Food History

Battling wines are good for an extraordinary number of things. The post I did on the Medieval poem has been mentioned in this month’s Carnivalesque (thank you, a_d_medievalist, for alerting me so quickly). What’s really cool about this is that it’s an edition about “food, on drink, on violence, on sex, on spectacle and pageantry, on the startling and the surprising, on chance and vicissitude” and there are some great posts linked. There’s more history than food in it, however, so I’m giving you a wine ad here for your delectation and to balance things out.

My mild practical joke was yesterday and I am a sober and serious historian today, working on a paper on Australian Jewish foodways for a July conference so I thought you’d like a small collection of interesting links. They’re each and every one of them chosen for different reasons. All of them relate to food history, of course.

The first link perhaps needs some explaining. It’s a reference table for historians (and possibly historical novelists) and shows grain prices over time. What’s really cool about this sort of thing is that you can look at grain prices and find out about food and society and whether society gets the food it needs. Riots and misery result when basic foodstuffs can’t be had and changes of government can be forced when the society puts the blame squarely on government. Think of the English Corn Law or the earlier Assizes. One day I might do a post on the Assizes and another day I might do one on the Corn Law and its history, but in the interim, take a look at Richard Unger’s grain price pages.

I realised this morning that I haven’t put nearly enough chocolate on these pages, so here’s a web entry that has some gorgeous eighteenth century chocolate pots. I want me one of these. I’m curious to taste the effect of the frother/molenillo (the wooden device that slots into the lid) - right now I use a hand capuccino frother or my blender, but I can’t know how near or far I am from the correct texture until I taste it made properly.

The next link is an example of a type of site I want to see more of. It’s the food specific to St Louis (excuse me while I break into song - in fact ignore me while I break into song, because my voice sounds nothing like Judy Garland’s. On a good day I sing on key, and that’s the most you can hope for.). What’s cool about this site is that it lists some of the foodstuff that the people of St Luis treasure as part of their culinary history. You can argue all you like about what food came from where and when things were introduced, but until a great deal more local histories are done we don’t even know a small percentage of what foods people claim as their own. The French do local pride in food particularly well, but St Louis has a rather impressive list of foods that have historical resonance for them:

Toasted Ravioli
Gooey butter cake
Prosperity sandwich
Pork Steaks
The Concrete
Peanut Butter
The Slinger
Provel ™ cheese
St. Louis style Pizza
St. Paul Sandwich
Brain Sandwich
Soft drinks - Whistle™, Howdy, 7-UP™ (its first name was “Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Sodas” - very catchy)
Ice Cream in a Cone
Hot Dog on precisely the right bun
Iced Tea
Hamburg Steak as a Sandwich (Hamburger)
Cotton candy (what us other countries call fairy floss)
Crab Rangoon
Bar-B-Que
Ham Steak
Bissinger’s™ chocolates

The great thing about lists like these is the minute we read them we think “But I know of such and such that was earlier” and “I know where they got that from.” And that’s the point. We need local claims so they can be substantiated and then we can look for patterns in what was eaten and when. We can find out who ate fairy floss and who ate cotton candy. We can look at different varieties of barbecue and work out what regions shared the same tastes.

If your town has a website that delves into the food it likes, invented or is proud of, I would love to see it. Same with local cookbooks. History is all about evidence, and there’s a lot of gorgeous material that never gets past the local school fete. This website is why St Louis is my favourite city this Monday.

The last website for now is one that balances the recipes for a Medieval dinner I gave a little while back. It’s a menu for < a href="http://www.kateryndedevelyn.org/eng1intr.htm"> fourteenth century meal.

Which reminds me, the next test for the Regency Gothic Banquet happens to be at my place and on my birthday. I think that after the meal everyone might enjoy my favourite fourteenth century hypocras recipe. It will mix periods in a shocking and delightful way.

I have been quietly pursuing a little mystery recently. The probable answer was staring me in the face, as it so often does with little mysteries.

