SC - Celtic Feast Repost--Long

[david friedman]

My apologies to the list if I am commenting on things from a while back.  I
didn't read the list for the entire month of August plus a bit, and am now
working my way slowly backwards.

Morgan MacBride posted her Celtic Feast and asked:

>Please, please feel free to comment, criticize, or add information.  :)
I'm taking you at your word.
...
>Next, I made griddle bread. There is all kinds of archeological evidence
>of the use of oats.  There is also a lot of evidence that the Early
>Celts made griddle breads and probably didn't bake (they actually found
>a  bog man  with part of a burned griddle cake in his belly).  I found a
>number of griddle bread recipes and put this one together based on
>recipes in British Heritage and a Meridian Publication called Early
>Period.
...
Your recipe for oatcakes used cooked oatmeal and baking soda (and you
comment that the latter is cheating).  If your oatmeal is rolled oats, they
too are a modern invention; also it is possible to do oatcakes without
cooking the oats first.  Cariadoc tried some experiments on what later
period Scottish oatcakes might have been, and here is how he wrote it up.
- -----
Scottish Oat Cakes: A Conjectural Reconstruction

"the only things they take with them [when riding to war] are a large flat
stone placed between the saddle and the saddle-cloth and a bag of oatmeal
strapped behind. When they have lived so long on half-cooked meat that
their stomachs feel weak and hollow, they lay these stones on a fire and,
mixing a little of their oatmeal with water, they sprinkle the thin paste
on the hot stone and make a small cake, rather like a wafer, which they eat
to help their digestion." (Froissart's Chronicles, Penguin Books
translation.)

So far as I know, there are no surviving period recipes for oat cakes. This
article is an attempt to reconstruct them, mainly on the basis of
Froissart's brief comment.

Rolled oats--what we today call "oatmeal"--are a modern invention. I assume
that "oat meal" in the middle ages meant the same thing as "meal" in other
contexts--a coarse flour. The only other ingredient mentioned is water, but
salt is frequently omitted in medieval recipes--Platina, for instance,
explicitly says that he doesn't bother to mention it--so I have felt free
to include it. The oat cakes Froissart describes are field rations, so
unlikely to contain any perishable ingredients such as butter or lard,
although they may possibly have been used in other contexts.

Consistent with these comments, the following is my conjectural recipe for
oatcakes as they might have been made by Scottish troopers c. 1400:

1/2 c "Scottish Oatmeal" --very coarsely ground whole oats.	1/4 c water
1/4 t salt

Put the oatmeal in a spice grinder and process for about 20 seconds,
producing something intermediate between what you started with and bread
flour. Add salt and water and let the mixture stand for about fifteen
minutes. Make flat cakes 1/4" to 3/8" in thickness, cook on a medium hot
griddle, without oil, about 3-5 minutes.

The result is a reasonably tasty flat bread. In scaling the recipe up for a
meal or a feast, you would want to experiment with grinding whole oats into
meal or find a finer (and less expensive) oatmeal than the gourmet product,
intended for making porridge, that I was using.
- ----
These oatcakes as Cariadoc made them are sort of sweet and crunchy.

>To go on the bread, I copied a recipe for Samit Spread out of Early
>Period. We know the Celts were big into dairy food, and nothing in the
>recipe is out of the realm of probably foods they would have used.
...
Just as a matter of curiosity, do we know that they used dairy spreads on
bread, or is this just "reasonable guess in the absence of recipes"?  As
you say, it is hard researching food from before cookbooks.

I note you use spinach in the pottage of greens and barley.  Did they have
spinach that early?  I had a vague notion that it was one of the things
that came into northern Europe during the Crusades.
>
>For a kind of dessert dish, I decided on mixed berries with hazelnuts on
>top.  We know the Celts ate strawberries (although not the modern kind)...

As of a few years ago, you could get Alpine strawberry plants from some of
the mail-order nurseries.  They are, I believe, a European species which
hasn't undergone the crossbreeding with a (I think) South American species
which makes our modern strawberries enormous and tasteless. The Alpine
strawberries are about twice the size of the little wild New England kind,
and almost as sweet and strongly flavored.  Unfortunately, I know of no way
of getting them other than growing them yourself.
>
>Sources included: ...

Other sources I would recommend are C. Anne Wilson's _Food and Drink in
Britain_, a wonderful book organized by chapters on different classes of
foods (dairy, fruits, meats, etc.) and within those by period, starting
with prehistoric, and Hagen's 2-volume work on Anglo-Saxon food.  I realize
that you are doing Celtic and not Anglo-Saxon, but it has got to be a
useful cross-check.

>THLady Morgan MacBride
>Shire of Glaedenfeld
>Meridies
>
Elizabeth of Dendermonde/Betty Cook


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