My guest on The British Food History Podcast today is historian Mark Truesdale, scholar of the fifteenth-century King and Commoner tradition and its early modern afterlife and author of The King and Commoner Tradition: Carnivalesque Politics in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, published by Routledge.
We talk about medieval carnival, the plot of a king and commoner tale, spying foresters, rude monks, the love of eating tiny birds, who the audience might be, and the ridiculousness of baking a venison pasty in Sherwood Forest – amongst many other things.
The British Food History Podcast is available on all podcast apps, YouTube, and can be streamed here via this Spotify embed:
A selection of illustrations from manuscripts of various king & commoner tales
Those listening to the secret podcast can hear about Henry VIII’s love of Robin Hood tales, cowardly herons, and Mark tells me who the king in these tales may (or may not) be referring to.
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Don’t forget, there will be postbag episodes in the future, so if you have any questions or queries about today’s episode, or indeed any episode, or have a question about the history of British food please email me at neil@britishfoodhistory.com, or leave a comment, below.
The harbour porpoise was the most commonly species eaten. They are 1.5 to 1.9m meters in length (Ecomare/Salko de Wolf Den Hoorn Texel)
It seems almost inconceivable that the porpoise – a type of small dolphin – would ever have been eaten, but it was once a most high-status ingredient. Although it is obviously a mammal, in the Middle Ages it was considered a fish, and therefore it could be eaten on fast days (all of the cetaceans were ‘fish’ as were seals and beavers’ tails) and it was usually served on fish days as a substitute for venison, another very high-status meat.[1] It seems that this was a bit of a blip for Europe: for the last few centuries, as well as in antiquity, dolphins have been very much considered a ‘friend of man’, and not an animal that should be eaten, not so in the Middle Ages.[2] The word porpoise comes from the Old French words porcus and piscus: ‘pigfish’ They have also gone by the names ‘mere-swine’ and ‘seahog’[3] and were eaten at the poshest of posh feasts. When George Neville celebrated becoming Archbishop of York in 1466, he held a huge feast, inviting 2000 guests of very high rank, the fish course was made up of 608 bream and pike, and 12 porpoise and seal.[4]
There were several ways of preparing it; if fresh it was poached and served in slices. In the late 14th century manuscript Forme of Cury, it is served with frumenty.[5] Sometimes it was cooked in a broth with wine, vinegar, bread, onions and its own blood.[6] It was also salted and cooked with dried peas and beans, rather like salt pork. If tip-top fresh, ‘porpesses must be baked’. The carving term for a baked porpoise is ‘undertraunche’[7], and it is served dressed with vinegar, cinnamon and ginger.[8]
The earliest mention of a porpoise hunt occurring in the British Isles comes from the 7th century just off the Irish coast by ‘foreigners’ most probably Vikings. The 10th century manuscript Ælfric’s Colloquy does mention the hunting of dolphins[9] and when we tick into the 11th century – during the reign of Æthelred II (the Unready) – there are rolls listing fisheries in Gloucester which specialised in fishing for them. Just one porpoise is mentioned in the Domesday Book – it was paid as geld at an estate in Kent. Post-conquest, they appear more frequently in ordinances for example: 10 people were supplied for Henry III in 1256 at the Feast of St. Edward – a feast that always occurs during Lent.[10]
A medieval depiction of a dolphin eating a fish (from Kongelige Bibliotek, Gl. kgl. S. 1633 4º, Folio 60v)
One does have to wonder how much luck was needed when it came to ‘hunting’ them because the majority of them seem to have been opportunistically acquired after the poor beasts were found beached. One, therefore, also has to wonder just how fresh these porpoises were when delivered to a noble’s kitchen. I suspect that they were very quickly salted down and stored until there were ordered. There were laws laid down as to who owned the poor creatures after they were found beached; for most of the Middle Ages they were considered ‘wrecks of the sea’, so it was a case of finders’ keepers, but in the 13th and 14th centuries – the period when eating porpoises reached its peak – it was asserted that all beached porpoises belonged to the Crown.[11]
The number of porpoises consumed really drops in the Early Modern Era: Henry VIII was gifted a porpoise at Calais in 1532, and in 1575 (during the reign of Elizabeth I) one appeared for sale at Newcastle Market. After that, mentions of porpoises as food seem to dry up.[12]
If you are a historical cook, you might be wondering what you could substitute if you wanted to recreate a dish containing porpoise for a medieval menu. Historian Peter Brears has one fine suggestion: use a large piece of the freshest, firmest and largest block of tuna you can afford![13]
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[1] Brears, P. (2012). Cooking & Dining in Medieval England. Prospect Books.
