January 26, 2018 · 7:59 pm

Two Easy Pickle Recipes

My previous post on pickling went on a bit, so I’ve added these two simple recipes as a separate one. The methods are not particularly comprehensive, so if you haven’t pickled before read the previous post for hints and tips.

Pickled Red Cabbage

As with many recipes for preserving, it’s difficult to come up with precise amounts. It all depends upon how much produce you have and the size and shape of your jars . A certain amount of guesswork is required. If you don’t make enough pickling liquor, you can quickly make more, and if you make too much, keep it in a sterilised jar; you can always use it pickle something else, or use it in salad dressings.

It is a good example of a system rather than of a recipe, but I reckon a good-sized red cabbage will need a litre of liquor. Oh and it’s a two-day affair, so don’t start this the day before a fortnight’s holiday or something:

 

Day 1:

1 red cabbage, sliced thinly, centre removed

Sea or rock salt

Scatter your sliced cabbage into a colander placed on a deep plate or large bowl and strew with plenty of salt. Cover with a tea towel and leave overnight for the water to drain.

 

Day 2:

1 litre of cider, wine or distilled vinegar

1 tsp peppercorns

1 chilli

1 tsp Allspice berries

50 g sugar

1 star anise

1 tsp Mustard seeds

Boil the vinegar with the spices and sugar, simmering for 5 minutes. Rinse the salt from the cabbage and pack into sterilised jars. Strain the hot vinegar and fill the jars with the piping hot liquor. Pop the chilli and star anise into the jars and a few of the seeds and berries (for prettiness). Put on lids and leave to mature for four weeks.

  1. Cover cabbage with salt for 24 hours.
  2. Next day, rinse away the salt and pack into sterilised jars.
  3. Boil up the remaining ingredients. Simmer 5 minutes and pour over the cabbage.

 

Delia Smith’s Quick Pickled Onions

from her Complete Cookery Course, 1982

“I’m afraid I have neither the strength nor the patience of endure long pickling sessions…so I always use the method below” says Delia.

No faffing about with this one: onions usually need brining or dry-salting. Delia skips this stage, but be warned: they don’t keep as long as regular pickled onions as the excess water isn’t drawn out by the salting process. They’ll keep 4 months maximum.

In her recipe, Delia asks for pickling spice, which you can buy already blended, but have a go at making your own; a keen cook will probably have most of the spices needed anyway! See the previous post for an example.

2 kg pickling onions [or shallots]

1.75 l of malt vinegar (Sarson’s is best)

25 g pickling spice

The first task is to peel the onions. Put them in a bowl and cover with boiling water straight from the kettle, drain and get peeling. The skins should now be relatively loose from their hot water treatment.

Half-fill your jars with onions – 4 1-litre jars will be enough – and share out half of the pickling spices between them, scattering nicely. Top up with the remainder of the onions, and then the rest of the spices. Pour the vinegar in (no need to heat it) and screw the lids on tightly. Leave the onions 8 weeks before eating them.

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January 24, 2018 · 9:40 pm

Pickling at Home

 

Pickling is a form of food preservation that uses either vinegar or brine to keep food from spoiling. Good cooks in all households, rich or poor, throughout history had to know what they were doing if they were to get maximum yield and minimum waste from their home-grown produce, whether a tiny veg patch or a large kitchen garden. Therefore, if we’re to cook historical recipes, we too need to know what we’re doing.

Pickling in brine is essentially curing with salt and I’ll tackle that subject in a different post (this is not be confused with the brining some veg goes through before being pickled in vinegar (see below).

I thought that I’d go through how to make your own pickles at home as I got some good feedback on my previous preserving post: fruit jelly preserves. Pickling is easy and doesn’t require any expensive specialist equipment, so if you have never tried your hand at home-preserving, give it a go. A similar method is used to make flavoured vinegars, so I’ll write a little post on those too.

The ingredients

Vinegars: any vinegar can be used, however for long-term preservation a vinegar that is 5% acetic (ethanoic) acid is required. When it comes to choosing the correct, go for your personal preference. Malt vinegar packs the strongest punch and goes best with onions and shallots in my humble opinion. The cider and wine vinegars have a fresher, subtler flavour and are pretty much universal. Distilled or spirit vinegar is vinegar in its purest form, essentially just acid and water and can be used to pickle anything. It can be a little harsh so requires flavouring with aromatic herbs and spices.

