Subject: Re: Provisions

From: [email-masked] (Stephen Bloch)
Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1993 05:27:54 GMT

[email-masked] writes:
>A friend and I are going to be going on
>a Medieval As Possible hike/camping trip and I was wondering what provisions
>we might take.  In case your wondering we are thinking of about the 11th or 
>12th century.

Of course, the notion of Going On A Hike or Going On A Camping Trip
probably didn't exist in the Middle Ages.  So I'll read the question as
"what would travellers in the Middle Ages eat while travelling through
sparsely-populated regions?"

I've seen medieval recipes with the comment "this is good for travellers",
generally recipes for closed pasties filled with meat or fish.  I've gone
to SCA "wars" with an armload or two of various such pasties, and found
they keep well for a few days; any more and I'd worry about nasty bacteria
growing in the meat.  I've also tried the same thing with chickpeas,
partly because they don't spoil as readily and partly because I and others
in the group tend variously towards vegetarian.  If you try this, experi-
ment with the seasoning before you go or you'll have awfully dull, bland
pasties.  I used currants, onions, and a variety of spices in addition to
the chickpeas.  The dough should be made with a fat that doesn't go rancid
easily, and probably worked enough to make any good piecrust-maker scream,
in order to make it tough and sturdy.  (This last is a suggestion from
Aidan the Golden, the guy who sells darioles from a tray at Pennsic.)

Moving from this already shaky ground towards Rampant Speculation, one
expects people carried some kind of bread, most likely a heavy or even
totally unleavened one (hey, matzoh is documented 3500 years back for
exactly this purpose!)  We know there existed a variety of cheeses in the
Middle Ages, and a relatively dry, hard cheese is good travelling food.
We know there was a lot of drying and salting of meat and fish, and it's
hard to believe travellers wouldn't take along some of this jerky.  It
also seems quite likely people would shoot or trap game and catch fish
along the way (and, if they had time, dry anything they couldn't eat
immediately).  Yogurt, kefir, and related substances can be carried in a
drinking skin, and don't spoil nearly as easily as milk (because they're
ALREADY spoiled!); they seem to have been discovered by Mongol nomads,
and possibly by lots of other people independently.  Medieval Europeans
drank a lot more wine and beer in everyday life than we do, presumably
because the alcohol killed the nasty critters that might infest any
water source in a populated area; I can only assume they would carry lots
of wine and beer on a long journey as well.  Medieval Europeans definitely
knew and used raisins, currants, prunes, figs, and dates in their ordinary
cooking, so one expects them to have carried them on long journeys (but
possibly cooked them before eating; I've read that many medieval medics
considered raw fruits and vegetables extremely unhealthy).

Basically, the kinds of foods we have recorded in cookbooks are medieval
haute cuisine, the sort of stuff prepared by twelve servants in a palace
kitchen rather than the sort of stuff you carry in a backpack.  So we
don't really know.

-- 
					Stephen Bloch
				    [email-masked]

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From: [email-masked]
Date: 14 Apr 93 12:19:43 PST

With respect to a request for Medieval travel food,
In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] (Stephen Bloch) writes:
> growing in the meat. 

 With all due respect (and for you, Stephen, that's quite a lot :)) my
microbiological heart can stop when I hear talk like this! Of course, it
depends on the ambient temperature, but I wouldn't dream of eating meat or fish
that sat out unfrozen on my counter for more than a few hours. I would suggest,
if no refrigeration is available, that you either transport the pasties frozen,
and eat them right when they thaw, compromise your medieval experience by
packing the little gems in a plastic bag with one of those chemical cold packs
(keeps things cold for hours, if wrapped to insulate), or go with food that
will need no refridgeration. As Stephen suggested, hard cheeses, unsquishable
breads (like crackers, bagels, crusty rolls), hard salomi or thuringer, etc. 
Most fresh fruit tends to mush into a jam in your pack (oranges do OK), but
carrots, turnips (I like 'em raw) etc do well. 