[2] Davidson, A. (1999). The Oxford Companion to Food. Oxford University Press.
[3] Gardiner, M. (1997). The Exploitation of Sea-Mammals in Medieval England: Bones and their Social Context. Archaeological Journal, 154(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/00665983.1997.11078787; The Shuttleworth Family. (1858). The House and Farm Accounts of the Shuttleworths of Gawthorpe Hall, in the County of Lancaster, at Smithils and Gawthorpe From September 1582 to October 1621 · Part 4 (J. Harland, Ed.). The Chetham Society.
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As I mentioned last post, I used Elizabeth David’s research on the medieval and early modern bread roll called payndemayn (medieval period) or manchet (medieval and early modern), to recreate my own. The two words at one point, it seems, were interchangeable. There are many spellings of payndemayn, the root of this word being French, pain demesne, from the Latin panum dominicum, the lord’s bread.[1] The word appears in medieval manuscripts such as Forme of Cury. Manchet is believed to be a contraction of the word payndemayn – main – and cheat, the name for another, similar bread made from refined flour that wasn’t quite as white as the really good stuff. Main and cheat eventually became manchet.[2]
It was ‘the lord’s bread’ because the small bread rolls – weighing in at around only 7 ounces (200 grams) – were so expensive that only the lord, at the head of the top table, would receive one. The small loaf would be cut by the lord’s server as described here in the Boke of Keruynge (the Book of Carving) written in 1513:
…take a lofe in your lyfte hand. & pare y lofe rounde aboute / than cut the over cruste to your souverayne, and cut the nether crust, & voyde the parynge, & touch the lofe no more after it is so served.[3]
The over crust, being considered the best part was eaten by the lord, and the rest divided up and given to whomever he so pleased. This is the origin of the idiom the upper crust we sometimes use when referring to the upper classes.
There are mentions of this bread all over, but there are no real recipes in the Middle Ages. There are several mentions of these loaves in recipes though, take this recipe for ‘Soppes Dorre’ from fifteenth century manuscript Harl.4016 (c.1430):
…take a paynmain, And kut him and tost him, And wete him in wyne, And ley hem in a dish, and caste [almond flavoured] syrup thereon.[4]
Elizabeth David went to great lengths in writing EnglishBread and Yeast Cookery to try and get an idea of what these breads were really like, gleaning cues from several sources and combining them. The earliest decent recipes and descriptions crop up in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but there are no complete ones: sometimes the ingredients are listed, but the amounts or the shape of the loaves are not given; other times, the shaping is described but the ingredients are missing. She also used artwork from the era to work out the likely shapes.
Elizabeth David’s oval-shaped manchet
It seems that they were also enriched with milk and/or butter and/or eggs, or none of the above, so perhaps something rather like a brioche (sometimes). Elizabeth took the information and created a flour mix of plain white flour, with some strong white flour and a little wholemeal flour, to replicate the lower gluten, not-quite-white nature of the wheat flour used at the time. She enriched her dough with butter and milk, avoiding egg. It put me in mind of my recipe for Cornish/Devonshire splits. She liked that in some descriptions the loaves were oval in shape. To replicate this, she made a deep slash in the dough before it went into the oven. However, I much preferred the sound of Gervase Markham’s 1623 way of shaping his loaves. He instructs us to take the risen dough and
mold it into manchets, round, and flat, scotch [cut] about the wast to give it leave to rise, and prick it with your knife in the top, and so put it into the Oven, and bake it with a gentle heat.[5]
He stabs their tops so that they wouldn’t rise too much in the oven.
