Payne ragoun, something sweet and easy to make

19 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by Saara in 14th century, desserts, Forme of Cury

Suomenkielinen resepti löytyypi ihan justiinsa yläpalkista!

The camping season is on and we just had a lovely weekend at Laukko Manor. Merry Swan group participated in Ancient Laukko Festival. Everything went so well. The weather, company, food, amount of tourists all were excellent! Now I am preparing for Hollola Medieval Fair which is this weekend. There we will be camping again, making food on open fire and churning butter. Displaying medieval cooking on open fire for the tourists and talking about the food. This time we will have a clay oven with us also and Lovisa from Sweden, who is a master with baking, has promised to bake for us. Cannot wait!

Payne ragoun is a dish that is very easy to carry with you to a camping event like Hollola and I will be making a batch. There are couple variations available of the recipe in different manuscript text versions in Forme of Cury. What makes it interesting is that there is a word missing in some of the versions. The word is pynes which means pine nuts. It is the key ingredient in the recipe. I first looked at Samuel Pegge´s version of Forme of Cury and I suddenly realized that there were no mention of pine nuts in the recipe. So I did what I always do and dug out all the other translations and books I could find and checked what they said. I happen to have the Rylands manuscript in my iBooks. At this point I also realized that Medieval Cookery blog has blogged about the recipe in 2009. So that explained a lot.

The recipe does not say how much sugar or how much honey to put in to it. I did a version of this recipe to Reader’s Digest Christmas issue 2017. Now I added a bit more sugar to the recipe and little less honey to test how it turns out. For my taste it is better now than before. The taste of honey can be very dominant but not in this version I think.

Payne ragoun – pine nut candy

Tak hony sugur cypre & clarifye it to gider & boyle it with esye fyre & kepe it wel from brennyng & whan hit hath y boyled a while tak vp a drope there or with thy fynger & do hit in a litul water & loke yf it hong to gider & tak hit fro the fyre & do therto pynes the thryddendel & poudour gynger & stere it to gyder tyl hit bigynne to thyk and cast it on a wete table. Lesche hit & serue hit forth with fryed mete. on flesch day or on fysche dayes.

3 dl sugar
½ dl honey
100 g pine nuts
pinch of ginger

Mix together sugar and honey in a pot and put it on a moderate heat. Keep stirring the mixture so it will not burn. Be careful not burn yourself with the mixture. Let it boil for awhile until the mixture reaches the soft ball stage which means the mixture become light and foamy with lots of small air bubbles. Then take it of from heat and mix in pine nuts and ginger. Then pour the mixture on a baking sheet or watered/ oiled surface. Let it cool and break. Serve with fried meat or fish like the original recipe suggests or eat it as it is.

Source

Forme of Cury, 1390

Butter

02 Monday Jul 2018

Posted by Saara in butter, middelaldercentret

≈ 6 Comments

This summer I have been able to make couple of my long-time dreams come true. First, I have a tent (small cone) for 2 to sleep in events. Second, now I have a fireplace in backyard where I can actually cook on open fire. Third I have a churn (churns).

Making my own butter with a churn has been a long-time dream. I have been looking for the right churn for some time. Finally asking around I found a person from Denmark who was able to sell me churns. Now after a busy spring and after vacation I took my churn and made butter for the first time. It was really easy to do!

First I soaked the churn in hot water for some hours.

I used only cream this time for making the butter. Old traditional Finnish and European way is to make butter from cultured (soured) cream. That can be done easily adding for example 1 tablespoon of cultured milk (piimä) or Nordic sour cream (kermaviili) to 1 liter of cream and let the cream rest in freezer for a day. It is matter of taste how people like their butter. Me, I prefer my butter either non cultured or if then just a little bit cultured. If the butter goes too sour it tastes stale.

Then churning…

After 30 minutes it looked like this:

Now the butter was ready for to scoop from the bottom of the churn. Save the churn buttermilk for making bread, it is very tasty.

After that it was time to wash the butter carefully with cold water. It is good to strain and wash away the churn buttermilk as carefully as possible. That way the butter stays fresh longer.

When the washing is done, salt the butter with 1 teaspoon of salt. Put it in a bowl and storage in the fridge.

The butter will keep from couple days to a week. After couple of days, my butter still smells and tastes fresh and good.

And finally couple pictures and videos from second week of June when our group went to Middelaldercentret, Nykobing Falster with friends. It was a textile week but textile makers needed to eat too.