Food History

Today and all this week I’ve been preparing for Passover, so naturally my mind has turned to food poisoning rather than to food proper. This is because of the curious and interesting results of going through one’s cupboards and refrigerator and freezer.

One day I might do a post on poison in food, but today I was thinking more about what happens when one doesn’t clean out cupboards and scrub pots and pans.

There was a rather good incident (retrospectively good, not pleasant at the time) at a Melbourne Cup carnival (in Canberra, Australia: centre of the known universe) for five hundred or so people a few years back. The head of a particular government department decided that we all would take too much time off if we had Melbourne Cup functions in each workplace, so he gave us permission for a two hour lunch (on flextime) as long as we were back at work for 2 pm. Then we could have exactly the time it took to watch the race (4 minutes?) and the rest of the afternoon was not to be spent in the usual drinks and silly hat competitions. You can still hear the echoes of groans resulting from his office-wide memo on the subject.

What happened? One of the stalls he so carefully approved gave most of us food poisoning. Instead of losing a bunch of us to drink for a few hours, he lost half the Department for nearly two days. And the area most hit? Australia’s Quarantine Inspection Service. I love this anecdote - I put it in a novel and the novel has been accepted by a publisher, so watch this space.

One type of food poisoning that is entirely fictional, rather than made into fiction, is the reason for people in the Middle Ages eating many varieties of spices.

People ask me, time after time after time:

“Was the meat all rotten in the Middle Ages? Did they only use spices to hide the flavour so they didn’t starve to death from lack of food?”

Interesting thought. On a whole bunch of levels that’s an interesting thought.

Firstly, if people could’t afford fresh meat, why would they spend the money they didn’t have on spices that cost many times the price of fresh meat?

Secondly, do you yourself open your cupboard or fridge and see something that’s foul and say “Mm, smells rotting. Foulness prevails. Ick. Must have it for dinner. Let’s just sprinkle some ginger on it first.”

No? The thought of stomach cramps and a visit to the hospital don’t appeal to you? You don’t like the thought of dysentery and all those other delightful side effects of food far beyond its eat-by date?

If you can’t stomach that food, why, then, would it have appealed to your ancestors? The side effects of food poisoning from rancid meat haven’t changed over the years and then - as now- it would only be appealing if there genuinely were no other food.

Which brings me to “Thirdly”. The population of Europe grew steadily and significantly until the fourteenth century. This means that mass starvation wasn’t nearly as common as some people seem to think (why can’t peasants be well-fed? why is there always someone in a room who assumes that they’re always starving?).

Look at demographics. Another firstly, once the meat animals are gone in a starvation situation, they’re gone, so too much starvation doesn’t explain the regular use of spices either. And we know that this wasn’t so - there was enough meat to supply more and more hamlets and villages and towns and cities, so the meat supply wasn’t impossibly erratic nor non-existent. Not that either would explain the regular hiding of rottenness with spices - only stupidity explains that, but let me continue arguing because obviously I’m in a mean mood and need to argue.

If you look at the Middle Ages you can see that increased population, you can see some cool improvements in ploughing, in field systems and in food distribution. So if things were better, why would rotten meat be a standard part of the diet? Pickled meat, yes. Putrid meat, no.

The truth about spices in the Middle Ages is that they helped preserve some dishes, but mostly they seem to have been used to make dishes more yummy. Like … you know … the reasons we use spices. Sometimes we make chutnies and pickles, but mostly we sprinkle pepper onto something or weave paprika through a goulash because we like the flavour.

Preservation is a good and flavouring is good - but hiding the inedible is really, really odd. I do wonder when folks assume their ancestors had no tastebuds and no common sense and not much intelligence what that says about the person who thinks such things, since - after all - they have received certain genes from these zombie-like ancestors.

And I think I’d better sign off before I get way too snarky for my own good. I think I need chocolate. Cinnamon chocolate perhaps, lest the chocolate itself be putrid and decaying.

I promised Farley - so long ago it’s embarrassing - that I would do a post on a rather cool Medieval poem known as La bataille des vins.

