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Title: Historisk kogebog: kogekunst i Danmark 1616-1910
Author: Else-Marie Boyhus
Genre: Historical cookbook, food history, renaissance, early modern, modern
If you have any interest in Danish food history between 1600 and 1900, then this is a must read! The book is both a book about food history and it is a cookbook in the sense that it is full of recipes from historic Danish cookbooks. I have already tried to cook already tried a few of the recipes and her translations are easy to work from. There is a huge number of illustrations that makes it book wonderful to look at and inviting. All of the illustrations are from the period they are accompanying.
Frumenty is kind of a wheat pottage made from boiled wheat with the addition of eggs, broth or milk. My version substitutes wheat for barley, so this is a barley frumenty.
Lately I have been coking medieval dishes and I had wanted to try to make frumenty for quite some time. As we were having a beef steak, a good beer and kale and orange salad, this seemed fitting.
As so often happens I was craving sweet this afternoon, so I decided to make something sweet after dinner out of the sad fruit that was sitting around. I had two grumpy pears and a few grumpy apples sitting around as well as some puff pastry in the fridge – which of course meant that I had to do a version of a medieval or early modern Pear and apple pie.
I use the Danish word postej to describe this dish but in the English medieval literature they are tend to be called “pye”. What we today would call a pie. Sometimes they are also called a Pâté.
A postej is meat, fish or fruit dish that is inside a container of dough, what in the English medieval kitchen would be called a “coffin” of dough. It was baked in the oven or in a postej-oven which is pretty much a Dutch oven. The dough can be edible or inedible as you please. The postejs I have baked so fare are baked with an edible dough – because anything else seems wasteful to me.
Lately I have played with medieval cooking and this weekend I deiced to cook this beautiful and tasty medieval pork and chicken pie for my family. A succulent medieval pie is a perfect introduction to medieval cooking to modern dinners. The filling is minced pork with fried chicken pieces and fruits dotted throughout.
Title: Renæssancemad – opskrifter og køkkenhistorie fra Christian 4.’s tid
Author: Bi Skaarup
Genre: Historical cookbook, renaissance
This is the latest book in my reading on pre-industrial food history project. This is another one in danish and is specifically about Danish food culture in the renaissance period.