Will you be able to cook? If you will, a number of stews can be made from
non-mushable veggies, spices (lightweight and non-perishable), lentils, etc. If
you must have meat, try to plan to use frozen for the first night out, and
dried after that (You can cheat and get the freeze dried stuff from your local
yuppie camping store. We have REI in Seattle).

If you are out in the wilds, food poisoning can be more than an inconvenience,
it can be deadly. If you have no cooler, take no chances.

If you like, I can e-mail you some period recipes that do well over an open
fire, with non-perishable ingredients. I've served them for fairly large camps
before (20+), with good success.

Thanks for tolerating my tirade...
Anne-Marie, who once got sick from meat while camping.
e-mail: [email-masked]

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From: [email-masked] ()
Date: 14 Apr 1993 21:34:30 GMT

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] writes:
"With respect to a request for Medieval travel food,
"In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] (Stephen Bloch) writes:
"" 
"" I've seen medieval recipes with the comment "this is good for travellers",
"" generally recipes for closed pasties filled with meat or fish.  I've gone
"" to SCA "wars" with an armload or two of various such pasties, and found
"" they keep well for a few days; any more and I'd worry about nasty bacteria
"" growing in the meat. 
"
" With all due respect (and for you, Stephen, that's quite a lot :)) my
"microbiological heart can stop when I hear talk like this! Of course, it
"depends on the ambient temperature, but I wouldn't dream of eating meat or fish
"that sat out unfrozen on my counter for more than a few hours. ...

I have to agree with both of you... I used to make rabbit-leek-and-mushroom
pies that would sit on my cupboard shelf for a week till we got around to
eating them and nobody ever got sick.  However, I recently did a lot of
research on food safety (for a cooking collegium) and now I am truly
appalled: I wonder how in the hell it is that we are not all seriously
ill and/or dead.  Guardian angels watch out for fools and innocents, I
guess.
"
"Will you be able to cook? If you will, a number of stews can be made from
"non-mushable veggies, spices (lightweight and non-perishable), lentils, etc. If
"you must have meat, try to plan to use frozen for the first night out,

For longer than that if you play your cards right.  We had a ten-day camping
event for the West Kingdom's 25th-year anniversary.  We were within reach
of supermarkets, but we didn't want to leave the site any oftener than
we had to.  We figured out what we were going to cook, ordered it from
our friendly butcher, and had him package each day's meat separately
and freeze it in his big supercold commercial freezer.  We put it in an
ice chest, interleaved with newspaper-wrapped dry ice, and took it to
the tourney.  We opened it once a day, to take out tomorrow's meat and
put it in the regular ice chest where it slowly thawed, helping to keep
the rest of the food cold.  By the last day or so the last of the dry
ice had sublimed and the rest of the meat had thawed; we put it in the
regular ice chest--for which, mind you, we had on-site supplies of
water ice--and cooked and ate it before anything could happen to it.
We lost no meat to spoilage.

and
"dried after that (You can cheat and get the freeze dried stuff from your local
"yuppie camping store. We have REI in Seattle).

We have REI in Berkeley, too, hooray, and I have a cauldron full of freeze-
dries which is my emergency supply.  If ever it gets really cold, wet,
and nasty, I could make a very large cauldron of soup which could keep
a lot of people this side of hypothermia and taste moderately good, too.

"If you like, I can e-mail you some period recipes that do well over an open
"fire, with non-perishable ingredients. I've served them for fairly large camps
"before (20+), with good success.

Oh, please, mail them to me too, or else post them, I suspect others would
be interested.

Dorothy J. Heydt
UC Berkeley
[email-masked]

Disclaimer:  UCB and the Cozzarelli lab are not responsible for my
opinions, and in fact I don't think they know I have any.

---

From: [email-masked] (David Friedman)
Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1993 22:23:45 GMT

On the subject of period provisions for a camping trip.

1. Someone posted on the dangers of spoiled food. How is this affected by
cooking? I generally assume that you can take a meat or cheese and egg pie
out of the refrigerator when you leave for an event and eat it five or six
hours later with no risk. Am I wrong? It was not entirely clear whether the
reference was to cooked or raw meat.

