Making Compost

In the couple of years that I have been doing historical cooking I have some recipes that I do over and over, that I have become known for in our camp, or at the museum. My pet recipes.

One of the things I really like to make for the weekends we’re portraying an army on the march is at least one pickled vegetable. Pickles keep well on a march, they can be made out of just about any vegetable, and are available almost year round. They can also be made up ahead of time. I like to be prepared for every eventuality, including the ones where we are unable to cook a meal as planned (like in the middle of a rain or snow storm) so having some pre-prepped things can come in handy.

There are a number of pickling and preserving recipes in various Medieval Cookbooks. My favorite is a mixed veggie pickle called Compost in one of England’s oldest cookbooks: Forme of Cury plus a number of other Medieval cookbooks, a nice list of which can be found on the Medieval Cookery website. There are also versions of this recipe with modern instructions in a number of published cookbooks including To the King’s Taste and The Medieval Cookbook.

The original in Forme of Cury looks something like this:
COMPOST. C. Take rote of parsel. pasternak of rasenns. scrape hem waisthe hem clene. take rapes & caboches ypared and icorne. take an erthen panne with clene water & set it on the fire. cast all þise þerinne. whan þey buth boiled cast þerto peeres & parboile hem wel. take þise thynges up & lat it kele on a fair cloth, do þerto salt whan it is colde in a vessel take vineger & powdour & safroun & do þerto. & lat alle þise thinges lye þerin al nyzt oþer al day, take wyne greke and hony clarified togider lumbarde mustard & raisouns corance al hool. & grynde powdour of canel powdour douce. & aneys hole. & fenell seed. take alle þise thynges & cast togyder in a pot of erthe. and take þerof whan þou wilt & serue forth.

I have made it a number of times, and make it differently each time, though the basics remain true.

Thinly slice a number of different vegetables, including:
At least a ¼ head of cabbage
Pears (definitely don’t leave these out!)
Carrots
Parsnips
Onions

At various times I have included:
Garlic
Fennel
Radishes,
Walnuts
Parsley root
Horseradish
Beets

You get the idea, while the cabbage and pears make up the main body, any vegetable (or fruit for that matter) that can stand up to being pickled can be used.

I briefly boil the veggies in salted water to soften them up, but don’t over-cook them. After draining them I sprinkle them with kosher (or pickling) salt to draw some of the water out and to help preserve them. While the veggies sit in salt I make the pickling brine (liquid they’ll be pickled in.) Because of food allergies in Das Geld Fahnlein I do not use wine, nor a vinegar based on wine, though those are what was historically used. I use apple cider vinegar mixed with distilled vinegar as the base. Then I add:
Honey
Sugar
Raisins (I prefer golden raisins, but that is personal preference)

And whole spices, at least some of these:
Cinnamon
Cloves
Black pepper
Mustard seeds
Ginger
Juniper berries
Anise
Saffron

Once the brine has simmered for a while, I pour in the vegetables and simmer for 5 minutes. Then I taste it all. It will be sour, but with a bit of sweetness. If you need to, add more honey and sugar. I usually don’t need to add more salt, but this would be the time to if you needed to.

Don’t simmer it for too long, the vegetables should retain their integrity. The Compost will need to cool before you put it in jars unless you are using canning jars. If you’ve done all the cooking, you can eat it the day you make it, but I prefer to let it sit in the refrigerator for a few days to blend a little. Usually I jar it up so it is easy to transport to events. This winter I bought a lovely ceramic jar from a potter that he had labeled an olive jar. I think it is perfect for pickles.

This is roughly the way I make Compost, but it is certainly not the definitive way. I highly recommend checking out the other published recipes to find the way that works best for you.
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Tea Brack

One of the exciting things about this past year at Strawbery Banke is that I have been able to explore a lot more food history. I had spent the last couple years teaching myself about medieval foodways, but it was awesome to look, first at colonial food, then Jewish cooking, and finally getting the chance to dip my toes into traditional Irish fare.

