[Sca-cooks] Looking for "Celtic" foods, especially "finger foods"
Johnna Holloway
johnnae at mac.com
Sun Mar 4 18:36:14 PST 2012
Have given this some more thought and have come to the conclusion
that maybe you need to concentrate on the finger food aspects.
We don't have "Celtic" manuscripts or printed books that contain a pre
1700 record of recipes,
and if we did, would they be much different than the medieval English
or French recipes of the same era.
Scotland's earliest printed cookbook is 1730s. Ireland is c1710 and
it's a reprint of an English volume.
There is one manuscript from Ireland that is worth a look.
Mary Cannon's Commonplace Book. An Irish Kitchen in the 1700s. http://tinyurl.com/6g2w7ye
It arrived today. It purports to be a privately kept Commonplace Book
from Ireland.
It contains 120 recipes collected between 1700 and 1707. In terms of
recipe collections from Ireland, that makes it pretty early.
So depending on the budget and number of people attending, perhaps you
could ask for donated dishes
to create a potluck of sliced corned beef, sliced ham, salmon (maybe
smoked), maybe sliced chicken, whole grain breads, cheeses, butter,
honey, and a salad if you can provide plates or bowls. Then do some
items like the oatcakes, and some sweet cakes. Maybe fresh berries and
cream. You'll have to decide what vegetables work as finger foods for
this gathering.
If you have the time, check out for modern recipes and suggestions:
The Country Cooking of Ireland by Colman Andrews.
Big beautiful expensive, great bibliography, photos, 250 recipes
Forgotten Skills of Cooking: The Time-Honored Ways are the Best - Over
700 Recipes Show You Why by Darina Allen. This book features the
skills of an agricultural past when people raised their own hens and
gathered berries in the woods. 600 pages covering lots of skills and
aspects of food and cookery. These are traditional recipes and skills,
but not medieval skills, so don't think that it's a one stop
encyclopedia for how to do it in a medieval fashion. (Too often people
still equate traditional with being old enough to be medieval. This is
country cooking from Ireland's past.)
Mahon, Brid. Land of Milk and Honey. Dublin: Poolberg, 1991. (also
Mercier Press, Irish American Book Company edition, Boulder, CO,
1998). This is a good brief historical account.
And back in 2006 I posted this neat item which for a bardic event
might be worth looking at.
August 8, 2006
Browsing this evening, I came across The Image of Irelande, by John
Derrick
(London, 1581). The most famous plate of the set shows the chief of the
Mac Sweynes seated at dinner and being entertained by a bard and a
harper.
http://www.lib.ed.ac.uk/about/bgallery/Gallery/researchcoll/ireland.html
Johnnae
On Mar 2, 2012, at 12:23 PM, Raphaella DiContini wrote:
> Greetings,
> The event is "Celtic bardic", and for some reason they
> strongly want to have a "finger foods" potluck for dinner. snipped
> Perhaps something like oatcakes too, but my other limitations are
> several people with Wheat/ or Gluten allergies, at least one person
> with an alergy to ginger & pork, one Vegetarian, and another who's
> allergic to black pepper. It's not "finger food" but I'm also
> contemplating making Egerdouce for the Barony's main contribution to
> flesh out the finger foods everyone else is being asked to bring.
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