2. There is a recipe for pickling cooked meat in a cookbook probably dating
from the 13th c., surviving in several daughter manuscripts, of which the
best known is probably the one in an Icelandic medical miscellany of the
15th c. (I think). We have used it many times with no problems, including
leaving the pickled meat at room temperature for a couple of weeks. If one
is being cautious, I believe  thorough boiling destroys botulism toxin,
which I gather is the most serious danger.

3. Dried pasta is common in the 14th-15th c. cuisine (Macrows, Losyns,
etc.). Easy to make and keeps.

4. Hais (al Baghdadi and the Miscellany) is recommended as travellers food
and keeps forever. So does gingerbrede (the medieval fudge texture kind).
Barmakiya, which is a sort of Muslim pasty, is also recommended for
travellers; I have not experimented with how long it keeps.

David Friedman

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From: [email-masked]
Date: 14 Apr 93 12:19:43 PST

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From: [email-masked] ()
Date: 14 Apr 1993 21:34:30 GMT

and

Dorothy J. Heydt
UC Berkeley

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From: [email-masked] (David Friedman)
Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1993 22:23:45 GMT

David Friedman

---

From: Alan Deacon
Date: 15 Apr 93 12:41:02 GMT

[email-masked] writes:

>Hello,
>	My name is Geoff Stewart.  A friend and I are going to be going on

>             			Many thanks,
>					Geoff

Unleavened bread, or only slightly leavened bread is best. I've tried various
Pitta or Nan style breads, they start out fresh but soon dry to an almost
biscuit/cracker like texture. cf Matzoh and Scandinavian crispbreads.

The harder the cheese you can get the better it will keep. Parmesan is a 
skimmed milk cheese, that from ewes has a nice taste. 

Smoked meat is fine. I can get smoked ribs quite easily, their good to add
to a pot of dried peas/beans.

Dried fruit, but not too much or you'll get the runs!

If you can get hold of them Carob pods make a nice touch. They are also called
Saint John's Bread as they are what he is supopsed to have lived on in the
wilderness. I've seen them in some whole food stores, they also grow wild
in Southern Mediterranean climates (I've scrumped them in Cyprus for example).

--
	Alan Deacon
	Central Computing Service		Email: [email-masked]
	University College London		Tel: +44 71-380 7359
	Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT		Fax: +44 71-388 5406

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From: [email-masked] (Eileen Kupstas)
Date: 15 Apr 1993 13:34:41 -0400

You might look into drying some of your own food; this would
be a technology available to the Medeival travelers. You can 
even do it the old-fashioned way by sun and low heat (fire) or
the more modern way with dehydrators. I've dried a number of 
things for camping and found them to keep very well, as long as
they are dried thoroughly (reduced to about 5% water for veggies,
a bit more allowed in fruits). A stew can be made of the 
ingredients very easily, or they can be eaten dry as "chips".
(This was the primary means of preserving in American pioneer
places, where canning supplies might not have been readily 
available.)
 Another way to preserve is by cooking in sugar syrup (what
we call "candying".) I've seen a number of old recipes for some
mighty weird candied things. This may have been very expensive
back then and not much used for the common person.

 I don't know if travellers actually did either of these, but the technology
would have been there.

Eileen

PS -- I guess my tofu jerky recipe wouldn't be of much use for a
	Medeival event :-)

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From: [email-masked]
Date: 12 Apr 93 18:35:54 GMT

Hello,

             			Many thanks,
					Geoff

---

From: [email-masked] (Stephen Bloch)
Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1993 05:27:54 GMT

-- 
					Stephen Bloch
				    [email-masked]

---

From: [email-masked] (Nick Maclaren)
Date: 15 Apr 93 19:11:41 GMT

>places, where canning supplies might not have been readily 

This depends on when and where you are camping.  Dried foods keep well
only in semi-arid climates or in permanent, watertight, heated buildings.
In Great Britain in winter the humidity rarely drops much below 100%,
and there is a condensing atmosphere every night (summer and winter).
This is why traditional dried foods are heavily salted in this part of
the world.  The same would apply to parts of the USA.

