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medieval cooking, out of season
The baronial holiday party was this weekend. This particular SCA group doesn't have much of a tradition of medieval recipes at potlucks, but I believe in making the effort; I made a dessert for the dessert auction, and an asparagus salad.
The 1609 household guide Delights for Ladies includes a recipe for puff pastry that ends with the following sentence: "You may convey any preetty forced dish, as Florentin, Cherry-tart, Rise, or Pippins, &c, between two sheets of that paste." In this context, I'm pretty sure "forced" means "spiced"; that's one of the possible meanings in the OED for farced, which is a possible alternate spelling. Modern puff pastry is pretty similar to the stuff that recipe would yield, and we had frozen cherries in the freezer left over from Thanksgiving, so cross-referencing with a sixteenth-century cherry tart recipe, I ended up with a lazy person's route to a c. 1600 dessert:
You could do something similar with apples, or any of the other options. "Florentin" here seems to be "Florentine", which is a bit like mincemeat; here's a flesh-day version with veal kidneys and a fish-day version without.
The asparagus salad was from the recently translated Prince of Transylvania's Cookbook. All of the salads cross-reference each other, so the instructions you end up with seem to be "make the same vinaigrette you'd make for beluga caviar, but add some sugar". I'm interested in the "rose vinegar"; I'm guessing this is vinegar flavored with roses, not rose-colored vinegar. I might try making some, sometime! In the meantime, I just went for a basic vinaigrette with a little bit of sugar and a little bit of rosewater.
The 1609 household guide Delights for Ladies includes a recipe for puff pastry that ends with the following sentence: "You may convey any preetty forced dish, as Florentin, Cherry-tart, Rise, or Pippins, &c, between two sheets of that paste." In this context, I'm pretty sure "forced" means "spiced"; that's one of the possible meanings in the OED for farced, which is a possible alternate spelling. Modern puff pastry is pretty similar to the stuff that recipe would yield, and we had frozen cherries in the freezer left over from Thanksgiving, so cross-referencing with a sixteenth-century cherry tart recipe, I ended up with a lazy person's route to a c. 1600 dessert:
1 package puff pastry
1 package frozen sweet cherries
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. ginger
2 tbsp. sugar
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Cook the cherries, spices, and sugar until thickened slightly. Pulse in the food processor (optional). Roll out a piece of puff pastry, spread the cherries on it, roll out a second sheet of puff pastry, cover, and squish the edges together. Cut into squares. Bake until brown and crispy (I think this took about forty-five minutes?)
You could do something similar with apples, or any of the other options. "Florentin" here seems to be "Florentine", which is a bit like mincemeat; here's a flesh-day version with veal kidneys and a fish-day version without.
The asparagus salad was from the recently translated Prince of Transylvania's Cookbook. All of the salads cross-reference each other, so the instructions you end up with seem to be "make the same vinaigrette you'd make for beluga caviar, but add some sugar". I'm interested in the "rose vinegar"; I'm guessing this is vinegar flavored with roses, not rose-colored vinegar. I might try making some, sometime! In the meantime, I just went for a basic vinaigrette with a little bit of sugar and a little bit of rosewater.