Tasting the Past: Recipes from the Middle Ages to the Civil War

By Jacqui Wood

The many influences of the past on our diet make the concept of ‘British food’ very hard to define. The Celts, Romans, Saxons, Vikings and Normans each brought ingredients to the table, and the country was introduced to all manner of spices following the Crusades. The Georgians enjoyed a new level of excess and then, of course, the world wars forced us into the challenge of making meals from very little. The history of cooking in Britain is as tumultuous as the times its people have lived through.Tasting the Past: Recipes from the Middle Ages to the Civil War documents the rich history of our food, its fads and its fashions, combined with a practical cookbook of over 120 recipes from the early Middle Ages up to the Civil War.Jacqui Wood guides us through the recipes brought ashore by the Normans, the opportunities brought by the food harvested in the New World during the Renaissance, and the decadent meals of the Royalist gentry outlawed by the puritanical Parliamentarians.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Nov 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9780750993647

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Bibliography

BRITISH FOOD has been hard to categorise in the past compared to the very distinctive cuisines of countries such as Italy, France and Germany. This is because it is an amalgamation of all of them, in the same way that the English language is a combination of five European languages: Celtic, Latin, Saxon, Viking and Norman. Our cuisine, too, is a combination of the typical foods of those that once conquered Britain over a thousand years ago.

But Britain’s assimilation of the foods of other cultures did not stop after the Norman Conquest. During the medieval period, the spices brought from the Crusades by the Normans were used in almost every dish by those who could afford them. When Britain itself began to have colonies, the culinary embellishments to our diet began again. During the Elizabethan period, strange produce coming from the New World was also adopted with relish by our forbears.

The Civil War period introduced Puritan restrictions to our daily fare, making it against the law to eat a mince pie on Christmas Day because it was thought a decadent Papist tradition. The Georgians took on chocolate and coffee with gusto and even moulded their business transactions around the partaking of such beverages. But it was really not until the Victorian period – when it was said that the sun never set on the British Empire – that our diet became truly global in nature.

This book will hopefully become a manual for those readers who want to put on a themed dinner party, providing a wide selection of recipes from each period in history. I have not included those recipes that I feel you would never want to make, but instead have focused on dishes that will allow you to experience what it was really like to eat during those particular periods. No one, apart from the truly adventurous among you, is going to acquire a cow’s udder from the butcher and stuff it as they did in the medieval period, or stuff a fish’s stomach with chopped cod’s liver!

Each chapter will begin with a brief introduction to the foods of the period that I found particularly fascinating during my research, and will end with the traditional festive food of the period. If you want to celebrate your Christmas in a completely different way, why not try a Norman feast?

THE NORMAN INVASION is remembered by every child in Britain because of the Battle of Hastings in 1066, when Harold was shot in the eye with an arrow. It was, however, just another Viking invasion under a different name. The Normans or North Men were a group of Scandinavian raiders who sailed up the River Seine and forced the French king to cede some territory on the north French coast. They settled in what we call Normandy today, becoming an independent kingdom over time. Even so, the Vikings who settled there quickly adopted the religion, language and customs of the surrounding French population so that, by the time they did invade Britain, to all intents and purposes they were French Normans.

It was the Norman knights’ Crusades and trips to North Africa that really brought another dimension to the diet of this new British nobility. The Crusaders occupied the Holy Land from 1099 to 1187, where the Crusaders ate sugar for the first time, which they called ‘honey-cane’, and they ate almonds, rice, dates, citrus fruits, pomegranates and rosewater on a daily basis. By the thirteenth century, this new cuisine had completely assimilated into the noble British diet.

Most European cookery books from the thirteenth century show that this Saracen Arabic influence was widespread. The Norman territory in Sicily shared much of this Arabic Greek and Latin culture too. Crops such as sugar, rice, citrus, pomegranate and saffron were grown in the Arab-occupied west, and saffron was eventually grown in England, hence the village name of Saffron Walden in Essex. Colouring food was also an Arab invention using saffron and other herbs to colour the drab, grey-looking sauces and make them take on a new vibrancy. Red food colouring was made from Indian sandalwood, which came west in the spice ships with pepper and other spices, but it was found that a cheaper dye could be made with crushed wild rosehips, readily available in the English countryside.

The first seven recipes are taken from the thirteenth-century Baghdad Cook Book by Muhammad ibn al Hassan, and show how much the Crusaders’ travels into the Middle East influenced British cuisine.

Lamb Stew with Mint and Spices

1½ kg lamb meat cut from the bone

Oil for frying

1 tsp salt

2 large onions

2 leeks

1 tsp ground coriander

1 tsp cumin

1 tsp cinnamon

300 ml yoghurt or sour milk

1 lemon

Bunch of fresh mint

Method

1.   Put the meat in a pan and fry in oil until brown, then add the salt and cover with water. Boil, removing the scum as it forms. Reduce the heat and simmer for 30 minutes.

2.   When the meat is nearly cooked, add the chopped onions and leeks to the pot.

3.   Add the spices and keep cooking on a low heat until all the liquid evaporates.

4.   Add the lemon, sliced thinly, and the yoghurt and the roughly chopped mint, and simmer for another 10 minutes. Serve with bread.

Lamb Stew with Mint and Apples

1 kg fatty lamb meat (breast of lamb is good)

2 chicken thigh joints

2 onions, chopped

1 tsp salt

1 tsp ground coriander

1 tsp cinnamon

½ tsp ginger

1 large bunch fresh mint

½ tsp pepper

450 g cooking apples

50 g blanched almonds (soaked in boiling water for 1 hour)

Method