Hi all,
Myself and some other folks from around here have got together to start a local SCA* group. Our first real get together will be happening at my home on the 11th of October. A number of activites are planned (craft, calligraphy, gossip, garb). There will be feasting afterwards and I though maybe we could do a cooking activity to add to the food (everyone will be bring some food to share).
So what I’m after is some nice simple medieval recipes (preferably something you have actually eaten/cooked and can thus vouch for) There are heaps of recipes on the web but I want personal opinions.
Vegetarian would be good but not neccessary
BTW I am a complete newby. There will be folks from the group that “planted” us present on the day and I’d like to make good impression.
MRW
Warden of the (west or western reaches can’t remember which)
Well, my first suggestion would be to romp through Stefan’s Florithingy and hit on Cariadoc’s Miscellaney and if you are really serious, send me a PM and I will hook you up with my roomie to get information on the SCA cooks mailing list which I am no longer a member of but is chock full of the best medieval cooks living.
What I would recommend, if it is a simple feast
roast chicken
armored turnips [where we get augratin potatoes more or less]
cooked mixed greens [spinach, escarole,mesclun. You can also serve the same mixture raw as a salalt]
bread, plain butter, honey butter, herbed cream cheese [think boursin but cheaper since you make it yourself] note the spreads on the bread is not period in general…
and to drink beer, or near beer for nondrinkers.
Vegetarians were not overly big in medieval european ‘noble cooking’ which is what we tend to have cookbooks for, we have recipes for what was the cooking staff for wealthy and noble families. There are discussions abounding in the florithingy on different menus.
And there are some good editions of very old cookbooks with modern annotation. One I remember is called Take a Thousand Eggs or More.
Fabulous Feasts is also a good book.
I see you’re in the Kingdom of Lochac, aka Australia. Met some great Aussies at Pennsic; lost a greatsword tourney to one Sir Brucey.
ETA: I remember some kind of 15th century candied rutabaga recipe that went over well. But avoid something called wine soup; tastes great while still hot, but upon cooling converts to something that tastes like it’s from another planet.
Any good hearty stew is popular. In general, I’d say a simple dish done well is preferable to a fancy dish that’s not quite right.
That’s not strictly-speaking true. There’s a whole set of recipes for Lent/“ember day” that do fine service as vegetarian (but not vegan) fare.
Personally, and easiest, I recommend mushroom pasties from the Menagier. Use prepared shortcrust pastry, make small (cupcake-size) piesand it’s simple, quick and delicious. Also, Tarte on Ember Day is a vegetarian quiche. Very yum.
For non-veggie fair, endored chickens (roast chicken glazed with egg & saffron) and chawettys (small open pork pies - we *cheat *like crazy and just use the filling from pork bangers, just adding dates, cheese, egg and spices) are highly recommended, as well as puomes (meatballs with currants)
Abbreviated recipes here on my Shire’s website:
More recipes on godecookery.com, which I highly recommend for Chaucerian-period cooking.
Yeah, I hated that. The new world was discovered “in period”. If they’re going to allow Middle EAstern Belly Dancing, Victorian era Pirates and Japanese Samurai, they should allow someone to be from The Colonies.
Ah well. Since it seems I’m going to be doing SCA again in the future, I should probably start practicing biting my tounge.
That being said, you could always look into pickling meats, and then using them in stews and whatnot. Very period.
Barring that, a second for stews. They travel well too.
In period, a lot of vegetables were served ‘with vinegar’ or ‘with warming spices’. The lack of specifics is irritating, but it can be liberating, too. I’ve had good luck with what I call Medieval Potato Salad. It’s diced boiled rutabaga and carrot (turnips and parsnips work, too), tossed with a garlic vinegrette. You can add onion, dill, or any other period bits that you’d like.
The ingredients are period, but the basic form is familiar, so it doesn’t scare people.
Baked Cornish hens are easy, tasty, and very “medievaly” in appearance. (I’m assuming that you can use electricity for the cooking of course, but if you can’t- fairly easy to roast them over a spit I should think.) Ditto ham (what could be easier to cook and look more in place at a medieval feast than a big ham?)
Good: any kind of bread, most grain dishes, anything big and “organic” looking like acorn squash or eggplants, etc. (not going with historical accuracy, just appearances), apples (raw or cooked), pumpkins (I KNOW THEY WEREN’T AROUND IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE NITPICKERS! But they do look medievaly!:)).
Really good but pricy: quail (like the many little birds Euros used to eat)
Bad: any kind of salad, tomatoes (verboten in the middle ages), anything colorful, cotton candy
As an honest-to-Og SCA feastocrat, here are two of my favorite, easy, SCA Period recipes:
Chykonys in Bruette
1 whole chicken
3 cups water
12 oz (1 can) beer or ale
1/2 tsp ground black pepper (preferably fresh ground)
2 tsp ground ginger
12 threads of Saffron (ground in 1 Tbs water)
4 Tbs bread crumbs
Cut chicken into pieces and place in a large pot. Add water, beer or ale, pepper and ginger. Simmer until chicken is tender and falls off the bone.