For Candlelight Stroll I am in the kitchen of the Victorian mansion, portraying an Irish servant, so when asked if I wanted to do some cooking, I jumped at the chance. The dichotomy of a girl coming from a culture of starvation (1850s Ireland) to become the cook in a house where almost any food is available in almost any season is extremely fascinating. Some of my bosses talked about the decadence of Victorian cooking, others about the long traditions of Ireland. At first I was at a bit of a loss, I had a short time to read up on two different food cultures, and I did not have a lot of museum support since the regular season was over. Still, I knew some basics: pies and puddings are good Victorian celebratory fare, tea and soda bread are good Irish traditions.

I called on my own Irish connection and my aunt Kathleen came through. She mailed me a copy of A taste of Ireland in Food and Pictures by Theodora Fitzgibbon. What a great book! Kathleen had marked her favorite recipes and I picked out one that looked good, a fruit-cake-like dessert that seemed festive enough, called Tea Brack.

The recipe book, surrounded by at least some of the ingredients

The gist of Tea Brack is you take a bunch of dried fruit and soak them in tea and whiskey overnight, then bake them into a cake.  I bought some golden raisins, used the dates and apricots I already had in the house, with some currants from Das Geld Fahnlien’s supplies (those supplies are living at our house this winter.) I made up a pot of Earl Grey and asked Stephen for a cup of whiskey. An entire cup. I probably should have halved the recipe, but by the time I figured that out it was much too late. Stephen is a bit of a whiskey snob so he has plenty of whiskey in the house, but it is all pretty expensive stuff. He sighed mightily as he poured me a little from this bottle and a little from that to make up a full cup. The house smelled lovely overnight, as the sugar and liquids were absorbed by the fruits. When I added in the dry ingredients it was an incredibly wet cake, but I poured it into two loaf pans and a round cake pan. It was supposed to cook at 300 for one and a half hours, but I started it a bit late, and needed to take it to the museum. So I started it at 300, then 20 minutes in Stephen turned it up to 320, and 10 minutes later I turned it up for 340. At exactly an hour we pulled all the cakes out of the oven, they were done.

The tea rack sits among the other goodies and looks splendid
Photo by Jess Boynton

The round one came with us to the museum, and it looked great on a plate among our tea things. We tell all the folks that come to visit us about the recipe from home, just like mother used to make, with tea and whiskey (that’s how you know it is Irish.) It tastes lovely too, the whiskey flavor has toned down a bit since that first night, now it is just nice and fruity with a smoky tone to it. I’d make it again, but definitely halve the recipe, and possibly make it a little more cakey.

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Pies and Cabbage

Adventures in Historical Cooking

I've had many adventures in historical cooking over the course of the season at Strawbery Banke, including a newly found love of baking pies. who knew. My mother might be the most surprised about all of this.

As the season cooled I have thought of firing up the bake oven at Wheelwright house (where I cook at the hearth most Thursdays) but was reluctant. I've never done it before, it has been a fairly warm season, and I would feel bad firing it up without a good supply of items needing to be baked. Things came together recently when I had two days in a row in Wheelwright, and the weather has turned decidedly chilly. I took day one to read some of the materials in the house compiled by earlier hearth cooks and to make a ton of pie crusts and various fillings. 

I knew that the oven itself did not have a flue, it uses the main fireplace flue. I was worried about getting a fire started in there because of the airflow, but it turned out to be no problem at all. I started a good fire, kept adding to it, and all morning I watched the oven get hotter. By the time I thought to put an oven thermometer in there it was up to 650 degrees. Yup. I fired the oven. I raked the coals out, mopped the ashes with a soaked broom, then waited for it to cool down before I put in the first two pies. I did not wait long enough. The first two quickly burned to black. I waited a bit longer, and the next two turned out edible if you picked the burnt bits off the top. Ah well, I learned a lot.

