A viking day

 Just like last summer my friends at Ingvara have set up a viking camp outside of Rättvik. Yesterday me and the regular group from the 16th century guild decided to go up there and be vikings for a day. With all bigger events still being cancelled we were all longing for some historical living. The weather forecasts looked really grim, basically rain all day, but we still decided to go through with the planned visit.

This year the camp was situated a bit further down the meadow, and they had built an two additional wooden houses, so not just tents. The location meant that it was in sheep and horse meadow, but unfortunately the chicken stayed closer to the modern houses and didn't run around in the camp.

There was plenty of crafting going on, with Kål-Henrik and Marlein made it showing and teaching sprang weaving. I had a new gown that I worked on, and I'm going to make a post about it soon.

I love the chance of cooking though, so I was really happy to be in the kitchen. We were making an ale-elk (ale-älg in Swedish) stew and a root vegetable stew with three different kinds of onions. I had also brought with me a sourdough from rye and spelt wheat. Unfortunately this is where the weather gods decided that they had given us enough good weather despite the forecast. When we had the pots going on the fire the heavens just opened up. We couldn't make bread, because the skillets we used go too wet, and the stews also got really watered down from the rain. The meat was still ok. We huddled for a while in the more permanent house and when the weather cleared up again I packed up and went home.

The last few times that I have worn my apron dress I have been annoyed that it feels too tight and long. So when I went home I simply chopped off 15 cm of it and rehemmed it. 

Medieval baking

Bread is an interesting subject. For the medieval person the saying "our daily bread" was totally natural, most of the energy intake simply came from bread. In essence bread is simply flour and water that's been heated up to become firm. There are so many variation on bread though, and recently I got curious about experimenting with medieval bread baking. In Swedish original sources, like food inventories at castles, there is always a difference between "herrebröd" - the lords' bread and "svennebröd" - the servants bread. In general it says that the finer bread was made from sifted flour, while the servants had to make do with bread from coarse and unsifted flour. But what kind of flour did they use?

Since I live in the middle of Sweden, well this is where it gets tricky if I want to recreate a bread that could have been eaten in my region. Wheat was a luxury, due to the climate only small amounts of wheat were harvested, and that was in the south part of Sweden. Barley was the most common crop in the north of Sweden well into the 20th century, since it's possible to grow it here. Rye started to make inroads into the medieval farms, but when looking it up it seems as if rye was harvested up to to around Lake Mälardalen. The people working at Västerås castle in the first decades of the 16th century were mostly supplied with bread made from rye. It is known that the area around Falun mine, so where I live, had to import food to supply the comparatively large population here, and my guess is that even if barley was harvested locally it was mostly rye that was imported.

So in the choice of flour for my medieval bread I could use wheat, rye or barley. They have very different qualities when it comes to baking bread though. The region where I live is still sometimes called the "crisp bread belt", the reason is simple barely can't be used to make nice soft loafs of bread, instead you make the thin and hard crisp bread from it. Since the inventory from Västerås talks about rye and wheat, I decided to work with those flours instead.

regular wheat flour, a mix of sifted rye and wheat flour, coarse rye flour

In order for the bread to raise you also need a leavening agent. All the modern cookbooks that offer medieval recipes that I've seen talk about the use of sourdough for the leavening in the Middle Ages in the Nordic countries. It is worth noting that there might be a lot of geographical differences within Europe as to what kind of leavning to use. Even if it's later Townsends has an episode on 18th century cooking talking about how sourdough was not used in the references that they have found, which are mainly in English, at the same time though when reading the Kajsa Warg's "Hielpreda i hushållet" in Swedisn from the 18th century she talks about making bread from sourdough. My secondary sources say that the kind of yeast you use for beer or baking yeast was not available here. I decided to go for sourdough, and thankfully you can find sourdough startes in some largers supermarkets so I could skip that step.

On the back of the package of the sourdough starter there was a recipe, I used that quantty of water, but nothing else from the recipe. Most modern recipes, even those saying they are historical, add extra fresh yeast to the dough, but I went with only the sourdough. The top metallic bowl is for the servants' bread. For that I simply just used the coarse rye flour, water and 1/3 of the sourdough packet. The dough was really hard and compact, no matter how much I needed it. This is what I suspected, since the rye doesn't have the same gluten content that makes wheat flour so great for baking.

For the lords' bread I used the mix of 60 wheat flor and 40 sifted rye flour that you can buy (rågsikt) and 2/3 of the sourdough. Inspired by a recipe from a Danish cookbook from 1616 (transcribed into both Danish and English) that makes a bread with sourdough and mentions several spices I also added ground aniseed and caraway seeds and about a table spoon of honey. This behaved much more like a regular bread dough and it was nice and soft to knead it and feel it starting to become elastic.

Both doughs were set to raise for an hour, then turned and left for another hour. Then it was time to turn them into bread shapes. The servants bread was still very dense and compact, it hadn't raised at all. So I baked it into a fairly thin round shape, similar to a crisp bread but it was so dense that I couldn't get it quite as flat as a crisp bread. The lords' bread was baked into four smaller round shapes.