The poem starts off a bit like a chanson de geste (Old French epic legend), which is how I came to know about it. At one stage I researched the introductions and conclusions to chansons de geste and chronicles and romances. Part of my dim and dark past, about twenty years before I promised Farley I’d write about wine.

When you get to the meaning, it’s a bit more like an adults only AA Milne. Instead of butter for his bread, King Phillip (possibly Phillip-Augustus) wanted wine for his table. Not any wine. He wanted the best. All of them white. What was the king looking for in his wines? Not too young, the poem says, and, from shipping records, not too old, either. Perhaps a season in age, or a year.

Most of the poem lists a bunch of wines, starting with wine from Cyprus which wasn’t at all beer from Ypres (the things poets do to find their rhymes. Even I could tell that the two aren’t the same!).

Let me give you a list of the wines, grouped as Henri d’Andeli did, roughly by region. Sorry if I repeat any - I’m following the poem and not alphabetic order. Some of the repeats are places with similar names, so I’m not going to delete them all for tidiness’ sake. If anyone has tasted wines from those places, please tell us about it . (Note: I haven’t always modernised the place names - I’m just a tad short of time this week, sorry. Most of the modernisations are from the French notes with the poem’s edition, as are the comments on the popularity etc of the wines. My sources are at the end of the post.)

The wines:
Aussai, Moussele , Anni, La Rochele, Saintes, Tailleborc, Melans (possibly Milan), Treneborc, Palma (possibly Torre di Palma), Plesence, Spain, Provence, Montpellier, Narbonne, Bediers, Carcassone, Mossac, Saint-Melÿon, Orchise, Saint-Yon, Orleans (a way popular wine at that time, according to a note by Héron), Jargeau, Meulan, Argentueil, Soissons, Hautvillers, Espernai le Bacheler, Sézanne, Samois
Anjou, Gastinois (either the modern Gâtinais or Gâtine), Issoudun, Chastel Raoul, Trilbardou, Nevers, Sancerre, Verdelai, Auxerre (Medieval happiness may well have been a bottle of this), Tonnerre, Flavigni, Saint-Pourçain (this wine also got a lot of Medieval press), Savigny, Chablis, Biaune, two wines from Beauvaisis, Le Mans, Tors, Argences, Chambly, Rennes, three from the Ile-de-France region, Auxerre, Soissons, Autel de Tauçons, Vermendois, Aviler, Chalons (not the same Chalons as before), Rains, Ausois, Moselle, Saint-Jehan d’Angeli, Angouleme , Bordiaus et Saintes, Poitiers, Chagni , Montrichard , Lassy, Châteauroux, Betesi (even the editors weren’t sure where this was, Héron suggests either Béthisy-Saint-Martin or Béthisy-Saint-Pierre), Montmorillon, Ysoudun, Vermendois, Saint-Brice, Auxerre, Goditouet,

The wine of Argentueil was as clear as tears of sorrow, and someone proclaimed it best of all. This led to tussles and some name-calling. My favourite insult, wine to wine, was “son of a gluttonous prostitute.”

You’ll be pleased to know the French wines handled themselves well in the fray and were very polite when they replied to an insult about how weak they were with “So you’re stronger than we are?” Yes, this led to them boasting about their flavour. Wines get like that when one doubts their alcohol content.

There is some discussion of the effects of the alcohol, which I shall not translate. I was going to say I wasn’t going to translate it because it will sully pure minds, but the truth is that it’s that sort of colourful thing that reads fine but translates terribly if done by me. You need a better translator.

And so the Wine Fight ended. Who won? Since the battle took three days and three nights with no sleep and with far too much wine, I’m really not sure the results count.

Bibliographic details for the scholars-at-heart:

The manuscript itself: La bataille des vins, Henri d’Andeli, Ms. Paris, B.N. fr. 837, f. 231-232v
Modern Edition by Alain Corbellari Les Dits d’Henri d’Andeli Champion Paris 2003
Less Modern Edition: H. Héron, La bataille des vins, Paris 1881

The turnip (brassica rapa) is a very durable ingredient, but one that isn’t always popular as human food. It comes in and goes out of fashion as food for humans. Sometimes turnips are consigned to the pile of vegetables use to feed cows, at others they are a gourmet’s delight.

