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Food history

Medieval soup of root vegetable with pork bacon

Medieval stew & soup of my own making

For the marked event we attended this weekend I made a medieval stew and a soup for our lunch. It was a cold windy and rainy weekend, so eating hearty medieval dishes was perfect.

To make dishes that ordinary people ate in the past you often have to attack it with imagination and knowledge rather than historical sources, because there are so few. This weekend I wanted to make lunch for us two days at a medieval marked event at Vistkøl Monastery. We had a wonderful event and got to talk to a lot of people about spices and mulled wine. For lunch I made a stew and a soup using the knowledge I have of period cooking. I will share the recipes and my thinking below.

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The medieval stew served with a bit of smoked mackerel

Medieval vegetables stew with pork

We know that people ate a lot of dishes with grain and pulses and that the most common meats eaten was salted pork and fish. Kale and cabbage was also very common ingrediens. This is my base for the stew I made Saturday. I used a stew I found in a book from Ribe Vikinge Center as a base, but adapted it to what I had at hand. Keep Reading

The spices used in the medieval mulled wine

We make two different traditional medieval mulled wines for the marked events we go to, hypocrates & lutendranck. The recipes we use are from a danish medical and cook book from the late 1500’s but the recipes goes back to at least the 1300’s. I have looked into the history of the individual spices before, but have forgotten most of the research I did, so it is time to do re-search it again. So where did the medieval spices come from and how were they used? #AskMeAboutMyGainsOfParadiseAgenda

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Lordly sauce

Lordly sauce is a medieval spice sauce made with spices and vinegar. This is quite a high end sauce because of the amount of spices in it.

The recipe is from Libellus de Arte Coquinaria, which is the compilation of several northern European cookbooks and manuals from the middle of the 1200’s. It is the first cookbook in Danish and I plan to put all 25 recipes up on the site when I get to them.

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Almond butter in a foodprocessor

Almond butter

Homemade almond butter – a great butter substitute both for contemporary dishes and for medieval ones. Almond butter is a healthy alternative to butter. It’s easy to make and it taste totally yummy.

I made almond butter today. Why because I wanted to try to it kept showing up in contemporary and medieval recipes.
Nowadays we make almond butter as a healthy butter substitute. However in medieval times they made it for lent.

In the middle ages on fast days, Christians were not allowed to eat animal products (from mammals that is), such as butter. The alternatives were mostly olive oil for cooking and almond butter for other uses. In Denmark and the rest of Northern Europe, this coursed problems as both were expensive imports.

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apple fritters and a dish of fresh fruit

Renaissance inspired apple fritters

Æbleskiver

In the renaissance in Denmark fritters of different kinds were all the rage. One of the ones that have transformed and is still a traditional dish in Denmark is the apple fritters “æbleskiver” – not that there is apples in the modern ones. This is a much more traditional apple fritter – with apples inside. They are super tasty and you might want to just eat all of them.

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