will describe that once, and note the differences after the ingredients list for each variation:

1. Chop the onions finely
2. Take a saucepan and melt the pork lard in it
3. Add the onions and sauté until soft, adding broth a spoonful at a time if the mixture starts looking dry
4. Add the wine, keeping on the heat (the original recipe does not specify but as the wine is added to the onions which are on the heat, it is a logical conclusion that it would stay on the heat)
5. Add the ground spices – the saffron was ground with a tiny touch of broth to release the colour before putting into the sauce.
6. Simmer for 15-20 minutes
7. Remove from the heat and add the vinegar, then season to taste.

Sauce for Conies Version 1.

1 onion

1tsp lard

2 tablespoons chicken broth

2 cups Sauvignon Blanc

12 threads saffron

1 pinch ground Grains of Paradise

1 tsp ginger

2 tablespoons white wine vinegar

1 pinch of ground black pepper

1 pinch of salt

2 tablespoons white wine vinegar

I chose Sauvignon Blanc as a wine variety that existed within period, in the south of France, so accessible to the Savoyard chef.

Sauce for Conies Version 2

2 onions

2 tsp lard

2 tablespoons chicken broth

2 cups Chardonnay

3 pinches grains of paradise

½ teaspoon ginger

8 threads saffron

2 tablespoons white wine vinegar

1 pinch ground black pepper

1 pinch of salt

Chardonnay originated in Burgundy, in the mid-eastern part of France and would also have been accessible. The oak matured citrus notes of the chardonnay seemed to be appropriate for a piquant sauce. I chose to use more grains of paradise than ginger to make a less obviously spicy sauce.

Sauce for Conies Version 3

3 onions

3 tablespoons lard

2 tablespoons chicken stock

1 and a half cups McGuigan classic white wine

12 threads saffron

½ tsp Grains of Paradise

1 ¼ tsp ginger

a good pinch of black pepper

1 pinch of salt

2 tablespoons white wine vinegar

I chose this as a reasonably generic white wine, without any dominant flavours.

I decided that this version should be more like a sort of chutney - a thick rich condiment.  With this much lard, it certainly is rich - but the fat is balanced well by the wine and vinegar.  Of the three redactions, this one is my favourite.

A short comment on cooking methods

The sauces in this recipe would most likely have been made in a large cauldron hung over a fire. While many cooks claim that this means that there was little control over the heat and cooking processes in a medieval kitchen, I challenge this claim.

An experienced cook, especially one of Chiquart's credentials, had a very good idea of how hot or cool the fires were on which he cooked. By changing from cooking over flame to embers, stoking, adding wood, removing wood, raising and lowering pots from above the fire-grate, a great deal of control can be made to the cooking process.

While modern cooking appliances are easier, stoves, whether gas or electric, still only have a range of numbers on them, so the cook is still left with decisions to adjust and change the heat on their cooking.

The ingredients: Lait Larde part 2

The ingredients

(wherein Kiriel establishes that lards aint lard, and investigates the pH of verjuice)

This recipe contains few ingredients, but the use of them is not as simple as you might assume! So let's go through each one.

1. Saffron

Saffron was the King of spices in the medieval world. Incredibly expensive, outrageously colourful and equally exquisitely delicate in flavour, these flower stamens remain today the world's most expensive spice. The strands are toasted lightly to dry them out so that they can be ground up and added to dishes. Imitation saffron powder will give a similar colour, however will not give the very specific flavour that real saffron imparts to the dish.

Just as Taillevent cooked for Kings, so I cook for judges deserved of great esteem, and thefore use a generous portion of this precious spice.

2. Lardons

The 1611 French/English dictionary describes lardons as “the little slice or piece of lard wherewith meat is stucke”. In modern France this remains pretty much the same – lardons are something akin to what we would call “bacon bits”, but in a more of a thick matchstick form.

Whatever form they are in, one thing is reasonably sure – medieval lardons would have been saltier than modern equivalents. Smoking and salting meat was the most common way of preserving meat, as refrigeration options were much more limited for the medieval cook. A well smoked and/or salted ham can be eaten for years – unlike the average slab of bacon you buy in the supermarket now! Try a lovely slender slice of Spanish jamon iberico and be converted forever away from pale and flaccid bacon!

For my initial experiments with the recipes, I tried a supermarket bacon, but it quickly became clear that as one of the fundamental flavours of this recipe, it just did not work.