Don’t rely on turnip appearing in a cuisine as a treasured ingredient, even if it’s grown in great quantities at a particular time and place. Also don’t rely on it being absent - turnip is a surprisingly unreliable vegetable given its degree of stodge. It was on Charlemagne’s preferred list of plants, so it’s not always gone unrecognised either. It’s a very unpredictable plant and I suspect there’s a great deal of interesting history behind its amicable dirt-covered exterior.

Young turnip can be a delight in salad, while older ones and turnips of the tougher varieties definitely need stewing or to go into soups. The leaf is a very refreshing addition to salads.

Thanks to a table full of cooks and tasters on Saturday, the Regency Gothic dessert mix is almost there. We tried almond custard (a bit gritty for most people), almond jumbles (nice and crunchy), burnt almonds (dangerously more-ish - three people said so), ginger drops (intense), heart cake (”very strong flavour” said one tester, “I like” said another), icecream (”yum”, “apricot and creamy”), macaroons (”popcorny”, “crunchy”), moonshine pudding (delicious and elegant - possibly the best bread and butter pudding I have ever eaten), raspberry cream (comments ranged from “different” to “Great mate”), savoy biscuits (”good but bland”, “strange texture”), rice cake (”nice”, “good with raspberry cream”), rice custards (”comfort food”, “nice spice element”), royal cake (”a bit exotic”, “plainish” and “moist and flavoursome”) and Windsor syllabub (”Creamy, spicy, alcoholic”). There was, alas, no negus, because the negus-maker gave his apologies at too late an hour to secure a replacement.

The first dish to drop from the final list was negus - it couldn’t be tried with the others, so I had to reluctantly let it go. There are two more courses to work out before we put the menu to the hotel and then we wait to hear from the chef - and that’s when I announce the final menu. The list of dishes that make it through to the final stages will have to suffice you for a bit. I can tell you though, that the final course will have some total delights. And if you’re truly impatient, I can give you that negus recipe we won’t be using.

What I couldn’t work out on Saturday, though, is if icecream was so near perfect in the early nineteenth century, why isn’t it all as simply wonderful now?

It’s far too long since I’ve added to the scone and biscuit tally. For new readers, I started collecting scone and biscuit recipes and references in a rather desultory fashion late last year. All contributions gratefully received, as long as they include a country (and even a region, if you can) and a rough date.

These recipes are from Jewish Melbourne in the 1950s. Yep, you guessed it, it’s more of my grandmother’s recipes. I should have looked for biscuit recipes in her cookbook ages ago, but tonight I remedy the deficit. Note the use of lard - this is definitely part of Jewish Melbourne past, not present.

This is the lot of them (as they were written down - I haven’t modernised at all) from this one book, which is the handwritten one we found hidden in the back room of my father’s dental surgery after he died. Also hidden there was a 1903 disarticulated skull which sits comfortably on a shelf in my lounge room and I call Perceval. You probably really didn’t want to know about the skull.

Tea Biscuits

1 cup SR flour, rub in 1 large tablespoon Butter, mix into stiff dough with lemon water, leave 10 mts. Roll out as thin as possible cut and bake in moderate oven until golden brown.

Ginger Biscuits

1 ½ cups flour, 1 cup sugar, ½ cup butter, 1 egg, 2 tablespoons golden syrup, 1 tablesp milk, ½ teasp cream of tartar, 1 teasp soda, 3 heaped teaspns ginger, 1 teaspn essence of lemon.
Method: - Mix butter, & sugar, egg golden syrup milk flour, ect, and lastly lemon essence. Put in ½ teaspoon on greased slide and cook in slow oven.

Gem Scones

Firstly heat gem irons and grease them well so as when the mixture will sizzle with a spoonful is put in. Beat 1 tablespoon sugar and 1 tablespoon butter, then 1 egg a pinch of salt. Then add 1 cup of milk and 2 cups S.R. flour. Drop in a spoonful in the iron and bake in oven 4 minutes. If oven and irons are right temperature scones will not take longer.

Drop Scones

Beat 1 egg and 2 oz until creamy add ½ cup milk and mix in 1 cup S.R. flour. Heat a frying pan and grease well. Drop mixture by teaspoons into hot pan and cook quickly. When little bubbles begin to rise turn scones with a knife and brown other side. Serve hot with sugar.

