Category Archives: desserts

Gyngerbrede

17 Monday Dec 2018

Posted by in 15th century, desserts

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Our reenactment group Merry Swan together with Häme Castle and friends arranged an event: Medieval food, everyday life and luxury, during the first weekend of December. I was displaying all sorts of vegetables and fruits that were most likely eaten in the castle during Medieval times. Representing luxury, I had payne ragoun and gyngerbrede for all the visitors to taste if they wanted to know how medieval delicacies tasted like. Having something to taste at the display was a huge success. Mervi had also baked different bread’s for guests to taste with homemade butter. She asked the spectators about how wealthy they were and then when hearing the response gave them either fine wheat bread, rye bread or barley bread all made from sourdough. She also baked some of bread at the site. Ah so much fun!

Anyway I have tested this recipe once and it worked. Many people have been asking for the recipe so I will publish it now although normally I will spend hours and hours to read and test the recipe. So here it is..

Suomenkielinen resepti löytyy yläpalkista!

Gyngerberde – Gingerbread

Take a quart of hony & sethe it, skeme it clene; take Safroun, pouder Pepir & throw ther-on; take gratyd Brede make it so chargeaunt that it wol be y-lechyd; then take pouder Canelle & straw ther-on y-now; then make yt square, lyke as thou wolt leche yt; take when thou lechyst hyt, and caste Box leves a-bouyn, y-stykyd theron, on clowys. And if thou wolt haue it Red, coloure it with Saunderys y-now.

Serves about 10

  • 450 g honey
  • 180 g dried bread crumbs
  • pinch of saffron
  • 1 teaspoon of ginger (optional)
  • ½ teaspoon fine ground long pepper (or black pepper)
  • 1 ½ tablespoon of cinnamon
  • (1 teaspoon of sandalwood powder)
  • whole cloves to garnish
  1. Bring the honey boil in a pot. Keep simmering the honey about 5 minutes. Stir and make sure it will not burn.
  2. Skim the surface.
  3. If you are using sandalwood to color the dish add it. Add saffron and pepper.
  4. Add dried bread crumbs and stir well.
  5. Take the mixture off the heat and let it cool.
  6. Sprinkle the cinnamon on a plate or cutting board where you are forming the pieces.
  7. When the mixture is not too hot you can cut it in pieces and form balls or use cutters to make different kinds of shapes. Dust the pieces with cinnamon or just roll the balls on the cinnamon.
  8. Garnish with whole cloves if you wish.

Comments: Since these gingerbreads are not baked, they are more like candies than actual biscuit or cake. The dough feels like marzipan but it can lose its form a bit in storage. Also the temperature will affect the shape after a while. The ginger is actually missing in the recipe but the name suggests that it might have added to the dish anyway. Although this is not certain. Some other similar gyngerbrede recipes does have ginger in it.

I decided not use the sandalwood either for coloring the gyngerbrede red this time. I do have sandalwood powder but I made this dish for the Häme Castle event and for the spectators to taste so I did not want it to be too exotic. Next time I need to test with the sandalwood and probably update the recipe after that. So at this point I don’t know how much sandalwood would be enough to color the dough, but my guess is that 1 teaspoon would do the trick.. perhaps less. Anyway the sandalwood is as the recipe says optional.

I had no boxwood leaves for to garnish the gyngerbrede (I don’t know if and where to get the leaves here in Finland). I am not completely sure but I read that they might be poisonous so I would omit them. You can use whole cloves to garnish as the recipe says.

Source:

  • Take a thousand eggs or more, A collection of 15th century recipes, Cindy Renfrow (Harleian MS.279, c.1420)

Konkavelite – Cherry pudding

03 Friday Aug 2018

Posted by in 14th century, desserts, Ein buch von guter spise, fruits

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Suomenkielinen resepti löytyy yläpalkista!

