[Sca-cooks] Need Recipes for Yule Contests...

[david friedman]

Artemesia asked for recipes:

>"Best Dish Using Winter Vegetables: Those used in pre-1600 Europe, that
>is: carrots, turnips, beets, cabbage, winter squashes, etc. NO Spuds
>(unless you can find an authentic recipe - we know of one) and no yellow
>cheese so Her Excellency Ælfwyn can judge. Must include ingredient list
>and extra points for using an authentic recipe (bring a copy of it.)
>This contest is part of Altavia's yearly A&S competition!"
>
>Our Baroness is a veggie-terran ::evile grin::, so I'd actually love to see
>period recipes that would cover the contests above. ;)

Try our online _Miscellany_ (unless you have a paper version), which
(among other things) has all of our worked-out recipes. There is a
section on vegetables; some of these recipes use meat or meat broth,
but some are vegetarian. There is also at least one recipe in the
section on soups (Rapes in Potage, rapes meaning turnips) which can
be vegetarian, depending on what you use for the broth.

All of the period recipes I know of for beet, mostly out of _Le
Menagier de Paris_, are for beet greens; I don't know when the large
root vegetable version of the beet was developed. Also, most of the
squashes we now use are New World species. A discussion of what sort
of gourds they had before the New World squash came in is also in the
Miscellany, in the essay on New World and late period foodstuffs; our
conclusion was that it was probably the white-flowered gourd/bottle
gourd, which you can sometimes find in East Asian groceries--assuming
we have identified the right thing across the language barrier, it is
sometimes called opo. It isn't very similar to any modern winter
squashes, tasting closer to zucchini.

The current version of the Miscellany is webbed in pdf format at:
www.daviddfriedman.com/Medieval/miscellany_pdf/Miscellany.htm

There is also an older edition webbed in html on Greg Lindahl's site.

Elizabeth/Betty Cook