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.

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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. 

Which Came First?

The latest issue of Current Archeology has an article about a really unusual archaeological food find in Buckhamshire, England--four eggs dating to Roman times, one of which is complete.  The article, complete with a picture of the find site and a good picture of the egg itself, can be read here.  (Here's a big "thank you" to Katrin Kania of a stitch in time, who included a pointer to the article in her latest post.)

The article characterizes the eggs as "chicken" eggs, but as Katrin points out in her post, it does not indicate that any DNA analysis of the find was performed. However, I just took a "large" sized chicken egg out of my refrigerator; it measures about 4 cm across the widest part and about 5 cm long.  That is roughly the size of one of my chicken eggs.   That suggests that any experiments with Roman recipes for eggs will make approximately the same amount of food as would have been available in Roman times--good to know!

The Current Archaeology article also notes that a book was recently published, summarizing the study of all the finds on the Berryfield site (where the eggs were found).  That book is being sold by Oxbow Books; a link to the page where you can purchase the book from them may be found here; and a review of the book (which also appeared in Current Archaeology) can be read here.  The book's price is GBP 20, which is not outrageous, though I unfortunately have other things I need to buy that have to take priority for me.

Berryfields was the site of a Roman-era settlement.  The eggs were found in a water-logged pit, along with a tray made of "woven oak bands and willow rods."  The Current Archaeology article reports the suggestion that the eggs might have been part of a votive offering,  "... perhaps the result of a procession along Akeman Street that culminated in the placement of the eggs, a tray of bread, and other offerings into the pit [where the eggs were found] as part of a funerary rite or other religious activity."  Though archaeologists have been known to ascribe to religion archaeological finds that do not have another obvious explanation, it is hard to imagine why chicken eggs would otherwise be placed upon a tray and buried in a pit.

Hopefully, other Roman finds will be discovered that will shed further light on these interesting eggs.