For the baking I used 200 degrees for the servants's bread, for the lords' bread I put it into the oven at 250 degrees to form a very hard crust and then lowered the temperature to around 220. Both breads were soft and nice straight from the oven when they were warm, but got hard and chewy when they got cold. The people who tasted it claimed that both tasted really good, especially with butter on them. There were jokes about the servants' bread, similarities with the Discworld dwarf bread and possible use of it as a projectile weapon.

The lords' bread is very similar to what I imagine a medieval daily bread would be. It can be used as a plate, it can be softened with liquids and used to scoop up soups and drippings.  It is also pretty similar to the fairly flat shape of bread you can see in medieval images.

Even if I'm happy with the lords' bread, I don't think the servants' bread is something that would have been handed out from a castle kitchen. Did they maybe add in some wheat flour to the coarse rye, just to make it easier to bake? Or did they use a finer rye flour than I did, to make it more similar to a modern dark rye bread? For now I have a lot of flour in my pantry, but I would like to do this kind of bake again and then I would switch the premade wheat/rye mixed flour with my own mix of spelt/dinkel wheat, which is closer to the medieval wheat, and fine rye flour. And I would try and make the servants' bread from fine rye flour instead of coarse rye flour.

The inspiration for the bread baking came from an article about the food inventories of Västerås castle 1517-1520, and I have written more about that article over at Historiekullan (in Swedish)

Making and drinking kvass

I have a tendency that when I'm tired and my mind is in overdrive - I go out in the kitchen and make something historical. This week it was "kvass". I hadn't heard about until I read this blog post by Historical living with Hvitr.. I got interested since is mentioned in sources back to the 10th century. Beer and breadmaking have been interconnected from the earliest history, since both are depending on yeast.  I even remember a book I read as a very young child that said "when the Egypticans wanted to make beer they started with making bread". Kvass as a drink that takes it's flavor from bread, and just a small bit of yeast, made me intrigued on if the taste would be close to these early kind of drinks. (I of course have no idea about this, but it made me curious). It is not unfeasible that this kind of drink would have been known in Sweden in the time period, after all most of our trading was to the East, and the area where I live have some Slavic burial finds.

Anyway I first set out to search for a Kvass recipe in Swedish - and it turned out if you do that you will not find anything realted to a drink made from rye bread. Kvass seems to be a name taken up by people who are into fermenting stuff, and used for all kinds of naturally fermented fruit drinks.* Anyway I decided to try out both kinds of kvass. For the ryebread  version I used the same recipe as Hvitr, it simply was the easiest to follow. For the Swedish recipe I followed this recipe for rhubarb kvass.

I only had access to 1 litre jars so I only made small batches. 

This is the rhubarb kvass. Everyone who tasted it liked it a lot. It had a bit of carbonation, but it disappeared quickly when I opened the bottle. It basically tasted lika very mild and non-sweet rhubarb lemonade. I'm definitely going to make variations of it again.

The origianl rye bread kvass I did a bit of miscalculation. As I said I only had a one litre jar, so I used less water, and didn't calculate that the bread would soak up a lot of liquid, so I only got 0,5 l of kvass in the end. The recipe I followed mentioned to toast the bread "like Chernobyl", but since I don't lie dark beers I only toasted it enough to make it completely dry.

As for the taste. It tasted very much like the Swedish drink "svagdricka", which is a fermented low-alcoholic malt drink. My kvass also had a distinct yeast flavour, and I don't know if that's how it's supposed to be, or if I failed the recipe. As it is it was a fascinating process to make proper kvass, but I'm not sure if it's worth the work if I can go to the store and buy a bottle that tastes the same in the supermarket.

* I'm thinking that all these Swedish health blogs that had recipes for fruit drinks that they called kvass chose to call them kvass to not relate the drink to mead, which after all is also a fermented drink from honey, but not exactly not known for any health properties.

Overnight stay at the viking camp

On Saturday I started my summer vacation. Work has been really busy the last two weeks and I felt that I needed to just go off somewhere and shut it off. I heard with the people at Ingvara Viking, that I visited on June 6th, and I was welcome to come and stay over night as well Saturday-Sunday.

I wore my only viking outfit, so the same as on June 6th, but for the evening I added an amber necklace that I have.

I did feel fancy though since Sofia, the daugher of one of the owners, is very good with doing viking hairstyles, so she braided my hair.

The lambs that were newborn when I visited in June had grown a bit now.

Of course I wanted to cook and do food preparations. I had brought with me two sets for making cheese. For Saturday evening I made a cheese by curdling whole milk and cream with vinegar. That one drains pretty quick so it only takes an hour or so.

