SC - Surviving Medieval Cuisine

[cclark@vicon.net]

In reply to my statement:
>recently launched, the Glaedenfeld Centre for Medieval and Renaissance
Studies.

Kerri asked on  27 Nov 1999 15:01:13 EST:
>What an ambitious project! How is it being funded? It sounds like things
got >started just recently, in the last year or so. I wish you success
because such a >facility would be a wonderful resource. Good luck.

Thank you, Kerri.  It is ambititious, almost audacious in its scope.  The
initial funding is coming completely out of my pocket, but we are trying to
work out legal matters where some of the property (that which is paid for)
can be leased to the corporation for a nominal sum (a rose lease I think it
is called) and corporate funds can be used to develop the needed facilities
without compromise of non-profit status and not increasing my personal tax
burden.  It will be a complicated  marriage between me and the corporation,
but as I have absolutely no heirs of the body, nor of the blood (that will
survive me anyway), upon my demise all properties and assets will revert to
the corporation.  The Centre concept was begun about 18 months ago with the
initial acquisition of the first 40 acres.  As I said, this is a project to
occupy me the rest of my life.

Yanna wrote re: Russian cookbooks availability on 27 Nov 1999 16:16:01:
>Food and foodways are mentioned within various documents of course, and >an
archive catalog isn't going to show that, unfortunately, but that doesn't
>mean there is a hidden cookbook out there, and certainly not something that
would have been hidden for ideological reasons.

>snip

>I guess we can all hope that somewhere, sometime, someone will dig up a
>hoard of letters with Anna Ivanovich explaining to her daughter how to make
>kasha, but it ain't happened yet.

Well guess what interests I have on this subject with a name like Akim
Yaroslavich?  Perhaps there are documents in the Novgorod-Seversky
excavations that we may discover available,  I would bet that if 12th
century recipes exist, it will be from those digs. My hunch is based on this
reasoning.  Unlike their contemporaries in western Europe at this period, a
majority of the citizens of Novgorod-Seversky were generally literate; not
just the nobility or the church heirarchy, everyone.  Literacy  there was
very comparable to modern America, perhaps even surpassing it.  They used
the plentiful bark of the white birch tree, writing with a stylus as the
bark surface darkened when compressed.  The soil acidity and low
temperatures  of this city have preserved literally tons of notes and
personal letters written on birchbark.  We have letters of mundane subjects
like a husband asking his wife to send him his two best shirts and new
underwear.  This hoard of preserved data is unique to this city-state of
ancient Rus as conditions did not preserve similar data in more southerly
cities like Kiev.   If "Mrs Ivanovich" wrote her recipes down, it is most
likely that they still exist here.
I have recently discovered a Russian national selling Russian subject books
on Ebay who has sold me some absolutely wonderful resource texts on
Novgorod.  She is Lyudmila Khononov, in Brooklyn NY.  Perhaps she could use
her contacts in book-selling to see if in-period cookery books are now
available.  Her address is Lkon5 at aol.com .  Her company name and Ebay
sellers i.d. is"Russiantroyka".

Thomas asked on 28 Nov 1999 01:25:
<Akim Yaroslavich wrote:
<<< Indeed they descended from the 'cidonitum' of Palladius circa 4th c.>>>

>Do you mean the two recipes for "cydonites" in Palladius lib. 11.20 (ed.
>Rodgers p. 213), or is there yet another passage pertinent to the history
of >marmalade?

Yes, the two from Opus Agriculturae, II.20.

>Palladius mentions, was like: "dehinc in melle >decoques, donec ad mensuram
>mediam reuertatur"? Does that mean
>- -- (a) that one has to boil the pieces of quinces until they are half of
their >original size or
>- -- (b) does that mean that the whole fluid must boil down to half of its
original measure?

I say (b) since my experience with boiling the fruit has shown me it does
not shrink noticably no matter how long you boil the pieces.

>Roughly: 'It is the nature of the honey to stop defects and  not to allow
that the >defects develop any further. This is the reason why honey
conserves even a >dead human body for several years without defect'.

A  lovely image there Thomas, even though likely true.

On 28 Nov 1999 01:25, Ras writes:
>ringofkings at mindspring.com writes:

<< I cut back by half on the pepper as modern tastes are not  used to odd
Tudor spicing. >>

>This is debatable besides the amount of pepper called for in the recipe
doesn't seem overly much considering the amounts of the other ingredient
>used.

This is correct, though from my large scale cooking experiences, I never
make a 1 to 1 upscale proportioning of spices as large batches just seem to
combine and meld differently from my small test batches. They seem stronger
a flavour in large batches.  I have compared notes with other SCA cooks on
this and they agree mostly with this observation.

>So basically you used the recipe as an inspirational source for a more
modern >type recipe? Is this correct? I have never seen a need, personally,
to modify  spices in a period recipe to suit 'modern' tastes.
You are quite right.  Mia culpa, mia culpa! Mia culpa maxima!  I wimped.
I further confess I  was using white pepper because I discovered that the
only black pepper I had on hand at the time was coarse grind.  I felt the
difference would be negliable at the time and also felt that the very fine
white pepper would meld in better for a smoother taste than I could achieve
with hand grinding the coarse pepper.  This was probably naive. I increased
the ginger and cinnamon mainly by taste to compensate for the my worries
about my wimpy peppering.  It tasted great, but was woefully a lie so far as
period accuracy went.

However, I will ask you something in a (defensive) afterthought.  Modern
spices are generally (to my understanding) fresher and more potent than say
peppercorns on the medieval trade routes and likely less adultrated.  This
is less true of spices like galingale which is still potent after decades,
but is it a valid argument about peppercorns and cubebs? We have all
discovered bad thyme and soapy sage on our racks.  Spices were so expensive
then, there would have been a natural reluctance to admit that a spice was
no longer sufficiently good enough to continue using it.  Could freshness of
modern spices (by comparison)
or stronger modern varieties of the spicies account for the apparent greater
quantities specified in period accounts?

Akim Yaroslavich
"No glory come without pain"

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