Fruit Scones

Sift 2 cups flour 4 teaspoon baking powder, pinch salt, and rub in 4 tablespoon butter. Add ¼ cup sultanas, chopped figs and chopped dates. Mix with milk into a soft dough. Cut into shapes and bake in a hot oven for 12 minutes.

Wholemeal Date Scones
Sift 2 cups fine wholemeal; 2 tablespoons cream tartar, 1 teaspoon cinnamon. Rub in 2 tablespoons butter. Add 2 tablespoon brown sugar and ½ cup chopped dates and mix into soft dough with ½ cup milk. Cut into shapes and bake in hot oven for 15 minutes.

Oatmeal Nut Scones

9 oz plain flour, 4 oz fine oatmeal, 2 teaspoon baking powder, 1 oz lard, 1 ½ oz butter, 1 ½ oz chopped walnuts, 1 ½ oz castor, sugar, milk.
Sift dry ingredients and rub in lard and butter. Add walnuts and sugar and mix to a soft dough with milk. Cut into shape and brush tops with milk and bake in hot oven for 15 minutes.

I love The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. Every now and again I open it and dip into it and sit there contemplating what I’ve just read.

Opening at random I find:

1. A heading “Little known French Dishes suitable for American and British Kitchens.”

2. p. 76, which mourns the loss of a favourite restaurant on the road the Chartres: it was a victim of the Second World War.

3. p. 49, which begins “From murder to detection is not far. And here is a note on tracing a soup to its source.” Toklas describes gazpacho for just over a page, gives us five recipes, then throws in ones she links are like it (cacik and tarata) to round things out. The chapter finishes “Too simple, my dear Watson.”
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The Coffee and Tea festival is now up at A Thought over Coffee. Enjoy!

I’ve talked in other posts of other places to buy herbs and spices online, but today I received a little parcel from Herbie’s. They only had a third of my dream list of hard-to-get stuff, but they got me my herbs and spices incredibly quickly and the quality is just gorgeous. I keep picking up my packets of chilli and admiring the gorgeousness of their content.

I have grains of paradise and file powder, long pepper and cinnamon leaf. I have Eucalyptus Olida, Mexican chocolate and three different types of chilli. And I have my favourite spice of all: cubebs. Expect posts on all these as I revisit them with my class and elsewhere later in the year.

This is an excuse for an ingredient - I’m having a night off. Salad oil is any oil without too strong a flavour that can be used as a salad dressing base. Canola, sunflower or safflower oil are all handy. I don’t regard olive oil as a ’salad oil’ even though I use it more than any other for salad dressings, because it lends any salad the distinctive aroma of olives.

Why a post about salad oil at all?

I’ve recently been considering terminology. One of the big bugbears of historical cookery is finding out if the writer of the recipe means the same thing by a term as you do. Most of the early nineteenth century recipes we’ve been testing recently have produced questions about sugar, because sugar is described in so many ways.

Food descriptions change and food descriptions vary, which makes it just as important to define ’salad oil’ as to give the botanical name for asafoetida. Both of them give us a shared vocabulary for exploring the culinary past.

I was 2/3 of the way through a long post about Anne-Marie Nicols and Women’s History Month when my computer misbehaved and ate the post. It must’ve been the mention of chocolate within it and the analysis of why it was highly unlikely that choc chip cookies could have been invented much before they were actually invented. Nothing else explains the sudden gobbling sound and the disappearance of the post.

Anne-Marie has a series of Women’s History Month posts - one very foodie - starting here. Don’t wait for my computer to behave - just enjoy them now!

When people talk about Jewish food it all sounds so easy. For Passover in two weeks we might have matzah brie and chicken soup and choc-nut cake and all kinds of wondrous stuff. Charoseth and chopped liver and pickles and edelbitter chocolate.

I don’t often hear people talk about the food before Passover. Finishing up food for Passover is never glamorous.

I grew up in an Orthodox household (which means we kept a kosher kitchen) in Melbourne in the 1960s and 1970s. Because we were a biggish family and each of us kids had numerous friends, getting the place ready for Passover entailed biscuits. Lots of biscuits.

