Medieval Diet on hold - again

Last time, it was because I didn't have a kitchen for a couple of days. This time, I'm sick. I have pneumonia and the medication I need to take requires food. This means fasting is out the window. I'll probably go back to it Holy Week (next week, the week after Palm Sunday) but from now until Monday, the diet is on hold while I get better.

Medieval Salmon Dinner

14th Century French Fresh Salmon recipe:

Fresh salmon. Smoked (keep the chine for roasting), cut into steaks, and then cooked in water; [add] some wine and salt while cooking; eaten with Yellow Pepper [Sauce] or Cameline [Sauce]. Some dry it again (for eating) on the grill. In a pie (if you wish) powdered with spices; eaten with Cameline [Sauce].

If it is salted: cooked in water without salt; eaten with wine and chopped scallion. 

I cooked it in a 50/50 mix of red wine and salt water because it's frozen.  ;-p   

Honestly, it just sounded like it would go better with the Cameline sauce if I cooked it that way. I set the oven to 390F and cooked it for about 20 minutes since I only have one small steak for me.

The Cameline sauce:

15th Century English version

Sauce gamelyne. Take faire brede, and kutte it, and take vinegre and wyne, & stepe þe brede therein, and drawe hit thorgh a streynour with powder of canel, and drawe hit twies or thries til hit be smoth; and þen take pouder of ginger, Sugur, and pouder of cloues, and cast þerto a litul saffron and let hit be thik ynogh, and thenne serue hit forthe.
Translation: Cameline sauce. Take white bread and cut it; and take vinager and wine, and seep the bread in it. Then put it through a strainer and add cinnamon, and draw it two or three times until it is smooth; and then take powdered ginger, sugar, and powdered cloves and put those in with a little saffron and then when it is thick enough, serve forth.

14th Century French version

155. Cameline: To Make Cameline Sauce. Grind ginger, a great deal of cinnamon, cloves, grains of paradise, mace, and if you wish, long pepper; strain bread that has been moistened in vinegar, strain everything together and salt as necessary
My version:

1/2 cup breadcrumbs
1/3 cup red wine vinegar
1/3 cup red wine
1 tablespoon cinnamon
1 whole long pepper
about 3 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon ginger (probably more)
1/2 teaspoons cloves
1 pinch of safforn

I used the good ole very medieval blender (it's a nutra bullet) to mix this all up and then heated it up until it had the consistency of apple sauce.

How was it? I am so glad I made a ton of the cameline sauce because it is delicious! The salmon is just a sauce conveyer. ;-)

16th Century Lenten Pasta Dish

255. Several ways to make and cook macaroni for a day in Lent.

Get a pound of fine flour and a pound of grated bread that has been put through a fine sieve, and make up a dough with boiling water and olive oil mixed with a little saffron.  On a table make the dough so it is not too firm, but well mixed together.  When it is warmed up make the gnocchi - that is, macaroni- on the cheese grater and put them to cook in lightly salted boiling water.  When they are done, take them out and put them into an earthenware or wooden vessel, putting on them a garlic sauce made with ground walnuts, cloves of garlic, pepper and breadcrumb that has been moistened in hot water.  Mix everything together and serve it garnished with pepper and cinnamon.   - The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi (1570) translated by Terence Scully

So, I didn't make the macaroni. I did call up my Mom and ask if I was a bad Italian for using Penne rather than macaroni. She laughed - not only does she do the same thing but my great Aunt (who is 93) called Mom up a few minutes before to ask a similar question - but in regards to chicken broth. Basically, I'm not a bad Italian and it's hereditary. :-)

Sorry I haven't made anything for the Historical Fortnightly in about a month. I was going to make gingerbread last week (sandlewood and long pepper!) but I ended up getting wrapped up in other things.

Anyway, back to the not-macaroni. I cooked whole wheat penne in salt water. Not exactly difficult.

The sauce recipe:

1/2 cup of breadcrumbs
1/2 cup of warm water
1/2 tablespoon of garlic powder
1 teaspoon ish of black pepper
1/2 cup of walnuts - ground up
1 teaspoon of salt

I first ground up the walnuts in the very period blender. I also added hot water to my already somewhat ground up breadcrumbs because I really was going to make gingerbread and just never got around to it. Since I didn't have garlic cloves (mine were dead), I used garlic powder. I threw this all in the pot to heat up with pepper. Unfortunately, it had the consistency of...vomit. Really, there is no other way to describe it. So, I added some more water and threw the sauce into the blender. About 20 seconds later, it looked much more like a sauce. However, it tasted like garlic flavored breadcrumbs. So I added salt which helped a lot - now it tastes like garlic bread on pasta. :-) I probably could add some olive oil to the mix to make it more yummy for a modern pallet.

This is after adding the cinnamon and even more pepper on the pasta dish. It really looks like a white sauce on pasta. Later in the recipe, it says a green sauce is also good. I might try that later.

Almond Milk and Rice

I made this rice dish a few days ago and realized I never posted the entire recipe!  I did mention it way back in 2012 - and I've made it every year during lent since then.

So, first, the various period recipes.  There are a lot:

• Rice with Almond Milk, Forme of Cury 
• Rice in a good manner, 14th/15th c Italian 
• Rice with Almond Milk, 15th C Italian 
• Rice, 15th C English 
• Yet another Rice dish, 16th C Netherlands 

Trust me, there are even more. They are all basically the same - rice, boiled in almond milk, with sugar. Sometimes you add more things, like cinnamon or raisins, sometimes you don't. For me, I add a lot of stuff because it's delicious.