Chorizo is the classic Spanish pork sausage. It ought to have nothing in common with Jewish cooking. Except that old Jewish recipes from the right sort of background (a branch of Sephardi that retained its Spanish cooking heritage with particular vigour) contain something called chorissa and it serves close enough to the same function as chorizo in that cuisine. They have to be the same thing. And they can’t. Pork is not commonly part of Jewish foodways. This was driving me quietly crazy.

I found half an answer in Chaim Raphael’s edition of The Jewish Manual. Chorissa was a specifically Jewish sausage, sold at a specialist Jewish butcher in nineteenth century London. It was used in recipes that were decidedly Sephardi.

But what was in the sausages? Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been pork. They were probably smoked beef sausages. The only evidence I have is here, however, and this may be a local variant.

From a general standpoint, my mystery is solved, but from the point of view of an historian, it has only really just started. Knowing that an ingredient existed and was used in a certain way in 1846 in London isn’t the same as tracing it from 1492 Spain to 1846 London. America in the late eighteenth century is the first step of my link and probably close enough to London so that I can assume that chorissa were smoked beef sausages. I need more evidence, though.

I don’t have time for a proper search, but I’ll keep my eyes open and report in as I find more links. To celebrate having come this far though, tomorrow I’m going to tell my Jewish butcher story. If I don’t, remind me. You’ll be really sorry to miss it if I forget. Trust me on this.

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

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.

I’ve fallen in love with the idea of posts on ingredients. I’ve had to answer so many different questions from so many of the recipe testers for the Regency Gothic Banquet that it struck me that we don’t all have a common cooking vocabulary. Besides, ingredients are FUN. Just for a little, then, I’ll do two or three posts a week on specific ingredients so when I say ‘aniseed myrtle’ and talk about its historic use , you know I’m not talking about aniseed or myrtle or even lemon myrtle. And so I can sneak in bad jokes while you’re not watching.

Speaking of aniseed flavoured spices, I thought a couple of them would be a good thing for today. My useless bit of Medieval trivia for the day is that aniseed was coated in sugar and used to aid digestion after giant meals. If that bit of trivia ever proves useful, let me know and I’ll upgrade it from ‘useless’ to ‘almost handy.’

Anise, aniseed or Sweet Cumin (pimpinella anisum) - in French is anise, in German is anis, in Italian is anice , but in Malaysian is jintan manis. It was originally from the Middle East and was used by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans.

The name anise refers to the green leaves of the plant and not to the seeds. Oddly enough, the seeds are known as aniseed (sorry, sarcasm mode is now off). Star anise has a flavour that depends on the same essential oil (anethole), that is found in anise, aniseed and cultivated fennel but is a different plant (illicum verum), a small evergreen tree belonging to the Magnolia family. I always think star anise tastes great but looks like big black spiders invading your stew. I use it to terrify small children.

Aniseed myrtle (backhousia anisata) also called aniseed tree or ringwood (if you ringbark it, does that mean you have ringwood ringbarked?) is a native of New South Wales and Queensland. The anise scented leaves does wonders for stews, and is also magic in salad dressing.

Last night’s post got me thinking. Some people integrate their health issues with their food and have a wonderfully co-ordinated existence and some of us have sad addictions to chocolate and chips and spend a lot of the time in justification.

It’s never as simple as understanding current medical principles and applying them. Every now and then a book emerges that explains the current views in simple or suposedly simple terms and gives guidelines. I thought it would be a good idea to introduce one of these books today.

If you’re interested in exploring food and health in more modern ways, then Talia, who comments here from time to time, has a forum with lots of stuff on emotional aspects of eating and lots of information branching off it. Emotional aspects of eating are only one part of food as medicine - if you want more, just say so in the notes and I’ll find you links to other parts.

Today’s book is Food Remedies. Facts About Foods and Their Medicinal Uses. It’s by Florence Daniel and was published in 1908. In theory, there are no remnants of Medieval science - it’s a thoroughly modern book (just not very recent). In practice, as early as the introduction, Daniel acknowledges a debt to Culpepper, and Culpepper frames his whole herbal in terms of the elements and humours and planetary influences. So her influences are modern (Dr Fernie’s Meals Medicinal), Ancient (the Talmud - though I guess it depends which part of the Talmud just how Ancient), late Medieval/Renaissance (Culpepper) and traditional (her mother).

