One of my favourite salads is one based on boiled pearl barley. I love pearl barley salad, because it is filling, fresh and easy to make. I often serve it instead of pasta or potatoes and people generally seem pretty happy with that. More often than not, we have it with fish or a steak on the side but sometimes I serve it with some fried goats cheese on top instead of meat on the side. I do quite a few variations on this salad, but the boiled barley is at the core of each variation.
On the blog I have talked about medieval spiced wine before. My boyfriend and I have decided that we want to start going to medieval reenactment markeds as spice wine merchants. To do this we of course had to get the clothing and gear, more about that in another post. We are going to our first marked in little under two weeks.
For the last month I have done experiments to source the best (cheap) wine to use for the spiced wines.
For the midwinter feast I couldn’t find period recipe for carrots, that didn’t involve mashing them, as we already had one purée on the table. I decided that I didn’t want a second one, so I found a modern recipe for carrots steamed in lemon juice with fresh theme.
I don’t really like cooked carrots all that much, but I liked these steamed carrots. They were gone by the time we removed the dishes of the second course, so I can’t have been alone in like them. It is a very simple dish, that is quick to make and quite tasty.
I found this for three clover cakes recipe in one of my mom’s 1980’s recipe books. I have never seen anything like them before, so I had to try it out! It turned out to be a rather tasty small cake or large cookie – I am not sure which is the better word. The recipe was found in a Christmas cookbook, but I do not know it as a Christmas cookie, so I think you could bake it at any time of the year. I am baking them for the a larp event.
Vanilla Wreaths are another Christmas cookie that is quintessentially Danish. Though they are also eaten outside Christmas. They are sweet, crisp and full of almonds and vanilla. The cookie goes back to around 1840. Here is my recipe as well as one of Madam Mangor’s recipes from 1866, that I am yet to test out.
These cookies were developed by Jewish bakers in Copenhagen in the early 1800’s at some point. They are part of the Danish Christmas cookie pantheon. If you ask most of my family they are the best part. There are many versions of this recipe, I have found a few for you. My family’s recipe as well as two from 1890 – they are quite different.
