Just How Long Have Things Gone Better with Bacon?

A common saying that turns up on the Internet these days is that "things go better with bacon."  

A few days ago, I found an article on an interesting blog suggesting that, in Europe at least, bacon has been making things better for a long time.  The post appears on https://www.bakerspeel.com, and the article can be read here. 

The author notes that in medieval Europe, bacon was the meat usually eaten by the lower and middle classes and was primarily preserved by curing, i.e., packing the cut meat with salt to draw as much moisture out of the meat as possible.   In early modern times (i.e., after 1600 CE) bacon was also smoked--exposed in a warm place to woodsmoke), but the smoking process is not, and was understood not to be, sufficient to preserve the meat alone so it was combined with curing to produce a better-flavored product.  Small amounts of sugar were added to the curing material for the same reason.  

I commend the article to my readers' attention as an interesting discussion of how bacon preparation methods--and of necessity the flavor profile that must have resulted--changed over time. 

NOTE:  Edited to change a clause in the third paragraph to read "but the smoking process is not, and was understood not to be, sufficient to preserve the meat alone so it was combined with curing to produce a better-flavored product."  The original said, incorrectly, that "smoking" was combined with "smoking" in the manufacture of early modern bacon. 

Mustard Eggs!

Mustard eggs

Having purchased a bottle of Dijon honey mustard at the supermarket, I decided to try Rumpoldt's fried hard-boiled eggs with mustard recipe again.  My thought was that using a sweeter, less harsh mustard would eliminate the unpleasantness of mustard bite and create a tasty dish while still giving the eggs an interesting flavor.  A photograph of the cooked eggs appears beside this post; as usual, click on it for a larger version.

The end result was successful!  The honey in the mustard almost, but not quite, drowned out the mustard bite to produce an interesting dish.  I sliced up two very lightly salted hard-boiled eggs before frying them, and added about a teaspoon and one-half honey mustard (compare the 5 eggs and 3-4 tablespoons of mustard in Volker Bach's redaction of the Rumpoldt recipe in Plain Fare), and those seemed to be appropriate amounts, at least to my taste.

Perhaps my final experiment along these lines should be to make the eggs using homemade honey mustard based on a (roughly) period recipe.  Plain Fare gives a recipe from the Liber de Coquina, which dates to the fourteenth century CE.  (Rumpoldt's book, in contrast, was published toward the very end of the sixteenth century CE.) A translation of the recipe from Liber de Coquina, and Bach's comments, follow:

Mustard can be made from mustardseed alone, or from rocket.  And it can be seasoned with honey or with sapa (reduced grape must). It is bound either with cooked egg yolk or with sugar. If it is to go with fish, distemper it with vinegar, if with meat, use verjuice.  This is better. 

• 4 tbsp mustardseed flour
• 1/3 cup honey
• 1 cooked egg yolk or 1 tbsp sugar
• vinegar or verjuice to taste
• cinnamon or cassia buds (optional)

(Says Mr. Bach:)  This is not so much a recipe as a set of general guidelines. Since mustard has good keeping qualities, you can easily make a batch of whatever combination appeals to you and bring it to the event, though this sauce is also easily put together on the spot. The basic principle is to mix mustardseed flour with honey (or reduced grape must, if you can get it) and thicken this sauce base with cooked egg yolk or sugar.  Once you need the sauce, you add vinegar or verjuice to taste.

Bach redacts the Liber recipe as combining "mustardseed flour" (i.e., dry mustard) with 1/3 cup honey, binding it with cooked egg yolk or a bit of sugar, and adding a bit of cinnamon or cassia buds to season it.  It would be interesting to try the egg recipe with this type of mustard instead of a modern pre-made mustard, and I may yet do so.  Watch this space!

 

NOTE:  (9/5/2022)  Amazon sells several brands of reduced or cooked grape must, including one made by a family-owned Italian company; it runs about $15 USD for an 8-ounce bottle.  Bach recommends using cooked grape must (unprocessed grape juice left over from the wine making process that is boiled down until it becomes thick) in this honey mustard recipe.  I may decide to purchase some and use it to make my own mustard for a third try at the recipe.  