Daniel takes us through a range of fruits and vegetables and discusses their medicinal uses. These plants are:
Almond, Apple, Asparagus, Banana, Barley, Blackberry, Blackcurrant, Brazil Nuts, Beans, Peas, Lentils, Beet, Cabbage, Caraway Seed, Carrot, Celery, Cresses, Chestnut, Cinnamon, Coconut, Coffee, Date, Elderberry, Fig, Grape, Gooseberry, Lavender, Lemon, Lettuce, Nettle, Nuts, Oats, Olive, Onion, Orange, Parsley, Pear, Peanut, Pineapple, Pine Kernel, Plum, Prune, Potato, Radish, Raspberry, Rice, Rhubarb, Sage, Strawberry, Spinach, Tomato, Turnip, Thyme, Walnut and Wheat. Quite a list, but also quite a limited list. And the rest of the book comprises indices - ways of getting at the information on each of these frutis and vegetables and herbs.

Florence Daniel is strongly fruitarian. She says on page 3 “I have myself known wonderful cures to follow on the adoption of a fruitarian dietary in cases of cancer, tumour, gout, eczema, all kinds of inflammatory complaints, and wounds that refused to heal.” She gives a general justifcation for this and cites pros and cons from various authorities.

From a modern scientific point of view, the material in this books lack validation and proof. From a food history point of view it’s fascinating.

Take her first article, on almonds. She suggests that almond soup is an excellent substitute for beef-tea for convalescents. Beef-tea was terribly standard for the invalid in 1908 - it was a pure bouillon made from good meat. Her almond soup alternative, however, is an old dish - I have seen similar recipes for broth to be used as a base for dishes five hundred years earlier.

It is made by simply blanching and pounding a quarter of a pound of sweet almonds with half a pint of milk, or vegetable stock. Another pint of milk or stock is then to be added and the whole warmed. After this add another pint and a half of stock if the soup is to be a vegetable one, or rice water if milk has been used.

In other words, one way in which older recipes have been retained or reintroduced into our diets has been through fads in food medicine. This is why Culpepper is as important in Daniel’s introduction as Dr Fernie.

I love these food history byways.

I wonder if anyone is collating medicinal treatises and food medicine books and comparing them with much earlier cookbooks? I hope so. If no-one is, then maybe one day I will. Food history is so much more than the history of cookbooks, and these food-as-medicine-manuals give us important clues on some of the wider roles food can play in a society.

I think I might have given the same recipe in two quite separate posts. This is the result of pure tiredness. Rather than do a careful check and delete a post, I will leave it and give you an extra post now. Writing is easier than careful cross-checking.

No biscuits and scones to replace the possible duplicate (though I’ve still got lots of recipes and mentions in literature I haven’t posted yet), but some thoughts on what food the tired ought to eat. Maybe thinking about foods that create alertness will help.

Using Medieval foodways as a guide, fatigue might be due to an imbalance in the humours or a body overburdened by … whatever. I’m not at all certain what bodies get overburdened by. Anyhow, if it’s overburdened, you want light food and a cleansing diet acording to Medieval theory. Things like fennel that help purify the system. Or hot pepper that warm it and help drive impurities out. And you want a hot bath strewn with appropriate herbs.

If you want to use food to balance your humours and create more energy, it becomes more complicated. If you have an excess of sanguinity (my face is red, maybe that’s the problem with me?) you want cooling food. Cucumbers, perhaps. Cold cucumbers, straight from the refrigerator.

Using food as an aspect of medical treatment was not uncommon in the Middle Ages.

We do it today. Especially when we’re tired. Food and drink as instant cure-alls. Different medical principles, same urgent desire to get some energy back into a fading day.

