First Course, in more detail, with a lot of overthink

How I love the internet.  I have a box of medieval and historical cookery books downstairs, and looking through them for interesting recipes is a pleasant pastime. But, for a project like this, where I'm trying to create a balance of ingredients from course to course, nothing beats the internet. In particular, the cookbook search on the Medieval Cookery website saves me hours and hours and hours of work. Just plug in the ingredient you're looking for, and half the work is done for you.

Saturday I posted the menu outline for this feast, and I wanted to go into a little more detail about why I made the choices I did.

First and foremost, I really like simple foods. While I'm not beyond making dishes that are fancy or require large numbers of well balanced ingredients, the foods I find most satisfying are really simple foods, using high-quality ingredients and well prepared. That's a bias that comes with me whatever I cook, but for large feasts like this one it has two further advantages: 1) fewer ingredients make it easier to stay within budget, and 2) I find people eating feasts tend to eat more if they can clearly identify what they are eating, even if it's prepared in a way that is new. (In this age of many dietary restrictions, simple preparations also mean a higher likelyhood that one ingredient won't make someone reject a whole dish.)

Because this is a February feast, my first step was to do a lot of research about foods that were available in a very specific place and time: I'm looking at England, and while in the back of my mind I'm thinking 'Anglo Saxon' the reality is that we have virtually no extant sources from that specific time and place, so I'm just looking as early as I can (avoid Roman) and hoping for the best.

Once I'd made a list of the ingredients I wanted to include, my next step was figuring out how to divide them by course, to keep things balanced. As I've mentioned before, the menu material in Le Menagier de Paris has been very influential in my thinking, as was the dietary rule of the Benedictine order cited in my recent reading. Basically from those two things I made the decision that I wanted the first course to be focused on sweeter flavors, and the second to have flavors that would be more complementary to with the rich, salty flavor of the ham. Because of the site restrictions on raw meats, I had to focus on pre-cooked proteins, a limitation that was actually, in some ways, pretty liberating.

To focus more on the first course:

- Bread and butter are, of course, a staple.

-  I plan to have salt available at each table

-  I am going to use sausage as a protein in the first course, in part because it can be cooked early and kept warm easily, and is edible at a wide range of temps. I also have a mental image of linked sausages as part of the overall "single platter" presentation of the meal, although I'm not sure if that's really realistic. (I'm sticking this link from the Globe about where to buy handmade sausages in greater Boston here so I can find it later. Also, link for Karl's Sausages. Wikipedia entry for Lincolnshire Sausages.) I am aware that leads to the issue that we're serving pork products for both courses, but it might be possible to do a chicken or beef sausage, although I don't think they're quite as authentic (but that's a guess).

- Cheeses. I plan to have a couple of different cheeses available as part of this course, but I haven't picked them yet and won't until later in the process. I also have to confess that I remain deeply in love with this dish of sausages and apples, but I'm not fully convinced that it fits with an early period presentation. Sounds yummy, though.

- A sweet rice dish: starting with the very ubiquitous blanc mangers, dishes of rice cooked in milk (or almond milk) and sweetened and spice are one of the most basic medieval  foods. I love the pairing of a sweet rice with cheese and meat. For a feast like this I will likely use an almond milk vs.cow's milk (to keep the dish vegan). Right now I'm leaning toward this classic version from Forme of Cury that is basically rice, almond milk, and saffron, although I also like this 15th c one that adds honey and wine. There are other versions that add toasted almonds. I like this one, but it's poorly sourced and the eggs render it non-vegan. There is also this rice pudding with raisins, dates, and currents that I like, but it's very late period, and of course the beef suet is a problem.

- Hot apples: Countess Meggie says that anytime is a good time for an apple pie, and I fully agree. While part of me simply loves the idea of starting a meal with an apple pie, the decision to do hot apples at the start is better thought out than that: apples go well with the sausages and cheese, they're a sweet and filling, apples would have stored well, but by the time February comes cooking them down really does a lot to help deal with a certain softness and mealiness apples in storage can develop. Here is an early pie of dates, apples, pears, and prunes (!) that is my leading contender at the moment, but the downside is it's pretty complex. A similar dish where you make balls from the mixed fruit and fry them - tempting, but not really the visual presentation I was imagining (although it's very tempting to both, honestly. They do share a lot of the same ingredients, but I wonder if doing both would be a little too ambitious). I also considered (and have basically rejected) Comadore, which is figs, and raisins, and pears, and apples, and a lot of spices, all cooked together and strained, and then put inside a crust and fried. I love the idea of this, but again it seems a little too detailed to produce on such a large scale. Le Menagier also mentions simply roasted apples in a few places, almost always in the first platter, this one with sugared almonds on top, but I like the idea of the coffin (crust) presentation better.

- Cabbages: I might be alone in this, but I do consider cabbage to be more on the sweet end of the veggie spectrum. A few years ago I did this dish of cabbages, onions, and leeks for a feast, which certainly falls on the sweet (but tangy) end of the food spectrum. And, I may very well end up doing this again for this feast. However, I've wanted to make compost (a number of sources cited there) which is a kind of pickled veggie that is then sweetened with honey, and which also includes dried fruit. Super sweet and can (and should) be served cold. Somehow the inclusion of a pickled food with the cheese and the sausages. Here's a ton more SCA discussion about how this dish is supposed to be prepared.