The other cheese was made by heating up sour milk (filmjölk) with a bit of sour cream (gräddfil) and then let it drain over night, so we had it for breakfast in the morning. The taste was pretty similar with the different methods, but the sourmilk one had a consistency that was closer to cream cheese while the milk and vinegar one gets grainier, almost like a crumbly feta style cheese. I'm not sure yet which style I prefer.

I got to sleep over in a corner of the stable, that they use as their shop. I had brought a modern sleeping bag and a wool underwear set. I also had my Enfys Nest cape and a sheep skin as blankets. I didn't feel cold. I think that for next summer, when I hopefully will go to proper events again, I want to make a wool gown that I can sleep in. I was woken up when I heard some scracthing noices and one of the hens started to get closer to me.

Good morning!

One of my favorite moments was getting up and cooking breakfast on the fire. We had oatmeal with apple and honey, freshly made flatbread with butter and cheese, and eggs. I'm not a big breakfast eater, but I just kept eating because it tasted so good.

For lunch we made herb dumplings from this recipe from Ribe Viking Center. It was a good thing to try making dumplings for ourselves and not for paying guests or as a demonstration first.

The herbs were taken by doing a round around the camp and picking stuff that's edible. The dumplings tasted good, but we all agreed on that it was too much work for the result. We also got a lot of filling leftover, but we simply heated it up with some fresh cabbage and had it as a sidedish. I think we agree on that as a demonstration meal or for guests it would be better to make some kind of flatbread or unfilled dumplings and then serve the green stew as a side dish.

Lovisa and Susanne are preparing the dumplings and greens

 Working by an open hearth is not the most ergonomical thing to do. They have a bench up where we could prepare the food, but there is a lot of standing up and bending down into the pots. They have a plan for the future to build a cooking shed, that would be more protected agianst the weather and also allow some more comfortable working spaces.

The dumplings with the leftover greens

I had also tried to make a Slavic drink called kvass, but I'm going to talk about that in its own post.

Rhubarb kvass

A viking day

With all big events of the summer cancelled, you have to create your own opportunities to wear costumes and have fun. Up in Rättvik two women, who had planned to spend the summer on tour to different viking markets and events to sell their goods, have instead put up a viking camp that you can visit and experience the viking life. This weekend they had a bit of soft opening, meaning that everything is ready but they won't welcome visitors until next weekend. Even if the viking age isn't a focus area for me, I do have my quick viking and of couse I jumped at the chance to cook historical food on open fire again.

The weather on the morning was dreadful, with really heavy rain, but I trusted the weather forecast that said that it would get better, and after lunch it cleared up and I set off to Vikarbyn outside Rättvik. Ok, technically it's Öja, on the outskirts of Vikarbyn, outside Rättvik.

Me in front of their big, main tent that act as a viking hall. 

Together with my viking outfit I'm wearing some accessories that are good examples of why it's good to have a few "time-travelling" garments that you can use for almost anything. I'm using my standard unsmocked, linen apron, last used for an 1897 photo shoot,  for shoes I'm using a very neutral pair of black slip on shoes in fake leather. They are so non-descript that I can use them for all eras where I don't have proper shoes. On my head I'm wearing my 16th century veil that I usually tie around my wulsthaube, but now I just tied in the back of my head. Viking women didn't have to cover their hair out of modesty, but I think it's a nice and practical way to keep the hair out of the way. Im also very happy with my new glasses that I have bought to be less visible when I'm costume. The frames are so thin that they are hardly visible in photos, compared to my standard thick, red frames. Later when it got a bit chilly I also wore my Skjöldehamn hood.

The camp is situated with a lovely view over Lake Siljan The only thing marring the historical feeling is the blue plastic balls for straw that the neighbouring farmer has set up, and they can't be totally covered by the wooden fence. They also have sheep, with very newborn lambs, goats and hens around.

The center of the camp is the open hearth. In the background you can also see several smaller tents.

After having a look around the camp and just sitting and talking around the fire it was time to get cooking, with historical food on open fire there is no such thing as a quick meal.

Basting the steak with the marinade

For the food recipes I haven't used any primary sources, instead relying on the recipes from Ribe Viking Center in Denmark, available in both Danish, English and German, and Fotevikens museum, available in Swedish and English.

The main dish was an alemarinated pork steak. The Ribe recipe called for regular lager, but I switched it for an ale instead. The pork had marinated for 24 hours, and it took almost 3 hours to cook over the fire. When it was ready it was delicious, you could really feel the ale flavour through the meat, and the pork was just done so it was tender but not so much that it fell into pieces. It could probably be on for even longer if you want it more tender.

Some were more eager to eat than others

With the steak we had buttermilk flatbreads. Basically buttermilk, coarse ryeflour and some salt mixed together to form a firm dough. I made the dough in the morning, and then we baked it in the evening. The idea is to let the buttermilk and rye interact and turn sour and create a natural leavening. The effect was small, but it was there. Since you can't buy buttermilk in Sweden I had to make my own butter in order to get buttermilk. For the butter I used 700 ml of cream and whisked it until I got butter, I used my very modern stand mixer for the whisking. The butter was then flavoured with salt and a teaspoon or so with honey, while I used the buttermilk for the bread.

