Medieval Recipe Advice

[footfootfoot]

Please don't mock this thread. I am having a theme party and would like to serve old food. I'm too tired to finish this properly, someone else take over.
Love

[Big Sarge]

large racks of ribs, whole roasted chickens, ham shanks. serve big chunks of greasy meat that needs to be gnawed on. use large round bread loaves and tear off chunks. a pungent cheese round goe along nicely. for drink, use horn cups or goblets filled with mead

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Big Sarge

large racks of ribs, whole roasted chickens, ham shanks. serve big chunks of greasy meat that needs to be gnawed on. use large round bread loaves and tear off chunks. a pungent cheese round goe along nicely. for drink, use horn cups or goblets filled with mead

Sarge, that's not Medieval; that's RenFaire -- its roots are sunk in Hollywood not history.

Something more on-target might be such as these, by search on "SCA recipes":

Medieval SCA recipes

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/food.html -- go mining through the links presented

Feast Food Recipes -- scroll down, scroll down, scroll down... main text and sidebar, looks like.

SCA Trail Bread The comparatively low 375F baking temp makes for chewy bread. I've seen this kind of thing before.

SCA Potluck

Selections from the first page -- of 1.23M hits. Go crazy!

And yeah, you can probably find recipes for lampreys or jellied eels if you look hard enough. No SCA feast or revel I've ever been to was that hardcore, though. Meat pies... a fair mess of meat pies...

[infinite monkey]

Apparently, the midievalites were heavy into barley.

Their comprehensive cookbook was called Barley & Me.

And ale. You need ale.

[wolf]

And some plover's eggs.

Suggestion ... watch Game of Thrones and serve whatever they're having ...

[wolf]

Actually, as an experienced renfaire participant, you'll be wanting things like turkey legs, meat on skewers (steak upon a stake), scotch eggs, and so on. Ale and mead to wash everything down. And if you can arrange for some dogs to wander about the banqueting hall to eat the leavings, I think you'll have it.

Bless the interwebz. You can find anything you need.

[skysidhe]

Served in bread bowls and eaten with knifes. No forks, no spoons.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by skysidhe

Served in bread bowls and eaten with knifes. No forks, no spoons.

Spoons, always, always. Table forks of the Middle Ages, Renaissance onward, and only spottily used at first, popular first in Italy. Two tines.

The bread bowl is a latterday mutant edition of the bread trencher -- the first sliced bread, incidentally. Loaf bread, the crusts cut away, trimmed into square, stiff slabs for pretty, usually five per diner: four in a square on the tablecloth, the fifth pyramided upon the middle of the square and stuff transferred or served to that. The pantler had a set of special knives to do the job for setting the table. They took their soups and stews in bowls back in the day. They would have been quite amused at the stew in a bread bowl, and would likely have adopted it, but I don't hear they actually came up with that one.

Kidding aside, I still take my medieval and medieval-oid food seriously.

[wolf]

Oh yeah, pa renfaire was big on soup in a bread bowl.

[Trilby]

I thought medieval food was synonymous with disgusting food?

Like roast pidgeons, roast sparrow and lark, lampreys and eels and things that look like Alien, ONIONS GALORE! and for desert - a lemon; the sweetest fruit known at the time.

[infinite monkey]

Sheesh, just come here: cabbage soup? What, is that like one step above 'gruel'?

[Sundae]

Potage - thick vegetable stew, sieved into a thick soup.
And yes, they used to have it on "trenchers" of bread, but served in bowls with bread (or bowls OF bread) is perfectly acceptable. It's VERY filling though, so perhaps just offer it as a veggie option.

Bri - lemons weren't grown here, so they wouldn't have been a common dessert. They would be imported from Europe with oranges which would have been far more popular. Pastries made with nuts and honey are more likely. The rich had access to a number of different types of sugar and used it extensively, even in savoury dishes.

Oh and contrary to the opinion that meat was always served with highly spiced sauces to hide the taste of it going off, meat was available all year round, fresh off the hoof or wing, but spices came from half a world and years away. Sauces were popular, but more likely used with English herbs like borage, sage, thyme, rosemary, parsley and chives. Garlic grows wild here and was used extensively to flavour food.

Puddings were also common - savoury puddings made with animal fat (suet). They are declining in popularity now, but even I grew up on steak & kidney pudding and beef pudding.

What do you have against the other food, Brianna? I've eaten pigeon, lampreys and eels. Yumyum.

(Can you tell I've just done both Tudors and Castles at school?)

[footfootfoot]

OK I am calling off this thread as a singular failure of a clone thread. I was too tired to do it properly. This has never happened before. It must be stress.

[wolf]

Originally Posted by footfootfoot

OK I am calling off this thread as a singular failure of a clone thread. I was too tired to do it properly. This has never happened before. It must be stress.

Shame. It's a great party idea.

[Sundae]

You know what?
I thought it was a clone to start with - but I have PP on ignore so I wasn't sure.

When I saw other people answering sensibly I really thought I was being helpful

Would you please consider having a Medieval Banquet just to try all this out?