Ursula

rugessnome asked me to post about, "Your choice of ingredient that you've used in recreating historical recipes but isn't used much in modern American cooking, or is used very differently."

I've been pretty good about writing up my medieval cooking experiments in the last few years, so I'm having a hard time thinking of something that I've used recently but haven't written about. This probably means that I'm taking some odd practice for granted. But let's talk about a tiny recipe mystery involving something I don't use very often: oatmeal.

I like granola, but I've never liked oatmeal for breakfast (I wish I did, since it's compatible with a bunch of my annoying dietary constraints!) Consider, now, this anti-oatmeal recipe for "buttered worts", from Gentyll manly Cokere, c. 1500:

To make buttyrd Wortys. Take all maner of gode herbys that ye may gette pyke them washe them and hacke them and boyle them vp in fayre water and put ther to butture clarefied A grete quantite And when they be boylde enowgh salt them but let non Ote mele come ther yn And dyse brede in small gobbetts & do hit in dyshys and powre the wortes A pon and serue hit furth.

Notice the warning: "let non Ote mele come ther yn" ("Let no oatmeal come therein"). A similar recipe from a slightly earlier source has the same prohibition.

Why, you might ask yourself, are the recipe writers going out of their way to warn you not to put oatmeal in your dish of buttery greens? One answer shows up in a seventeenth-century Danish cookbook:

VI. To cook cabbage

There is no need to write much about it, every farmer’s wife knows how. And often at a farmer’s you will taste a better cabbage than in the noble’s kitchen. However this is how a cabbage is cooked: Put water and oats on the fire with a red onion or two finely chopped. Let it seethe until it is nice and smooth. Chop the cabbage finely, the finer the better it will be. When the sauce is smooth then put the cabbage into it and let it seethe until it is soft. Then put butter in: but if you want it with lard then grind the lard finely first and let it seethe with the oats.

It's unusual to see a medieval recipe for oatmeal with vegetables, because "every farmer's wife knows how"--you have to infer its ubiquity in other ways, such as the prohibitions against it. (A friend once shared a variation on the oatmeal-with-vegetables theme using steel-cut oats and bacon, and it was very good!)

While I'm browsing, here's a recipe for a snack or dessert involving a sweet oatmeal pudding on toast:

To make a cawdle of Ote meale.. TAke two handful or more of great otemeale, and beat it in a Stone Morter wel, then put it into a quart of ale, and set it on the fire, and stirre it, season it with Cloues, mace, and Suger beaten, and let it boile til it be enough, then serue it forth vpon Soppes.

And the Danish cookbook has a recipe for cherry glop on fried bread, which is more the sort of dessert I would choose:

Take cherries and put them in a colander so that they don’t touch each other. Put the colander in a warm oven so that they are well dried and then they are good prunes. These you can use this way: Take wine and water equal amounts. Seethe the cherries in it and put some sugar into it. Then fry bread in butter and let this sauce over it.

This weekend, I did some test cooking from the sixth-century dietary manual De observatione ciborum (Anthimus). I skipped the pennyroyal because you don't use an herb traditionally employed to induce uterine contractions unless all the potential diners are on board for that experiment, I skipped the spikenard because our probably-American stock is so old it's tasteless and true Nepali spikenard is endangered, and we were out of a couple of other odd ingredients. But I did buy a costmary plant:



This herb smells lemony and tastes bitter; you can use it fresh or dried.

One of the longest recipes in Anthimus is for a beef dish:

Beef which has been steamed can be used both roasted in a dish and also braised in a sauce, provided that, as soon as it starts to smell, you put the meat in some water. Boil it in as much fresh water as suits the size of the portion of meat; you should not have to add any more water during the boiling. When the meat is cooked, put in a casserole about half a cup of sharp vinegar, some leeks and a little pennyroyal, some celery and fennel, and let those simmer for one hour. Then add half the quantity of honey to vinegar, or as much honey as you wish for sweetness. Cook over a low heat, shaking the pot frequently with one's hands so that the sauce cooks the meat sufficiently. Then grind the following: 50 pepper corns, 2 grams each of costmary and spikenard, and 1.5 grams of cloves. Carefully grind all these spices together in an earthenware mortar with the addition of a little wine. When well ground, add them to the casserole and stir well, so that before they are taken from the heat, they may warm up and release their flavor into the sauce.

( cut for interpretations and more recipes )

rugessnome asked me to post about "historical cookery (and unusual ingredients in it)".

This seems like a good time to post a redaction of some medieval Andalusian cookies! I found the recipe, from an anonymous thirteenth-century Andalusian cookbook, at Medieval Cookery.

( The Preparation of Ka'k )

I made individual cookies, though the gloss as "Biscotti" on Cariadoc's page seems to suggest these could be double-baked. (I would like to have a gazelle cookie cutter!)

Here's how I made the filling. The balance of spices is good, but I made way too much filling. I think I might have halved the quantities in my notes, but it's still likely too much--fortunately, almonds and sugar will keep.

( Filling recipe )

I used the dough recipe for Lebanese spinach triangles from Anissa Helou's Savory Baking from the Mediterranean, substituting untoasted sesame oil for olive oil. You can find that recipe Food and Wine; the cookbook version doubles the quantities, making it 2 cups flour, 1 tsp. salt, 1/4 cup oil, and 1/2 cup warm water. This recipe makes a soft, workable dough. (For a savory medieval recipe using the same dough, see Andalusian Feta Pies.)

I rolled the dough out very thin--ideally it should be translucent--and cut circles a few inches across with a cookie cutter. I scattered a spoonful of the almond filling on each circle, placed another dough circle on top, crimped the edges, and sprinkled a tiny bit more almond sugar on each cookie for garnish. Bake in a 450° F oven for about fifteen minutes, or until golden brown.