I tried the recipe again with a mature salt cured speck and the improvement was enormous, but it still was missing the smoky flavour I felt was needed.

I visited two butchers that smoke their own meats and bought a wedge of speck from each. They were very different from each other and both delicious, and choosing which was the better flavour was challenging (oh the sacrifices I make for my cooking, eating lots of bacon flavoured cheese!)

3. Milk

Milk of course in period was not homogenised nor pasteurised. Homogenisation is the process by which the fats (the cream) in milk are broken up and distributed through the milk, where naturally they would slowly rise to the top of the bottle or carton as cream. Pasteurisation is a process whereby milk is raised to a high temperature to kill off bacteria.

What difference does this make to cheesemaking? Ask any French cheesemaker and they are likely to simply throw their hands up in the air and mutter something along the lines of “Philistine!” at the question. Homogenisation does not in my experience in fact make a great deal of difference at least at the level of cheesemaking in this recipe.

Pasteurisation does make a difference. Hundreds of modern French and Swiss cheeses are made from unpasteurised milk. These cheeses tend to have a far stronger smell than any Australian cheese you will ever have tasted, although surprisingly, often a far milder taste than you expect. Unpasteurised milk is hard to get in Australia – you can sometimes buy it as “bath milk” from organic shops.

Other things that also made a difference in period, and in some countries continue to make a difference is the season, and the feed the animals eat. The amount of fat and lactose in milk changes according to the season and the taste and properties of the milk change dependent on the diet of the animal – Vacherin Mont d'Or for example is made from a mixture of milks – one part from when the cows eat spring grasses, and one part from when they eat hay – oh and only from one particular mountain in France. 


I might as well do a bit of myth busting while I am on the subject of milk.
You are sure to have seen in the shops "Permeate free milk" advertised as if permeates are some evil chemical. Well in fact permeates are a mix of  milk-sugar (lactose), vitamins and minerals that are found in milk.  Because the qualities of milk from the cow change seasonally, adding (or not) permeates allows dairies to have consistency in milk across the year, which among other things means that they don't have to make a different nutrition label for every batch of milk, and means that the milk you buy today will have the same qualities as the milk you buy tomorrow. No evil, just consistency.  Whether you feel you want consistency in your milk is another question that I won't get into here.

I tried this recipe with both homogenised and non-homogenised milk, achieving the same results.
You do need to use whole milk though, not skim or non-fat!

I made the decision not to use sheeps milk a) because I couldn't find it and b) I thought it best to try and get a more familiar taste in the cheese.

4. Verjuice

I started this experiment trying both verjuice and wine (as per the James Prescott version of the recipe). With new white wine, the milk refused to curdle. With verjuice it refused to curdle. A few days later the same wine (having sat on the kitchen bench) mixed with verjuice did curdle. I also tried with red wine which worked excellently:

But of course then I discovered that my recipe was wrong, so had to abandon the whole wine experience. I tried again with verjuice and again it failed. I tried with verjuice mixed with lemon juice and had much greater success. So   I decided it was time to investigate the properties of verjuice a bit further.

Verjuice is unfermented grape juice produced from early season grapes – picked before they are fully ripened. But the acidic qualities of verjuice differ from grape to grape, and within the season Menagier de Paris states that “in July old verjuice is very weak and the new is still too sharp. After this time, during the harvest, a mixture of half old and half new is best”. (recipe 279).

It was common in period too, to have substitutes for verjuice, since its unfermented nature meant that it did not preserve well. In the Italian period cookbook Libro della Cocina, it is advised that you could use lemon juice, orange juice or rosewater as substitutes. Menagier de Paris even provides a recipe for a sorrel based verjuice.

I concluded that the verjuice I had (Maggie Beer) was probably a bit more sophisticated and less acid than period verjuice. To test the acidity of my verjuice, I sought out testing strips. After some searching I had to settle on purchasing a set of strips to test swimming pools and spas. Unsurprisingly the acidity of lemons is rather off the scale compared to that of the average swimming pool but it still provided some useful data. 

 

I compared Maggie Beer verjuice, Anchor verjuice, (squeeze) lemon juice, and later, vinegar.

