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Cooking from Primary Sources: Some General Comments by Dr. David D. Friedman This is an excerpt from Dr. David D. Friedman's collection of materials on medievalism "Cariadoc's Miscellany". Dr. Friedman's full collection of articles is online at Recreational Medievalism - http://www.best.com/~ddfr/Medieval/Medieval.html. It should be noted that Dr. Friedman's articles were written for the Society for Creative Anachronisms - a group whose Scope focus is based on Western Europe prior to the 17th century. The Kaganate reader should keep in mind the difference in Scope (the Kaganate being focused on the Turko-Mongol world 560 - 1530 CE). One definition of what the Society is about is "studying the past by selective recreation." Period cooking is one of the few activities that really lets us do this, in a sense of "study" that goes substantially beyond merely learning things that other people already know. There are thousands of pages of period source material available, and I would guess that most of the dishes have not been made by anyone in the past three hundred years. As with many things, the best way to learn is to do it; the following comments are intended to make the process a little easier. When working with early English recipes, remember that the spelling has changed much more than the language and is often wildly inconsistent; one fifteenth century recipe contains the word "Chickens" four times-with four different spellings, of which the first is "Schyconys." It often helps to try sounding out strange words, in the hope that they will be more familiar to the ear than to the eye. Recipes rarely include quantities, temperatures, or times. Working out a recipe consists mostly of discovering that information by trial and error. You may find a modern cookbook useful in doing so. The idea is not to adapt a modern recipe but to use the modern recipe for information on how long a chicken has to be boiled before it is done or how much salt is added to a given volume of stew. That gives you a first guess, to be used the first time you try the dish and modified accordingly. It is sometimes asserted that real medieval food would be too highly flavored for modern palates. Thomas Austin, the 19th century editor of Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books, mentions a Cinnamon Soup as evidence that medieval people preferred strongly seasoned food-but as that soup is only a listing in a menu, this tells us more about 19th c. English cooking than medieval English cooking. Our experience with recipes that do contain information on quantities suggests that this assertion is not true. For many years we made Hippocras, from the recipe in Le Menagier de Paris, using about half the ratio of sugar and spices to wine specified in the original, because otherwise it came out too sweet for our tastes. Eventually Jeremy de Merstone (George J. Perkins) pointed out to us that, while the pound and ounce used in Paris in 1391 were approximately the same as the modern pound and ounce, the quart was equal to almost two modern U.S. quarts-which implied that, by modifying the recipe to taste, we had produced almost exactly the proportions of the original, correctly interpreted. The same conclusion - that medieval food, although hardly bland, was not extraordinarily spicy - is suggested by our experience with other recipes. One exception is a collection of dishes from 16th century India for which we have ingredient lists with quantities but without instructions; many of them turn out too salty for modern tastes. I am told that the same is true of modern Indian cooking in India. Along with the idea that medieval food was overspiced one finds the claim that the reason it was overspiced was to hide the taste of rotten meat, due to the lack of modern refrigeration. We have found no evidence to support that claim and quite a lot to oppose it. Chiquart's description of how to put on a large feast, for example, makes it clear that he expects to slaughter animals on site. Other sources show medieval cooks as concerned with the risk of spoiled meat and taking reasonable precautions to deal with it. Finally, there is the observation that hiding the taste of spoiled meat does not prevent the effects; a cook who routinely poisoned his employer and his guests would be unlikely to keep his position for long. Two reference books that we have found helpful are the Larousse Gastronomique and the Oxford English Dictionary. The former is a dictionary of cooking, available in both English and French editions. The latter, which is also useful for many other sorts of SCA research, is the standard English scholar's dictionary; it contains a much more extensive range of obsolete words and meanings than an ordinary dictionary. Also, Two Fifteenth Century Cookbooks and Curye on Inglysch contain glossaries. An approach to developing recipes that we have found both productive and entertaining is to hold cooking workshops. We select recipes that we would like to try or try again and invite anyone interested to come help us cook them. The workshop starts in the afternoon. As each person arrives, he chooses a recipe to do. We suggest that people who have not cooked from period recipes before do new recipes so that they can actually have the experience of working directly from an untouched original. Anyone who feels too inexperienced to do a recipe himself helps someone else do one. The details of how the recipe is being prepared-quantities, temperatures, times and techniques-are written down as the dish is prepared. The afternoon and early evening are spent cooking, eating, and discussing how to modify the recipes next time. Many of the recipes in this book were developed at such sessions. We have never yet had to send out for pizza. Tourney and War Food Suppose you are going to a tournament and want to bring period food to eat and share during the day. Suppose you are going to a camping event, such as the Pennsic war, and expect to be encamped for something between a weekend and two weeks. What period foods are likely to prove useful? For both one day events and wars, we have accumulated a small collection of period foods and drinks that can be made in advance and kept without refrigeration for an almost unlimited period of time. They include Hulwa (p. 124), Hais (p. 101), Prince-Bisket (p. 101), Gingerbrede (p. 100), Excellent Cake (p. 102; this is actually slightly out of period), Khushkananaj (p. 104), Sekanjabin (p. 132) and Syrup of Pomegranate (p. 133). The last two are drinks that are prepared as syrups and diluted (with cold water for sekanjabin and hot water for granatus) just before being served. The syrups are sufficiently concentrated so that, like honey or molasses, they keep indefinitely. For a one day event we will often also bring a cold meat or cheese pie; Spinach Tart (p. 97) is one of our favorites. In addition, one can bring bread, cheese, sausage, nuts, dried fruit-all things which were eaten in period and can keep for a reasonable length of time. A camping event, especially one more than two days long, raises a new set of challenges and opportunities-period cooking with period equipment. One of the associated problems is how to keep perishable ingredients long enough so that you can bring them at the beginning of the event and use them at the end. One could keep things in a cooler with lots of ice-especially at Pennsic, where ice is available to be bought. This is, however, a considerable nuisance-and besides, it is unlikely that either coolers or ice were available at a real medieval war. Better solutions are to choose dishes that do not require perishable ingredients, or to find period ways of preserving such ingredients. One of our future projects along these lines is to work out some good recipes for salted or dried fish, which was an important food in the Middle Ages and one that keeps indefinitely. Our most successful preserving technique so far is to pickle meat or fowl, using Lord's Salt (p. 141). The pickled meat is strongly flavored with vinegar and spices, so we pick a recipe to use it in that contains vinegar or verjuice in its list of ingredients. We wash most of the pickling solution off the meat and make up the recipe omitting the sour ingredient (and any spices that are already in the pickled meat). Two recipes that work well with pickled chicken are Veal, Kid, or Hen in Bokenade (p. 76) and Coneyng, Hen, or Mallard (p. 78). There is an Indian bread (p. 10) and two Islamic pastries, Murakkaba (p. 105) and Musammana (p. 107) which are made in a frying pan rather than an oven, and are therefore easy to make on site. There are also recipes for fritters and funnel cakes (pp 116-120), many of which are suitable for camping events. There are many other possibilities for non-perishable period dishes. They include recipes using dried beans (pp. 21-22, 51, 74) or lentils (pp. 52-53). They also include one very familiar dish-macaroni and cheese, known in the Middle Ages as Macrows (p. 138) or Losyns (p. 136). If you have fresh meat available, there are many possible recipes; Meat Roasted Over Coals (p. 62) is good and very straightforward. If you roast a large amount of meat for one evening's dinner, A Roast of Meat (p. 49) is a good way of using up leftover roast meat for the next meal.