Balsamic, Champagne and sherry vinegars can do the job of pickling perfectly well but are far too expensive for your glut of allotment red cabbage, though a touch of balsamic vinegar added to another does work well.

Pickled quails’ eggs

Herbs & Spices: Though not strictly essential, herbs and spices do give your pickles an extra aromatic dimension and take the edge off that often harsh vinegar astringency. Most herbs can be used with great effect: thyme, rosemary, bay, savory, oregano, dill and fennel all work very well.

Pretty much any whole spice can be used successfully here: fresh ginger, peppercorns, mustard seeds, allspice berries, cinnamon sticks, fennel seeds, dried or fresh chillies and dill seeds are the usual suspects. Use whatever you like, but a general rule for spice mixes is to add up to 25g of spice to each litre of vinegar. A good general spice mix:

1 tbs allspice berries

1 tbs mustard seeds

1 cinnamon stick

2 tsp black or white peppercorns

1 tsp fennel seeds

1 or 2 dried chillies

I’m going a little mediaeval and including sugar as a spice: the deliciousness of a pickle can be heightened immensely with a seasoning of sugar. This is especially important when pickling fruit such as pears or strawberries.

Salt: Many vegetables need to be salted in some way before pickling. The salting process draws water from the veg both firming it up and taking away water that would otherwise leach out and dilute the vinegar. Use either rock or sea salt for this, never table salt; it is far too harsh and inevitably some salt ends up in the final pickle, so a nice complex salt is best.

There are two types of salting: dry salting is where salt is sprinkled over vegetables and left overnight to drain. The other way is by brining, where the veg is immersed in a strong salt solution for 12 to 24 hours. A typical brine contains 85g of salt per litre of water.

The produce: these are the fruit, vegetables or eggs you want to pickle! They need to be a good size, unbruised and not overripe. Some vegetables need to be salted or cooked, some neither! When preparing your produce, make sure the pieces are a good size for when you come to eat them, and that they of a good size and shape to be packed well into jar. It’s important to remember that the produce needs to be completely covered and that there needs to be a decent space, around one centimetre, between the vinegar and the jar rim.

The Equipment

Aside from your regular kitchen pots, pans and jugs, there is little specialist equipment required.

Muslin & string: used to tie herbs and spices to infuse into the vinegar. Not essential though, as you always pass the vinegar through a sieve.

Jars & lids: obviously this is a must-have. I tend to use stocky hardwearing Kilner jars where I can, but I also hang on to any decent-sized jars that come my way. Make sure the metal lids of jars have a layer of white plastic under them; this makes them vinegar-proof.

Just part of my jar collection!

How to Pickle

This is a four-stage process:

Preparing the produce: Sometimes there is no prep, sometimes there’s cooking or salting. Check the recipe before you embark on your preserving as some veg needs a full 24 hours salting!

Preparing the pickle: The vinegar is simmered with its herbs and spices for 5-10 minutes, depending on the pungency required. This can be strained if a muslin bag wasn’t used. The pickling liquor is used hot or cold depending upon the recipe.

Potting: sterilised jars need to be packed quite tightly with your produce before the vinegar is poured in. Make sure everything is covered and pop the lid on tightly. Give the jar a jiggle to remove air bubbles. See this post if you don’t know how to sterilise jars.

Maturing: Leave your pickles for a month before eating them so that the vinegar can penetrate the veg. Waiting also matures the flavour making it more rounded and less harsh. Patience, dear readers, is a virtue.

Alright, that’s the basics…I’ll post recipes soon. If you can’t wait for me to post, see this previous pickled egg and this pickled beetroot recipe.

Pickled white beetroot

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January 11, 2018 · 1:19 pm

Vinegar in the Home

Vinegar is, of course, delicious on your fish and chips and a great preserver, but it has been put on a bit of a pedestal by many because of its seemingly myriad uses in the kitchen and home.

Here’s a culinary tip I spotted in a book called Domestic Cookery from 1840 which is useful to anyone who has just caught themselves a hare; when hanging it in your larder, place a bowl beneath the beast to collect the blood. Add a teaspoon of vinegar to the bowl to stop the blood from coagulating. The blood can then be used to thicken the sauce when making the classic dish, jugged hare. Vinegar is used in the same way when making black puddings from fresh blood.

