This is Part 2 of a post I began earlier in the week. That one focused on a dinner featuring items from England and the Netherlands in the 14th and 15th centuries. This one follows up with a lunch item and a dessert option. If you haven’t read that one to understand why I was doing this at all, please go take a look – otherwise, this may strike you as weird (more so than usual).
And yes, I know – several people pointed out that my pictures include modern conveniences, like aluminum pots, propane stoves and a plastic spork. This was NOT an exercise in experimental archaeology! The “medieval” part of this stops at the modern interpretation of old recipes.
Again I want to give credit to the wonderful repository of recipes found at Medieval Cookery. The folks here have done a lot of the homework to translate sparse, Old English (and other language) descriptions of food from the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, written in a style long before anything we would call a recipe, into something that can be recreated in the modern day. I’m not going to try and duplicate or take away from the wealth of the resource here – but I will summarize a few of the selections and what I did to make them successful in a camp setting.
This time – a hearty lunch of Sausages in Pottage (France, 16th century), and a modern-feeling dessert, Applemoyse and Snowe (England, 16th and 17th centuries).
Sausages In Pottage
As I mentioned in my earlier post, “pottage” is a general term referring to a thick stew – basically anything that is chunky, simmered, and generally consisting of vegetables and grains. I took some liberties with the sausage here, and picked something that might not be representative by using a smoked pork kielbasa (largely because it would keep well in a camp setting). I imagine if you wanted to do this in a way more representative of the 16th century, a more basic sausage like a bratwurst might be more appropriate.
Ingredients (to serve 6)
2.5 lb. sausages
3 apples, peeled, sliced, and then each slice cut in half again
3 onions, sliced
2 Tbsp butter
2 cups red wine
2 cups water
3 tsp. cinnamon
1 1/2 tsp. nutmeg
3 tsp. sugar
3 tsp. salt
You’ll need a large pot for this – I used a big saucepan but a dutch oven would work well too. First, cook the apples and onions in the butter. Depending on what kind of sausage you use, you may need to brown the sausage up front as well. If you’re using a smoked or cured sausage like I did, you can afford to wait – but raw meat obviously needs to cook. If you’re doing that, you may find that the butter gets absorbed by the onions before the meat is cooked well through, so you can either a) use more butter, or b) add just enough water to keep things from sticking. I can’t provide a solid answer here as this will also be dependent on the leanness of your particular sausage selection and how much fat renders out while it’s cooking. None of this is terribly precise, and it won’t be ruined if your mileage varies a bit.
Regardless, once you get the sausage cooked, take it out and slice it into chunks before adding them back to the pot. In my case, cheating with cured sausage, I just cut it first, added it after the onions and apples got a head-start, and cooked it until it was heated through, since it was already “cooked”.
After the meat is done and the onions and apples are tender, add the wine, water and spices (again with a sweet combination of spices more familiar to baking desserts than savory cooking – this seems to be a medieval trend), bring to a boil, and let it simmer until all the flavors are blended and the alcohol has cooked off. Feel free to add more or less wine and water to get the consistency you want. “Pottage” does imply a stew-like consistency, but letting it thicken and cook down will result in a nice rich flavor that is not bad at all.
The result is, like the beef I described in the previous post, different, though not bad at all. The combination of sausage and apples is pretty timeless, I think, and you can’t go wrong with onions. It’s the cinnamon, nutmeg and sugar that give this combo a twist that is just not common in modern recipes. Despite that, it’s extremely good, and made for a hearty lunch all by itself (actually, with a good thick cut of bread).
Applemoyse
This is one half of the dessert. “Snowe” is a separate recipe to be made below – but the full product is the combination of the two!
Ingredients
3 cups plain apple sauce
3/4 cup sugar
3 egg yolks
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. ginger
This is rather simple, and it turns out people have been cooking mashed apples for centuries, literally. Start this with plain, unseasoned apple sauce (either a can or a jar), and you’re most of the way there. Blend everything together and cook it over low heat in a saucepan until thick. The spices are right at home here (finally!), and the egg yolks add a nice richness.
Snowe
Ingredients
1 cup cream
1 egg white
1 Tbsp. sugar
1 tsp. rose water
This is, you can probably tell, a rather straightforward hand-made whipped cream. The Medieval Cookery site points out that modern whipped cream is made by whipping the egg and the cream separately and then folding together, but it really does work fine if you put all the ingredients in a bowl and whip it together with a whisk until it forms peaks. The addition of rose water (or any similar floral essence) gives it a slight change that makes it uniquely un-modern. It’s not commonly used these days (I found it as an obscure cocktail mixer in a liquor store), but vanilla wasn’t available to Europeans back then, so…
Another thing you can use Snowe on is a bonus recipe we had for breakfast.
French Toast
There is absolutely nothing unusual about this. French toast has been around, in some form, since the Romans made it in the first century, and the English were apparently making it (and calling it French) in the 16th century. So just make whatever you’re used to and it turns out that you’re doing it the way it has always been done!
I didn’t follow a strict recipe, but I think (essentially) what I did could be repeated by doing this.
Ingredients
12 slices of thick-cut wheat or whole grain bread (white is too modern!)
4 eggs, beaten
Cream
3 tsp sugar
2 tsp cinnamon
Fresh berries (blackberries and raspberries would have both been around in Medieval Europe)
Mix the beaten eggs and cream together in a shallow dish (I didn’t refer to a specific quantity of cream here because I normally just eyeball it and go for consistency – maybe a cup?). Dredge bread through the mix to lightly coat both sides and then fry in a skillet until browned. Sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon and serve with berries and a dollop of Snowe.
That’s it! A few things I’d do differently if I did it again, but it was fun, we explored some new things – and importantly nobody went hungry (I managed not to make anything inedible, even if it was a tad weird in places…)
I highly recommend getting out of the comfort zone like this. And remember that just because you’re outside doesn’t mean you have to limit your cooking creativity.
Get Out There!
Flying Squirrel Outdoors 