SC - My anti modern cheese thing

[BalthazarBlack@aol.com]

Looking at the recipe for Sweet Tisane in Le Menagier, I have come across a
few questions.
the recipe is:

Sweet Tisane. Take water and boil it, then add for each sixth of a gallon of
water one good bowl of barley, and it does not (or it does matter?-Trans)if
it still has its hulls, and get two parisis'worth of licorice, item, or
figs, and boil it all until the barley bubbles; then let it be strained in
two or three cloths, and put in each goblet a large amount of rock-sugar.
This barley is good to feed to poultry to fatten them.

I redact this so far as
boil 1 cup of  whole barley (with or without hulls) in 1/6th of a gallon of
water with 3 or 4 licorice sticks or 1 or 2 figs (just a guess) until it
becomes barley portage. Then strain out the portage part, and drink the
resulting liquid with a sugar lump in the bottom. (I don't have room in the
upstairs apt. I live in for the poultry so I'm going to skip that part of
the recipe :)  )

Now I guessed on the figs and licorice, because I have no idea how much a
parisis' worth is, much less 2 of them. Can anyone enlighten me on this?
also, would this had been drunk hot, cold or lukewarm? While it says rock
sugar, I could see it mean either rock candy, which means it needs to be hot
to let the candy sweeten the drink, or a sugar cube, which could sweeten a
lukewarm drink.


the reason I'm asking (besides mere curiosity) is that I have a booth at the
Taste of Postville on the 27th of Aug. Since there is a large chance of my
doing the cooking part of the booth by myself, I'd thought that having a
medieval drink booth would be easiest  prep-wise. So I've been looking for
non-alcohol drinks, preferably cold ones.
If anyone has recipes for any others, I'd be glad of them - likewise, if
anyone wants to help (and is anywhere near Postville IA on that date) I'd be
welcome of them too!

Beatrix of Tanet
Geisterhugel, Calontir