[Sca-cooks] breadcrumbs & grain disheswas:gingerbread

[Raphaella DiContini]

I personally always try to make my breadcrumbs for period recipes (and sometimes for any modern ones depending on purpose), as I've found the storebought ones in a tin to leave a more gritty mouthfeel not to mention being more costly. If I'm just making dinner for 1-10 I'll just grate it by hand, if I'm doing the sauces for a feast and don't have a separate sauce person I'll use a food processor.

There are several sauce and broth recipes that call for breadcrumbs or specifically call for you to grate bread into them. 

Quick examples: 
III. "Agliata", roasted garlic sauce. 
Agliata to serve with every meat.  Take a bulb of garlic and roast it under the coals (substitute an oven in the current middle ages).  Grind the roasted garlic and mix with ground raw garlic, bread crumbs and sweet spices.  Mix with broth, put into a pan and let it boil a little before serving warm. 

XIII Little broth for fish 
Take the fish and boil it, then take parsley and walnuts and the crumb of bread and grind these all together, and take sweet and strong spices and let it boil altogether (in the fish broth) and put it over the fish and it is good, perfect etc. 

One of the first ones I did as a sauce for wild boar at Boar's Hunt, there are three variations, but I used the first and it specifically tells you to take bread with the crusts cut off, toast them until dark/black and grate it into crumbs: 
XIV Ciuiro* (civet) or sauce black to ash gray for boar 
If you want to make a black sauce, take meat that is well roasted/cooked and beat it to a paste in a mortar, and take the middle (no crusts) of bread and toast until it is black.  Soak this toasted bread in vinegar, break it up and sieve it well and mix it with the shredded meat.  Add long pepper, grains of paradise and ginger and grind these three things to a smooth paste.  Put the above meat paste a sauce made with vinegar and with lean broth of the meat, and boil this stew/sauce in a pan.   This sauce should be black and strong with spices and sharp with vinegar. 

Oh, and it also reminded me of this Italian hot grain + fat dish: 
XXIV Maize dish (Frumenty) good and very useful. 
If you want to make frumenty, take the wheat berries, and grind/beat it well until the husk lifts, then wash it well.  Put it to boil in water, but don’t boil it too much, then pour away the water.  Then add inside the fat of whichever animal you wish, and you want to make sure that you don’t add too much.  Add sweet and strong spices, and saffron, and if you don’t have wheat then you can take rice, and it will be good. 

With rice being offered as an alternate, I've made this before for gluten intolerant folks. 

>From Helewye's translation of Libro Cuchina: 
http://www.geocities.com/helewyse/libro.html#III

In joyous service, 
Raffaella 

--- On Wed, 9/9/09, devra at aol.com <devra at aol.com> wrote:

> From: devra at aol.com <devra at aol.com>
> Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Sca-cooks Digest, Vol 41, Issue 33
> To: sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org
> Date: Wednesday, September 9, 2009, 12:45 PM

> <Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Recipe for period gingerbrede
> 
> i am liking this.  how fine should the breadcrumbs
> be?
> 
> cailte>
> 
> I just used commercial, plain canister dried bread crumbs.
> 
> Devra