Mustard Eggs?

A long while ago, I downloaded a short book by Volker Bach called "Plain Fare."  It is meant to provide a resource for SCA folk who want to add documentable, relatively easy recipes to their repertoire for outdoor events where kitchen space is limited and many conveniences (such as refrigerators) are not available.  A copy of the book may be downloaded for free here.

Recently, I've been re-reading Plain Fare and noticed a recipe that is not only easy to make, but that I thought I'd like:  "Eggs in Mustard Sauce."  It appears in a late sixteenth-century cookbook called "Ein new Kochbuch / Marx Rumpolt; mit einem Nachwort von Manfred Lemmer" ["A New Cookbook / Marx Rumpolt; with an Epilogue by Manfred Lemmer"].   The recipe itself consists of taking hard-boiled eggs, slicing them up, frying them in butter, and stirring some mustard into the pan before serving.  It's meant to be eaten immediately after cooking, while still hot. 

So I tried it.  The part about frying the eggs in butter was great, but unfortunately I used Dijon mustard and the result was too sharp to be pleasant, at least for me. Bach's redaction suggested using a "mild" mustard; next time, I'll use a honey mustard instead and see how that comes out.

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

P.S.  Sorry to have fallen behind on updating this blog, but I had a good reason:  my husband was diagnosed in June with stomach cancer.  Fortunately, it was a type of tumor that is very slow growing, and had not spread.  So he had surgery in July to remove it, and is now recovering. 

Book Review With An Offer: A Medieval Cookery Primer

I recently acquired a copy of the following booklet, a photograph of which is shown to the right of this post:

Berry, Jeff.  A Medieval Cookery Primer:  A Programmed Approach.  Compleat Anachronist, Issue No. 188, Second Quarter 2020.  ISSN:  2375-5482. [55 pages]

This little book isn't a primer.  Nor does it contain facts about medieval cuisine, except incidentally.  Instead, it's a suggested course of readings and activities intended to enable the reader to teach himself or herself the art of medieval cookery. 

Mr. Berry begins with the assumption that to understand historical cookery, one must first understand the cookery of one's own time, the better to appreciate differences between one's own cookery and that of earlier periods. As a consequence, his first chapters begin with information on typical cooking techniques of the period and the equipment used to achieve them.  The chapters are:  Modern Cookery (primarily 20th century); Early Modern Cookery (e.g., 17th and 18th centuries) and Medieval Cookery (the 14th and 15th centuries)  In each chapter, he selects at least one popular period cookbook and discusses several recipes therein, noting features in each that differ from modern recipes.  

In the final chapter, "Perils and Pitfalls", Mr. Berry deals with problems the reader likely will encounter in attempting to recreate a historical recipe in a 21st century kitchen.  For example, the simple act of substituting one food item for another in a recipe can be problematic, if the item is an extinct plant or an herb no longer deemed safe for human consumption.  Use of old texts that have been replicated using modern optical character recognition (OCR) devices can introduce their own types of errors.  

Finally, (as the title of my post indicates), if any of my readers is interested in obtaining a copy of this little book, I have a copy I would like to sell.  For reasons that are not interesting to describe, I ended up with two copies of Berry's little tome.  I am willing to sell my extra copy for what I paid for it ($7.50 USD), plus the cost of shipping.  If you are in the United States, I can send the book at "media mail" or book rate, which is extremely cheap.  If you're outside the United States, e-mail me at cathy at thyrsus dot com and we can discuss who will bear shipping costs and what type of shipping method is appropriate.   

Gingerbread!

Molded, gilded, & colored medieval-style
gingerbread in the form of a Tudor Rose.

Gingerbread by Tammy Crawford; Photo from GodeCookery.com

Gingerbread Men.  Photo by
alcinoe (originally from en.wikibooks,
transferred to Wikimedia Commons)

Cornish fairings.  Photo by foodista,
originally posted on Flickr

There are a combination of spices that so-called "First World" countries associate with the winter holidays, such as Thanksgiving (in the U.S.) and Christmas.  If you are American, Canadian or British, you likely know what they are. They include ginger, cinnamon, black pepper and cloves.  Nutmeg, mace, and allspice later joined the list as Western explorers discovered them in Indonesia and the Caribbean.  