I also had some turnips that we put in the embers. They tasted good, but it was a bit hard to remove the charred outer skins from the turnips. Finally on the way to Rättvik I had passed my mother and picked up a big, bunch of nettles, so we made nettle soup. The nettle soup didn't have any recipe but it was nettles, some small yellow onions and a small parsnip, cooked until tender in stock (we used a modern stock cube).

All in all it was a real viking age feast, and a great escape from 2020. I will probably go up and visit more times in the summer. If you want to visit the camp it is open weekends the whole summer, but you need to prebook your visit, in order to be able to maintain social distancing they can't have too many visitors at once. Learn more at Ingvara.se, the site is in both Swedish and English.

Maids of honour - 16th century inspired tarts

The latest season of The Great British Bake Off had a technical challenge to make "Maids of Honur" which was said to have been a favorite of Henry VIII. Of course I had to try and do this 16th century-inspired recipe.

Since it's not my own recipe I will just provide the link to Prue Leith's Maids of Honour.

So yummy!

The recipe takes some time but was fairly easy. The result is delicious, among the best things I've baked in a long time. For people more into fantasy and cosplay than history this is definitely how I imagine the Lemon cakes that Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones loves so much.

There are some issues with this when it comes to historical accuracy. The major thing is that the recipe uses lemon curd, and from a quick google the earliest reference to lemon curd that I can find is fro 1844. There is an older version called "lemon cheese", and that is when you use lemon juice instead of vinegar (like in Prue's recipe) to curdle the cheese. I couldn't find references to this that were older than the 18th century though, but this was just a  quick check in my regular historical cooking references and google. I'm also hesitant about the use of a rough puff pastry. It's not impossible for the 16th century, the earliest recipes for regular puff pastry dates back to early 17th century and rough puff is just an easier version of it. In my experience it's more common with short crusts or even hot water crusts for tarts in the time period though.

I'm going to make these kind of cakes more, but I'm also curious about experimenting to see if I can find something more close to what they would have been like in the 16th century. First of course I need to check through the historical online recipe books, but I also have some ideas.

I would like to try a version where I use another kind of crust, and instead of lemon curd I could do the cheese curdle mix and add in preserved lemons or bitter oranges (pomerans). After all there are not many lemon trees growing in northern Europe, and we know that preserved citrus fruits were a favorite at the Swedish court in the time period. For spices I would definitely add in saffron and mace to start, but cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg are always good combinations as well. Some of the sugar can be replaced with honey as well, but this cake with its imported fruits and spices would only have been eaten at the court and they would have had access to sugar and not just honey.

A late evening Roman treat

Ok, I might not be totally sober, but what I just did has sparked quite a big discussion on my personal facebook page, so I figured it might be a good to save it for the future.

In these corona times I'm sitting at home on a Friday evening, drinking a glass of wine (or two) and feel a sudden urge for something sweet. I don't have anything sweet at home, but I can always bake something...I was thinking about donuts, but they involve yeast and proving, so then I started thinking about historical recipes for fried stuff, since they didn't have the same access to leavening as we have today. I checked one of my historical cookbooks, and found a recipe from De re coquinaria by Apicius. I also found a version of Apicius translated into English at Project Gutenberg.

This is Apicius recipe from book VII, or recipe 299:

TAKE A PREPARATION SIMILAR [1] [to the above] AND IN THE HOT WATER [bath or double boiler] MAKE A VERY HARD PORRIDGE OF IT. THEREUPON SPREAD IT OUT ON A PAN AND WHEN COOL CUT IT INTO HANDY PIECES LIKE SMALL COOKIES. FRY THESE IN THE BEST OIL, TAKE THEM OUT, DIP INTO [hot] HONEY, SPRINKLE WITH PEPPER [2] AND SERVE.

My version

1 cup of milk (or water)
3/4 cup of flour
oil for cooking (for an authentic Roman taste use olive oil)
honey
black pepper

Bring the milk to a boil. Stir in the flour and keep stirring over the heat for a minut or so, or until th dough don't stick to the sides o the pot. (think a choux pastry but without eggs)

Pour it onto a plate spread it out until it's 3-4 mm thick. Let it cool completely. The dough should be firm but still a bit sticky. Cut out whatever shapes you would like, I simply used my knife and made squares.

Heat the oil and fry a couple of pieces at a time. Place them on a paper towel to dry off the excess oil, and then on a plate. When all pieces are fried drizzle honey over them and finish with a sprinkle of black pepper.

They were soooooo yummy, this is absolutely a recipe that I will try in the future, and possible on a medieval event when I'm doing historical cooking.

