Medieval inspired vegetable soup

At the medieval marked we shared dinner with our friends who let us into their camp, so I cooked for us all. I had some leftover meat pies from lunch and had brought some lamb sausages (which were sadly really greasy and not all that nice). To supplement that I cooked a medieval vegetable soup.

I had some stock from the cooking of the pie meat. I had pouched some chick and saved the cooking water, I used that as stock, but I am pretty sure it would have worked fine without it. You can of course cook this at the stove top, but it is a perfect campfire dish.

Creating the recipe

We do not have any recipes for simple dishes like a vegetable soup, not because people didn’t eat them – we are pretty sure they did. When reading and writing were uncommon skills and paper was expensive, you only wrote down the unusual recipes, the ones you seldom had the need for, or the ones you wanted to share with people, you rarely sew. This meant that recipes for simple everyday food, were not written down – and defiantly not saved for prosperity.

I chose the vegetable to be in season and all of which would have been available in the medieval Denmark. If you have any spring herbs handy, I am sure they would work great, but we were too tired to do any foraging this evening.

The soup was tasty and filling and quite a lot better than the sausages.

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Vegetable soup

A tasty and filling spring soup, inspired by medieval cooking techniques and produce. Perfect campfire food.

Course Main Dish, Soup & stew

Cuisine Campfire cooking, Historical cooking, Larp cooking, Medieval

Prep Time 10 minutes

Cook Time 30 minutes

Total Time 40 minutes

Servings 4 people

Ingredients

• 2 spring onion
• 1 fennel bulb
• 2 onion
• 2 sticks of selleri
• 150 milliliters pearl barley
• water or stock. Use a bit more than you amount of soup you want
• salt
• peber
• a bit cooking fat Lard would be perfect. We used coconut fat as that was what was at hand

Instructions

1. Make sure to have a fire going with some embers.
2. Cut the vegetables into chunks, dices and slices
3. Fry them off quickly to soften the onion in the bottom of the cooking pot
4. Pour in water (the amount you want for the soup)
5. Let it simmer for a bit
6. Add the barley
7. Let it all simmer until the barley is tender (this should take about 20 minutes)
8. Season it with what-ever you got handy, but it will need a bit of salt. Herbs would be great.
9. Serve the soup with bread