My attempt at ‘scotching’ my manchet loaves
I used my Devonshire splits dough as the basis of my manchet recipe, which, as it turned out, was pleasingly very close to Elizabeth’s, except – of course – I used much less salt than she. I decided to make some in the oval shape preferred by Elizabeth, and some like those described by Gervase Markham.
By the way: coincidentally just as I was cooking and researching this post, esteemed food historian Ivan Day posted on his excellent Instagram page a photo of Markham’s manchet, showing that scotched waist, along with some other breads of the same era. Here’s a link to his post, if you want to take a look at those.
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This post complements the episode ‘Forme of Cury with Christopher Monk’ on The British Food History Podcast.
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The Three Witches as depicted in a 19th Century woodcut
Round about the cauldron go; In the poison’d entrails throw. Toad, that under cold stone Days and nights has thirty-one Swelter’d venom sleeping got, Boil thou first i’ in the charmed pot. Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble!
William Shakespeare Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 1
As it’s Hallowe’en I thought that I’d write a little post all about cauldrons, because of course along with a broomstick, pointy hat, black cat and warts it is a must-have for any witch worth their salt at this time of year.
The Battersea Cauldron (pic: British Museum)
Let’s start off with what a cauldron is, just on case you are unfamiliar with them. They are large, rounded cooking pots that are suspended over a fire by a chain or on support legs in the centre of the fire, and they have been used all across Europe since the first millennium BCE. One of the oldest ever found was excavated in Battersea and is therefore known as the Battersea Cauldron. It made up of bronze sheets melded together and is huge. It has been described as “one of the largest and most sophisticated metal objects of the day” and is estimated to be 3000 years old, and it obviously got some use judging by the number of reparation patches it has covering its surface. Whatever size your cauldron was, it was an expensive bit of kit and built to last, so it is more unusual to find out without patches. Precious items such as this were passed down through the generations and the “man who owned an iron cauldron” says Dorothy Hartley, “had a definite standing above those who cooked only in small pots and pans.”
You may be thinking that a selection of pots and pans might be preferable to a massive cooking pot because they give you more options and you don’t have to make giant vats of food all the time, but a cauldron is surprisingly versatile and was rarely used for just cooking great big broths with bones bobbing about the surface. No, the cauldron was in fact the complete cooking and hot water system; take a look at this wonderful illustration from Ms Hartley’s excellent books Food in England:
The mediaeval cauldron, from Food in England by Dorothy Hartley
You can see here how the cauldron was actually compartmentalised and filled with a whole variety of foods. At the base is a large joint of meat that required long cooking, usually wrapped in a flour paste and the tied up with cloth, then sat on that were wooden slats upon which all sorts of things were sat. There would have been some suet puddings wrapped in cloth simmering away, as well as bag puddings made up of peas, beans or cereal grains such as the classic pease pudding. If you did want to make some hearty stew, you placed your ingredients in earthenware jars, filled them with stock or water, covered them tightly and poached it in the cauldron water. This gentle way of poaching meat produced deliciously juicy cuts of meat; in fact, one cauldron found in Warwick Castle bore the legend: “I give meat good savour.” Often the meat was jointed and sat in a large jug, to produce old British classics such as jugged hare (or rabbit, I’ve also seen recipes for jugged kippers and jugged peas). Dorothy illustrates some beef tea being made where the meat is sat in its jar on top of some birch twigs, preventing the meat from sticking to the bottom. I love little details like those. You had to be very careful cooking like this though because those sealed pots acted like pressure cookers and were prone to exploding!
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Aside from all of this, the cauldron also provided the washing water and bathwater. “I hope” says Hartley, “you now understand that because there was only one cauldron on the fire there was not one thing for dinner.”