Brown food is good food - a week with 1890's lunches

The last week I was home in isolation due to coming down with some cold symptoms (I feel fine now). Since I was working from home I decided to take the time to actually try out some food that was eaten in the period 1895-1906 in Falun, since the museum where I'm working are aiming to build up a living history part dedicated to that time period. Most of the food is very hearthy and simple with few ingredients.  Since I'm not doing hard manual labour for me it was definitely enough to have lunch, and then just a very light dinner because I was still full from the lunch. Also my dinners were almost all vegetarian, since the lunches were severly lacking in vegetables and it feelt good to eat something that wasn't just different shades of brown and beige.

The recipes are with one exception taken from the book Dalmål - från barkbröd till björnstek, by Kerstin Ankert et al., but I have modified them to be more suited for one person, and for a modern stove.

Sluring  - a recipe after Anna Johansson, wife of a brewery worker,  in Falun 1906.

Served with some crispbread and pickled greens

2-3 slices of thick bacon
200 ml milk
150 ml wheat flour

Fry the bacon in a pan and remove it but keep the fat in the pan. Mix the milk and flour into a batter and pour it in the pan. Let it simmer for 20 minutes and stir from time to time until it turns lightly yellow. Eat with the bacon.

This tasted as expected, and I like bacon so it was good.

Korngrynskaka or barley pudding - a recipe after the worker Axel Petterson in Fredshammar 1897

I forgot to take a photo of this dish

100 ml dried barley
1 small onion
1tblsp golden syrup (ljus sirap)
30 g butter/margarine/fat
300 ml milk
salt

Grease a baking dish and pour the barley into it. Chop and fry the onion in the fat until golden. Mix it with the barley and add the syrup and some salt. Pour the milk over it and put it in the oven at 175 degrees Celsius for 45-50 minutes, or until the barley has soaked up all the milk and is soft.
I don't like fried onions in gratins, some of my least favorite dishes in the traditional Swedish kitchen have golden syrup added to them so I was really sceptical, but it tasted surprisingly good.

Kolbotten with sauce

Kolbotten - recipe after Lena Johansson, a miner's wife, in Falun,1906
3 slices of bacon
150 ml flour
150 ml water
salt

Mix the water and flour and let it rest while you fry the bacon in a pan. Remove the bacon and pour the batter into the pan. Put a lid over the batter and let it fry on a low heat for 15-20 minutes, turning it once to make it even on both sides. The result is a quite thick pancake.

Sauce  - a "common dish for workers in Borlänge at the turn of the century"
25 g of fat (margarine/butter/bacon drippings)
1 tblsp of flour
200 ml water
one small onion
chives
salt

Use the same pan that you used for your bacon and kolbotten. Add in some more fat and let it melt. Whisk in the flour and when you have a thick paste you add the chopped onion and water. Whisk the sauce so that it is smooth and let it simmer on a low heat, be careful so that it doesn't burn, until the onions are soft. Add chives and salt for some extra flavour. The original recipe doesn't have chives, but it's such a common herb in other recipes from the same time so I didn't feel bad for using it.

Eat the kolbotten and bacon with the sauce poured over it. You can also substitute the kolbotten for boiled potatoes.

Klimp with mesost-sauce - recipe after Listen Mårtensson, wife of a painter, in Falun 1906

Klimp is basically the Swedish form of small dumpling, it's a great food because it's very cheap and filling. In Sweden it was common to cook the klimp in soup or stews and use them instead of potatoes or bread.

Klimp
50 g flour
30 ml milk
pinch of salt

Whisk the flour, salt and milk into a smooth batter. Boil up a generous amount of water, with salt in it. Take a spoonful of the batter at the time and drop it into the boiling water. The klimp rises to the surface when it's cooked through. It has a tendency to stick to the bottom so it might be good to use the spoon and make sure they can rise up.

Mesost-sauce
Mesost or in Norwegian brunost is a cheese made from the whey, and usually contains some amount of goats milk. It has a sweet taste that is a bit toffeelike. I really don't like mesost, so I used messmör (mes-butter) which is a softer, more mellow spread also made from whey but without any goat's milk.

1 tblsp fat (margarine or butter)
1 tbslp flour
200 ml milk
1 tblsp mesost or messmör

Make a roux from the fat and flour and whisk in the milk. When yout have the consistensy that you like add the mesost and stir it in until it as melted into the sauce.

This was sooooo good, and definitely my favorite dish of the week. I added some chives to the serving.

And finally something sweet to go with all the savory dishes

Bärkaka or berry cake - from a description Selma Ström's Hemma på Elsborg, a book about growing up in Falun around the year 1900.

Spisbröd

25 g margarine or butter
400 ml flour
1 tsp baking powder
0,5 tsp salt
200 ml sourmilk (filmjölk)

100 g frozen berries (or fresh if you have them, should be lingonberries but I used a mix of currants and strawberries)
golden syrup (ljus sirap)

Melt the margarine/butter and let it cool. Mix the flour, salt and baking powder. Add the fat and the sourmilk. Take up the dough and use a rolling pin to make really flat round cakes and prick them with a fork. Fry the cakes in a dry and hot pan, around 2 minutes on each side. When they are finished place them under a towel to keep them warm.