Cherry time isn’t over yet (in Finland) so I will put my other projects (other recipes) on hold and write this down now, rather than waiting for the next year. There are some variants of this recipe (both medieval and adapted) available on the internet. This was my first time I have made konkavelite so I decided to follow two similar recipes from Ein Buch von guter spise (c 1350). It was very good! So tasty! If you happen to have lots of cherries and you want to make a tart check this old recipe of mine.

Konkavelite – Cherry pudding

Ein konkavelite

Zu einer schüzzeln ze machen. man sol nemen ein phunt mandels. und sol mit wine die milich verstozzen und kirsen ein phunt. und slahe sie durch ein sip. und tu die kirsen in die milich. und nim eine vierdung rises, den sol man stozzen zu mele. und tu das in die milich. und dim denne ein rein smaltz. oder spec. unde smeltze daz in einer phannen. und tu dar zu ein halbe mark wizzes zukkers. und versaltz niht, und gibz hin.

Ein gut fülle

Konkavelit macht man von kirsen. von den suren kirsen. daz sint wiseln. die sol man nemen. und von mandelkern eine guten mandelmilich machen. und mit eime wine die kirsen wol gesoten. und mit ir eygin brüe. und geslagen durch ein tuch. und denne gegozzen in die mandelmilch. und gar gesoten in eyme hafen. und dor du wol gerüert mit ris mele, und smaltz genue dor an geton, und auch würtze genue und zuker doruf. und versaltz niht.

Serves 4

Almond milk (about 3 dl)

  • 3 dl peeled and finely ground almonds
  • 2 dl red wine
  • 4 dl water

Ingredients

  • 500 g fresh cherries
  • 3 dl red wine
  • 1 tablespoon of rice flour
  • 1-2 tablespoon of lard or bacon fat
  • pinch of salt (if not using bacon fat)
  • 1 teaspoon of cinnamon
  • ½ teaspoon of ginger
  • 1 dl sugar (or less if you wish)

First make the almond milk. Simmer together the finely ground almonds, wine and water in a pot for about 5 minutes and stir occasionally. Take of the heat and let it rest for about 30 minutes. Stir couple of times.  Pour the milk and the mass through a fine strainer or a cloth to a pot and discard the solids.

Take of the stems from the cherries and put them whole in a pot with 3 dl red wine. Simmer until the cherries pop and they are done. Add water if needed. This takes about 20 minutes. Take the cherries out of the wine and pound them carefully through a strainer to the almond milk. Discard the stones and the skins. Take a little bit of the almond milk and cherry mixture to a cup and stir in the rice flour. Put the almond milk and cherry mixture on the stove and when it simmers add rice flour, spices, sugar (a pinch of salt if not using bacon fat) and lard. Boil briefly, stir and serve.

Comments: If you use the fat from frying bacon, be careful not to over salt the pudding. You can substitute lard or bacon fat with butter. Using lard will make the pudding much more set when the pudding cools down. Spices are optional so if you wish you can add also little bit of other medieval spices than cinnamon and ginger. The recipe is actually hinting that this dish is supposed to serve warm but it is delicious if cold too.

Source:

Payne ragoun, something sweet and easy to make

19 Thursday Jul 2018

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

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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

More about the quinces!

04 Monday Dec 2017

Posted by in 14th century, desserts, fruits, Le Menagier de Paris, spices

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I forgot to mention that quince (Cydonia oblonga) is very often confused with flowering quince (Chaenomeles japonica) which are two completely different plants. Flowering quinces can be cultivated in Finland. As far as I have heard you cannot get the quince (Cydonia oblonga) survive in our climate. I was confused when some time ago I was talking with my colleague who insist that they have a quince tree (or more like bush I think) at their backyard. But of course she mean the flowering quince! You can use it for making marmalade aswell but keep in mind that it is not the medieval fruit they used in Europe at that time. There went my dream of cultivating my own quince fruits :(.

Anyway on a more happier side note there is now a Finnish translation available at “Reseptit” section and the recipe is also saved at the upper bar section.

