Mushroom Pastries – Le Menagier de Paris
Generally speaking I’m not a big fan of mushrooms, but this seemed like a pretty good fairly straightforward recipe to add to my collection of vegetarian side dishes.
Sawge yfarcet – Forme of Curye Sage Pork Meatballs
Today I redact and make sage pork balls from Forme of Curye.
Sambocade – Form of Curye
A favourite of Company of the Staple’s Sambocade makes a delicious dessert. Effectively, it’s an elderflower cheese cake.
Original recipe from Forme of Cury
Sambocade. Take and make a crust in a trap and take cruddes and wryng out the wheyze and drawe hem thurgh a straynour and put hit in the crust. Do thereto sugar the thridde part, and somnodel Whyte of aren and shake therein blooms of Ellen and bake it up with euros and Messe it forth.
My translation: Take and make some pastry and put in in a trap [open pie case] and take [cheese] curds and wring out the whey and draw it through a strainer and put it in the pastry. Mix Sugar and egg whites and shake fresh blooms of elderflower in top, bake it with rosewater and serve it forth.
14th Century Curfew
Medieval curfews, also known as “couvre-feu” or fire covers, are ceramic or iron covers used to keep the embers of the fire overnight. They are an example of how doing things the medieval way is easier than trying to adapt modern ways to this lifestyle.
The current convention, and a requirement of many sites, is to put the fire out each night ,and then restart the fire each morning.
This causes a lot of additional work, particularly if water is used to put the fire out each night, as new kindling and tinder must be used to build up the fire to the ember stage.
Using a curfew to keep embers overnight, allows the initial work to be skipped, and the fire can be built back into a proper cooking fire quite quickly. It also takes less skill and know-how to get a fire going again when there are embers as a starting point, compared to starting completely from scratch.
Getting Started with Researching Medieval Clothing
Getting started with medieval research – the first places to look.
Tucking your dress into your belt – Sources
It can be quite easy to fall into re-enactorisms. “Why are you doing it like that?” “Oh, because so-and-so does it like this”
So my goal for 2018 is to document all the little things where when someone asks us “and why do you do it like that?”
I’m starting off with a fairly light-hearted subject -tucking your dress into your belt while you work.
Mistakes were made
We talk a lot about the dishes that went right, where we tried them out and people say nice things about them and ask for the recipe.
And then people say “oh no I couldn’t do it, I don’t know how to cook”. Well, I didn’t know how to cook before I started cooking for medieval events. I’ll do a blog article about how to go from being unable to boil eggs to cooking on a campfire for 100 people another time. But today I want to talk about the three biggest mistakes I’ve made when trying to make a medieval dish.