Jugged hare
Cauldrons were such important and precious items that they were even found in burial sites such as the Baldock Burial, a Bronze Age burial site in Hertfordshire, where a whole plethora of things were found including a cauldron complete with joints of meat, ready to sustain the dead as they journeyed to the Afterlife. Pagans revered them and they became symbolic of death and resurrection, often being buried in near or bogs and rivers, locations they considered to be domains of both the living and the dead.
Because they were imbibed with magic, they appear in several myths and legends; for example, the Irish god Dagda owned a cauldron that did not just magically produce food but also cured disease, healed wounds and brought the dead back to life. There was also a Cauldron of Knowledge that told you everything you wanted (and did not want) to know. There are plenty of Welsh and English stories that involve cauldrons too (though I haven’t come across any Scottish ones for some reason).
St John the Apostle boiled in oil from The Hours of Henry VIII, (C) The Morgan Library & Museum
Cauldrons of course sat upon flames and were extensively found in medieval and Tudor Christian art to depict what might happen to you if you went to Hell. One example depicts Dives – a rich man Jesus tells us of in the New Testament, who was very rich but would not share his food with a poor beggar. He is shown “tormented with thirst stewing forever in one of Hell’s capacious cauldrons.” Another manuscript knows as the Hours of Henry VIII clearly shows St. John the Evangelist sat in cauldron of boiling oil looking pretty chilled out and happily preaching whilst being tormentind by his captors. He would be later be miraculously preserved in the oil rather like, one supposes, like some nice comfit duck legs.
So there we go, I hope you have enjoyed my brief history of cauldrons and appreciate that they are not just for witches…or Hallowe’en!
Such a mortality of men in England and Scotland through famine and pestilence as had not been heard of in our time.
The Chronicle of Lanercost1272-1346
In the autumn and winter of 1314, Britain experienced a period of extreme wet and “bizarre” weather; torrential rain flooded the fields, rotting crops and drowning livestock. The staple food of the time was of course bread, but the ‘daily’ bread was becoming more and more scarce as stored grains either went mouldy or were “innutritious”. In a good year, one might expect a good return on grain planted: for each grain sown, you could get up to seven grains back. In 1315 the return was devastating: now you reaped one grain for every two planted – had they known it, they would have been better off not sowing seeds in the spring, but of course they did not know that this spell of bad weather would devastate crops for almost two years.
Edward II
What could be causing this? Naturally at this time, all eyes turned to God – it was obvious He was punishing the English, but what could they have done to deserve this? One answer could be found in the King’s Vita. Edward II was on the throne, and at this time all kings had a running commentary-cum-almanac written about them and their times called a Vita, and his Vita placed the finger of blame directly on the English people themselves. Apparently, the English “excel other nations in three qualities in pride, craft and in perjury. All of this comes from the wickedness of the inhabitants.”
In reality, it wasn’t just the English who were affected by the weather, it was widespread, hitting the whole of the British Isles, Northern France, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, Germany and West Poland. At the time, each country seemed to think the ordeal was happening only to them, and all of them insularly blamed their own nations for their own personal famines.
A map showing the areas of Europe affected by the Famine (from Arizona Geographic Alliance)
During winter of 1314/5 people quickly realised that if they were to keep aside some of their grain to sow in the springtime there was very little spare to grind into flour for bread. This was not uncommon; England is, after all, wet and warm a lot of the time. Things usually picked up the next year and as long as there were some seed and livestock reserved for the new farming year all would be well. The problem was the weather did not change in the springtime and produced next to no crops. It was obvious a real famine was on its way.
In response to this, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Walter Reynolds, ordered Parish Churches throughout the realm to partake in some ‘solemn processions’ in an attempt to curry favour with God. King Edward and his Parliament tried something a little more practical and attempted to stave off, or at least put off, the famine by rationing and regulating food prices so that everyone could get at least something. Parliament fixed the price of wheat, sheep, cattle, chickens and eggs. It cost 12 shillings for ‘a live fat cow’ and a penny for two dozen hens’ eggs.
