[Sca-cooks] FW: spice and cheese question for my turnips recipe

[Saint Phlip]

On 12/2/06, Steve Berry <srberry at teleport.com> wrote:
> Dame Arwen Lioncourt here again,
>
> Hopefully I'm not being a bother, but as I said, after 16 years of serving
> the SCA as a chirurgeon/herald/entertainer, I realized that I don't really
> know ANYTHING about period food and what it takes to make it authentically.
> Hence the kingdom A&S entry.....
>
> Of course now that Pandora is out of her box, I'll never be able to cook
> Spaghettio-s at a camping event again.... more's the pity!

Never too late to learn- and there are actually quite a lot of
relatively simple recipes for medieval style camp cooking.

> To that end, I've been reviewing all the versions of the Armored Turnips
> recipes that I've gathered from Platina, Epulario, some modern websites, and
> my father's version.  The biggest differences are in the types of cheeses
> used and the spices.
>
> I'm going to use fontina, and I'm pretty happy with that choice because I
> can date it back to the 1200s in the mountains northwest of Venice (unless
> one of you more learned folks thinks I'm whacked).  Of course, how Arwen
> would have gotten an Italian cheese like fontina in 1576 Ipswich is a
> question I need to answer..... Can anyone point me to resources for the
> cheese trade in Elizabethan England?  Was there one?  I'm assuming at this
> point that they might have brought cheeses with them along with whole spices
> on merchant ships from Italy?

I'm sure they brought cheeses, but I would suspect they'd tend to
bring hard cheeses rather than soft, simply because hard cheeses
travel much better. OTOH, if you have a cow, a goat, or a sheep
(female, please ;-) You have the basis for cheese. If you look at
cheese as an effective way to preserve milk products, and armored
turnips as a tasty way to serve preserved milk, you'll likely be a bid
closer to the Medieval POV. That said, fontina, if not exactly what
folks in England would have used at the time, would certainly be
representitive of a style of cheese that they made.

> So, to the spices:  Some recipes say to use poudre dolce with sugar as the
> focus, but I have always used a more poudre forte version with a stronger
> note of pepper/cinnamon.
>
> For folks who have cooked the recipe or simply have opinions, what do you
> think?  I really think that sugar is the wrong answer.  I really think that
> a poudre forte of cinnamon, black pepper, galingale, nutmeg, clove, and
> grains of paradise would be the best to capture the savory and sweet.
> Thoughts?
>
> Thanx!  You are all a REAL brain trust!!!
>
> Dame Arwen Lioncourt OP

Well, I tend to agree with you, as far as flavor preference, but
again, I believe you were talking about Elizabethans, and as I
understand it, sugar was a newish thing, and they were using it for
everything, so I'd tend to think that the actual armored turnips they
have served would be sweeter than our preferences are.

However, as a suggestion, armored turnips aren't a very difficult dish
to make- they've been served at many a feast throughout the Knowne
Worlde. Why not make two dishes, one with your preferred spicing, and
one with the more sugary type?

Medieval folks tended to catagorize their spices differently than we
do, so quite often, you'll find what we'd call a sweet spice in what
we'd consider a savory dish, and vice versa. As you slip into this
aspect of this hobby of ours, why not make a point of trying to see
exactly how they tasted the world? Worst comes to worst, you can
always not try it quite that way again ;-)

-- 
Saint Phlip

Heat it up
Hit it hard
Repent as necessary.

Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.

Psalm 146
King James Bible