SC - early Irish -- recipes???

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Gerekr at aol.com wrote:
> 
> Hello all,
> 
> Thursday night we're going to Cooking Night and hoping to assist the
> autocrat of this fall's Amergin's Revenge (Celtic bardic) event with menu
> development -- for 7thC Irish!!
> 
> I understand that they have the salmon purchased, and probably smoked by
> now.  Gerek and I are collecting oatcake recipes that are at least pure
> in ingredients, 8-)...

I tried to find this on disk, but it proved easier to locate it on our
Provincial web pages:
 
> 3) North English Oatcakes 
>               Havercakes or riddlecakes differ from the sgian oatcake of the
>               Highland Scots in that they are made from a soft dough or batter,
>               rather than the firm pastry dough of the sgian. Such batters probably
>               derive from attempts to preserve grain-pastes or porridges by cooking
>               and drying, and the resulting cakes are probably older than the sgian.
>               All these cakes are, in fact, prehistoric. Archaeologists have found
>               oatcakes in Iron Age peat bog deposits, and havercakes are mentioned
>               in Langland's Piers Plowman[6]. The problem is that the earliest
>               written recipe I've been able to find falls just outside of period, in the
>               family receipt book of Gulielma (Mrs. William) Penn. She spent her
>               entire life in Northern England and died in 1694. Some of the receipts
>               were recorded by her mother and grandmother, and it isn't really clear
>               who is the author of which receipt. The recipe may date from as early
>               as the 1640's or so. In addition, such cakes were obviously made,
>               evidently substantially unchanged, from the Iron Age up until the
>               Second World War. 
> 
>               "(#73) Too make thin oat Cakes It must bee made with oaten meale
>               steped all night in pump water, and bake it the next morning pore in the
>               batter upon a stove with a brass Ladell"[4] 
> 
>               I used about two cups of steel-cut porridge oats, ground a bit finer into
>               medium-fine grits. Modern riddlecake recipes call for pinhead oats,
>               which are a bit smaller than porridge oats, but definitely not flour,
>               either. To this I added about a quart of water to achieve a pourable
>               batter, bearing in mind the batter would thicken as water was
>               absorbed. Fairly hard tap water doubled pretty well for pump water.
>               While it's possible the mineral content of the water would affect the
>               final product, I thought the addition of Burton water salts from my
>               brewing supplies would be going a bit too far. 
> 
>               I let the batter prove overnight. Whether this was intended to provide
>               natural leavening with airborne yeasts I can't say, since no details are
>               provided about covering the bowl. I covered it with a plate and left it
>               unrefrigerated. I believe the object of the overnight steep is to save time
>               and fuel (Cook while you sleep!). Certainly no noticeable leavening or
>               souring occurred. 
> 
>               Modern home recipes for riddlecakes call for portions of batter to be
>               baked on a griddle on or near the fire, on one side only. When the
>               cakes begin to peel away from the griddle, they are removed and hung
>               on a rack before the fire to fully dry and crisp. In the North of England
>               they were frequently hung on a clothesline near the hearth. In their
>               soggy, flexible form, they're pretty hideous. 
> 
>               I opted for a toasting directly on the rack of a 250° F. oven, which took
>               about half an hour to achieve a palatable product. It ended up being a
>               bit like matzoh, a bit like Wasa Krispbread, and a bit like a commercial
>               oatcake.
 
As I recall HG Cariadoc has documentation (a first-hand historical
description, not a recipe) for medieval Scots oatcakes; the historian
speaks of the habit of Scots soldiers having a bakestone among the gear
hanging from their saddles, and a bag of meal from which to make oatcake
batter by adding the right amount of water. It seems quite possible that
if a seventeenth-century English recipe is nearly identical to a
medieval Scots one, it might well be reasonably close to a Dark Ages
Irish recipe (not that there were any "Dark Ages" in Ireland, to speak
of). 

> "Somebody" in this house is convinced that Irish soda bread would/could
> be period for 7thC, others are not so sure...  Bear's Irish buttermilk
> bread posted on this list has baking soda and cream of tartar -- I do
> recall there being discussions about baking soda being period; and cream
> of tartar can be scraped off wine barrels...

The cream of tartar would be pretty much unnecessary in any case; soda
bread seems to have originally been made with sour milk, which provides
plenty of acid. Cooking soda (sodium carbonate, a.k.a. washing soda) is
known to be period (it appears in several Roman recipes, anyway), but
I'm not aware of its being used as a leavening. I understand, though,
that until the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was common
enough for bread to be baked in Ireland and Scotland with no leavening
at all, probably from softer wheats than we're used to. The idea was
that one had to have "light fingers" i.e. the ability to completely mix
the dough into a cohesive mass without any gluten-developing kneading,
and without eliminating the air pockets. Maybe this wouldn't be very
comparable to Wonder Bread (not that there's anything wrong with that!),
but as food one could do worse. I sincerely doubt soda bread existed
before the nineteenth century. 
 
> Ann Hagen's Anglo-Saxon food barely mentions Ireland; Thora Sharptooth's
> list of Viking foodstuffs mentions what was found in Viking Dublin, but
> we haven't actually seen that source ourselves yet.

If it's a matter of not knowing where to look for it, it's at:

http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~capriest/vikfood.html

Thora herself, BTW, is a lovely and helpful person. You might consider
contacting her directly...

HTH,

Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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