The biscuit recipe was adapted to meet the ingredients that needed to be used up. The tins of biscuits we took to school started off as full of fruits and nuts and chocolate chips and ended up butter or coconut. By a week before Passover there was no more flour in the house and we finished up the last sugar and vinegar with a tin or so of toffees. We might have a dish of sago or something else a bit more unusual to finish up other odds and ends, but really, the only food we had to get rid of (in the caravan, technically sold to my father’s dental nurse for the duration) were mostly food colourings and essences.

I did my cupboard just now, ready for furious finishing-up over the next 2 weeks and the results couldn’t be more different.

I have enough flour for precisely one batch of biscuits. I had enough polenta for two batches of pancakes and enough honey for two, so I made one for lunch today and have diminished the polenta, the honey and the eggs all at once. Yay me. Not all the food is finishable, so I have a shelf of the cupboard that I shall simply seal off and pretend it doesn’t exist. There is only one of me, after all. And I’m not nearly as religious other members of my family.

I threw out all the out-of-date food. There wasn’t too much of that, though how I managed to get 3 boxes of pudina chutney mix and let them all get three years beyond their use-by date is a mystery.

I will be eating quite a bit of nori maki this next fortnight - rice and seaweed and wasabi and soy sauce were most plentiful. Also heat-and-serve spinach curry. I have enough for two meals of that. I have Vietnamese spring roll wrappers and some sheets of lasagne. Great Northern beans, chickpeas, one meal worth of pasta shells, three of spaghetti and one small roll of buckwheat noodles. Enough red lentils for one dish of dhal (to go with both the spinach curries, I think, since my dishes of dhal are large) and some ground almonds. Ground almonds and flour = almond biscuits, of course. The sweetest things there are a tin of unsweetened peaches and some almond-flavoured agar-agar jelly mix from Singapore, which will go very nicely together if someone drops in. And I really can’t face those lasagna sheets: I’ll give them to a very fortunate friend.

My mother, on the other hand, is making biscuits as usual.

Mum’s Biscuits

Ingredients:

150 g butter or equivalent amount of oil
1 large egg
1 small cup sugar
1 cup SR flour
1 drop vanilla (optional)
any flavouring/additional ingredient you feel like (eg mixed dried fruit, coconut, chocolate chips)

Method:

Melt butter. Add everything else. Mix well. Drop a teaspoon at a time on well-greased trays. Bake in a moderate oven for 10-15 minutes.

PS The picture is of bread because for eight days in April I won’t be able to eat it. That’s another thing about pre-Passover preparations. Bread becomes the dream food that will soon become the stuff of painful denial. I’ve already started wandering longingly through the bakery part of the supermarket eyeing off shelves of ciabtta and pitta with wisful gluttony. I can’t buy any though. Too much to finish up. Too little time.

It will all be over in three weeks. If I say it often enough I might believe it.

Thanks to author Elizabeth Chadwick, the strange no-bake gingerbread from the Regency Gothic testing has finally worked. She had some important observations to make about it, which help make sense of why most of the gingerbread recipes we tested were such abject failures. The most important observation was that not all food was made to be consumed immediately: maturity is a factor in cooking.

At first she was a little worried:

Comes out a bit like marzipan in texture and slightly glossy. … It is entirely edible non-baked but the flavours are very powerful. The black treacle gives it an almost bitter after-taste and the quantity of ginger ensures it’s very hot.

However it’s not unpalateable and while probably an acquired taste, it’s the kind of acquired taste one might develop for very intense dark, bitter chocolate or the strongest of strong cheese. ….

So: A success with caveats. It does work as a no-bake and would be very warming on a cold day.

Then she sent me a second report, confirming very strongly that the ‘no-bake’ interpretation of the recipe was absolutely correct.

Her final comment was:

It definitely gets better as you keep it. It’s dried out more now and become a little crumbly. Texture is turning to half way between cake and biscuit. The flavour has mellowed too - still strong but not quite so much of a blast. So I would think it wasn’t eaten straight from the kitchen, but left to stand for a few days.