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This was a great idea in theory, but in reality, it was a disaster; there was so little food that traders’ and farmers’ businesses were no longer viable. Things really were at a stretch, even the King, when he turned up with his household at St Albans for a visit, something that kings loved to do – they would turn up with their entourage and expect their hosts to house, feed and water them opulently. It was a great honour to have this thrust upon you, and dukes and earls of the land all dreaded finding out the King was coming to them. They knew the royal party would clean them out and have them haemorrhaging money for the entire period. Well not this time – August 1315 – for his host could barely find enough bread to feed them.
As the year progressed price fixing was ditched, and prices increased hugely. Now, a quarter barrel of wheat (a bit under 13 kg) rose in price from five shillings to forty shillings, and all you were getting for a penny now was “2 little onions”. By 1216 there had been two years without a harvest and the Archbishop of Canterbury was forced to sell his holy relics to pay for food.
If you didn’t fancy your chances stealing food, you could have a stab at some foraging. The trouble was much of the undeveloped lands were boggy and filled with rotting vegetation too. People tried digging up roots, eating grass and even the bark from trees.*
Sheep and cattle were killed from outbreaks of ‘murrain’ (a highly virulent disease, probably food-and-mouth); in Berwick, starving soldiers boiled and ate the carcasses of their diseased horses for sustenance. Animals all around the country died in their thousands, and the people literally could not eat them fast enough. In a normal year when animals were killed their meat was cured in salt to preserve it, but because of the extreme weather it was too wet to dry salt, causing a shortage making it extremely expensive so they rotted.
An image showing both people starving and cattle succumbing to murrain
For England, it was worst in the north (it is ‘grim Up North’, after all). Northumbria had to deal with constant raids from starving Scots and were reduced to eating “dogs and horses and other unclean things”. There was even talk of cannibalism: “others stole new-born babies to devour.” Hopefully this story was apocryphal.
One in twenty died during the famine but for those who survived, insult was added to injury because a “great pestilence” came and devasted a population weak with malnutrition and dysentery. The next year would improve a little, and in 1318 there was bountiful harvest. However, it took years for the livestock population to recover from murrain. As for the people, they were affected by cold winters, poor harvests and disease much more than before the famine; the Great Famine had left Europe in a weakened state for several decades and “[t]here would be really no sustained growth for a hundred years.” Quite so, because little did they know that soon Europe would be hit by its first wave of the Black Death, which devasted those countries hit by the Famine even harder that the rest.
Today, we cannot imagine being at the mercy of the elements like this; with modern technology and farming methods, we reckon these events are things of the past – in the Western World at least. To some degree I am sure it is true, but today we have never been so UNaware of how our food is grown and processed. I wonder just how many narrow squeaks we have had. I expect they are not infrequent.
*this might seem a little far-fetched, but deer commonly strip and eat the bark and its inner green layer in times of hardship such as wintertime. I wonder if folk observed this behaviour and thought it wouldn’t hurt to give it a try too.
In this episode we look at the history of Lent: When was it enforced? What were the rules? That sort of thing. Neil looks at how the belief in the four humours shaped what we ate in Lent, and how they caused illness and changed our moods throughout the year.
This week – the first full week of fasting – is an Ember Week. There are four Ember Weeks throughout the year – one for each season – and this is the spring one.
Neil then goes to the beautiful John Ryland’s Library in Manchester to see an early manuscript of the Forme of Cury, the earliest cookbook written in the English language, to find and cook from it ‘a tart for Ember Day’ which he cooks for his friends Kate and Pete with mixed results (recipe below).
A huge thanks to the staff of the John Ryland’s Library, who were very helpful indeed, and to Kate and Pete for letting me assault their taste buds.
Most of all, thanks to you for listening – if you have anything to add about anything you hear, feel free to post a comment, tweet me (@neilbuttery) or email me at neil@britishfoodhistory.com.
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Scroll down to see a list of photos and links all about the things discussed in this episode. See you next week!