I seem to have an admirer at the museum. I do not know what I did to deserve the praise I've received, but it does mean that I've attempted several cooking methods I might not have without of the confidence of others. This weekend in Shapiro house I made Sauerkraut. Actually, I started sauerkraut. It was not nearly as hard as I had thought it would be; I collected cabbages from various gardens throughout the museum, washed them, chopped them and then put them in a big crock and smashed the cabbage bits with a big masher. When possible I got kids to help me with the mashing, I probably should have got the adults to help me too because my hands were sore by the end of the day since I had made butter the day before and the motions were very similar. The reason why I saw I only started it is because to make sauerkraut the cabbage must ferment in its own juices. So I won't actually know if I've made sauerkraut for another couple of weeks. Just in time for the Museum season to be over. Sigh.

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Now I'm Cooking

If anyone had asked me even 6 months ago if I thought in the span of a week I'd make pie crust, noodles from scratch, cook up 3 pounds of strawberries, and stew a roast in prunes, well I would not have believed the first bit let alone all the rest. I don't cook at home because both Stephen and Alysa enjoy cooking, and they both hate washing dishes. Usually at home by the time I am hungry enough to want to eat I am too hungry to cook.

But when food is a method to learn about history, I'm finding my appetite for cooking is fairly unbounded! there are 2 houses at Strawbery Banke where cooking takes place: Wheelwright House, where a modern person shows off 18th Century hearth cooking, and Shapiro House where Mrs. Shapiro makes kosher meals on a coal stove that has been converted to gas. I am assigned to both houses at various times over the course of the week, and I always end my week with Saturdays in Shapiro.

One of the ways that the museum saves money on supplies is by asking us cooks to bring raw ingredients in, with the understanding that we can bring home anything we cook. It guarantees the museum a variety of food offerings while Stephen and Alysa get to take a break from cooking to try things like sweet & sour cabbage stew, and Colonial meat pies. I am having so much fun, learning by cooking, and helping teach museum visitors about the seasonality of food or about the rules of koshering. It is a little nerve-wracking trying to plan out menus in advance so I can purchase the ingredients, luckily I build enough time into most mornings that I can stop at the store on the way in to work if necessary. So far I have not had any major failures, I have burnt some fritters when I was too busy chatting with the school children to remember to flip them, and this week it was too hot for my pie crust to hold together, but for the most part I've been very pleased with my undertakings.

In Shapiro I am working from the International Jewish Cookbook. It was published in 1917 and is available online here and my mother found a version printed in 1947 with ration substitutions added in. I started the summer by making a chicken soup (so traditional) and followed it the next week with Cholent, a Jewish dish made up on friday night and stewed all night so it could be eaten on Saturday. Since I was cooking on Saturday and serving on Sunday I made a sweet & sour cabbage soup the week after, stewed beef with prunes & sweet potatoes the week after that.

My biggest cooking accomplishment in Shapiro House came on a day when one of the other Mrs. Shapiros called out sick, and I got to cover in the middle of the week. Since I did not get time to prepare I was dependent on the supplies already in the house. In looking through the little pantry I found plenty of flour and sugar, a box of dried up prunes and a jar of apricot jelly. My mind went instantly to hammentashen, so I used my smartphone to look up a recipe that sounded the most like the way my mom makes them, dug up some yeast and went to town. Before that dy I had never made any recipe with rising dough on my own. But when you have all day and no-one is required to eat what you make it seemed like a good time to take a risk.

I set the prunes to stew in some water and made my dough, went to lunch and when I came back the dough had risen nicely and the prunes were well stewed. I spent the rest of the afternoon making small batches of little triangular pastries that turned out delicious.

Colonial hearth cooking is its own unique experience but this post is long enough. I'll have to tell you all about my wheelwright exploits at a future time.