Several observations. First: some food was for keeping. Second, if ovens are not mentioned, baking might be an error even if the modern version of the recipe is baked. Finally, early nineteenth century gingerbread is not one thing. Each and every recipe has the potential to be a memory of the fifteenth century or to be adapted to newer cooking technologies. Each and every one might be for eating immediately, or for storage and maturation. Some of the gingerbread recipes are still obscure to me - I can’t make sense of how to cook them without them loking like fertliser or gravel or .. something else. The Old Foodie has promised to take a look at the recipes we used and see if she can work out what happened, but - as I haven’t time to send them to her for a little - this might take a while.

Gingerbread is proving surprising interesting.

I’m playing with your brain. [insert creepy music here] Well, maybe not everyone’s brain - just a few readers. I posted about my teaching on my normal blog and then realised it was also a culinary history post. I was going to send people in circles from one blog to another and think evil thoughts all the while, but instead I’ll just paste the body of my post and anyone who reads both blogs can have five minutes off.

“Because I’m in an exceptionally kind mood, I thought I would share with you what the apples looked like that endangered Isaac Newton’s brain. What I really want right now, though is to eat the Gloria Mundi variety, so I can exclaim “Sic transit Gloria Mundi” as I munch.

Why am I fixating on historical apples? Because I can’t make up my mind how long before my Food in History course begins is the right time to ring the local heritage apple orchard (which has Pearmains!) and to ask if we can please have a class excursion there.

The excursion isn’t on the course outline and would be entirely optional, but the apple guy knows his stuff (and has Pearmains!!) and it would be an exceptionally cool thing to do. It would be especially exceptional in May, if I have my when-apples-ripen correct and quite a few varieties are in season (my inner-apple-date is all based on Passover - we always had our first Grannies and Goldens for first night Passover when I was a child).

In an ideal world, we might be able to ask for a tour and then buy a heap and take them away for tasting or for historical cooking. Now wouldn’t *that* be an excursion and a half - an orchard and then cook historical varieties in recipes from their period of earliest note. I don’t know if we’d do that the same day or if we’d divvy the loot and bring recipes in the next Tuesday. I suspect I’m in dreaming mode until I ring the amazing apple guy and ask what he thinks.

Maybe it’s peak harvest for him and excursions aren’t possible. We shall see. It may not be possible at all. In which case I will browse on the Brogdale Horticultural site for many hours, exclaiming “Sic transit gloria mundi” for entirely different reasons.”

It’s funny how - outside the university - many people talk about stultifying academic exchanges and assume that intellectual developments happen at a snail’s pace. Inside a discipline there are rushes of major change based on a century or so of groundwork. Scholars rely on the past, but also do fascinating things during their lifetimes.

Archaeologists have always looked at food. Midddens and muckheaps are excellent places to find out about people’s lives. Now they’re looking at it differently and in a way that crosses over with the work of historians more readily. This creates such a wonderful depth in how we can see our food pasts. It also means that serious foodies need to start keeping an eye out for archaeological reports.

This post gives an example of one worth looking at. Rene T.J. Cappers has written Roman Foodprints at Beneike. Archaeobotanical evidence of subsistence and trade in the eastern desert of Egypt. It was published by the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles.

Don’t be put off by its scholarly apparatus. This book puts the food of the region into important contexts. If you want to understand people and their lives and their food habits, these contexts are crucial.

Capper looks at trade networks and how they affect populations in the region. He examines vegetation then and vegetation now and the exigencies of nomadic life. He looks at food production and differentiates between cultivated and wild plants. There’s a whole chapter on peaches.

The great thing about scholarly apparatus is use it to find the precise bit of information you’re after: in this book you can get to the material by plant name, you can follow up ideas in the bibliography and you can see exactly what the author is talking about through the colour plates at the end.

This type of book isn’t for the faint-hearted: you need to have your brain in gear. It will, however, open up a great deal of amazing insights into peoples past and their relationship with food and with food production.

These are the recipes that were used for the feast at Conflux (Canberra SF convention) in 2006. The most-loved one by far was the hypocras, but everything except frumenty garnered many good comments. There’s no frumenty recipe here (if people didn’t love it, why include it?) and I’ve left off the feast trimmings. This, then, is the essential core of the feast. (And I did blog it on my other blog, way back when, but I’m repeating myself because people are interested and looking for things Medieval.)

