Medieval Cooking

The last couple of weeks have been dedicated to preparing for Pennsic and there has been very little else going on in my house. Okay, that’s not entirely true. There has been the usual days spent with my daughter going to the park, talking, walking around the track, working on the fruitcake reliquary, and our normal weekly routine. This makes for an extremely busy time.

Cooking has been perfunctory: Bread baking on Tuesdays and daily meals. I’ve been working up a menu of Viking food for a catering gig that I have in August, which has been fantastic. The most research I’d ever done was to see how Viking food and Frisian food matched up as Frisia is within reasonable traveling distance from England and during the Dark Ages there was most certainly water travel. I’ve been pushed to think about things differently, less ornate than cooking sixteenth century food, and infinitely less direction than the handy cookbooks that are available from later periods of time. The ingredients are less fussy and sometimes difficult to work with, like barley, which has no gluten and the breads are flat and made differently than the yeast risen loaves that I’m familiar with. Additionally, the primary meats are fish and pork as pigs are a high return animal since they will eat table scraps and still allow you to gain a lot of food from them if you use them nose to tail as the Vikings most certainly did. There is very little in the way of decoration so the food must stand well on its own. In the modern context in which I work, this translates into slightly higher quality ingredients. During the Dark Ages, it would have been whatever was available, regardless of quality, and you may have had a mix of both high and low quality foods in a singular dish. This is not to say that the Vikings ate bad food, but that they had to be less selective in what they chose to cook with as waste was not an option. I am also looking into presentation, which is minimal. This is still very much a work in progress and a full report will not be available until after Pennsic as I simply don’t have the time for details in this medium prior to that.

The thing that has been consuming most of my time is the fruitcake reliquary as I have a deadline during Pennsic for it to be completed. Or, at least as completed as I am going to make it. The top of the box is my project. The rest of the box is a project for whatever talented soul would like to make it so. I’ve hit a number of roadblocks, all of them creative. I get so far, hate what I’ve done, erase a bunch of it, and then start over again. On Monday night I hit a point where I didn’t hate it, so I have been able to move forward on it at a far faster clip than previously. If you’re interested to see what I have so far, here is a picture:

It’s not done being penciled, as you can see. The colors that I will be using are gold, blue, red, black, white, and whatever feels right for shading, etc. It’s based on fifteenth century Italian scrolls, rather than reliquaries as the medium that is more appropriate for reliquaries requires metalworking skills that I do not have nor do I have the time to learn right now.

I have been sewing like a madwoman so that our tent is properly done for living in it for two weeks. I don’t have pictures of what I’ve been doing, but it’s basic repair work and the addition of a set of flaps that will attach to the outside of the ring to help keep rain out of the doors and off of the sides. They’ll be about four inches wide.

The primary cooking that I’ve been doing is attempting to replicate the “Peachberry” pie that is available at a local restaurant chain. It’s amazing. Peaches, blackberries, and raspberries in a double crust. I had dinner with friends coming up where I was to bring dessert, so that is what I was planning on bringing. I didn’t make the crust by hand as we were running out of time today so I purchased one that didn’t have lard in it (being a Vegetarian, it was necessary) and found that Marie Callender has a wonderful crust with vegetable shortening in it. The recipe is:

Peachberry Pie a la Jenn

Five peaches, peeled and cut into slices
a quart of raspberries
a quart of blackberries
1/2 cup Sugar in the Raw
1 t vanilla extract
2 T arrowroot powder

Cook down the peaches with the sugar until they are soft.
Add the vanilla.
Add the raspberries and blackberries into the pot.
Cook until you get a good amount of liquid.
Add the arrowroot powder and cook until the liquid reaches a velvety consistency.
Pour into two pie shells.
I used a single sided pie shell, rather than a double sided pie shell.
Cook for 20 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
Serve either hot or warm.
Serve with a dollop of fresh whipped cream.

It was as awesome as the pie at the restaurant and didn’t cost me $2.99 a slice.

As stated earlier, updates will be sporadic and I will provide as much content as I can before I go on hiatus for two weeks. I hope that everyone is enjoying their summer and look forward to getting to regular updates after the hiatus, which should be the second week of August.