A brown hare (photo: Damien Waters)

Vinegar diluted in water can clean and polish so many things: floors, windows, stainless steel, chrome, carpets and cruets (no one wants a dirty sauce cruet!). Mixed with pinhead oatmeal or sand it works as an abrasive, cleaning oily hands efficiently, and mixed with bicarbonate of soda it can unblock your sink. Vinegar is a deodoriser, so add a few drops of an essential oil to a weak vinegar solution to make your own air freshener. Used neat it will remove ink stains from clothes and sanitise wooden chopping boards.

It has medical uses too. Hippocrates apparently used vinegar to treat sores and other infections, and the Victorians used to make a vinegar, sage and honey tea to treat sore throats. Modern medical research is looking into the application of vinegar to treat several diseases, including cancer.

Hannibal

By far my most favourite use of vinegar in history comes courtesy of Hannibal, that great Carthaginian general, who famously crossed the Alps on elephant. It is said that he used vinegar to dissolve any boulders blocking his mountainous path! He must have been either a very patient man, or had somehow produced acid as strong as hydrochloric.

For more – somewhat more modern – tips on using vinegar in the home take a look at the Sarson’s website.

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November 22, 2017 · 9:55 pm

A Trip to the Sarson’s Vinegar Factory

SARSONS-LOGO

A couple weeks ago I was invited by the iconic British condiment company, Sarson’s, to have a look around their factory and see the process of vinegar-making. They contacted me as they had noticed my little blog and thought I might be interested in seeing what they do because they make vinegar in the traditional way; and we’re all about tradition here at British Food: A History.

The word vinegar comes from the French words vin meaning wine of course, and aigre meaning sour or sharp, so when we talk about British malt vinegar, it’s actually a bit of a misnomer. What is in your bottle of Sarson’s used to be called alegar: sour ale! I think the word should be brought back (I’ll pop a note through to Mr and Mr Sarson).

Vinegar – aka ethanoic or acetic acid – is produced when specialist bacteria called acetobacteria metabolise normally deadly alcohol (ethanol) and harness energy from it. It takes a real specialist to use this killer chemical as a food source. Vinegar is, of course, an excellent preservative itself.

It is thought that vinegar and alcohol fermentation were discovered and refined in tandem, and the earliest example of vinegar-making goes right back to the ancient Babylonians who were brewing it from their beer and wine in 4000 BC! The ancient Romans refined methods somewhat, using wooden barrels to age and develop flavour.

The rear of the original London factory (Southwark Local Studies Library)

There are there are many types of vinegar, but malt vinegar, which is made from barley, is uniquely British, although these days it does travel a bit. Barley was a very important crop in Britain as it was grown to eat, but also to make ale. The average person in mediaeval England would drink around a litre of ale a day and it was the main source of calories for many (and much safer to drink than the water). Our love of ale meant there was plenty spare knocking about to transform into alegar. Sarson’s are the only company still making it in the traditional way and they have been producing it since 1794.

Before I had even arrived, I was greeted a delicious sweet and sour malt smell, and when the taxi pulled up outside the Manchester factory I was greeted again by the lovely folk who run the place. I donned my lab coat, safety glasses, hard hat and beard snood, and looking altogether pretty damn sexy I headed over the see the initial steps in the process.

I had always assumed that when malt vinegar was made, ale would be bought in and then fermented, but this is not the case! Sarson’s do the whole process from start to finish, including making the ale itself. It is truly made from scratch.

Barley grains

The first step is to lightly mill the barley so that the grains can crack open. It is then soaked in spring water and heated up in mash tuns: huge metal vats that constantly stir the barley and the water is collected. This process of mashing extracts the sugars.

Swishing away the sweetwort

I was allowed a little taste of the sugary liquid – or sweetwort – and couldn’t believe how sweet and delicious it was (when I got home, I looked in a few old books and found that home-made barley water was produced in essentially the same way).

The cooled sweetwort now enters the first round of fermentation: yeast is added so it can get to work anaerobically turning sugar into alcohol. This six-day process produces a barley ale that is a whopping 9.5% alcohol.