Sometimes we eat energy bars for the calories or the fat or the instant glucose kick. Sometimes we drink energy drinks for the sheer glucose kick. We use them as proof of the correctness of medical theory the way people did in the Middle Ages except - instead of the humours - we look to restore vitamin levels and feed ourselves minerals and amino acids and tricksy herbs with useful side effects.

I’m not a doctor, but it looks as if a vitamin drink with lots of minerals and guarana, accompanied by an iced cucumber salad should do *something*. If it doesn’t kill me, you’ll see me tomorrow, hopefully more alert.

I didn’t even know the Gode Cookery site gave awards for historic food writing, but they do and I have been given one. What a nice way to start the working year!

Several years ago a Sydney (Australia) organisation that works to make kosher food more interesting asked me to do them a little booklet on Medieval food for Jewish New Year. I kept all my rights on it and not too long after it appeared in print I denuded it of recipes and gave the article to my publisher for her website. It’s not my most popular article on the Trivium Publishing site (that honour belongs to the one that has descriptions of Old French insults) but the number of hits it attracted was one of the reasons I started this blog.

To celebrate my article being the recipient of the January 2007 Gode Cookery Award, I think I’ll give you one of the missing recipes.

Spiced mushrooms

500 g small button mushrooms (Swiss brown are ideal, but will need to be cut into quarters)
1 small onion
olive oil
1 pinch ground pepper
1 pinch powdered ginger
1 pinch nutmeg
2 pinches coriander seed (ground)

Peel and wash mushrooms. Boil until they shrink (c 10 minutes).

Cut onion finely, then fry it in olive oil. Keep the heat high, add the mushrooms and cook for maybe 2-3 minutes. Add salt and spices, lower the heat and cook covered until golden.

The Carnival of the Recipes this week is all about people who hate to cook or can’t cook. It doesn’t matter how much you hate cooking, you still need to eat, so when I saw the topic, it made me think.

It struck me that some common assumptions about food history are a tad unfair to those who genuinely lack an affinity for cooking. The rich might have had servants, but what did an ordinary person do? Cooking could be hard labour prior to modern equipment and it’s frightening to think of hours of daily effort to produce something you really didn’t enjoy creating or care about eating.

There have always been alternatives to cooking in the big cities. We know this about societies from Medieval Londons to Ancient Rome.

There’s a heap of evidence for takeaway pies sold round London Bridge (I think we’re talking about the bridge in Arizona and its predecessors, not any of the bridges currently spanning the Thames - I don’t know if the tourist services there sell meat pies or just give rides on red doubledeckers) and for food joints that flirted with the fire authorities in the Middle Ages. Think of it, the need for no-cook meals led to great fires of London.

Paris was as well off as Rome and London from at least the twelfth century. A function of big cities has always been a population that didn’t have a household fire (due to poverty or sub-renting), or couldn’t cook, or was itinerant. You can still buy full meals at the Paris street markets, and there is a lovely set of Paris street cries from the thirteenth century.

You can read about the street cries here. They’re in a poem by Guillaume de la Villeneuve, with a modern French translation. No modern English translation. Some of the foods mentioned as having their own street cries are waffles, salted meat, honey, hot pureed peas, lots of lovely salad vegetables all fresh and crispy, cheese from Champagne and Brie, butter, deliciously ripe fruit, pate, dried fruit and nuts, cake, hot Breton pancakes, bread, good strong wine. Enough for a feast. Enough to save a non-cook with money from any kind of hunger.

In the home, there were failproof recipes too. The famous Sephardic baked egg may have originated as completely foolproof food for the religiously compliant non-cook.

Baked egg

Just place an egg (with its shell still on) in warm ashes and go away and do other things. The resulting egg has a gorgeous texture and the only skill required is cracking it open once it has sat long enough and maybe finding some salt to eat with it.

It’s midsummer and I’m online during a pause in the storms. I love these storms: we need the rain so desperately. I hate the storms: imagine trying to fit hours of online activity into odd minutes. Because of the time limitation at this end, I thought you might like a link today. Is it the right day to give you links? No, that’s Sunday. Just pretend today is Sunday and on Sunday I will give you today’s recipe and we will all be equally confused.