And that's the first course. I've gone into a lot more detail here than I expected, so I'm going to end here. I still need to detail out the other two courses for us, and also I want to talk about this cool thing I read about the role of women in Anglo-Saxon feasts (which I had meant to write about today). But that's the first third set and done. Let me know what you think? Please?

Exiting Research Mode

Well hello!

So, yes, I got all of you all excited about this project and then proceeded to be completely silent for six weeks. Sorry about that. All I can say is work and holidays took up a lot of my free writing time, and what time was left I spent reading. And reading. And reading. And trying to get my head around how to make what I want to do work within the restrictions that the site kitchen imposes (which, to be frank, I find increasingly intimidating, in large part because it's not my local group's site, and I don't want to screw it up for the local group by accident). And then I read some more.

Most of my reading was two books: The Mead-Hall, Feasting in Anglo-Saxon England (Stephen Pollington) and Ann Hagen's Anglo-Saxon Food and Drink. Although neither is a true cookery book, I like them both, and found them both useful, for somewhat different reasons. The Mead-Hall primarily discusses the cultural aspects of the feast, while A-S Food and Drink talks a lot about the archeological evidence for certain ingredients (which is fascinating and I love) but has very little about menus and the actual food that was cooked.

I now have a notebook full of notes, and a pretty clear idea of what we're doing. Three services (four if the budget somehow allows for it, but three for certain), two of "cooked" foods and the third of cold foods, including nuts and fruits. This is a combination of the "platters" approach that Le Menagier de Paris lays out and the rule of meals for Benedictine monks (of all things) that is discussed in some detail in A-S Food and Drink and seems, overall, like a good rule to follow that echos the menus suggested in Le Menagier.

I'm still in the process of pulling actual recipes. But I wanted to share with you a bit of what my notes look like:

-----------------

Winter

Hard Cheeses, Salt meats, dried cereals, pulses (beans)
Live animals

Soft cheeses, meat pudding, sausages

Apples and Onions
Leeks
Garlic

Source quotes a salad comprised of garlic, scallions, onions, leeks, young leeks, and herbs.

Carrots (not orange), parsnips, radishes, turnips

Kidney beans, broad bean, dried peas. (Dried peas stewed in wine.) "Juicy" peas reference fresh peas. Lentils. 

Cress. Cabbage. 

Fennel. Celery. Combined with beans to combat flatulence.

Mushrooms.

Apples, pears, plums, mulberries, plums & cherries, grapes, dates and figs.

Hazelnuts, walnuts, sweet chestnuts, pinenuts.

Honey.

--------------
And that, believe it or not, is the feast.  I don't have all the specific recipes quite lined up yet, but I'm getting there. Then we just have to price and source it..

Some stuff I'm looking at:

Sausages in Pottage (1604 and French, but encapsulates everything I'm reading about in one neat package.)

Medieval Cheese

En Gerhit (1345 German) I think it's a sauce? More research needed. 

Salat (Forme of Cury 1300) - Related to the garlic and onion salad referenced in A-S Food and Drink

Cured Ham (1616, far too late, but salted hams are clearly around in this period) The entire note is "XLVI - SpegeSkinke [cured ham]. Take salt and garlic and rub the ham with it and pierce through the sword [?] ginger, cloves and garlic"

'Heathen Peas' (1345 German) Peas and honey. "One hands this out greedily, cold or warm."

Drawen Beans (c. 1300 - turns up in Forme of Cury and a lot of other places) I've always wanted to try this, and this may be the time. Arundel 334 adds bacon.

Fresh Parsnip Pie (1604 and French) Too late and too french, but I'm very intrigued by what seems to be a mashed parsnip pie, and it certainly fits with the food themes listed above.

Apple Tarts (and here is a second one) The Forme of Cury one is ... wait for it ... an apple, pear, fig, raisin, prune AND FISH tart. They had me right up until the fish. I'm almost tempted to do tiny personal hand apple pies as part of the first course, but we'll probably go with a bulk tart instead.

I will probably serve leeks and mushrooms, just because I almost always do leeks and mushrooms. I'm currently searching for more creative leek and mushroom ideas than the regular Funges one.

Edited to add: I should probably look for a barley dish, since I'd like to do barley water as a beverage and I'd hate to waste all that barley.

--------------------------

Possible First platter: Hot apples. Sausage. cheese. maybe something with cabbage if I can find something. Some kind of rice dish. Bread.

Possible Second platter: Ham, with sauces. Some kind of dish with peas. A dish with onions. Leeks and mushrooms. Something else with a rich, bacony flavor. More bread. Parsnip fritters?

Probable Third platter: spiced walnuts. chestnuts. fresh fruit (grapes, I'd love to do pomegranates or something else rare), wafers or thin pancakes with honey for dipping.