Recipe:

1/2 cup Rice
2/3 cup Almond Milk
2 tablespoons sugar or to taste
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ginger
2 carrots
a couple handfuls of raisins or as much as you like


Boiling the rice is pretty basic - I tend to boil it over a medium heat.  Just boil it in the almond milk - our rice is WAY fresher than what they got in the middle ages so that boil and reboil thing isn't necessary.   Add the sugar to the almond milk.   Add the chopped carrots about halfway through it being cooked.  I like using the heritage carrots (if you look at the photo, you'll see a white carrot!) but regular modern carrots are fine.  About a couple of minutes before it's done, add the spices and the raisins - you don't want the raisins to swell up too much.

I eat this a lot.  It's sweet (because of the sugar) but it's also pretty good for you.  It has raisins, carrots, and almonds.   I made this on Thursday and it's just as good as I remembered.  ;-)

Friday's Dinner

Now that the kitchen is back in order (one of my brothers was kind enough to come over and help me move the fridge and stove back in place), I can cook again!  While on the mini break, I fasted most of the day and ate steamed shrimp with garlic ginger sauce on rice (Chinese food) at night.  Not exactly too terribly exotic, really.  In both Italy and England, there are mentions of shrimp (prawns), garlic, ginger, and rice during the 15th and 16th centuries. 

All I really wanted yesterday was hot chocolate and hummus.  So that's what I had.

Today, it was toast, olives, and olive oil with herbs to dip the toast in for lunch.  For dinner, I'm making Apple Pie but I crushed up the cinnamon sugar pita chips I had on hand for the upper crust (the original Italian recipe calls for cookies).  I'm also making some more apple flavored Sekajanbin but with a small difference - I used only the red apple flavored vinegar this time.  It's loosely based off of this 13th Century recipe for an apple syrup as well as the traditional sekajanbin recipe. 

EDIT:  Forgot to add the new crust recipe.

1 cup sugar
1 1/2 cup flour
1 cup of almond milk (probably could have used less)
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon

It's much better than the previous lenten recipe I've used.  It's much fluffier for lack of a better word.   It still needs *something* so I'll keep playing with it. 

Fixing up the kitchen

This week, I had a new tile kitchen floor installed - which is 1000%  better than what I had before.  Apparently, I had corkboard and vinyl stickers (yeah, I don't know either.)

However, once the floor was installed, the new baseboard didn't match at all and I could finally see the wall behind the fridge and oven...and it needed to be painted.  Badly.

What you see is the decades of paint this house has been through.  Pink in the 1950's.  The super bright yellow chartreuse right in the "seam" of the wall is from the 1960's.  The I'm not sure if it's a sunny lime or a not yet ripe lemon from the 1970's makes up the majority of the wall in the left side of the photo.  I should also point out, this was after I cleaned the wall.  It was even scarier before that.   This is what was hiding behind my fridge and oven.

So, I went to my home goods thrift store, the Community Forklift, which is just a few miles down the road from me.  I wasn't looking for exact matches to anything - I wanted to see what they had.  I knew I wanted a "sandy" color for the background, a terracota color for the bricks, and a glossy tardis blue for the new baseboard.   (More on that later)

I amazingly found all three for $2.50 at the thrift store.  I was shocked to find the glossy tardis blue but extremely happy.  I figured terracotta and sandy were fairly normal colors.  

I already had plastic wrap, blue tape, and some brushes so, really, all I needed was the paint.
First, I painted the tricolored wall with the sandy paint.

It looks splotchy in the photo because I had just finished putting on the second coat.  At this point, it already looked WAY WAY better than it did before.  I could have left it there but I wanted something cool and something that, when I sell my house in a couple of months, others will think is nice.  ...Meaning I couldn't paint in an elven door or a Tardis.   Although the wall is pretty well hidden when you glance at the kitchen, it's not when you are doing dishes at the sink.

The next day, I taped off the bricks - which was a LOT easier than I expected.

Since this is behind the fridge and the oven, I didn't care about perfection.  Not all the lines are exactly the same but they are all close.  The "bricks" are supposed to be the same size as the panel ones for consistencies sake - 7 1/2" by 2 1/2".  Once I got the horizontal lines up - which involved measuring every 2 1/2"- I then started on the vertical.  Once you have the first two rows done, it's just about copying those all the way down - no more measuring!   Pretty simple and then you paint!

I am a very messy painter.  Even if a little bit of the paint ends up outside of the edges, it's no big deal with this faux paint - they are supposed to be bricks!   Bricks sometimes have little notches or there are places where the mortar just didn't quite cover.  It's fine.

I waited two hours - I only did one coat- and then ripped all the tape off the wall much to my pup's amusement.

You can just see Abby's tail and back at the bottom of the photo.   Like I said, it's not perfect, but it's far less visually abrasive than the paint colors of the 3rd quarter of the 20th century was.  I'm pretty sure this will blend in with what is up on the walls now (and I can't take off because they put the cabinets over it) and won't jar anyone doing the dishes.  

Medieval Lenten Diet on Hold

There is one key thing you need to do the medieval diet properly - and that is a fully working kitchen.  Although I probably could run over to the Shepherd's Hut and use the portable stove - I don't really have a safe place to put it in my house right now.

My project of the day - besides sewing- is fixing the kitchen floor.  This meant that both the fridge and the stove had to be moved out of the kitchen.  Although the fridge works fine - it can be plugged in anywhere- the stove can't.  (Different plug and different amps).   Given that the ground is completely frozen - literally, we had an ice storm- I can't go outside and start a fire either.  I don't have a fireplace - one of the many reason I want to sell this place- so...the only thing I have is a microwave oven.  ...Which isn't very good at cooking medieval food.

For the next two days, I'm going to stick to the general rules (no meat) but I'm also going to have a pb&j and some root beer.  :-)