[Sca-cooks] Medieval cooking for non-cooks

[Mark.S Harris]

Kiri said:
> Here are several recipes, from different periods.  The first is an Elizabethan
> recipe, and the remainder are earlier--14th century or so.  If you have any
> questions, let me know...they are all pretty simple.

> 33.  To make a syrose (cherry pottage).  Take cherries and stone them and
> grind them well and draw them through a strainer and place it in a pot and add
> white grease or sweet butter and good white bread and add good wine and sugre
> and salt, and stir it well together, and put it into a dish and garnish (?)
> with cloves and "strew sugar about". (III.  Utilis Coquinario from Curye on
> Ingysch)
>
> Redaction:  (Serves 8)
>
> 2 1# cans Tart Red packed in water cherries
> 2 1/2 tsp. sugar
> 2 Tbsp. Butter
> =BC tsp. salt
> 3/4 Cup White bread crumbs   whole cloves
> 1/2 Cup sweet white wine   Caster sugar

How much salt in the above redaction?

> I hope these work for you!  They are fairly easy, should be inexpensive and
> and are quite tasty.

Thank you very much for these. I am trying to encourage folks new to
period cooking to try cooking something for the pot luck dinner at
our upcoming Yule Revel. I have formatted each of these recipes to fit
on half a sheet of 8 1/2 x 11 paper then printed them off, cut them in
half and will be distributing them to those interested at our baronial
fighter practices and other events.

If anyone has any more like these, I would be interested in seeing them.
These were nice because they didn't use unusual items such as grains of
paradise, were fairly simple in technique for new cooks and could easily
be described on half a sheet of paper. I have selected a few more from
the Florilegium, but if anyone has any others I'd like to have them.

I like the way these were formatted, with the original recipe, including
where it was from, a more modernized (or translated) version of the
original recipe and then a redaction.

I have started a file for the Florilegium of these types of recipes.
Perhaps this would provide a resource for those people looking for
something for folks that ask them "Is there something period, yet
simple, that I could bring to the event?".

Thanks,
  Stefan