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British Food a History: Lent was produced by Beena Khetani and is a Sonder Radio production
I’m carrying on the medieval almond milk theme (I will move away from this topic, I promise) with another post on what could be described as mediaeval England’s national dish – blanc mange. Blanc mange – literally white food – was a simple stew of poultry and rice poached in almond milk. Over the centuries, it evolved into the wobbly dessert we know and love (or hate) today. In France almond soups thickened with rice or bread are still eaten, so it appears that the blanc mange diverged into two different dishes: cold pud and creamy soup.
Blanc mange wasn’t just popular in England, but over the whole of mediaeval Europe. It began life as a Lent dish of rice, almond milk and fish such as pike or lobster, but people liked it so much that it was eaten at every meal, where the fish could be substituted with chicken or capon. Outside of Lent it could be flavoured with spices such as saffron, ginger, cinnamon and galangal, seasoned with verjuice, sugar and salt. It is thought that the dish originates from the Middle East, the part of the world we imported rice and almonds.
It’s worth mentioning that although a Lent dish, no commoner
could afford this meal even in its most basic form– imported rice and almonds
were very expensive, as were farmed chickens. This was commonplace food for the
richer folk of society.
Here’s an example of a blanc mange recipe from around 1430:
For to make blomanger. Nym rys & lese hem & washe
hem clene, & do þereto god almande mylke & seþ
hem tyl þey al tobrest; & þan lat hem kele. & nym þe lyre of
þe hennyn or of capouns & grynd hem small; kest þereto wite grese &
boyle it. Nym blanchyd almandys & safroun & set hem aboue in þe dysche
& serue yt forþe.
This recipe seems to be for a blanc mange served cold or warm;
the rice is cooked in the almond milk and cooled while the capon or chicken is poached
separately. Saffron and almonds are sprinkled over the dish before serving.
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I’ve looked at a few recipes and they don’t really change over the next two hundred years – always chicken or fish, rice and almond milk and a few mild spices, sometimes served hot, sometimes cold and often adorned with slivered almonds fried in duck or goose fat and a sprinkle of sugar, all before being served forth. They also seem extremely bland with most recipes containing no spices at all. That said, many of our favourite foods are bland: white bread, mashed potatoes, avocados and mayonnaise all belong in the bland club, so bland does not equal bad. In fact, bland food is usually comfort food, and I strongly suspect that this is what is going on here, a bland white food, served at every meal no matter how grand. Blanc mange was mediaeval comfort food, the macaroni cheese of its day!
The blanc mange went from a chicken and rice dish to wobbly
pudding somewhere around 1600 it seems. A 1596 recipe uses capon meat, ginger,
cinnamon and sugar, and is pretty much identical to the recipes from 1400, but
then I find in Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book of 1604 that she gives
instruction for a cold sweet. She describes a moulded dessert set with calves’
foot jelly (i.e. gelatine), almonds, rice flour, rosewater, ginger and cinnamon.
Mediaeval Blanc Mange
I’ve combined the methods of several recipes from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The important thing to remember is that mediaeval almond milk would have contained sugar, salt and a little rosewater, so if you want to use the modern shop-bought stuff, you might want to add a little of all three for authenticity. Alternatively, you can have a go at making some yourself.
The spices I went for were ginger and cinnamon, but you can
add white pepper, galingale and saffron too if you like.
The only thing I have done differently to the original
recipes is to leave my chicken on the bone; bones stop the chicken drying out
in the cooking process and flavour the dish.
1 chicken jointed into 8 breast pieces, 4 thigh pieces and 2
drumsticks, skin removed
3 tbs duck or goose fat
white rice measured to the 300 ml line of a jug
½ tsp each ground cinnamon and ginger
1 ½ tsp salt
small handful slivered almonds
Demerara sugar and more salt for sprinkling
Pour the almond milk in a saucepan and heat up to almost
boiling. Meanwhile, in a large saucepan melt one tablespoon of the goose or duck
and when hot, tip in the rice. Stir to coat the rice grains in the fat, then
add the spices and salt. Add the chicken pieces and hot almond milk and stir
just once more.
Turn the heat down to low, place on a lid and simmer gently
for 25 minutes.
When the time is almost up, fry the slivered almonds in the
remaining fat until a deep golden-brown colour.