Cindy Renfrow has a great deal of interesting stuff on the various pages of her website, but the one containing culinary history links is my personal favourite. Hours and hours of exploration. Enough to keep all sorts of people out of mischief until the weather clears at this end.

This recipe has been one of my favourite Medieval English delights for a long time now. When I teach it in class I call it ‘junk food’ because it has the instantly addictive quality of all the best junk food. In texture it’s more a pancake than a doughnut, but it is most certainly deep fried and it has to be eaten as soon as you make it. It’s a lovely party dish, because you can cook it and your friends can stand around and sprinkle sugar on the crespez and then eat them at once.

If you want to see the recipe in Middle English (with a modern tested recipe by historians) you can find it in Pleyn Delit, by Constance Hieatt, Sharon Butler etc. This is one of my favourite cookbooks for things Medieval and I will introduce you to it as a book properly one day. In the meantime, the version below is mine own, straight from the Middle English. This means all the errors in it are my own too. And that it’s sadly messy in its instructions - all my most loved recipes enter a certain disorderly zone in my mind - I cook them by feel and memory and don’t worry too much about measuring or having forgotten to get the flour out until everything else is mixed.

Crespez

Beat egg white, milk and flour together with a bit of sugar and salt. You want a mixture you can dollop (”so that it be renneng” are the original words). Hieatt and her co-authors suggest adding yeast, and they suggest adding it to milk that has been warmed early in the process. The yeast gives it a doughnut scent. Without yeast it’s more like a fried pancake - still nice, but not nearly as addictive.

Take “freysshe grece boyling” - I use canola oil which is inauthentic but doesn’t smoke. An animal fat (e.g. lard) would give it an interesting flavour and be authentic, but I’ve never tried it. Deep fry a little at a time. The recipe actually suggest dribbling, but I prefer to dollop with a teaspoon to make round snacks.

When each fritter is a nice, light brown, drain well, and sprinkle some sugar and eat it at once.

The secret Jews of Spanish lands suffered under the Inquisition. Some of the records of the Inquisition contain the most amazing food history - people’s food habits were used to determine if they were practising Jews (with their religion in hiding) or good pork-eating Catholics. One of my favourite (but saddest) cookbooks is a reconstruction of recipes and a memory of some of the lives from the trial records taken at the end of the fifteenth century in Valencia. The reconstructors are David M Gitlitz and Linda Kay Davidson and the book is A Drizzle of Honey. The Lives and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews.

Chanukah is a festival of freedom and it doesn’t hurt to remember that these Jews weren’t free. The culinary tradition from A Drizzle of Honey records Jews who chose conversion and also chose to celebrate their culture through cooking. The freedom to cook and eat the dishes you choose and that your ancestors chose before you became potentially fatal. When I make these I always remember that the freedom to eat food that helps you remember your heritage is an important freedom.

Bunuelos

Dough: 1 package dry yeast, 1 1/3 cups warm water, 3 cups white flour, 2 beaten eggs, generous pinch salt, 1 tbs olive oil
Syrup: 3 cups honey, 1/4 cup water
Topping: Cinnamon mixed with icing sugar

Dough method: Dissolve yeast in 1/3 cup water warm water. Wait ten minutes. Stir all of the yeast mixture, eggs, salt, oil into the flour. Gradually add the rest of the water until the dough is slightly tacky. Cover and let rise until doubled in bulk.

Syrup method: Mix honey and water in a saucepan and bring to the boil. Reduce heat and summer for 5 minutes. Reduce heat further to keep syrup hot until needed.

Fry fritters in oil*, a teaspoon at a time. Do not crowd the pan. When they puff up and become golden (c 8 minutes) they should be ready. Drain on paper towels. When they are drained, drizzle the syrup over them and then sprinkle with the cinnamon/sugar mixture.

*Olive oil is the correct oil but vegetable oil gives a browner finish.

Can one ever have too much good fruit? This is a slightly different list to the one I developed. It doesn’t show varieties extant at a certain date, but the ancestry of a range of varieties you can buy currently.