_____________

Unohdin mainita viime postauksen yhteydessä, että tosiaan kvitteni (Cydonia oblonga) ja ruusukvitteni (Chaenomeles japonica) menevät helposti sekaisin. Ne ovat kaksi eri lajia, joista ruusukvitteniä voidaan kasvattaa Suomen olosuhteissa, kun taas kvitteniä ei. Ihmettelinkin hetken kun työkaverin kanssa keskustellessa ilmeni taannoin, että hänen pihallaan kasvaa kvitteni puu. Hän taisi tarkoittaa ruusukvitteniä ja minä kuulin ehkä väärin että puu, vaikka kyseessä taitaa olla ennemminkin pensas. Ruusukvittenistä saa myös hyvää hilloa, mutta kannattaa muistaa, että se ei ollut sama hedelmä, jota käytettiin keskiajalla Euroopassa. Suomenkielinen käännös kvittenimarmeladista löytyy nyt tuolta yläpalkista kohdasta “Reseptit”.

Check this article and blog:

http://blog.metmuseum.org/cloistersgardens/2008/10/27/the-golden-quince/

Quince marmalade

03 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by in 14th century, desserts, fruits, Le Menagier de Paris, spices

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It is sometimes painfully hard to get some ingredients here in Finland and when you do you have to jump and get them right away. So couple weeks ago I heard that there are quinces in a store and I went there and get some. I made quince marmalade from Le Ménagier de Paris c.1390 and pre-boiled and froze some quinces for later use. I have never made anything with quinces. How funny! But needn’t say I was so excited I left everything I was writing and searching for the blog and concentrated on only quinces for some days. You will find the Finnish translation and the recipe below in the upper bar recipe collections after couple of days.

*Suomenkielinen resepti löytyy parin päivän päästä yläpalkissa olevan linkin kautta.

Quince marmalade

To make cotignac, peel quinces, cut in quarters and remove the eye and the pips. Cook them in some decent wine and then strain. Boil some honey for long time and skim it, then add the quinces and stir thoroughly. Keep boiling until the honey is reduced by at least half; then toss in hippocras powder and stir until is completely cooled. Then cut into pieces and store.

  • 2 big quinces
  • 3 dl red wine
  • 2,5 dl water
  • 500 g honey

Spices: 1,5 teaspoons of Hippocras powder or well ground spices:

  • 1 teaspoon of cinnamon
  • ⅓ teaspoon of ginger
  • ⅓ teaspoon of grains of paradise
  • ⅕ teaspoon of nutmeg
  • ⅕ teaspoon of galingale

Peel the quinces and take the gores away. Cut them into quarters and boil in good red wine and water until they are really soft. Take the quinces out from the wine and strain them through strainer and discard the pulp. You will get about 1,5 dl of quince paste. Carefully boil the honey in a pot for 5-10 minutes and skim the foam of the surface. Stir in the quince paste and the spices. Boil carefully stirring all the time until the honey has diminished into half. Be careful not to burn the honey. Keep stirring after taking the pot of fire and let the marmalade cool completely before cutting.

Hippocras powder (as it is said in Le Ménagier de Paris): a quartern of very fine cinnamon, half quartern of cassia buds, an ounce of hand picked fine white Mecca ginger, an ounce of grains of paradise and a sixth of an ounce nutmeg and galingale together.

The Hippocras powder mixture made me think quite a long time about how much the spices you need to spice the quince marmalade. Especially how much there might have been in the spice mixture in Paris 1390. All this thinking took some hours and I will get back to it later. The recipe for the quince marmalade or cotignac tells us to just toss in some Hippocras powder and nothing about the exact amounts. The spice mixture is written down and is quite detailed in another recipe in Le Ménagier. There you can see how much and what kind of spices you need to make the powder.

So either you make bigger batch of Hippocras powder mixture and then toss some of it to the quince marmalade or go with the suggested amounts in the recipe above. If you happen to have both Ceylon cinnamon and Cassia use both but if not then what ever cinnamon you have. If you don’t have galingale or grains of paradise you can either leave them or substitute them with something else like using a bit more ginger and tossing a pinch of black pepper to the marmalade.

