January journal: adapting a medieval recipe

[ursula]

yhlee asked me to post about adapting medieval recipes to modern recipes.

The SCA slang for this process is "redacting" recipes. There are a couple of things you can do to prepare. The first is to cook medieval food from recipes other people have redacted. I like the recipes page at Medieval Cookery, which is consistent about including the medieval recipe along with the redaction. I've also cooked a lot from The Madrone Culinary Guild's pamphlets and The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy. (A friend of mine actually learned to cook from this book, because it was the only cookbook she owned as an undergrad.)

The second preparation is to practice cooking more experimentally in general, if you're someone who usually follows recipes closely. I was fairly confident tweaking recipes and making substitutions before I started redacting medieval recipes. A lot of cooking medieval food is just a more extreme version of the process where you look at a recipe and say, "I have chard instead of spinach today," or, "I'm going to grate this ginger instead of digging out a food processor" (or "I'm going to use the food processor instead of mucking around with the hand grater," if that's more your style). I know Mark Bittman tends to give reasonable advice on substitutions--I learned to cook meat from his Best Recipes of the World, which is pretty good about telling you what other sorts of meat you can use in any given recipe--and sometimes writes up huge matrices of possible alternatives. Maybe people can suggest other sources for this type of advice in the comments?

Let's redact Sausages in Pottage from Daniel Myers' translation of the 1604 cookbook Ouverture de Cuisine. (The link also includes Myers' redaction, so you can compare his version to mine at the end!)

Here's the recipe:

Sausages in Pottage. Take sausages, & fry them in butter, then take four or five peeled apples & cut into small quarters, & four or five onions cut into rings, & fry them in butter, & put all of them into a pot with the sausages, & put therein nutmeg, cinnamon, with red or white wine, sugar, & let them then all stew.

I'm going to write down my stream of consciousness for constructing a recipe. In practice, I'd do a lot of this in my head, while taking enough notes on quantities to reconstruct a formal recipe for sharing.

The first step is to read the medieval recipe and think about what it should taste like. I think this should be some sort of stew, with savory flavors from the sausage and onions, and some sweetness from the apples. You could conceivably envision this as a dish more focused on sausages, with a sweet fruit sauce, or as something approaching a soup. Your idea about what this recipe ought to be like will inform your choices about the quantity of ingredients, since most medieval recipes don't give detailed quantities.

Next, make a list of ingredients. We need sausages, butter (or some sort of cooking oil), apples, onions, nutmeg, cinnamon, red or white wine, and sugar. I more or less always have butter or oil, onions, nutmeg, cinnamon, and sugar in stock, but if I wanted to make this dish, I would probably have to buy sausages, apples, and wine.

I'd buy four to six sausages, mostly because around here it's easy to buy nice frozen sausages in packs of four or six; I'd look for a pork sausage seasoned with salt and pepper and not a whole lot else. (You definitely don't want anything spiced with chile peppers, since those are a New World vegetable that hadn't really entered the cooking lexicon yet.) Alternatively, if I don't want to let a pack of sausages defrost overnight, the closest grocery store has a butcher counter that sells very tasty sausages; I just don't trust that the meat was organic/humanely raised/what-have-you.

How many apples? The recipe says "four or five". On the other hand, modern fruits and vegetables are often bred for size, so it's possible that your grocery-store apples are bigger than the ones the writer of this recipe envisioned. I am most likely to buy heirloom apples from the farmer's market (or the "farm stop", which sources from local farmers), and those run smallish; I also like the idea that there are about as many apples as sausages. This means I'd still use four or five. If I was attempting to cook medievally from a very bland American grocery store, I'd probably buy something like three big McIntosh apples, or, if the selection was even blander, two green apples and one red one. Modern onions are more likely to be huge than modern apples, so if you're shopping for onions, too, I'd recommend one to four, depending on how large they are and how much you like onions. (I personally like onions, but they make me feel sick if I eat a lot of them, so these days I err on the low side.)

You can spend as much or as little time thinking about wine as you like. Medieval wine wasn't aged in the same way modern wine is, so when I'm feeling fancy about my medieval wine choices, I buy something like Beaujolais Nouveau. When I'm not feeling fancy, I spend $10 and pick a label that I don't think is horribly tacky. For red wine sold in the US at this price point, you're likely looking at something from Australia, New Zealand, or South America, though sometimes I look for low-end French wine just because this is a French recipe; if you prefer white, I'd probably look for pinot gris/pinot grigio, which is a bit less sweet than other inexpensive white wine.

Once you've assembled your ingredients, think about what you need to prep. In this recipe, it's fairly straightforward: we need apples that are peeled and "cut into small quarters", and onions cut into rings. I peel my apples with a sharp paring knife, cut them in halves, and cut the cores out, which often involves cutting in half again. At this point, I look at the pieces and decide if they're small enough. Honestly, I usually cut the quarters in half again, to make a piece that might be one big mouthful; the choice is yours, though. I cut my onion(s) into fine half-rings. (Onions do not make me cry, because I usually wear contact lenses. Oddly, nobody ever mentions this as a cooking hint.)

