Kim’s answer to “? On the subject of Christmas food - mince meat (as opposed to minced meat) use to have meat in it.…” > Likes and Comments
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Re-enacting was a lot of fun - plenty of "oh, that's why they did it that way" moments when you try out something. Incidentally, there is a big fat myth that the Medieval and Tudor diet was all meat because there are so many cook books that only talk about meat. Was it heck. Meat was special - which was why you had so many cook books on how to deal with it. Household accounts of food purchased shows the true story. There was quite a lot of rosewater used in deserts. There are recipes putting prunes and meat together. Or a sweet and sour sauce using "verjuice" - which was the juice of crab apples or unripe grapes and is acid, but not as much as vinegar. They did do roast meat, but the classic entirely savoury meat and two veg plus spuds of the 20th century must have come in rather later. The peasant "cuisine" was pottage - anything cheap boiled in a pot - beans, wayside plants and the like. If you were a fraction better off then you'd manage porridge for breakfast and pottage for supper. Owning a milk cow was the tip over point for the poverty line. If you had a milk cow, then you had butter, milk, cheese and her calves to sell. They may have eaten a bit themselves but a lot of it was sold to people better off. Another "thing" is the modern perception of the older traditional breeds as being much too fatty. They didn't eat all the fat - it was also used for making tallow candles and greasing the cart axles.
That is fascinating! I've come across verjuice and pottage in books, but never stopped to investigate exactly what it was. How interesting - and it makes complete sense regarding the much lower quantities of meat in the diet. Rearing animals is expensive.
One of the other "things" in period cooking is dealing with tough meat. Cooking a leg of mutton (not lamb) wrapped in a thick layer of pastry - we used wholemeal as that is closer to the period flour - to keep in all the moisture. They refer to it as a pastry coffin. You cook it for about 6 to 8 hours at only about 120C at most and baste the pastry from time to time with the juice that oozes through it. The pastry itself is very tasty. The meat came out tender with a rich flavour. One I haven't tried is boiling in butter - it really was boiling not deep fat frying, much lower temperature, a gentle simmering of meat in molten butter.
It sounds like you made some amazing things! How cool to have the chance to investigate all those traditional dishes.
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Carro
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Feb 04, 2021 11:12AM
Re-enacting was a lot of fun - plenty of "oh, that's why they did it that way" moments when you try out something. Incidentally, there is a big fat myth that the Medieval and Tudor diet was all meat because there are so many cook books that only talk about meat. Was it heck. Meat was special - which was why you had so many cook books on how to deal with it. Household accounts of food purchased shows the true story. There was quite a lot of rosewater used in deserts. There are recipes putting prunes and meat together. Or a sweet and sour sauce using "verjuice" - which was the juice of crab apples or unripe grapes and is acid, but not as much as vinegar. They did do roast meat, but the classic entirely savoury meat and two veg plus spuds of the 20th century must have come in rather later. The peasant "cuisine" was pottage - anything cheap boiled in a pot - beans, wayside plants and the like. If you were a fraction better off then you'd manage porridge for breakfast and pottage for supper. Owning a milk cow was the tip over point for the poverty line. If you had a milk cow, then you had butter, milk, cheese and her calves to sell. They may have eaten a bit themselves but a lot of it was sold to people better off. Another "thing" is the modern perception of the older traditional breeds as being much too fatty. They didn't eat all the fat - it was also used for making tallow candles and greasing the cart axles.
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That is fascinating! I've come across verjuice and pottage in books, but never stopped to investigate exactly what it was. How interesting - and it makes complete sense regarding the much lower quantities of meat in the diet. Rearing animals is expensive.
One of the other "things" in period cooking is dealing with tough meat. Cooking a leg of mutton (not lamb) wrapped in a thick layer of pastry - we used wholemeal as that is closer to the period flour - to keep in all the moisture. They refer to it as a pastry coffin. You cook it for about 6 to 8 hours at only about 120C at most and baste the pastry from time to time with the juice that oozes through it. The pastry itself is very tasty. The meat came out tender with a rich flavour. One I haven't tried is boiling in butter - it really was boiling not deep fat frying, much lower temperature, a gentle simmering of meat in molten butter.
It sounds like you made some amazing things! How cool to have the chance to investigate all those traditional dishes.
