I like baking, but I prefer soft cakes, cupcakes and things like that. I don't like making cookies, it's boring and to be honest I'm not a big fan of hard dry cookies. Also next weekend at the Christmas fair at Falu Gruva I'm going to be portraying a well to do woman from the late 17th century, and I got inspired to see if I could make some cookies from the time period.
My first cookie that I made was a gingerbread cookie. Gingerbread goes back to medieval times, if you count it as a very spicy cake or cookie. In Swedish the name is still "pepparkaka", meaning pepper cake, giving a hint of one of the spices that was used but has disappeared from modern recipes.
For the spices I used a recipe for "Små pepparkakor" from Cajsa Warg's "Hielpreda i hushållningen för unga fruntimmer" from 1755, which is freely available on Google Books. Her recipe is quite complicated though, and since I didn't feel like recalculating all the old measurments I decided to use the ratios for flour and liquid from the recipe for "Simple Gingerbread" from Townsend and Sons. By mixing the two recipes I ended up with this, I have written the recipe in both English and Swedish:
2 cups of wheat flour/ 2 kkp vetemjöl
½ cup of honey/ ½ kkp honung
1 tsp each of / 1 tsk vardera av
cinnamon/kanel
cardamon/kardemumma
mace/muskotblomma
ginger/ingefära
allspice/kryddpeppar
cloves/nejlika
cest of lime/limeskal (Cajsa Warg calls for the rind of preserved lemon and bitter orange/pomerans, but I didn't have any at home, and the recipe needs some citrus to balance the honey)
50 g butter/smör
1 tsp baking powder/ 1sk bakpulver (Cajsa Warg used potash/pottaska, but I don't have that in my kitchen).
Heat the honey with the spices until it's liquid, add the butter and pour the the liquid into the flour and baking powder. Mix it into a fairly solid dough, add water if needed. Roll it out to 0,5 cm thickness and cut out shapes. Bake in 200 degrees celsius for 8 minutes.
As the honey and butter cools it gets harder to work with the pastry. I don't know if the pastry should rest, like a short pastry, or if one should be quick and work with it while it's still soft. For this batch I tried to be quick, it could well be worth testing to let it cool for an hour the next time. This is the kind of recipe that I would have no hesitation serving at a 16th century or medieval event, if you are rich enough since all the spices and use of wheat flour is basically there to show off wealth. By the 18th century this would have been an old fashioned or traditional recipe.
The other recipe that I made was straight from Cajsa Warg and is a recipe for "fänkålskakor", fennel biscuits. This was a tougher recipe to make since I had to recalculate the measurements, or simply guess when it came to how much flour was needed. My recipe ended up as:
300 g of honey (I actually ran out of honey so I used a mix of honey and light molasses/sirap)
30 g of zante currants/ korinter
7 g of fennel seeds/fänkålsfrö
60 g of butter/smör
300 g of wheat flour
Pound the fennel seeds in a mortar. Mix the butter and wheat flour, add the honey, fennel seeds and currants. Mix into a pastry. Roll it out to around 0,5- 1cm (Cajsa calls for a finger thickness) and cut out shapes. Put it into a 200 degrees Celsius oven for 11 minutes. They turned out very hard, like a biscotti. Next time I would take them out earlier from the oven.
This ended up as a very wet pastry, I was really unsure if I had enough flour or not. Still Cajsa calls for using flour when rolling out the pastry, which is probably a sign that it should be sticky. It ruined my shapes when I tried to lift them to the baking tray though. This also reads like a very old fashioned recipe for the 18th century, and it's last in her cookbook so maybe it's put there because it's traditional, not so much for it being a "modern" taste in the 18th century. I was afraid that it would taste too much like liquorice, but it's actually a nice and clean taste. It's funny I hate honey and liquorice, but this recipe shows that things can change when you bake them.
Finally I made kringles. It's related to the more known German pretzel, but in Sweden it's a sweet pastry. Kringles are knows since the Middle Ages, but it's hard to know what they tasted since the name has more to do with the shape than the taste. The way it's cooked, where it's first boiled in water and then dried in the oven makes them very longlasting. Up until the 19th century they were made for special occasions. For my version I used a 19th century recipe from Arboga. The 19th century is evident in that it's using yeast and sugar. To age the recipe into something more like what was done in the Middle Ages I would use a sourdough, or at least exchange some of the wheat flour for rye. I didn't get this recipe to work though and it was way too fiddly. I'm glad that I halfed the recipe so that I only had to make 10 kringles. It's from Charles Emil Hagdahl's "Kokkonsten" from 1879, and it's said to be a traditional recipe from Arboga.
100 g butter
40 g sugar
30 g yeast
50 ml milk
1 tsp cardamon
ca 400 g Wheat flour
The recipe only calls for the yeast to be dissolved in lukewarm milk and then to work the ingredients into a fairly hard dough. I decided to melt the butter, maybe that was my mistake. After the dough has proven for 30 minutes make kringles, prove for another 30 minutes. Boil a big pot of water, put the kringles into it one by one, when they rise up to the top of the water take them up and let them dry. Finish in a 200 degrees Celsius oven for 15 minutes. (I didn't get my dough to rise)
No comments:
Post a Comment