Today, these combinations of spices are associated in our minds with the flavor of pumpkin pie, spice cakes, and ... gingerbread! Gingerbread turns out to be a very changeable concept, assuming different forms in different periods.

During the high Middle Ages, gingerbread was not a bread, cake, or cookie.  It was a kind of sticky candy made with honey and bread crumbs, and flavored with the "holiday" spices we still use today.  The topmost photograph to the left above shows a molded shape made from this sort of "gingerbread".  Yet ginger came to Europe through Asian trade with the Mediterranean; it was already known and used in Ancient Rome, and certainly predates the Middle Ages.  Ginger was originally cultivated in Southeast Asia, and is believed to exist only as a cultigen, and not in a wild form.  So tracing the travels of ginger across the world doesn't really pin down how long "gingerbread" has existed, or even what forms it may have.

Nowadays, "gingerbread" might be a cookie, a hard biscuit, or a cake, and the various nations of Europe, as well as the English-speaking world, have their own characteristic forms of gingerbread; Wikipedia names a few of them here. American varieties often use molasses, a common sweetener in the United States that is a byproduct of the sugar cane processing process. 

Gingerbread cake with mountain cranberries
Photo: Johan Bryggare
(Wikimedia Commons)

But there is a lot of overlap between the forms of gingerbread, as I discovered when searching the Internet for information about ginger snaps the other day.  I think of "ginger snaps" as a hard crunchy cookie, that can range in form from wafer-thin to as much as a quarter-inch thick.  When I think of ginger snaps I think of a cookie made and sold in the Philadelphia area under the brand called Sweetzels.  Sweetzels actually sells similar cookies as "ginger snaps" and "spiced wafers"; the spiced wafers are easier to find where I live.

To my surprise, I learned that a type of cookie identical in appearance to the Sweetzels cookies is known in the United Kingdom as a "Cornish fairing" (see the second picture to the right).  A "fairing" is a treat sold at a country "fair", and fairs existed (and may still exist?) all over the United Kingdom.  The thick, ginger-flavored biscuit was characteristic of fairings sold in Cornwall in particular.

Much the same assortment of spices as have been used in gingerbreads have long been the key ingredients in pumpkin pie.  Nowadays these "pumpkin pie spices" are added to all kinds of foods, ranging from cereals to lattes.  That's done for one simple reason.  People like them, so they sell, or at least they sell in the fall and winter.  That likely means that gingerbread will never quite go away, because it has a similar flavor and invokes similar thoughts of celebration and holiday.  Meanwhile, I am planning to make a "gingerbread" cake for Christmas, in my slow cooker.  Sometimes, the more things change the more they remain the same.

Historical Vinegar

Happy New Year! Because my holidays were (for once!) filled with social activity, I have not done much cooking or blogging. Now, however, I am embarking upon one of my New Year's resolutions--to update this blog at least once a month. 

For my first post of 2016 I'd like to focus upon a phenomenon that my readers might know about but which is new to me; reproductions of historical vinegars. 

Alan Coxon, who is known as a "food archaeologist", makes and sells several historical vinegars as a sideline to his lecturing, writing, and doing videos about historical food. His on-line shop features three different vinegars: Ale-Gar, a 15th century English vinegar; Roman Viniagre, an ancient Roman style vinegar, and Ancient Greek Viniagre, an ancient Greek variation.

Ale-Gar is made from ale that itself is brewed using a 15th century English ale recipe.  It incorporates chocolate stout malt, and is "fermented over oak" to round out its unusual flavor, which Mr. Coxon compares both to balsamic vinegar and to Worcestershire sauce.  Like Worcestershire sauce, Ale-Gar is dark brown in color.

