Subject: Re: Medieval Recipe

From: [email-masked] (Elise A. Fleming)
Date: 16 Jan 1995 12:44:37 GMT

Hello!  May I give a warning?  DON'T use _Fabulous Feasts_ for
medieval recipes.  She uses ingredients that weren't available
in that time or place and makes other serious errors.  The food
tastes good, but it isn't medieval, necessarily.
 
Here is a truly medieval recipe which is fun and easy for 6th
graders.  It is called "Leach" which is an English attempt to
say the French word for "milk."  The original recipe comes from
Thomas Dawson, _The Good Huswifes Jewell_, 1596.  I'll give you
my modern version and can send you the original if you want/need
it.
 
1 quart of milk, whole or 2%
3-4 packages of Knox unflavored gelatin
1 to 1 1/3 cups sugar
1 1/2 (or more) tablespoons of rosewater
 
(Note:  Sixth graders may not like rosewater.  It smells and
tastes like perfume.  My senior high students mostly didn't care
for it because of that.  You might try a mild flavoring such as
strawberry or cherry.  Vanilla is NOT medieval.)
 
Take a quart of milk.  Put 1 - 1 1/2 cups of that milk in a
bowl and sprinkle the pckages of gelatin over the milk, stir-
ring it as you sprinkle.  While the gelatin is softening (about
five minutes) heat up the remaining milk.  It needn't come to
a boil.  Add the sugar and stir until it is dissolved.  Add as
much flavoring as you like.  Pour into a glass or metal pan
and set it in the refrigerator to cool.  Cut into one-inch
cubes when set.  It makes a jellied milk rather like the extra-
firm jello kids make.
 
Have fun!  I'd like to make a "softening" of my "warning".  
Pelsner's book _Fabulous Feasts_ is a pretty book and has very
good pictures, as well as interesting information on medieval
foodways.  But, her recipes are suspect.  There are other, 
better medieval cookbooks available.  _Pleyn Delit_ is one
that is frequently found in public libraries.  _To the King's
Taste_, _To the Queen's Taste_, _Dining With William Shakes-
peare_ all are out of print (I believe) but I found copies
in the county's libraries.  The recipes are much better re-
searched and the modernizations are much more accurate.

Elise/Alys

---

From: [email-masked] (Jody C. Patilla)
Date: 17 Jan 1995 19:14:29 -0500

In article <[email-masked]>,
Alf Christophersen <[email-masked]> wrote:
>Hm. Do you have some documentation of Knox existing in the medieval time?
>Your recipe sounds like something quite brand new. Doubt they ever
>had gelatin at all at that time. Bu, they may have knowledge about
>making things stiff by high-pectin containing fruits and using this to
>stiffen the porridge.

	Oh, gelatin has been around for a very long time. Medieval cooks
knew well how to get boil it down from bones, calves' feet, chicken feet, etc,
just as medieval artists knew how to make glue from horse's hooves. Those
near sea coasts knew how to make gelly from seaweed, too.

>>1 to 1 1/3 cups sugar
>Really?? Where is the traces of that raffinery????
>If sweets has been used, it must have been some natural sweet stuff,
>not pure, white, refined sugar :-)

	THe sugar was likely the light brown kind that comes in a loaf.
That is a lot, though - in medieval times, sugar was rare enough to be
considered medicinal.

>Possibly rose petals themselves was used here. Doubt that the rosewater
>you buys in the shop was available also then.

	Every medieval lady of a large house knew how to make her own 
rosewater with petals from rosa damascaena and an alembic still. The taste
for rosewater in desserts was no doubt brought back to Europe by the
Crusaders.

-- 

jcpatilla					[email-masked]
Otter, otter, otter! Floating on the sea!
Eating fish and urchins, happier than thee....

---

From: [email-masked] (Alf Christophersen)
Date: 17 Jan 1995 20:03:36 GMT

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Alf Christophersen               | Computer engineer
                                 | Institute for Nutrition Research
[email-masked]            | University of Oslo
list owner                       | PO Box 1046, Blindern
Editor of 'Slekt og Data'        | N-0316 Oslo  Norway
Quarterly organ of               | Tel. +47 22 85 41 97
DIS-Norge, PO Box 146, Manglerud | Priv. N-4909 Songe 
N-0612 Oslo                      | tel. +47 37 16 42 09

---

From: [email-masked] (Jeff Berry)
Date: 17 Jan 1995 19:52:43 -0500

Well, I couldn't let this pass.