Serve the chicken and rice in deep bowls with the almonds, salt
and sugar sprinkled over.
There you go, pretty easy stuff really. And the verdict?
Well, it was quite bland, but pretty tasty with all of the adornments, and the
flavours developed a lot over night when I reheated some. The sugar wasn’t as
weird tasting as you might expect, and the mild scent of rose water really
lifted the dish. The almonds fried in duck fat were amazing, and I’ll certainly
be stealing that idea. Will I make it again? Probably not, I must admit, but it
was an interesting experiment. Next post, I’ll give you a very easy recipe for
a proper dessert blancmange, one of my favourite things to eat. Until then,
cheerio!
Last post I wrote about my little experiment making almond milk. With my batch I decided to make a mediaeval recipe from the first cook book in English, Forme of Cury. It was written around 1390 by the cooks of King Richard II; I’ve written about it and cooked up a few recipes from it before.
The one I chose is called Rosee, and it is like a pudding – in the American sense of the word
– i.e. a thick custardy dessert. This one is thickened with rice flour instead
of eggs like a regular custard and is flavoured with rose petals (“with flours of white rosis”) as well as
some ginger and cinnamon. It’s not the right time of year for roses, so in lieu
of the blooms, I used some rose water instead. It’s also flavoured with pine
nuts and dates, which also adds a little texture. Sugar is the sweetener –
which wasn’t refined to pure white in the 1400s, so I used soft light brown
sugar to replicate this.
You don’t have to use mediaeval almond milk, you can buy it,
or just use regular cows’ milk.
Here’s how it is written in Forme of Cury. It’s hard to decipher, but once you know the now
defunct letter thorn (þ) is makes a th sound (so seþe is pronounced seethe), it makes it a lot easier.
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Rose Pudding 1390:
Take thyk mylke; seþe it. Cast þerto
sugur, a gode porcioun; pynes [pine nuts], dates ymynced, canel [cinnamon], & powdour ginger; and seeþ I, and alye [mix] it with flours of white rosis, and flour of
rys. Cole it; salt it and mess it forth. If þou wilt in stede of almaunde
mylke, take swete crem of kyne [cows].
Hopefully you get the gist – it takes a while to tune in!
I didn’t follow the method exactly – I used my own cook’s logic to the dish – but I made quite a delicious pudding, and it didn’t feel as though it was a vegan dessert. A knob of butter or a glug of cream, goes a long way with making food satisfying, but I genuinely didn’t miss them. It really goes to show that the King and his court did not go without during Lent!
25 g pine nuts or chopped mixed nuts, plus extra for
decoration
2 to 3 tbs rose water
Put the flour and spices in a small saucepan and whisk in
the milk, starting by adding just a third of it at first to prevent lumps. When
all of the milk has been added, put the pan on the heat and bring to a simmer,
stirring well with a wooden spoon or small whisk as it begins to thicken. Add
the sugar, salt, dates and nuts. Keep it simmering very gently for around 10
minutes to cook out the flour. If it looks like it will be too thick, add more
liquid (it sets quite firm, so when it is hot, you’re looking for the
consistency of thick double cream).
Remove from the heat and add the rose water – I like quite a
lot, but it can be rather overpowering, so add enough that seems just right and
then add a shake more. By doing this you are compensating for the fact it will
be served cold, the flowery aroma less pungent.
Pour into serving cups – I went for small coffee cups – scatter
with a few more dates and nuts and cover with cling film to prevent a skin
forming. Pop them in the fridge until set.
Half an hour before you want to serve them, take them out of
the fridge to take off the chill.
Over recent years, as we have become more aware of people’s food intolerances and allergies there has been a great rise in the amount of plant-based milks consumed in the western world. We’ve also realised that there are many benefits associated with the cutting down of animal products in our diets. One of these plant milks – almond milk – is actually having a Renaissance because it was a food that used to be consumed in abundance in mediaeval Europe. Indeed, if I was writing this 20 years ago, it would be appearing in my ‘Forgotten Foods’ series on the blog.
