SC - spelt

[margali]

Stefan li Rous wrote:
> 
> > ps. Anyone have a practical, documentable recipe for a Black (or any blood)
> > Pudding?
> 
> I think there might be a recipe in the same file. Another one I would look
> in is this one:
> puddings-msg      (58K)  1/ 7/00    Medieval puddings. Recipes. Custards.
> 
> Is "puddings" really a good way to group both custard type puddings and
> blood puddings? Where would you all look for each of these?

Not sure. Almost all real puddings seem to have a starch element in
common, ranging from black puddings made with oatmeal, rice or
breadcrumbs, up through the various bread and "plum" puddings. I'd keep
the sausage-y puddings separate (under sausages; if it's in a casing,
generally it is ultimately a sausage, pudding or no) and then have
puddings, sweet and savory. Bear in mind that the term "pudding", as the
name of a dish, mostly occurs pretty late in period.

Le Menagier de Paris gives a black pudding recipe (~1390 C.E.), as well
as a sausage recipe mentioned recently. Gervase Markham's "The English
Housewife" (1615 C.E.) also has several recipes for sausages, black and
white puddings. There are also various instances of similar dishes (if
not so named) appearing in the medieval English sources (14th-15th
centuries), such as Fronchemoyle, which IIRC is a white pudding cooked
in a stomach bag, kinda like haggis lite, and malaches, which is a
mixture very like a black pudding (oats, blood, fat and spices) cooked
in a tart shell.
> 
> > pps. I have a friend who is planning to make preserved meats for our period
> > encampment (I'll be bringing the cheeses).  Any pointers on documentation,
> > sources, modern instructions, health regs, etc would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> drying-foods-msg  (35K)  8/24/99    Drying foods in period and for the SCA.
> food-storage-msg  (85K)  6/ 8/00    Storing and preserving food in
> period. Non-
>                                       refrigerated food for camping and Pennsic.
> meat-smoked-msg    (8K)  9/17/99    Medieval smoked meats. Smoking meats.
> pickled-food-msg (118K)  5/23/00    Medieval pickled food. recipes.
> potted-foods-msg  (11K)  4/ 7/00    Cooked foods put in pots and sealed
> w. fat.
> stockfish-msg     (81K)  5/26/00    Period preserved fish. Dried, smoked
> and
>                                        salted fish. Recipes.
> vinegar-msg       (40K)  8/ 4/00    Vinegar in period. Making vinegar.
>    (kind of goes along with the pickled-food-msg file mentioned above)
> 
> These may keep your friend busy for a while. :-)

Sorry to keep piggy-backing on your message, Stefan, I missed this the
first time around. The articles in the Florilegium are an excellent
resource. I would add only (and for all I know this _is_ in the
Florilegium) that modern considerations like botulism and various other
food-borne illnesses are vitally important concerns, and we stress them
more now than people in the Middle Ages did largely because we
understand more about them. Period preservaton techniques were developed
largely through trial and error, in an age when error often meant death.
We can use the techniques they developed without any deaths of our own,
by looking at modern recipes for things like hams, sausages, and other
preserved foods. In many cases the technique hasn't changed at all.
Cato's instructions for salt pork are almost identical to Jane Grigson's
modern recipe for, IIRC, York ham. The only difference is that Grigson's
recipe involves measuring weight loss in the ham, which a period farmer
or charcuterer would have done by feel or eye.

I recommend you look in Cato's "De Agri Cultura", Columella's "De Re
Agricultura", for really old techniques for food preservation, most of
which survive today, then see the hog slaughtering section of Le
Menagier de Paris. Also Gervase Markham, Hugh Plat, Kenelm Digby, etc.
Then look at some modern recipes and look for parallels to find period
methods that can be made to conform to modern concepts of sanitation.

Oh, and if you're good, maybe later I'll be able to post the dried beef
recipe from "A Soup for the Qan"...  

Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com