Strain, saving the broth and remove the skin and bones from the chicken.
Return broth and chicken to the heat and bring to a boil. Add bread crumbs and saffron and simmer until thickened. Remove from heat and serve.
I found I didn’t need the bread crumbs, but it worked out well a little thinnner. This went over very well at an autumn feast I did.
Cheese Tarts
1 lb. shredded cheese I use sharp cheddar myself; less period but more tasty.
2 eggs
1/4 tsp. each salt & ground mustard
1/8 tsp. each pepper & ginger
1 1/8 tbs. butter
pastry for 1 double crust pie
Combine cheese, eggs, spices and butter. Put 3 cups of this mixture in an unbaked pie shell. Cover with the top crust which has either slits cut in it or a design of some sort. Bake at 375º F for 20-25 minutes or until crust is browned and a knife inserted in the pie comes out clean. The recipe makes 8 small pieces per pie. Important to actually serve this one either lukewarm or room temperature; I also enjoy it cold for breakfast.
8 oz. spinach
1 oz pine nuts
3.5 oz ricotta cheese
2 large eggs, beaten
1.25 oz ground almonds
1.5 oz grated parmesan cheese
Rinse the spinach, place in a large saucepan and cook for 4-5 minutes until wilted. Drain thoroughly. When the spinach is cool enough to handle, squeeze out the excess liquid.
Place the pine nuts on a baking sheet & lightly toast under a preheated broiler for 2-3 minutes or until golden.
Place the ricotta, spinach and eggs in a bowl and mix together. Ad the pine nuts, beat well, then stir in the ground almonds & parmesan cheese.
Spoon the spinach mixture into a pie crust, and cover with the top crust, cutting slits in crust.
Bake in a preheated oven at 425 degrees for 10 minutes. Reduce the temperature to 375 degrees and bake for an additional 25-30 minutes. Serve hot.
*I believe I ended up doing this w/o the pine nuts and the ground almonds, it was still very tasty. *
Buttered Worts
• 8 cups of any combination of spinach, cabbage, beet greens, onion, leeks, parsley, etc., chopped I seem to recall using cabbage, collard greens & leeks.
• 1/2 stick (1/8 lb.) of butter
• salt to taste
• 1 cup unseasoned croutons I ended up w/ garlic herb croutons, but it worked.
Cover greens with water; add butter and bring to a boil; add salt. Reduce heat & cook until tender; drain. Place croutons in serving bowl and cover with cooked greens.
Stuffed Onions
Large yellow or white onions
Commercial bread stuffing
Raisins, nuts, herbs, other additions
Cut the tops off the onions and peel the onions. Slice the bottom slightly so they will sit in a roasting pan. Carve out the center, leaving a shell about 1/2" thick. Dice the center of the onions to add to the stuffing. Prepare the commercial stuffing per the instructions on the package. Saute the onions in oil or butter, with the raisins and other fillings. Stuff the onions with the prepared fillings, and place in a roasting pan. Bake at 350 degrees for about 45 minutes.
Came in to mention that one myself. The gentle who runs that site is the person who got me into the SCA many years ago. His recipes can be very dangerous to the waistline!
Heck, turkey is ABSOLUTELY period-- it was called “Indian Hen” in at least one German cookbook of the late 1500’s. My good friend Master Tirloch of Tallaght (in Atlantia) cooked a feast based on his translation of that cookbook (which included turkey in numerous forms, plus tortillas and such) and subsequently got a Laurel for his culinary research.
(And I should say that my husband and I are some of those “Samurai” – actually, he is, I’m more on the courtier side of things!-- and we are currently working on 1500’s Thai personas: Ayutthaya, the former capital of Siam/Thailand, was a major hub in SE Asia, and you got the Portuguese, French, Dutch and English all coming through there, not to mention Persians and other Muslims, Chinese, Japanese and so on.)
There are numerous redactions, but we usually make it as follows:
Equal amounts butter, cream cheese, and Brie
Salt/pepper to taste
Melt the butter (at which point you can throw in thinly sliced asparagus or other such things, and let it cook-- bacon or ham is also good). Add the cheeses and melt until gooey. Season to taste. Serve with cubes of bread (like fondue) or slices of bread for dipping, or pour over simply cooked vegetables.
This stuff is pure win (it’s been called the Atlantian national dish) and we have taken it to numerous non-SCA events, where it has gotten rave reviews. It does, of course, have about 12000 calories per serving, but it’s soooo worth it.
It’s especially easy to make if you use a fondue pot, since you can keep it warm indefinitely.
Another excellent recipe: Strawberries in Snow. It’s easy and really, really good. Serve it with shortbread cookies or pizzelle wafers, if you have access to them.
Colouring dishes with saffron, sandalwood, flowers, gold leaf…not colourful? I always use current non-hot Indian cooking, like Hare Krishna food, as a guide for how I like my medieval cooking to look (minus the chillis and cinnamon, I find the spice-set very similar)