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Another Post About Storage

The thing about acquiring historic stuff, is you then need historic methods of storage. I had started to gather historic storage methods before the Guild, I bought a wooden chest as a prop for faire one year, and my mother bought me a beautiful pack basket, and has been supplying me with various other baskets for years. The first year of Das Geld Fahnlein I used the wooden prop box and bought an unfinished simple toy chest as my period storage, everything else got hidden in the corner of our tent.

2010
At the beginning of last year storage was even more on my mind as we tried to become even more historical and get rid of as many modern intrusions as we could. I made big canvas duffels for Stephen and I to hide our hiking backpacks. Now the packs go under the bed in their sacks and even the kids who crawl into our tent will not catch a glimpse of the modern stuff. During the first season my lovely prop box slid out of the back of our truck at an intersection and got pretty smashed up. It is not repairable since it is plasterboard and was not too durable to begin with. But Stephen had been inspired by the folks at Das TeufelsAlpdrücken Fähnlein  who sat down for dinner on chests and bundles (much more historical than chairs.) Stephen made me a beautiful wooden box where I store all my accessories: modern toiletries, historical sewing projects, playing cards, gloves etc. He also held a guild workshop to help people make their own boxes. Three more people in the guild got theirs completed, a few are still in progress, including the two Stephen started for himself! Fellow guild member Magda also got into the historical packing thing. She had already owned two wooden boxes, but she made canvas sacks for her bedding, plus sacks for other members of the guild who would arrive each morning with their things in plastic bags or backpacks. She also bought an unfinished toy chest like mine, and she bought a large beautiful pack basket to add to her impression.

I painted my toy chest in Reischach colors so we could tell mine apart from Magda’s, and filled it with tent accouterments like the rope bed tightener, our religious paintings, and our game boards. I dug out three big baskets that were also left over from my days as RenFaire Props Master to hold our clothing and some of our bedding plus all the random stuff that got thrown in at the last minute. We were given a chest as part of a wedding gift so Stephen used it for his accessories and personal items.

2011
At the end of last year I started to seriously think about storage for our bedding. I get cold very easily, so we not only pack sheets and pillows for our bed, but we packed at least three wool blankets, a couple of fleece blankets, some linen blankets, an electric blanket, and a historical sort of coverlet to throw over the whole thing. Yes, this is probably excessive, but I hate being cold. In the spring I bought waterproof canvas to cut and sew into bundles and I bought cotton webbing to wrap around the bundles and make them into backpacks. Then I tried to figure out how to sew them together to make them look like historical bundles. I even got Stephen to help and we both decided that not only were the bundles probably not sewn together at all, but they were most likely made of tent canvas or bedding material with everything else bundled up inside it. Why carry more things than you absolutely need? But I was determined to have dry bedding that could be transported in the back of the truck, so Stephen and I wrapped our bedding up like burritos in a tortilla then wrapped the webbing around like ribbons on a gift package, and did manage to get it on people’s backs! This spring we had an in-period set-up day and marched in to the Connecticut Renaissance Faire with bundles on our backs.

The packs were not perfect, if you needed one thing from inside you had to take the whole thing apart. Also the webbing slipped around on the waterproof canvas. After the May show I stitched three of them into big "u" shapes with one end open, my next step is to sew two horizontal lines of webbing on to the sacks, leaving open spots through which to thread the vertical webbing. That will secure the sack and make it into a pack. I have not done this yet, but it is on my list before the end of September.

Meanwhile I am totally jealous of fellow guild member Magda, who proved at our last two events that she can unpack and pack up all her gear in a completely period way. Her boxes, baskets and bundles just sit on top of her little rug (that goes on the floor inside her tent) in a pile until the cars are allowed on site. Magda is the person that has the next largest amount of stuff next to Stephen and I, and keeps her tent open for the public during the day just like we do. She and I go back and forth in some very low-scale competition to up our historical game, though really we stay pretty well even, and the more historical we are, the entire guild benefits. In this case, Magda has reached the goal before me, but I hope I’m not too far behind. As of the spring my last major things in modern containers were the kitchen stuff and the tents.