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked]
>Alf Christophersen               | Computer engineer

Sorry for all the quoting but I felt it was important.  Actually, Alf
the recipe as she has presented it is in fact a fairly reasonable
modernization of the period recipe.  I provide for your (and others)
enjoyment one of a series of chatty articles I wrote a while back
which deals with leach specifically.  I have trimmed it some to
bring the important points home.

***BEGIN EXTRACT OF ARTICLE***
Glancing through the recipe book, I find that my menu source has
no recipe for Leche.  Ok.  Fortunately I have others.  Working backwards
I find, in "The Forme of Cury", the following: 

  Leche Lumbard
  Take rawe Pork and pulle of the skyn, and pyke out the skyn synew and
  bray the Pork in a mort w ayren rawe do thro sog, salt, raysons corance,
  dat mynced, and powdo of Pep powdo gylofre. a do i a bladder,
  and lat it seeth till ibe ynowh. and when it is ynowh, kerf it leshe it
  in likeness of a peskodde, and take grette raysons and grynde hem in
  a mort, drawe hem up with rede wyne, do thro mylke of almand colo it
  with sanders a safron and do thro powdo of pep a of gilofre and boile it.
  and whan it is boiled: take powdo of canel and gyng, and tep it up with
  wyne. and do alle thise thyng toghd. and loke that it be renys, and lat it
  not seeth aft that it is cast togyder, a sue it forth.

Hmm, not only is that hard to translate, but it looks like a real pain to
make. (It is also worth mentioning that "Fabulous Feasts" has what claims
to be a version of the recipe.  To my eye, it looks almost nothing like
the original.  Caveat Emptor.)

Anyway, I have even more books, let us look further. Here we are, in Hugh 
Plat's "Delightes for Ladies":
  59. To make Leach
  Seeth a pint of Creame, and in the seething put in some dissolved 
  Isinglasse, stirring it till it be very thicke, then take a handful
  of blanched Almonds, beat them and put them in a dish with your Creame,
  seasoning them with sugar, and after slice it and dish it.

Now, that's more like it.  A quick glance in a good dictionary tells us
that Isinglasse is gelatin made from fish guts.  Lovely.  (A later 
conversation with my father reveals that this was also used to clarify wine, 
interesting.) So, I decide to try the recipe.  A trip to the grocery store 
reveals that they have no Isinglasse, but I'm guessing that regular gelatin 
will do (the first recipe works forward from pork and a bladder, so it should
be ok).  The gelatin packet says that it works on 4 cups of fruit juice,
so I'll use 3 cups of Creame and 1 cup of skim milk (since I had some
around).  I'll skip the almonds, since I don't much like them.  I'll
use a quarter cup of sugar.

I did all that.  It was ok.  A little bland and a little thick.  So,
as a guess for the next recipe, I think that probably half to 3/4 the
amount of gelatin and maybe 1/3 of a cup of sugar.  Want to try it?
Come to cooks guild, although it's probably over by the time this sees
press.  So the recipe is:

A leach, after Hugh Plat:
Heat 3 cups of cream or milk. Mix 1/2 to 3/4 oz. gelatin with another
cup of milk according to directions on gelatin. Add 1/4 to 1/3 cup of
sugar to the heating milk. Mix in the gelatin.  Stir till well dissolved.
Cool.

***END EXTRACT FROME ARTICLE***

There you have it, some lovely documentation for you.  The Forme
of Curye is c 1390 and Delights for Ladies is 1609.

Jeff Berry, [email-masked]
"You're a notch and I'm a legend"-------Alice Cooper
"I don't need TV when I've got T-Rex"------Mott the Hoople

---

From: [email-masked] (John E. Taylor III)
Date: Wed, 18 Jan 1995 07:45:38 -0500

In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked]

> In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] (Elise A. Fleming) says:

[deletions]
> making things stiff by high-pectin containing fruits and using this to

Knox just does all the work for us...making gelatin by boiling up bones and
hooves and the like goes _'way back_.  Prehistoric, I'd guess.

