[Sca-cooks] Holiday gift ideas.

[Ruth Frey]

> From: "D Wolff" <scadian at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Anyone have a good  period recipe that can be made as gifts for 
> the upcoming holidays?

     For sending sweets, gyngerbrede (in one of its many incarnations), comfits made from spices and nuts (not sure if the nuts are Period, but people love 'em), and candied citrus peel top my list.  They're all relatively quick to make and last a loooong time, so they ship well.  They are also physically durable if your shipping agency isn't gentle.  :)

     I don't have specific recipes at my fingertips for any of those, though I could look up my versions, if desired.  But they're pretty common in most historical cooking resources . . .

     Some of the "jellies" would be good, too.  I remember the recipe for a very nice one off the top of my head: take equal weights of honey and pureed or grated raw apples (the most flavorful you can get), and cook them together over medium-high heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture begins to get stiff and comes away from the side of the pan, forming a coherent mass.  Mix in your favorite "sweet spices" blend (apple pie spice would work great, though you could get more period-specific if you wished), spread in a pan or on a baking sheet, about 1/4" thick, and let air-dry/cure for several days.  Cut into squares, diamonds, whatever shapes you wish, dust again above and below with your sweet spice mix, and it's ready to go.  It keeps quite well, and is totally delicious (like distilled apple pie!).  The downside is, it's at least a couple hours of cooking and constant stirring to get the right texture.  I couldn't tell you exactly *how* long, it will depend on the jui
ciness of your apples, and the water content of your honey.

     I adaped the above jelly from a Period recipe in Redon and company's "The Medieval Kitchen" (don't remember what the original source was at the moment), and those authors recommended using bay leaf as a substitute for an undefined "leaf" in the Period sweet spice mixture.  They also recommend (and I can't remember if this has any Period basis or not) layering the pieces of jelly with bay leaves for storing/serving, which I have tried once.  It seemed like a nice presentation, and I was making the stuff for a formal feast, so I did a decorative circular-pyramidal layout on the trays, arranging smaller and smaller cirlces of jelly on top of each other, with dried bay leaves and a sprinkle of spice in between.  People were incredibly impressed with it, though really the only hard part was the length of cooking -- and dried bay leaves are really quite inexpensive.  A high per-pound cost, but you have to consider how many dry leaves are in a pound!

     Anyway, you could probably adapt that to packing the jelly in a box layered with bay leaves, for a pretty presentation.  But I'd only ship it in cold weather, when the stuff didn't have a chance to melt together into a solid lump!  :)

      Something else I have done for gift baskets is to make "frumenty kits," with wheat berries, sugar (the little teeny sugar cones you can sometimes get in the Mexican section of grocery stores are perfect for gift baskets!), saffron, a good quality sea salt, and a recipe.  The recipients add water and milk.  I picked frumenty in particular because where I live (Palouse region of WA/ID in the US) is a major wheat-growing area, so wheat is something of a "local" specialty.  I imagine you could come up with a similar "kit" for other grain-type dishes.

            -- Ruth