Heat the fruit until it's soft and mash it with a fork. Take a cake and spread a generous layer of the berry mash on it and sprinkle some golden syrup over it

16th century ornamentation

From lightsabers and jedi it's back to the 16th century. Today I had the joy of reading an original manuscript from the year 1520. The texts have been transcribed and are available in a book frm 1997, but I was really interested in the original for some other reasons. As an historical recreator I was curious about the ornamentation of the script, since this is a book that was made in Sweden in 1520 it would give a lot of information on style and elements. In the printed book there is also a note that there is a recipe in the original, but since that is more of a scribble they hadn't included that.

You are not allowed to take photos of the original, but I tried to copy the designs by hand. The book was a very expensive items, it's made from vellum with illuminated golden initials. Still not all illuminations are finished, and a lot of the elements surrounding the golden intitials are quite uneven and look almost hastily done.

The most common element was this, that I called the snowdrop.It's not always mirrored, they are sometimes just upright and they also some times have four stems, with two in each direction and all of them of different height. After the stems it's usually three horizontal lines and it ends with a Z lying down. Sometimes it's just two horizontal lines before the Z.

Sometimes the snowdrop has a more solid part at the top and on the larger ones the tip of the solid part is sometimes filled with ink. It occurs facing in both directions.

On one page there was this little simple scrolling element. I added the top and bottom straight lines to help me draw th scroll, it wasn't there in the manuscript.

I feel really inspired by these ornaments, and I will definitely see if I can incorporate them in my 1520s court gown project somehow.

As for the recipe, well unfortunately my reading of 16th century handwriting isn't the best, and unlike most of the text this looked liked something that was just scribbled down on an available piece of paper. It is a list of things that were eaten during the Walpurgis celebrations. Unless the recipe actually calls for "porgs", which I find unlikely, I just couldn't make out anything except that you should finish it off with saffron. To the dish with the recipe they also had one long pig and one little pig.

Under the recipe there is a list of other foodstuffs, which also gives an insight in the household. The list contains

Cod, herring and stock fish, pork, beer (two kinds), butter (two kinds) bread (two kinds) and spirit vinegar.

The separation of the foodstuff gives a view of the first part, where you have saffron and pigs (probably meaning fresh meat and not salted pork) where for the feast and the noble family, while the other list is made up of simpler food that presumable was consumed as everyday food, and some of it probably by the servants as well. The separation of two different kinds of bread, butters and beers is likely a separation of the quality of the items, where the noble family's food was of the higher quality while servants had to make do with food of a lesser quality.

Food and snowball fight - Sten Stures ben celebration

The 19th of January is the anniversary of the Battle of Åsunden, where the Swedish regent Sten Sture lost his leg, and later died from the infection. This is celebrated through "Sten Stures ben" (the leg of Sten Sture) where you have snowball fights and eat chocolate balls. For more info on the battle, in Swedish, you can visit my Historiekullan blog. In 2020 it's 500 years since the battle, and our small 16th century group in Falun decided to celebrate it with a proper feast. Unfortunately we have the worst winter I can remember this year so there is no snow on the ground. When we arrived at the feast we had a discussion about finding snow that still remained in some ditches along the way, but that was it. Then some surpise guests turned up - and they had brought snow with them in a portable freeze box!

Snowballs and chocolate balls are ready

By now it was dark though so I don't have any photos of the glorious snowball fight that ensued. We basically put the freeze box with the snow in the middle and then it was about running to the freeze box grabbing snow and throwing it towards the other team.  Then we ate the totally non-historical chocolate balls.

I had finished my new shift, but since it was cold and dark I only have pictures of me wearing my gollar over it, so it's not visible. I wore my green longsleeved 1520's gown and I lent a friend my mustard kirtle and high collared shift so that she could join in for the feast.

For the feast I brought two dishes that I've worked on for a while and feel that I can share with you.

Hunters pudding

Hunters pudding, from the summer

The Hunters pudding comes from Townsend and Sons 18th century cooking and the recipe is available in both video and written format.

Here is my version of the recipe

300 g wheat flour
300 g of fat*
300 g of dried** fruits in small pieces
Peel of 1 lemon or lime (or candided lime or orange - suckat)
3 whole eggs
50-100 ml of milk
1 tsp ginger
1 tsp nutmeg

Put a big pot of water on the stove and bring it to a boil.

Mix the flour fat and fruit untill it feel almost like a crumble, with the fat and fruits all coated by the flour. Add the eggs and then milk until you have a fairly sticky dough. Depending on how dry the fruit is and how big the eggs are you migth need more or less milk. Add the spices, at least a tsp but even better more.

