“Sumer is icumen in”, and the thought of cooling salads will be on everyone’s mind. I offer a medieval salad for your enjoyment. It is, however, not what you think. There’s not a leaf of lettuce to be seen in it....
Now that the Lenten fast is behind us, let’s look at a more festal dish. I apologize to the vegetarians among my Readers, as this is a patently carnivorous recipe, even though it is fowl rather than red meat. It is also another example of there being nothing new under the sun. We’ve apparently been savoring chickens this way for most of a millennium....
Today’s recipe is a lesson that not every recipe is in a cookbook because it tastes good. This will also get into aspects of medicine, culture and religion, as well as cooking. "Spring is sprung," and Lent is just around the corner. The housewife has to solve several problems: How to give your family a "spring tonic", how to satisfy the priest that you are properly penitent for Lent, and how to get rid of all those eggs for the season of fasts. She solved several of these problems with a spring dish called a Tansy....
With Twelfth Night past, Plough Monday signals the start of the working year. And nothing warms after a day of cold (and likely wet) farm work like a bowl of hot soup. Because our society looks at a great span of years, so should our look at cookery. I offer, therefore, a receipt (recipe) from slightly out of our SCA period, but from a source widely accepted as very likely to have been cooked in the seventy years or so before the receipts were published. Because this author is so late, you will not need a translation as before. Any needed modernization of spelling will be placed in italics and parentheses, as for "receipt" above....
Take a quart of hony, & sethe it, & skeme it clene; take Safroun, pouder Pepir, & throw ther-on; take gratyd Brede, & make it so chargeaunt that it wol be y-lechyd; then take pouder Canelle, & straw ther-on y-now; then make yt square, lyke as thou wolt leche yt; take when thou lechyst hyt, an caste Box leves a-bouyn, y-stykyd ther-on, on clowys. And yif thou wolt have it Red, coloure it with Saunderys y-now....
With courteous greetings to the good folk of the Barony of Terra Pomaria, I would fain begin a new Missive, on a subject near and dear to the heart (or stomach) of each of us – that is, our meals in the Society. To the end of improving all our tables and the pleasures thereof, I would like to occasionally offer receipts from period books of cookery, with a moderate few hints on translation and realization....