Since our niece recently came to live with us, we had to clear out our spare bedroom, which was really the place for all of our LH supplies. A lot of them went into our bedroom and the sewing room, but I knew the 4 plastic bins of kitchen gear would never make it into either room. So one bin of barely used stuff went into the attic, some of the nicer looking stuff that I did not want to bring to every show went on shelves in the den. For the stuff that goes to every event where we are cooking, I bought another toy chest, but stained it this time. And put all of the cooking utensils in it. If I want to cook with it, it has to fit in the one box (or be a big cast iron pot, which does not belong in a box in the first place.) All of our historical eating gear has gone into a basket, so when the high table needs to be set for dinner, anyone can do it, and when the dishes are done, the stuff for Stephen, Alysa and myself can go right back in the basket. I even sewed little pouches for the plates and bowls out of scrap wool so they have padding in the box and basket. Which leaves only one kitchen item left, and that is the food itself. This fall I want to be much better about removing plastic bags before getting to camp if possible, and using plain canvas tote bags or baskets to carry groceries in. My newest purchase is a really cool cooler basket in which to hide our perishables. It holds 5 gallons, the basket supports 300 lbs if someone sits on it, and the cooler liner is removable when it needs to be washed. I can't wait to use it!

Brown box for cooking stuff, basket for eating gear, the basket is really a cooler.

We’ve still got to come up with historical methods for hauling around tents, ropes and stakes, but I’m feeling that finishing up the bedding bundles, plus urging Stephen to finish his two wooden chests are good steps to move us into the fall.

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When is a cabbage not a cabbage?

Not too long ago Deirdre Larkin of the Cloisters Museum (part of the Metropolitain Museum of Art) wrote an article on the cloisters blog, The Medieval Garden Enclosed, about Medieval colewort and kales which are part of the cabbage family. Since the Germans are well known cabbage lovers, and I spend a lot of my time reenacting Renaissance German I was delighted with the article, and intrigued with this part:

"Vegetables have changed far more since the Middle Ages than the medicinal plants or wildflowers grown here at The Cloisters, and it is more difficult for us to represent them accurately. The brassicas have changed the most. Our large, tight-heading cabbages do not much resemble the small loose-leaved medieval colewort." 

But today I was reading  Food in Medieval Times  by Melitta Weiss Adamson. Adamson had this to say about cabbage:

“Of European ancestry, cabbages were originally headless, and were eaten by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. Not until the first century B.C. do we hear of headed cabbages that may have been cultivated in northern Europe first. In the Middle Ages the headless kale, or colewort, was a staple food of the Scots, while headed cabbage was favored by the Dutch and Germans. Other varieties belonging to the cabbage family that were cultivated in medieval Europe, especially in Italy, were cauliflower and broccoli. Headed cabbage was usually boiled or made into sauerkraut, as it still is today. The fact that in Bavaria cabbage was eaten three to four times a day, as one sixteenth-century physician tells us, illustrates how important a foodstuff cabbage was for the common people. In the upper-class cookbooks, however, cabbage is rarely mentioned. Not only did it lack exclusivity, it was also thought to generate melancholy and cause nightmares. Its one redeeming feature was that it was considered an antidote to drunkenness. Cabbage juice with honey was recommended for people who had lost their voice, and cabbage leaves were used to dress wounds."

Now I’m confused. One is saying that in Medieval Europe the cabbage head as we know it had not yet been developed, the other is saying that certain cultures did have cabbage in head form. Although Food in Medieval Times was printed before the Cloisters article (2004) all of the sources listed on the article are much older (the newest is 1999.)

There is a good chance that the problem is in the huge timeframe covered by the term “Middle Ages” and in the large geography covered when one says “Europe” so they could both be right! Now I want to know: when and where is the earliest documented head of cabbage? When can we safely say that most of Europe had some form of cabbage that formed into a tight head? And which came first, cauliflower or broccoli?