The Maggie Beer tested slightly differently to the Anchor verjuice, which showed equivalently to the lemon juice in both alkalinity and pH. Interestingly the Anchor showed very low traces of free chlorine, and the vinegar's pH test result was outright bizarre.

So from then on I used the Anchor verjuice, to much better effect. The taste of verjuice in the cheese is quite different from lemon and very pleasing.

5. Cloves

Freshly ground cloves – ah that smell, redolent of mulled wine and easter buns! An absolute staple in every sophisticated medieval kitchen, cloves were among the most prized and necessary spices. Every cook would have a pouch of cloves and they were an essential ingredient in the classic medieval spice mixture, powder forte.

You may feel wary that something as spicy and strong as cloves would overwhelm this dish, but have faith... there is something magical that seems to happen when you combine cloves and speck...!

6. Pine nuts

There are many species of pine that produce edible pine nuts. As an ingredient in my research I have seen them mainly being used in period Italian and French cookery.

A brief mention of tournsoc:

This is Gozophoria tinctoria, a lichen – it is naturally blue but turns red in acid situations and blue in alkaline – presumably the combination of it and saffron creates the green mentioned in the recipe.

References:

Secondary

Le Viandier de Taillevent – Vatican manuscript
Le Viandier de Taillevent – Sion manuscript

Le Viandier de Taillevent – Mazarine manuscript

Le Viandier de Taillevent – Biblioteque Nationale manuscript

A dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611), by Randle Cotgrave

Tertiary

Early French cookery – Scully

The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages – Terence Scully

Le Viandier de Taillevent – James Prescott *I do not recommend using this!

Fine Cakes 2 - from the Good Huswife's Jewell

Here is an old recipe from "The Good Husewife's Jewell" published in 1596:

Take fine flowre and good Damaske water you must have no other liqueur but that, then take sweet butter, two or three yolkes of egges and a good quantity of Suger, and a few cloves, and mace, as your Cookes mouth shall serve him, and a lyttle saffron, and a little Gods good about a sponfull if you put in too much they shall arise, cutte them in squares lyke unto trenchers, and pricke them well, and let your oven be well swept and lay them uppon papers and so set them into the oven. Do not burne them if they be three or foure days old they bee the better.

My redaction:

• 2 cups flour
• 175g butter
• 3 egg yolks
• 1 cup sugar
• 1tsp saffron, ground
• ½ tsp cloves
• 2 tsp mace, ground
• 3 tablespoons rosewater
• 1 tsp baking powder

Mix dry ingredients, and rub in the butter to make something resembling fine breadcrumbs. Add the egg yolks and rosewater, and mix to make a dough. Wrap in plastic wrap and keep in the fridge for an hour or so to settle. Roll out to 5mm and cut out shapes. Bake for about 20 minutes at 175 degrees until lightly golden.

Fine Cakes - English spiced shortbread

This recipe is from "The Widowes Treasure" which was published in 1639. It is pretty much a spiced shortbread, but made, interestingly, with pre-baked flour. This gives them a really beautiful crisp texture.

The original version:
Take a quantity of fine wheate Flower, and put it in an earthen pot. Stop it close and set it in an Oven, and bake it as long as you would a pasty of Venison, and when it baked it will be full of clods.Then searce your flower through a fine sercer.

Then take clouted Creame or sweet butter, but Creame is best: then take sugar, cloves, mace, saffron and yolks of eggs, so much as wil seeme to season your flower. Then put these things into the Creame, temper all together. Then put thereto your flower. So make your cakes. The paste will be very short; therefore make them very little. Lay paper under them.
My version:
1 cup plain flour
90 g butter
1 generous pinch of saffron
3 cloves
1/8 tsp mace
1/4 cup caster sugar
1 egg yolk

Bake flour for 15-20 minutes at 180 degrees, in a closed casserole dish. The flour shouldn't brown, but you will see that it clumps together if you stir it with a spoon.  Allow to cool, then sift.

Grind spices with sugar. Cream butter, sugar/spice and egg yolk till the consistency of thick cream. Fold in flour.  Do not knead the dough. 

I pressed small amounts of this mixture into molds to make flour shapes, which popped out of the mold easily.  One of my apprentices forms them in to small balls and then presses them flat. As the original recipe says, the paste is very short! Bake on baking trays lined with paper for 10-15 minutes at 180 degrees.

*Note: be careful with the mace - depending on the particular mace you have, it can be very strong!