Take a piece of cloth, for historical accuracy use linen, I use a clean cotton towel. Put the towel in the boiling water until it's totally soaked. Then place it in a bowl. Sprinkle flour over the whole cloth, It's really important (I've learnt this the hard way) that all the fabric that will be in contact with the dough has flour on it. Place the dough in the middle of the cloth, wrap it up and tie it all together with a string. Tie it tight, the pudding will expand a bit, due to the eggs, but not too much. Put the cloth package int the pot of boiling water. I tie the package to the handle of the pot, so that the package doesn't drop to the bottom and comes in contact with the direct heat. Boil for 3,5-4 hours. It's hard to overboil a pudding, if you feel through the package it should feel firm and not squishy. I have better been safe than sorry and had it boiling for some more time. Cut the string and unwrap the cloth - eat.

* I have tried this recipe with butter, lard and margarine. Butter and lard both influence the flavours a bit. I definitely prefer butter to lard, but I actually think margarine works best. I would love to get my hand on suet one day and try it, but I've never seen that in Sweden.
** I try to use at least 100 g of xanthe currants (korinter), but for the reast it has been a mix of dried plums, dates, apricots, green raisins or regular raisins. All depending on what I've had at home.

Century and location - 17th-18th century, England
Difficulty level - low
Time - it takes a loooooong time to boil
Vegetarian - It contains eggs, milk and fat, the fat can definitely be substituted for margarine and the milk with water.

Onions in cumin* sauce

My other recipe comes from the great site Medieval Cookery. which in turns links to a web edition of a late 15th century cookbook in Dutch. The web edition has the original text, the modern Dutch and English versions side by side so you can compare them. This is a great side dish, with a surprisingly mild flavor to the onions.

250 g of baby onions - also known as pearl or boiler onions, max 35 mm in size (steklök eller pärllök)
400 ml of almond milk
2 slices of bread, made into bread crumbs
1 tsp cummin (spiskummin)
0,25 g saffron
1 tsp salt

Peel the onions and put them in a small pot. Cover them with almond milk, add in the bread crumbs. If you use fresh slices of bread remove the crust. Add the spices and bring to a boil. Once it boils let it simmer until the onions are tender. If you need to add more almond milk, to cover the onions, and the sauce gets too thin, just add more bread.

My version is a very thick stew, as a side dish it might be nice to make the sauce thinner and then just pick up the onions and don't eat so much of the sauce. The thickness of the sauce only depends on how much bread you add to the almond milk.

*cumin is spiskummin in Swedish, not kummin!

Century and location - Dutch 15th century
Difficulty level - low
Time - short
Vegan - it's a totally vegan dish.

Renaissance plum pie

With the summer over I'm going to share some of the recipes that I have been working on and cooked. One of my new aquisitions is this book.

The title translated into English is "Renaissance food - recipes and food history from the time of the Vasa monarchs", which basically means food from the 16th and early 17th century. It is a modern cookbook, but it notes where they have exchanged older ingredients for modern equivalents. It also has a lot of fact texts inbetween the recipes. Overalll it's a great and fun book, even if I would have liked some clearer references on where exactly the recipes come from. One of the recipes is a cherry pie, based on an early 17th century recipe from the Brahe family (really the highest nobility in Sweden at the time). The recipe is a cherry pie, and I didn't have any cherries, I also didn't get the pastry to work when I followed the recipe so this is really my interpretation of a renaissance pie.

Plum pie

pie pastry
600 ml of wheat flour
50 g sugar
1 egg
25 g butter
50 ml water

Mix the flour, sugar, egg and butter. I used a food processor. Add the water until the pastry comes together and forms a ball. Let it rest in the fridge for 30 minutes.

Filling
400 g fresh plums
100 g of mixed dried fruits (I used green raisins and zante currants/korinter)
2 slices of white bread
25 g butter
50 g sugar
50 ml sweet wine (I used port wine)
1-2 teaspoons cinnamon
1-2 teaspoons cardamon
1-2 teaspoons lemon juice

Eggwash
1 beaten egg

Take off the crust of the bread ans fry the crumbs in the butter until lightly brown. Chop the plums and fruit into fairly large pieces. Add the sugar, bread, spices and wine and use a big spoon to mush it all together. Make sure the bread soaks up the liquid so that the filling doesn't get too wet.

Take the pie pastry, cut it in half and roll it into two equal sized round discs. Place one in a baking tin with removable sides. Make sure that the pastry goes up a centimeter or two on the sides. Add the filling. Place the pie lid on top and crimp the sides. Make a whole in the lid, to allow steam from the filling to escape during the baking. Brush the top with the eggwash and place it in the oven.

Bake in 200 degrees celsius for 35-40 minutes.

This recipe gives a fairly flat pie. The pie pastry isn't crumbly, but is tougher and more chewy. It makes it easy to hold the pie in the hands when you are eating it.

Frumenty - perfect for historical breakfast or lunch

This Sunday morning I decided to do somthing extra with my breakfast so I made frumenty. Frumenty is found in cookbooks from the Middle Ages and into the 18th century. It is a good exampl of the changing taste of the people eating the food. In the Middle Ages it is mentioned as a staple and it should be served together with lamb or veal. In the 18th century though it is considered as a food suitable for invalids.