Remember that European travel was a summertime activity in mediaeval
times, mainly due to the state of the roads.  The same constraint did
not necessarily apply to North Africa or the Arabian peninsular.

Nick Maclaren
University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory,
New Museums Site, Pembroke Street,
Cambridge CB2 3QG, England.
Email:  [email-masked]
Tel.:   +44 223 334761
Fax:    +44 223 334679

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From: [email-masked] (Stephen Bloch)
Date: Sat, 17 Apr 1993 23:43:36 GMT

[email-masked] replied:
> With all due respect ... my
>that sat out unfrozen on my counter for more than a few hours.

Frankly, I was a little shocked when I read what I was writing, too.
And on more careful reflection, I'm not sure it's true.  I'm semi-
vegetarian, so if I'm making snackables for myself I tend to do
spanakopita or a veggie-modified meat-pasty recipe, both of which
offer a less inviting growth medium.  On the occasions I've done meat-
pasties with a group, we've taken coolers and only had the pasties
out for a few hours.

However, the question remains whether such pasties are any safer than
jes' plain meat.  The filling is thoroughly cooked, then sealed
carefully in dough, then baked or boiled.  Does the dough provide a
decent barrier to reinfection?  How long would it delay the nasty
bacteria?

David Friedman mentioned the Arabic recipe "Barmakiya", which if I
remember right is a pasty filled with fish.  This is one of the ones I
tried with the aforementioned camping group.  I've only made it once,
so I haven't really debugged the recipe.

-- 
					Stephen Bloch
				    [email-masked]

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From: [email-masked] (Jonathan E. Quist)
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1993 18:13:52 GMT

>decent barrier to reinfection?  How long would it delay the nasty

I've heard (though can't confirm any references) that part of what helps
seal the insides of pasties and the like is the fat in the crust -
somehow, I'd expect a lard-based crust would be much safer than one
from vegetable shortening, if this is true.  Of course, traditional
pasties in the American midwest was not as a traveling food, but as a working
food that retained heat for 6 hours.  (or 8 hours, or 17 hours, or whatever
the standard time was from the start of work in the morning to the
lunch break...)

Didn't the Frug comment on the durability of Cornish pork pies, which he
says are served cold?
-- 
Jonathan E. Quist        [email-masked]       Lachman Technology, Incorporated
DoD #094, KotPP, KotCF '71 CL450-K4 "Gleep"                 Naperville, IL
 __       There's nothing quite like the pitter-patter of little feet,
 \/                   followed by the words "Daddy!  Yay!"

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From: [email-masked] (Nick Maclaren)
Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1993 13:53:09 GMT

>Didn't the Frug comment on the durability of Cornish pork pies, which he

I am puzzled by this.  While pork pies are made in Cornwall, they are
actually a speciality of the Midlands.  Cornish pasties were intended
to be served hot, and are kept that way from morning to croust or lunch
by wrapping them in a napkin or equivalent.  They can also be eaten cold.
Pork pies are almost always eaten cold, though there are varieties that
are eaten hot.

In either case, cooked meat products keep fairly safely for 3 days to a
week at typical winter temperatures (40-50 Fahrenheit) and from 1-3 days
at typical summer temperatures (50-60 Fahrenheit).  This drops to hours
for tropical temperatures, and is why there are many British travel (and
similar) books that warn people of the dangers of the tropics.  My mother
still has a few, and they make amusing reading.

The reason that they are relatively safe is that most of the aerobic
bacteria etc. are fairly harmless (moulds, yeasts etc.), and that the
storage conditions do not promote things like botulinus.  However,
remember that people brought up to such conditions are effectively
immune to minor contaminations (like salmonella) that may affect a
typical modern city dweller quite seriously.

Nick Maclaren