As you may know, mediaeval Christians fasted a lot. There
were two great fasting episodes: Advent and Lent. Every Wednesday, Friday and
Saturdays was a fast day, meaning that around half of the days of the year were
spent fasting. No meat or animal produce was allowed to be eaten, except for
fish which was considered cool and calming and so appropriate for these days of
solemnity.
The nutrition contained within almond milk. Notice the added ingredients.
Just like the people do today, mediaeval folk tried to make
alternative products that could fill the same satisfying gastronomical niche as
the real thing. Almond milk was one of those products.
Almonds were imported (as they are now) and very expensive.
Households were expected to make almost all their own food and drinks and
almond milk was no exception. The expense and effort required to make it made
it a fasting ingredient reserved only for the rich, and they consumed a lot of
it. King Edward I went through a startling 40 000 pounds of almonds in just two
years!
I must admit I quite enjoy modern almond milk as a drink or in
porridge but find it otherwise a little insipid, so I was interested in finding
out how mediaeval people went about making it and what it was like. From my
reading, it seems to be thicker and more substantial than todays, where it was
refined into a thick almond cream or curdled to make a kind of almond curd
cheese. I’m not sure if this would be possible using the almond milk of today!
On the other hand, modern almond milk may be more
nutritious. When people moved from cow’s milk to plant-based milks, many didn’t
realise there would be a massive drop in their consumption of nutrients like
calcium and vitamin D. This led to concerns that people would become deficient,
and so modern manufacturers fortify almond milk with extra nutrients to help
people to achieve their recommended nutritional allowances for the day.
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Making Mediaeval Almond Milk
The basic method was acquired from the Arabs who were
supplying much of the almonds themselves via the vast network of trade routes
that stretched out through Eastern Europe, the Middle East and beyond.
The begin almonds would be pounded very fine, sometimes with
a little spring water or rose water to stop them oiling; they didn’t want to make almond nut butter by
accident! After this initial exhausting task, the almonds would be soaked in
spring water (though I have found references to soaking them in barley water
too). After soaking, it was passed through a strainer and seasoned with salt
and some honey or sugar. Cream could be made by boiling the milk down until
very thick or made into curds by adding vinegar before straining. I came across
this recipe for an almond cheese so thick, you could slice it:
Take almond milk, and
boil it, and when it is boiled take it from the fire, and sprinkle on a little
vinegar. Then spread it on a cloth, and cast sugar on it, and when it is cold
gather it together, and leche it [slice it] in dishes, and serve it forth.
So how does mediaeval almond milk compare to compare to
todays, and how is it to use as an ingredient?
I updated the mediaeval approach to making almond milk, but the ingredients essentially remain the same.
100g ground almonds
2 tsp rose or orange-flower water (optional)
1 tsp sugar or honey
A good pinch of salt400 ml boiling water
60 ml white wine (optional)
The first task is to get those ground almonds super-fine.
Put them in a blender (a Nutri-bullet style blender is perfect) with the rose
water and about 50 ml of the hot water and blitz in pulses until very smooth. Add
the rest of the boiling water and leave to stand and soak for around 20
minutes.
Give the milk a good swish around and pass it through a
sieve to remove any large pieces of ground almond. Sweeten with the sugar or
honey, add the wine if using and allow to cool.
The mediaeval almond milk is now ready to use.
The Verdict
Well I must say, I was quite impressed with the end result. It
was more substantial than bought almond milk in both texture (it was creamy)
and taste (the honey, salt and rose water). It wasn’t chalky or gritty either like
I expected. I don’t recommend adding the wine however; it put the flavours out
of kilter for me, but each to their own I suppose.
I heartily recommend making some. I made a rose-flavoured pudding (see next post) and I even tried making the cheese with the left-over almond milk.
I was rather odd in flavour, I added soft dark brown sugar and a couple of tablespoons of red wine vinegar, let it stand for a few hours and then passed it through a scalded tea towel sat in a sieve. It could make an interesting mediaeval version of a Yorkshire Curd Tart I think.
British Food: A History 