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Historical Cooking: The Steep Part of the Curve

Detail of a camp kitchen from a 1551 painting by Matthias Gerung

Part 1 and Part 2 bring us up to this spring, now it is almost fall. The faire is less than a month away and I am in full panic mode about cooking at the faire. You’d think with a year under my belt I’d be less nervous, but I am totally not. I still don’t cook much at home, and last year I let myself get away with some things that I will not myself get away with in the long run. Now that I have a little more experience I really only want to cook historical recipes. Last year I used any old historical recipe from the couple of cookbooks I’ve got, now I want to be able to trace the lineage of all my recipes.

It started this summer with fritters.  Last year Amanda cooked fritters. She does it with her 1830s cooking lessons, and she found medieval recipes too. She slaved over the fire cooking those fritters, and everyone loves them. Amanda will not be joining us in camp this fall and fritters seemed too ubiquitous to leave off our menu. They are seriously ubiquitous. The historic cooking blog I read did a whole series of posts on fritters, and most of the medieval cookbooks in my collection had recipes for fritters. I decided to photocopy and organize all the different recipes on fritters that I could find, so that I would not have to drag my recipe books to faire when making the recipes, and so I could decide exactly which recipe to use. While I was photocopying the fritter recipes, I decided to photocopy the recipes that I had used last year for similar reasons: I could take a photocopy to the grocery store when buying ingredients, and I could compare the similar recipes and see which one I liked best and which one was the most historically appropriate. Since I was photocopying all those I decided to photocopy other recipes I had already identified as ones I wanted to try this year, and once I was in this far I decided to photocopy recipes from my medieval cook books that looked like the ones I had made last year that I had found in non-historic circumstances. Over the past two weeks I have made a lot of photocopies (I’m sorry environment.)

I put all those recipes in sleeve protectors in a three ring binder, organized by recipe type. I also made sure to write on each recipe: what book I had gotten it from and where that book had gotten it (the original source.) I was really lucky that a lot of my cookbooks not only noted the source of the original recipes, but included the original text along with modern cooking methods. By looking up one of those original sources I found out that a lot of these medieval cook books have been transcribed (written out in modern English) and put on the web. Also at the same time I was madly immersed in cookbooks we went to Pennsic. I’ll write more about Pennsic later, but one of the more enjoyable things I did while there was attend a number of classes on cooking. While normally I am leery of using stuff posted on the web by random SCAdians, once I have met a person I feel much better about trusting their historical research. And a lot of the people I met do have web pages full of recipes. Needless to say I spent way too much time last week reading and printing out recipes.

While I was tracking down sources I was looking in particular for ways to justify the Alton Brown Lamb and Barley stew recipe that I’d made last year, so I was looking at a lot of mutton recipes and at meat cooking methods. I was looking for instances of directions for browning meat before cooking it and the use of carrots. I learned that browning usually only happened after everything had been boiled once, and that the further back you go the less carrots are a foodstuff, the more they are a medicine (at least according to the cookbooks.) I also figured out that the cookbooks I was predominantly looking at were written in the 14th century, whereas we portray the year 1528. Also, though I was finding cookbooks from Fance, Italy, Spain and England, it seemed like none of the German cookbooks (of which there are several) had modern recipe redactions in English. A few of them have been transcribed on the web, but I’m not feeling confident enough to do my own redactions.

Now I’ve gone through a few more cookbooks (Julie loaned me some) I’ve made a few more photocopies (my three-ring binder has grown from a half inch binder to a 1-inch binder) and I’ve figured out the new things I want to try this fall. Along with all the recipes that I’ve done before I would like to make:

Sweet & Sour White Fish
Stuffed Eggs
Cherry Soup
Poached Pears
Compost (a type of mixed pickles)
Ash Roasted carrots
Emperor’s Fritters (cheese)
Apple Fritters
Frumenty

Wish me luck!

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