Frumenty is basically a porridge made from wheat berries. There is a difference between the medieval and 18th century recipes. In the 18th century it is cooked with milk, and even sometimes with cream, while the medieval recipes has it made with water and just a bit of milk or almond milk. The almond milk was to be used during lent and other fasting periods when you should not eat dairy. The option with almond milk of course makes it easy to turn this into a vegan dish.

This is a medieval recipe for frumenty for two persons. Swedish translations of some of the words are in italics.

100 ml wheat berries (matvete)
200 ml water
75 ml milk or almond milk
pinch of salt
pinch of saffron
handfull of xanté currants (korinter) or raisins
1 egg yolk (skip for a vegan meal)

Pour everything except the egg yolk into a pot and simmer on a low heat for around 15 minutes. Take a spoonful of the warm mixtures and whisk it with the egg yolk before adding all the egg to the pot. This s to temper the egg yolk so it doesn't turn into scrambled eggs when added to the porridge. Stir until the mixture has thickened.

A recipd with both currants and saffron is a recipe for the upper classes. To make it a more lower class meal you can remove those. If you want to really show off your wealth you add not just a pinch but a lot of saffron and even some sugar on top.

The taste of the medieval frumenty is pretty bland, it is a porridge after all. I think that the 18th century version, that is richer due to the milk, is better and more suited to my taste of what a porridge should taste like. It is very filling though and you will not go hungry after a bowl of frumenty. It is a very easy recipe though and I recommend it for warm breakfast or lunch.

The great 18th century cookshow Townsend and Sons have an episode when they make 18th century frumenty. They take the time to remove the husks from the wheat berry, I didn't bother about that this morning.

Medieval chicken with almonds and grapes

Today is the first of May and I have invited my mother, sister, and brother-in-law to a spring dinner. I'm going to serve a medieval recipe of chicken that I've worked on for the last year. The first time I did it I made it as a filling for pies that I brought to Tuna Ting. This recipe is more of a stew, if you want it as a filling you need to thicken it more, or simply fish out the meat and vegetables from the broth.

This recipe is not based on a particular recipe from a certain cookbook. Almonds and almond milk were really popular in the time period and variations of cooking meat in almond milk comes up in several cookbooks. The combination of almonds and grapes is still found around the Mediterranean. Today when non-dairy milk products have become a lot more common it is fun to use them when cooking medieval food. Make sure that you get natural and and unsweetened almond milk though. Of course for the most historically accurate version you can make the almond milk yourself. 

This is a recipe for the upper class, and would have been a real rarity up in the North, where you don't exactly have a lot of fresh grapes. It is more likely that they would have used zante currants (korinter) instead if trying to make it up here. If you want to make it even more luxurious add some saffron to it.

This is the base recipe, I will give you vegetarian/vegan and camp-friendly versions at the end.

Ingredients

700 g chicken cut in cubes

4 schalottes, finely chopped

2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped

2-3 handfulls of green grapes

500-600 ml of almond milk.

2-3 egg yolks

fat to fry in.

Fry the schalottes and garlic until they are shiny and translucent, but not brown. Add the chicken and let it get some colour, but don't brown it. Add the almond milk and the grapes and let it simmer until the chicken is cooked through. Whisk the egg yolks in a bowl, add a 100-200 ml of the broth and whisk it in, then add the egg mixture to the main stew and whisk while heating it. The eggs add thickness, if it doesn't thicken enough you can use flour or starch to thicken it, preferably wheat.

Add some fresh grapes on top when you serve it.

Serve with: For a medieval serving I serve it with bread, rice or roasted turnips (majrovor) and some pickled onions.

Vegetarian and vegan versions

This is a recipe that is easy to make vegetarian or vegan versions of. I have switched the chicken for turnips, and that gives it a stronger flavour. Simply cook the turnips until just through, there should be some resistance to them and not a mush. For the vegan version you need to thicken it without the eggs, either with modern starches or if you can find wheat starch. Regular wheat flour can also be used as a thickening agent.

At a camp

Everytime you work with chicken you have to think about the hygiene. In the summer and in a place where you don't have access to a dishwasher, or at least a lot of hot water, it's possible to substitute the raw chicken for pre-grilled chicken. Fry the onions, add the almond milk, bring it to a boil and add the the egg yolks. As a final step take the pre-cocked chicken, remove any skin if it had one, shred it and put it in the almond sauce.

An historical Christmas bake

Earlier in the autumn I had a survey on my facebook page if people wanted me to share my historical recipes on my blog, since I have been asked from time to time for them. Enough people wanted me to post them on the blog, so I will do it from time to time. The blog is not going to turn into a food blog, I will just limit it to when I actually do historical cooking.

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)

My Christmas kitchen quartet (as I call my favorite decorations) inspects the result. The kringle is at the top, the gingerbrea is the round one (I tried to stamp it but the pastry was too stiff to be able to make a nice pattern) and the fennel biscuit is the square one.