I have written down the Hippocras powder recipe and changed the quarterns and ounces to teaspoons, which will unfortunately not give you the exact right amounts but gives a hint of how much spices there are. I will write down the whole recipe of Hippocras later and some thoughts about the spice mixture and the amounts.

Hippocras powder mixture:

  • 28 tl fine cinnamon (probably Cinnamomum Verum)
  • 15 tl cassia buds (Cinnamomum Cassia)
  • 7,6 tl ginger
  • 7,6 tl grains of paradise
  • 1,2 tl nutmeg
  • 1,2 tl galingale

Sources:

  • The Good Wife’s Guide. Le Menagier de Paris by Gina L.Greco and Christine M.Rose. c.1393

 

Zabaglone

09 Saturday Jun 2012

Posted by in 15th century, desserts, UlfR

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Today at the test kitchen it was all about my husband in charge of cooking. This following recipe is his (my husband’s UlfR Knutsson’s) and with his permission and suggestion I am gladly writing it here. (Scroll down for Finnish version/ Kelaa alas suomenkieliseen ohjeeseen!)

There is by the way a great article about this dish online!

Zabaglone – warm egg custard

For four cups of Zabaglone get twelve fresh egg yolks, three ounces of sugar, half an ounce of good cinnamon and a beaker of good sweet wine; cook this until it is as thck as a broth; then take it out and set it on a plate in front of the boys. And if you like you can add a bit of fresh butter.

Serves 1

2 dl sweet white wine (as sweet as you can find)

3 big egg yolks

2 teaspoon sugar

1 teaspoon cinnamon

(½ teaspoon of butter, optional)

Mix all the ingredients together and warm gently whisking all the time. Let it simmer couple minutes until it thickens and serve warm. If you want you can add more sugar and cinnamon.

Comments: He said that he used Riesling for the dish and it wasn’t sweet enough. Also he said that as the other article suggests strawberries would be nice addition to the dish, unfortunately ours are not ripe yet ;) (he is referring to our strawberry pot which will give us if we are lucky probably less than 20 berries, when they finally will be ripe).

(The Neapolitan Recipe Collection, Cuoco Napolitano, 15th century, Terence Scully)

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Tällä kertaa koekeittiössä kokkasi mieheni UlfR. Hänen luvallaan ja pyynnöstään laitan tämän reseptin tänne blogiin. Tästä ruokalajista on muuten hyvä artikkeli netissä!

Zabaglone – lämmin munaviinikeitto

For four cups of Zabaglone get twelve fresh egg yolks, three ounces of sugar, half an ounce of good cinnamon and a beaker of good sweet wine; cook this until it is as thck as a broth; then take it out and set it on a plate in front of the boys. And if you like you can add a bit of fresh butter.

1 hengelle

2 dl makeaa valkoviiniä (makeinta mitä löytyy)

3 isoa kananmunan keltuaista

2 teelusikkaa sokeria

1 teelusikka kanelia

(½ teelusikallinen voita, jos haluaa)

Sekoita kaikki ainekset keskenään kattilassa ja kuumenna sekoittaen hyvin koko-ajan. Anna kiehua hiljalleen pari minuuttia kunnes keitto hyytyy. Jos haluat, lisää sokerin ja kanelin määrää.

Kommentit: UlfR sanoi käyttäneensä Rieslingiä ja se ei ollut ihan riittävän makeaa. Lisäksi hän sanoi, kuten yläpuolella olevassa artikkelissa viitataan, sopii ruoka hyvin mansikoiden kera.. valitettavasti meidän mansikat eivät ole vielä kypsiä ;) (hän viittaa siis meidän amppelimansikkaan, josta hyvällä tuurilla saa ehkä alle 20 mansikkaa, kun ne ovat vihdoin kypsiä).

(The Neapolitan Recipe Collection, Cuoco Napolitano, 15th century, Terence Scully)