Roman Viniagre is made with what Mr. Coxon describes as a "quality wine", and then is infused with spices and sweetened with honey.  As he describes it, "[i]t oozes herbs and spices, fruit and floral undertones".  Tasting it, one detects "cinnamon, hints of camomile and a touch of peppercorn."  It is lighter in color than Ale-Gar, rather like a cider vinegar in appearance, judging by the photographs on the website.

Ancient Greek Viniagre is made from a different, more acidic wine than the Roman version, and is spiced with coriander, resulting in a product that balances sweetness with a slight bitterness.  He suggests using it where one might use a modern rice vinegar.

Each of these vinegars costs 9.95 BRP for 300 ml (about 10 ounces).  That's pricey, but I may order the Roman version someday, just to see how it works as part of a dressing for salad.

What I would rather have, even more than bottles of the vinegars themselves, is more information from Mr. Coxon, not about his recipes, but of the research that led him to make the choices he made in creating those recipes.  Ale-Gar is made from ale brewed using a period recipe, but what evidence led him to make the Roman and Greek vinegars as he did?  They may be fine tasting products, wonderful for use in cooking, but I wish I knew more about why he believes the combination of wines and spices make them Roman, or Greek.

Unfortunately, (judging from his Facebook page), Mr. Coxon appears more interested in traveling, promoting British tourism, and cooking, than in disclosing his historical research for others to use.   I hope that will change as he gets older and seeks to build a legacy for himself.  In the meantime, it is good to see that someone other than the Dogfish Head Brewery* thinks there is profit to be made by recreating the tastes of a bygone age.


* Note: Dogfish Head requires web surfers to input their (presumably adult) birthday onto a splash page in order to be permitted to access the site.

12th Century Recipe Discovery

Thanks to the 12th Century Workshops Facebook page, I learned that some 12th century recipes have been newly discovered in a manuscript originally written at the Durham Cathedral Priory in Durham, England.  An article describing the find may be found here.  The manuscript itself is now housed at the Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University.

According to the article, the manuscript, which was written around 1140 CE, consists primarily of medical recipes.  That makes these recipes about 150 years older than the recorded recipes previously considered the oldest recipes in the "western medieval culinary tradition" (whatever that means).  The newly discovered recipes are for a variety of sauces to be eaten with mutton, chicken, duck, pork and beef.

The most interesting part, to me, is the list of herbs and spices featured in the sauces:   parsley, sage, pepper, garlic, mustard and coriander.  The author of the article thinks this assortment may give the sauces a "Middle Eastern" flavor, to a modern palate.  That may depend on whether the recipes require fresh coriander or the dried "fruits" (also called "seeds"), which are used with cumin in Indian and Middle Eastern cuisine. 

Durham University is planning a workshop and related luncheon at the end of this month in which students, under the guidance of a food historian, will make sauces based on their understanding of the recipes.  That's an event I would love to attend.  Hopefully, the event will generate further news articles with more information about this find. 

A Pilgrim's Picnic Basket

This month, I have been traveling and doing non-food related things away from home (such as learning sword and polearm fighting techniques with these wonderful people). As a result, I haven't been engaging in food experiments, or blogging about food.

I did find a little time to surf the Internet, though, and I found a very interesting article on preparing foods that can be safely carried without refrigeration and eaten while traveling. The article, called "A Pilgrim's Picnic Basket," can be found here. I commend it to the attention of anyone who has considered the question of what medieval people ate when they did not have access to other people or a fire.

I expect to continue to have little time for blogging or cooking for the next two weeks, but that should change later in August.  See you again then!

Useful Sources for Medieval Cooking Measures

Robin Carroll-Mann recently reported on the SCA-cooks Yahoo list that the following sources on medieval weights and measures are available, in their entirety, on Google Books:

"Italian weights and measures from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth
century" By Ronald Edward Zupko
http://tinyurl.com/ykrd2ec

"A dictionary of weights and measures for the British Isles: the
Middle Ages ..." By Ronald Edward Zupko
http://tinyurl.com/y9o83ue

The URLs link to the Google Book location of each. I am reporting these by way of expanding access to this source of information.

EDIT: Note the comment by heroquester below. Zupko may be useful but may not be completely trustworthy.