>From  what I've read in this newsgroup, rosewater seems to have been fairly
common in medieval cooking.  I expect others will comment on this and the
sugar, as to the nature and source of these ingredients.

--
John Taylor    (W3ZID)     |  "The opinions expressed are those of the
[email-masked] |   writer and not of Rohm and Haas Company."

---

From: [email-masked] (Curt Sampson)
Date: 18 Jan 95 02:45:59 GMT

[email-masked] (Jody C. Patilla) writes:

[In regard to 1 and 1/3 cups sugar in a medieval recipe.]

>That is a lot, though - in medieval times, sugar was rare enough to be

By the 16th century in England sugar was extremely popular and used in
large quantities. The English had been known for their rotten teeth due
to their huge appetite for sugar. One is hard put to find a recipe
without sugar in it in my early 17th century book on housewifery (oh
stop frowning--of course it's a word! :-)). There's a wonderful salad
that consists of layers of various greens interspersed with layers of
sugar.

I suppose one could still consider England to be mediaeval in the 16th
century. :-)

cjs
--
Curt Sampson  [email-masked]		Opinions are mine,
Fluor Daniel Wright, Ltd. 604 488 2226		not Fluor Daniel's.
1075 W. Georgia Street
Vancouver, B.C., V6E 4M7	 	De gustibus, aut bene aut nihil.

---

From: [email-masked] (Roots)
Date: Wed, 18 Jan 1995 13:27:48

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Alf Christophersen) writes:
>From: [email-masked] (Alf Christophersen)
>Subject: Re: Medieval Recipe
>Date: 17 Jan 1995 20:03:36 GMT

>Your recipe sounds like something quite brand new

(Snip).

What do you expect her to do?  Go out and get some hoofs and bones and boil 
them to get some gelatin??   :  )

Seriously,  the gelatin that Knox makes is not significantly different from 
"home made" except perhaps a little more sanitary.

It is an interesting debate about whether a recipe is authentic only if it was 
prepared in a stictly authentic manner even if the results are exactly the 
same as if prepared with a modern equivilent.

---

From: [email-masked] (Colette Tremblay)
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 1995 08:15:21 GMT

In article (Dans l'article) <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] (Jeff
Berry) wrote (écrivait) :

(deleted)  A quick glance in a good dictionary tells us
> interesting.) 
(deleted)

Isinglass is still used for clarifying home-made wine. You can get it at
stores that sell ingredients fot home winemaking. Good luck
Colette

-- 
Colette Tremblay
Universite Laval
Quebec QC Canada
Zone 4b

---

From: [email-masked] (Mark Waks)
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 1995 20:52:58 GMT

>That is a lot, though - in medieval times, sugar was rare enough to be

Except that the recipe posted isn't medieval, it's Elizabethan (note
that the source is 1596). By this time, my understanding is that they
not only had the making of refined sugar down pat, they were pretty
well mad for the stuff. (We had an all-Elizabethan feast in these parts
a few years back; it was quite good, but overall sweet enough to be
almost cloying -- a remarkably high fraction of the dishes involved
sugar, including a fair number I wouldn't have expected.)

The moral of the story is, be careful about generalizations about
period cooking.

(The message was elsewise a good rebuttal of the usual canards, though...)

				-- Justin

Random Quote du Jour:

"The wages of sin are death; but after they're done taking out taxes,
 it's just a tired feeling."
		-- Yelizaveta Medvedeva

---

From: [email-masked] (Cheryl Tallan)
Date: 20 Jan 1995 20:41:52 GMT

Jody C. Patilla ([email-masked]) wrote:
: In article <[email-masked]>,
: Alf Christophersen <[email-masked]> wrote:
: >Hm. Do you have some documentation of Knox existing in the medieval time?
: >Your recipe sounds like something quite brand new. Doubt they ever
: >had gelatin at all at that time. Bu, they may have knowledge about
: >making things stiff by high-pectin containing fruits and using this to
: >stiffen the porridge.