Here's what they looked like before baking:



And here's the finished version:



These come out cracker-like and somewhat crisp, with subtle sweetness from the filling. If you want a more clearly cookie-like cookie, I recommend experimenting with butter in the dough instead of oil. These might also be nice in a buffet spread with things like olives and cucumbers.

Interests meme from bluebaron. Comment if you'd like me to choose interests for you to write about?

calabi-yau manifolds

These are the thing I research! They're particular higher-dimensional spaces that are flat in the sense that if you were inside one you would experience no gravitational force, but are curled in on themselves in complicated ways. Here's the picture everyone uses, and here's a slice I generated using a different equation. Calabi is the Italian mathematician who conjectured that these spaces should exist. Yau (my mathematical grandfather) proved they actually do.

medieval knitting

I've done a lot of knitting based on medieval objects (or seventeenth-century patterns), over the years. It's usually in the round, and finer than a lot of modern work. Here's my current project:



Those are size 1 needles (that my friend vandyhall made out of brass rod), so it's fairly small knitting, though not nearly as tiny as the original, which is a silk relic pouch preserved in a church in Switzerland.

onomastics

This is the fancy way of saying "the study of names". What interests me about studying names is less the individual names, and more the fact that thinking about names in different times and places provides an excuse to learn about languages, culture, and the way they interact. I'm particularly nerdy about classical Greek and Roman and medieval Turkic/Turkish and Mongolian names, though I've picked up all sorts of things, over the years.

In the Society for Creative Anachronism, rulers of a kingdom are chosen by tournament. Each entrant in the tournament must designate a person as "inspiration", who will serve as consort if that entrant wins the tourney; fighter and inspiration must be of opposite sex. Sovereign principalities must have one prince and one princess. Baronies may have one baron, one baroness, or a baron and a baroness, but may not have two ruling nobles of the same sex.

Debate about this policy within the Society generally follows the lines of the gay marriage debate. Supporters of the status quo often add that there's no historical basis for two men or two women in a romantic relationship serving as rulers of a medieval kingdom; opponents of the status quo concede this point, but argue that the policy should be changed anyway, for reasons of basic fairness.

I believe that the gay marriage analogy is flawed, for a simple reason: there is no requirement in the SCA, tacit or explicit, that ruling nobles have any sort of romantic or sexual relationship. If Duke Hypothetical, having divorced Countess Mundania, chose to fight for his grown daughter Lady Hypothetica, the populace's response would be, "Why, isn't that sweet!" not "Incest is disgusting! I can't subject my children to this filth!" I've heard young men advised to choose a long-time SCA member, someone old enough to be their mother, as inspiration (to provide grounding experience to a reign). And I've known multiple pairs of ruling nobles and fighters/inspirations who were not involved romantically and not ever planning to start.

Thus, the appropriate historical question is not "Did two men or two women in a romantic relationship serve as rulers of a medieval kingdom?" The appropriate question is, "Did two men or two women ever share ceremonial rulership of a medieval kingdom?" (I specify ceremonial rulership since, in the Middle Ages as in the Society, the precise balance of real power varied based on time, place, and circumstance.)

Did two men or two women ever share ceremonial rulership? Absolutely! Those of us raised on English fairy tales often assume that a king's oldest surviving son must inherit the kingdom; but in much of medieval Europe, succession by primogeniture was neither obvious nor inevitable. Kings, counts, dukes, princes, and emperors often chose to crown a successor while they were still alive to pick one. The chosen co-ruler was often a son, brother, or spouse of the first ruler, but not always: sometimes an ambitious person finagled a co-rulership, and sometimes co-rulership solved a territorial dispute.

A random selection of co-rulers in medieval Europe follows.

• In June 1170, Henry, the second (and then oldest surviving) son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, was crowned king by the Archbishop of York. He is generally known as Henry the Young King; since he died before his father, he never reigned alone.
  
• French kings who ruled with their fathers include Hugh, son of Robert II (eleventh century), and Philip, son of Louis XI (twelfth century)
  
• Several of the English kings of Kent ruled jointly with fathers, sons, brothers, or nephews.
  
• Harold Hardrada forced his nephew Magnus the Good to share the kingdom of Norway with him.
  
• In the Italian principality of Capua-Benvenuto, brothers as well as fathers and sons shared the title of prince (The New Cambridge Medieval History notes, "On one occasion, very briefly in 939-40, this meant that there were no less than four persons using the princely title: Landulf I, two of his sons and his younger brother, Atenulf II.")
  
• The German region of Oels-Cossil had brothers ruling as co-princes in the fifteenth century.
  
• A thirteenth-century treaty made Andorra a principality governed by two unrelated co-princes, the Count of Foix and the Bishop of Urgell.
  
• In the tenth-century, the duchies of Naples and Amalfi had father and son co-dukes.
  
• Father/son pairs served as co-counts of Flanders (twelfth century), Toulouse (tenth century), and Macon (tenth century).
  
• Pairs of brothers shared countship in medieval Catalonia (see Ch. 8 in The Experience of Power in Medieval Europe)
  

I have listed western European examples above. In the Roman empire, and later in the Byzantine empire, multiple emperors were quite common: examples include Justin and Justinian, as well as the two empress plus emperor combination of the sisters Zoe and Theodora together with Zoe's husband Constantine IX. (See
Byzantine Empresses: Women and Power in Byzantium.)

(That's glasseye's hand and one genuine medieval ring from Mark der Gaukler.)