Medieval cooking – or the Sarum Kitchen!

I’m not going to go the way of Fr Z with his excellent Italian and American recipes, but I thought I would write about a special dish I prepared for my wife, as it was her birthday. I wanted to do something unusual and really good, so I thought of pre-Reformation England, a culture heavily influenced by the Normans in more than the Rouen / Sarum liturgy.

I simply searched Google and found a whole site of medieval recipes. Here is the homepage of this excellent site. The medieval recipes I have seen show no quantities, as the cook is assumed to know what he or she is doing. It leaves a lot of space for initiative and personal taste. The recipe is given in Middle English, a modern English translation, and finally an adaptation for modern kitchens, available foodstuffs and familiar methods. Fascinating.

I know very little about the history of cookery and how things changed after the Reformation, when one began to eat to live and not live to eat! My time in Europe has exposed me to the traditions in France and Italy contrasted with the blander fare of northern Germany and Switzerland. My own mother was brought up in a southern English home between the wars, and she learned the art of doing the standard English roasts and “making do” with little during the week. She grew up during the Depression years and lived through the war in her early teens. The woman I married was brought up by a good conscientious mother who simply lacked any talent in the kitchen. After years of burnt pig’s liver and various other “delights”, my Sophie applied herself to cooking meals that are truly nourishing and make the pleasure and convivialité of the family table. She spent time as an au-pair girl in Rome in the 1980’s, and thus learned real Italian family cooking.

Myself, I have lived many years alone in various places and took with me what I had learned from my mother. Some days it had to be quick and easy, and most of the time dirt cheap. As a student in London, I scoured the supermarkets and butcher’s shops for offcuts of bacon and belly pork. Cheap meat with potatoes, cabbage, fruit and vitamin supplements enable one to get to the end of term on very little! Later, I tended to learn along the way, especially in the presbytery near Le Mans where I spent a while with the good parish priest.

Good cooking is quite tiresome and time-consuming, but when you get the right idea, it can be fun. For the past couple of days, the theme of medieval English cuisine filled my mind – but what? I found Brawn en Peuerade , and I was sold on it. So I checked the kitchen cupboards and found we had all the spices, but I needed to go and buy the meat, some diced bacon to add to the taste, and some fresh ginger if I could find it. I also needed a bag of small onions. After filling the van with diesel and buying a vase of flowers (we bought her main present a few days ago in Rouen), I returned home and got to work.

I introduced a few slight variations, and it was all successful. The ingredients, to my surprise, were the spices used for making vin chaud here in France. There’s the Norman influence in our culture, and more so in the medieval era. Since then, with the Reformation, our more Germanic and Saxon aspects came to the fore. Anyway, the four spices are cinnamon, cloves, mace and pepper. The equivalent of one and a half bottles of red wine went into the pot – don’t worry, I used vin ordinaire. The meat is pork without too much fat, but a little of it to give “character”, and I added diced bacon. Chicken can be used, but I went for the good hog – Dans le cochon tout est bon! Red wine vinegar is added and finally grated fresh ginger. The medieval recipe indicates sandalwood to give a red colouring, but I omitted that. Why bother?

As for most stews, I fried the pieces of pork and the onions in the meat juice. The bacon also needed to be fried. The wine went into the pot – a heavy cast iron pot, and I added the spices. After it comes to the boil, strain the wine to get rid of the cinnamon residue – or you can use cinnamon sticks which are removed before serving. Then add the onions and meat and bring to a simmer. I then added the grated ginger, lots of it, and then the wine vinegar. I tasted the liquid and found it rather bitter. There is no mention in the medieval recipe of sweetening. Honey is what was used for many things in those days, as there was only beet sugar. I found a pot of good monastic honey and added some local farm honey from around here, lashings of it. I had worried a little about using honey, but honey-roasted ham is a favourite in America and England. It turned out just great.

It all needs patience and time for the flavours to mix. The aim is to get a right balance of acid, bitter and sweet. I overdid the honey a little, and had to add a little more vinegar to restore the balance. I left the pot simmer for about two hours and let the sauce reduce to about half its original volume.

The dish was accompanied by something that was on no English table in the fifteenth century, a potato. The potato was discovered in the New World and brought to Europe by the Spanish in the sixteenth century. So much for authenticity, but the oven baked potato went very well. I found a nice Côtes de Rhône at home and made an apple tart for dessert.

I will be going back to the medieval recipe website for more!