Spiced mushrooms
500 g mushrooms (Swiss brown are ideal), 1 small onion, olive oil, 1 pinch ground pepper, 1 pinch powdered ginger, 1 pinch well-ground nutmeg, 2 pinches ground coriander
Peel and wash mushrooms. Cut into pieces. Boil for 10 minutes.
Cut onion finely, then fry it in olive oil. Add the mushrooms and have the flame on high for a short time. Add salt and spices, lower heat and cook covered for 15 minutes. Stir from time to time. Serve when golden.

Fenkel in soppes
1 bunch fennel, 2 med onions (chopped very fine), between 2-4 cups water depending on taste, ½ cup olive oil, pinch ginger, pinch pepper, salt to taste, toasted bread (one slice per person)
Shred the bulb part of the fennel. Heat oil, and add onion and fennel. Stir over a low heat until they are wilted (but not brown). Add water, seasoning and bring to a boil. Simmer until fennel is tender.
Served by the hotel in bowls (as a liquid) with bread cubes.

Fried beans
1 kg fava beans (most other varieties NOT correct), 2 onions (minced or diced very finely), 2 cloves garlic (minced), olive oil
If you are using fresh beans, then cook till tender before adding the onions. If you are using tinned beans, then bring to the boil before adding onion. Cook onions with the beans for 3 minutes. Drain well. Saute beans, onions and garlic in olive oil, for c 5 minutes.

Roast beef with garlic/pepper sauce
Beef preferably spit roasted.
Sauce: 2 slices wholemeal bread (remove crusts, toast, then crumble into bowl or blender). 2 tbs wine vinegar, 1 cup wine, 3 cloves crushed garlic, ½ tsp ground pepper, ¼ tsp salt.
Let toasted breadcrumbs soak in vinegar for 5 mins, then blend the two ingredients. Add wine. Add other ingredients and boil until it thickens slightly (but stir it throughout).

Chicken with orange sauce
Roast chickens, cut into serving pieces, and simmer 15 mins in the sauce below.
Sauce: 2 sliced oranges (leave skin on), 1 cup white wine, juice of 1 lemon (unless you can get Seville oranges, in which case just add extra orange juice), ¼ tsp ginger, salt to taste.

Hypocras (spiced wine)
1 litre of good red wine or of dry white, 150 g icing sugar (not icing mixture),1 ½ tsp cinnamon, 1 ½ tsp ginger, small piece fresh galingale
Grind spices together. Add sugar and spices to wine. Mix well and let sit for two hours. Filter wine very thoroughly (preferably twice, using a double thickness of filter paper or fine material) until it is quite clear. Keep somewhere cool for at least a day or two before drinking.

Daryols
Pastry tart shells (one per serve - the hotel served very tiny ones, which were very cute), 10 egg yolks or five eggs, c. 1/2 cup sugar (to taste), 2 generous cups light cream, 1/4 tsp cinnamon, pinch ground saffron.
Beat eggs and sugar together then beat in cream, cinnamon and saffron. Stir over low heat until it begins to thicken. Pour into pastry shells. Bake at 400 degrees for c 20 minutes.

Pomesmoille
450 g cooking apples (no modern variety of apple is correct: Granny Smiths are closest I have found of the main Australian varieties), 70-140 g ground almonds, 2 cups milk, up to 1/2 cup sugar (amount of sugar depends on how sweet apples are), 1/4 cup rice flour, 1/2 tsp cinnamon, 1/8 tsp ginger, pinch each of ground cloves, salt, nutmeg.
Make an almond milk with milk. Mix sugar, rice flour and almond milk in saucepan. Stir in apples and bring to a boil over medium heat. Stir until quite thick. Combine a spoon of pudding with all seasonings except nutmeg, then stir mixture into rest of pudding. Pour into serving dish. Sprinkle nutmeg on top and chill. The hotel cut the apples coarsely - I prefer them cut fine. Have some of this and a bit of hypocras and your taste buds will swoon.