[Sca-cooks] Medieval root beer; early Frankish food
JIMCHEVAL at aol.com
JIMCHEVAL at aol.com
Sun Jan 20 12:55:05 PST 2013
At some point I want to summarize the book's worth of information I've been
gathering on food under the Frankish dynasties; that is, the Merovingians
and the Carolingians. This is part of a more general project looking at
French food before Taillevent et al:
_http://chezjim.com/food/pre-v/_ (http://chezjim.com/food/pre-v/)
But while waiting to do that, here's a glimpse at a very early Frankish
meal.
Anyone who's consulted Bonnie Effros' work may have seen her account of
meals found by Fremersdorf in two 5th century Frankish graves under Saint
Severin in Cologne. Others have reported the same information in slightly
different form, including Edouard Salins, whose monumental work (1959) on the
Merovingians gives a more detailed account of the finds (IV:32). One had a
bird cooked in honey and a pot of what seemed to be fat for consumption
(common enough in the early medieval period), as well as two eggs set on grass
in a bowl; the other contained millet gruel flavored with honey, meat which
had been cooked in fat flavored with sage and mustard (probably black
mustard), and two drinks. One was a glass of wine (per the residue); the other
is sometimes described as a kind of mead, but in fact seems to have been...
birch beer. That is, the residue of pollen shows that it was a fermented
drink using birch sap.
In fact, there is nothing very surprising about this; various drinks are
still made with birch sap today:
_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birch_sap_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birch_sap)
Except that... there is no mention of this in any written records. So this
may be the one speck of proof that early Franks drank what, in America at
least, became root beer.
So, want to make a very early medieval meal? Roast a bird (preferably a
tough one) in honey, serve it with millet gruel, also flavored with honey,
cook either pork or beef (probably) in fat flavored with sage and mustard
seed and... make up a batch of homemade root beer. (You probably want to skip
the bowl of fat unless you're REALLY feeling hardcore; the wine was
probably a southern product and imported north, for what that's worth.)
As you can see, we're a long way from trenchers and verjuice here. But
that's a whole other story.
Jim Chevallier
www.chezjim.com
Newly translated from Pierre Jean-Baptiste Le Grand d'Aussy:
Eggs, Cheese and Butter in Old Regime France
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