If you read the recipe closely, you can tell they're using different vessels for frying and for stewing. This is an interesting fact about early seventeenth-century cooking technology! I have a saucier, sort of like a wok but with a flat bottom, that works well for both things. You probably have some sort of saucepan? I would melt some butter in this pan (maybe a tablespoon? That's a good unit of butter.) When it melted, I would fry the sausages in it. You want to let them get very dark, almost black, on at least two sides, more if you can. Cooking tongs or maybe big cooking chopsticks are the right implements for turning sausages, but a spatula or ordinary fork will work in a pinch. Once the sausages are out, pull them out and let them cool on a plate or meat-safe cutting board. If the sausages split and release a lot of fat, and you're worried about that (ideologically, I think Americans stress about fat for stupid reasons, but practically, these days high-cholesterol food makes me quickly and violently ill), you can pour off some of the fat at this stage. They probably won't, though.

Add another tablespoon of butter to the pan and let it melt, if you need it. Throw in the apples and onions. Add a pinch of salt; medieval recipes tend not to specify salt, but frying onions is a good place to include it. Fry everything together until the onions start releasing water and become slightly translucent.

You don't need to be stirring the apples and onions every second, so you can use some of this time to cut the sausages into bite-sized pieces. This partitioning of the sausages isn't in the medieval recipe, so maybe it's not intended; I like having similar-sized bites of sausage and apple, and this division makes it easier to share the dish with more people, but if you like semi-scientific cooking and you anticipate a number of guests that is consistent with your number of sausages, you could leave them whole.

Once the onions are translucent, return the sausages to the pan, and add enough wine to cover them. In my experience, this is around half a bottle of wine (maybe a cup and a half if we're being precise, two cups if we like round numbers).

We also need to choose quantities of nutmeg, cinnamon, and sugar! Cinnamon is a fairly unobtrusive spice, so I'd use a teaspoon. Nutmeg is a bit more powerful. Maybe start with a quarter-teaspoon of ground nutmeg? Or, if you have a whole nutmeg, grate it until you get bored. The sugar is acting partly like a spice, because sugar used to be expensive. It also counterbalances potential sourness in the apples and wine. I'd start with a teaspoon. Add the spices to the pot, and stir everything.

Bring the mixture to a boil, then lower the heat until there are just occasional bubbles. Let it simmer for a while. After twenty minutes, start checking the apples. When they are cooked to your liking (I like them cooked through, but still decidedly separate pieces), check a spoonful of the goo/broth for seasoning; you might want to add more salt, or more sugar. If you do adjust the seasoning, cook for another minute or two to let the flavors blend. Then turn the heat off, and serve.

This is a good recipe to dump into a crockpot and bring to a potluck, if you frequent medieval crockpot potlucks. It's also a good recipe to make on a propane stove when camping.

Myers' redaction adds water, which I think is unnecessary, and uses fewer apples. If you follow his recipe, you'll get something that might be soupier (depending on how long you let things cook down), and that is more focused on the meat.

Comments

[ursula]

If you like apples, onions, and sausages, and aren't terribly concerned with authenticity, you can also make a very tasty version of this recipe with a bottle of beer. Just don't use an IPA or another hoppy beer; the hops concentrate in cooking and taste weird.

[sara]

I'm just laughing because I learned SCA cooking at about the same time I learned cooking overall, and my recipes still look like this pottage. "Take some sausages and apples and do them up in some butter until they smell right. Then you want to put in the onions, also some nutmeg and maybe a little cinnamon and some wine, not the rice wine, the red. Leave it all on the stove until it seems done."

I am now teaching my son to cook and yes it's driving him a bit nuts.

[ursula]

Me too, honestly! But my spouse likes much more precise directions, so I can slow down and try to be more exact, if I concentrate.

[kareina]

Yah, me too, and I learned to cook from grandma, who was also a "nuff/not nuff, taste it/touch it add more till it is right" kind of cook. It took me years before I realised that other people actually want measurements for cooking.

[azurelunatic]

My "and whack the thing in the oven until done" discomfits my partner.

Take a whole package of chicken thighs. Sprinkle with enough garlic powder. Bake. Flip and sprinkle the other side, being sure to use enough. Bake until done.

"...What do you mean, 'enough'!!!"

[ursula]

The medieval cooking version of this is "until it be enow".

[kareina]

Yah, people keep asking me "how long does it need to bake"? I normally reply "until it is done" and "check it the first time the nose alarm goes off--you don't want to over cook it.

spork of fooding!

[yhlee]

This looks delicious!

I confess that I had to Google what "pottage" even is because I had no idea...

Re: spork of fooding!

[ursula]

It's really tasty! For a while this was in my regular winter dinner rotation, though my dietary requirements have shifted, so it's more of a "share with lots of people" food now.

Working with medieval recipes definitely expands one's vocabulary. I should really figure out what to do with that mastic I acquired.

[redsixwing]

Oh, yum. Thanks for writing up the thought process.

I had to look up 'pottage' to try to figure out what sort of a dish this was intended to make, as my first read through the recipe generated an expectation of a thin soup. Your description sounds much more appetizing.

It's interesting to think of what would be available when. For casual purposes, I think my favorite German sausages would be good... they have a nutmeg flavor that would play nicely with this kind of seasoning.