Lutendranck was the first historic spiced wine I tasted. Lutendranck is a medieval sweetened and spiced white wine that was typically enjoyed cold. While Kasper thinks the name means lute drink – or he puts it “gitar wine”. It sadly isn’t the meaning, rather it means something like clarified wine – which makes sense since it has been put though a sive to remove the spices. But it is less of a good story. It is sweet and spiced and totally yummy. The batch I made last week started tasting kind of like good mead and now tastes very spiced but still totally delicious. The wine could be drunk for fun or as a medicinal drink that could cure mental problems such as: longing, cantankerous, misery and melancholy. It could also be used to clean the chest and against coughs.
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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.
My boyfriend and I are talking about doing some reenactment markeds – at some point in the future. We are talking about the possibility of going as spiced wine merchants. In the past I have made a spiced white wine, lutendranck, which is really tasty. So when I had two liter of red wine sitting around and ran into a recipe for hypocras I of course had to try it. After making both I have started collecting different recipes for both wines.
Title: Middelaldermad, Kulturhistorie, kilder og 99 opskrifter
Author: Bi Skaarup, Henrik Jacobsen
Genre: Historical cookbook, middel ages, medieval
I really enjoyed “Middelaldermad…”. The book was helpful and full of great infomation about food and cooking in the middle ages. It is a quite readable book and a good introduction to cooking medieval food. The recipes work well, taste good and are quite easy to follow. They also include the source material, so you can track it down if you want more infomation.
Last night I made lamb culotte with baked root vegetables (I can not recommend baked turnip) and this kale salad. The rest of the meal wasn’t very historical inspired but the salad was based of one I found in one of my books about medieval cooking. I thought I would share it with you because it turned out to be pretty yummy.
Title: Historien om danskernes mad i 15.000 år
Author: Bettina Buhl
Genre: Food history, Denmark
The scope of this book is kind of impressive – it tries to cover Danish food history. Half of the book is however based around food after 1850 where there are of course more source material. For my purposes that is sadly where I find it least interesting. And I did find that the part of the book that covers pre-1660 is way better – in my opinion. The focus of the book everyday cooking rather than cooking by the elite.
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.