: 	Oh, gelatin has been around for a very long time. Medieval cooks
: knew well how to get boil it down from bones, calves' feet, chicken feet, etc,

The cookbooks of the 14th and 15th centuries had quite a number of recipes
for making gelatin. I don't have my collection here but I have no
doubt that, if pressed, I could come up with at least five citations.
On the other hand, I don't recall off the top of my head porridge
recipes including fresh fruit (though I do recall porridge recipes
with meat).

: just as medieval artists knew how to make glue from horse's hooves. Those
: near sea coasts knew how to make gelly from seaweed, too.

: >>1 to 1 1/3 cups sugar
: >Really?? Where is the traces of that raffinery????
: >If sweets has been used, it must have been some natural sweet stuff,
: >not pure, white, refined sugar :-)

Sugar appears much more often in medieval cookbooks than say, honey.
This may have been because sugar was more expensive and the cookbooks
were left to us by the wealthy. Sugar was a common ingredient in
Western European cookbooks as early as the late 13th Century (cf. the
Anglo-Norman recipe collections edited by C. Heiatt).

: 	THe sugar was likely the light brown kind that comes in a loaf.
: That is a lot, though - in medieval times, sugar was rare enough to be
: considered medicinal.

The illustrations from the Medieval Health Handbook (modern title), an
edition of various manuscripts from Italy in the late 14th Century
describing the "humourous" properties of various things include some
of sugar. It looks an awful lot like those cones of white sugar I
think I've seen at pioneer re-enactment sites.

: >>1 1/2 (or more) tablespoons of rosewater
: >Possibly rose petals themselves was used here. Doubt that the rosewater
: >you buys in the shop was available also then.

I doubt it too. However, they did have *something* they kept calling
rosewater in the cookbooks. The orange carrots you buy in the shops
today, I believe, are distinctly different from medieval carrots. What
are we to do when faced with a recipe calling for carrots? Most people
would use the best available substitute. I suspect that is what this
redactor was doing with a recipe that called for rosewater.

: 	Every medieval lady of a large house knew how to make her own 
: rosewater with petals from rosa damascaena and an alembic still. The taste
: for rosewater in desserts was no doubt brought back to Europe by the
: Crusaders.

: -- 

: jcpatilla					[email-masked]
: Otter, otter, otter! Floating on the sea!
: Eating fish and urchins, happier than thee....

Note. I am not saying that this redaction is/was a medieval recipe.
At best it is one persons best attempt at recreating a medieval
recipe. Without comparing it to the original I cannot begin to even
formulate an opinion on how close at probably comes and without
actually experiencing both it and the original (impossible) I cannot
ever be sure.

But it cannot be condemned for using gelatin, sugar and rosewater as
ingredients as all three are well documented in the surviving corpus
of medieval recipes.

David (NOT Cheryl) Tallan
who receives mail (and flames) at his own mailbox
[email-masked]

please ignore .sig file below
-- 
Cheryl Tallan   [email-masked]

---

From: Joyce Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: 2 Feb 1995 22:02:37 GMT

Here's a secret:  

Take an animal.  Simmer it until it dissolves. Strain out any
solid bits left, pour it out on a smooth piece of marble (aluminum
foil today), let it dry, and crumble it up into pieces.

This is gelatin.  Aspic is a less purified form.  If the "animal"
is rabbit skins, you get the "rabbit skin glue" found in
art-supply stores.  You will also meet the same stuff sold as
"hide glue" in fancy woodworking stores.  And yes, Knox gelatin is
a highly-purified, food-grade version of it, and can be used in
your calligraphy and woodworking projects, and also as a food
thickener.

Me, I don't care for boiling down rabbits.

-- Joyce
[email-masked]

---

From: [email-masked] (Alf Christophersen)
Date: 1 Feb 1995 19:18:32 GMT

>recipes including fresh fruit (though I do recall porridge recipes

I know that making gelatin was known at that moment, but the recipe ask
for Knox gelatine :-) And I doubt that that commercial line of gelatine
was available at that moment, that is, the recipe is modernized for
our times, and then, it is not medieval anymore. :-)

And the sugar must be the cones, not white raffinery sugar as the 
recipe ask for. Or maybe brown candice sugar??