July is the busy month that looks to the harvest about to roll in. Thomas Tusser recommends in his “Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry” that the farmer should “Get grist to the mill, to have plenty in store, lest miller lacke water, as many do more.”...
By June most of the crops are in, and time comes for repairing and building around the farmstead. Thomas Tusser recommends in his “Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry” that the farmer build sheds and other less permanent structures. “So likewise a hovell will serve for a roome. to stack on the peason when harvest shall coome. And serve thee in winter, more over than that, to shut up thy porklings thou mindest to fat.”...
Plenty of tasks in the busy spring, including some that ensure plenty and sweetness in the later part of the year. Thomas Tusser cautions in his “Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry” that the farmer should “Take heede to thy bees that are ready to swarme, the losse thereof now is a crownes worth of harme: Let skilfull be readie and diligence seene, lest being too careless, thou losest thy beene (bees).” Digbie is one of the few recipe collections that uses a great deal of honey, and that is mostly for brewing. So, I will take us a bit farther afield to Italy for a taste of honey....
Spring is upon us, and the first promise of plenty shows in the flush of new spring grass. The cows have calved and are “freshening”, which means plenty of milk and cream for butter and cheese. Thomas Tusser devoted a whole poem in his “Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry” to proper making of cheeses, with directions to “Cisley”, the name he gave to the dairymaid....
In the Middle ages through the 18th century this time of year was often called “the starving spring.” The spring was the time of hopes, because you had eaten most of the winter stores, and all you could do was eke out the time to the early harvest on what could be scavenged from field and barn....
The farming sage Thomas Tusser recommended in his "Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry" that in February, "Where banks be amended and newly up cast, sow mustard seed, after a shower be past." That was a wise recommendation indeed, for mustard was one of the common seasonings for rich and for poor. The poor could grow it without cost even in wild places like newly turned field banks, and the rich just liked it as a sauce....
Winter is here in its depths. Yule merriment may have left us all with tender stomachs, or colds, or both. If you were lucky enough to have a cow in milk at this inclement season (or imprudent enough; January is definitely NOT when you want a calf in the barn!), you could remedy the problem with a bit of posset....
“Christmas is a-coming and the geese are getting fat…” I explained last month one of the things you could do with a goose – now let’s move on to the fancier trimmings. Yule feasts, especially in the royal households, have been a time to pile on the gilding and decorations to fancy up the feast. Which, of course, brings us to the subject of “subtleties”. Subtleties, those jaw-dropping decorations designed to evoke tributes, awe, and wonder in the people who demolished them, were frequently constructed of marzipan, called “marchpane” in the medieval cookery books....
Longer days draw on apace, and the agricultural year draws down to its close. After the grain harvest about the first two weeks of August, young geese were turned into the fields to eat up the grains that shattered out during the harvest. This custom fattens them nicely for the traditional feast holidays of Michaelmas, (which was a time of great markets after harvest) and Martinmas (which was the start of the slaughter season, when winter meat was laid in.)....
A bounteous harvest is coming in and the season of feasting is upon us. Feasting means parties, and parties mean special foods and drinks, as much as the budget of the household would allow. A favorite postprandial tipple during most of the middle ages was a sweetened spiced wine called “hippocras”. This concoction was named for the healer Hippocrates, the Greek physician known as “the father of medicine”, and was deemed a great aid to quiet digestion....