Now the alcohol can be converted into vinegar in the second round of fermentation. It was this part of the process that I found to be truly amazing: I assumed that to make a product and attain perfect consistency between batches, Sarson’s would have to seed the ale with a mother (or mother-of-vinegar to give her full title, a of plug acetobacteria) that had been carefully selected over years or even decades, to produce a unique strain (wine and beer makers do this with their yeasts). What Sarson’s actually do is simply add the shavings of the bark from the larch tree, which naturally harbours a community of acetobacteria species. This all happens in wooden tubs called acetifiers and it takes seven days for the larch bacteria to do their magic.

The huge physics-defying oak barrels!

For the last stage, the vinegar is stored in huge 40 000 litre barrels – some 100 years old – to be standardised to the correct strength (5% ethanoic acid).

Standardising the final product

The vinegar is heated up to kill the bacteria and it is piped through to the very noisy and exciting bottling room. I loved watching the bottles rattling around on the conveyor belts. It was as though I had literally stepped through the arch window on Playschool!

Then, to top it all off, they handed me my very own personalised bottle of malt vinegar!

Many thanks to Sarson’s for asking me to come to their place and let me be a nosey parker for an afternoon – I will certainly be paying the malt vinegar I put on my fish and chips in even higher regard from now on!

Next post, I’ll write a little bit about how we use – and used vinegar in the home.

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November 17, 2017 · 7:40 pm

How to Make Medlar (or Quince or Crab Apple) Jelly

Last post I told you all about the overlooked fruit the medlar (or openarse). It’s a tricky one as it can’t just be picked and eaten like most dessert fruits. The way to get the most of any medlars you do get your hands on is to make a jelly, a beautiful deep vermillion preserve which makes an excellent accompaniment to game, roast or cured meats and cheese.

I thought it would also be a good opportunity to go through the process of making a jelly preserve; something I have been threatening to do for a while. This recipe works well with the close relations of the medlar: the quince and the crab apple.

Choosing the fruit:

There is a bit of disagreement as to how ripe your medlars should be; some say only unripe medlars should be used, others that ¼ to ½ of them should be bletted (soft and brown). I have only ever used unripe ones – these produce a clear, bright jelly with an astringency comparable to strong tea. Next time, I’ll be patient and wait for a good proportion of them to blet.

Medlars are high in pectin, a chemical glue that sticks plant cells together. As fruit ripens, the pectin is broken down by enzymes making the fruit soft. When making a jelly, one needs to release the pectin by boiling the fruit until pulpy so that it can set the jelly. If using a lot of ripe fruit, I would suggest adding some crab apples or tart eating apples such as Cox’s orange pippins or russets. Alternatively, a proportion of the sugar can be replaced with jam sugar, ensuring a decent set.

Quince and crab apples do not have this problem and you should be okay.

It’s worth mentioning that if you only have a few medlars, quinces or crab apples, you can supplement with some regular apples and the resulting jelly will be still be great. I’ve made quince jelly with 50% apples before and it was delicious!

Ingredients and equipment:

Aside from the fruit, all you need is water, granulated sugar and some optional cider vinegar. I think a little vinegar cuts through the sweetness very well, but you can leave it out if you prefer.

I don’t add herbs and spices to medlar or quince jelly, but crab apple jelly can benefit from some subtle flavouring: things like rosemary and thyme work well as do cinnamon, cloves and black pepper.

Specialist equipment is easy to get hold of and inexpensive: you’ll need a good-sized sheet of muslin or a jelly bag (though a tea towel or pillowcase will also do the job), a sugar thermometer or temperature probe, and some jars with lids.

Method:

Day One

Scrub the fruit(s), chop roughly – there’s no need to peel or core the fruit – and place in a large pot along with any herbs and spices if using. Just cover the fruit with water and bring to a good simmer and add some cider vinegar, around 50 ml per litre of water.

Turn on the heat, cover and simmer until very soft. Very hard fruit can take an hour, though I do give things a helping hand by squishing the fruit against the side of the pan with a wooden spoon.

When the fruit is ready, scald your muslin or jelly bag iwith hot water. If using a jelly bag, place it on its stand with a bowl beneath it, if using muslin, use it to line a bowl. Carefully, ladle the fruit and cooking liquor into the bag/lined bowl – be careful.

The jelly bag can be left to do its thing, but if just using muslin, a little extra work is required: collect up the edges and tie them well with string. You now need to hang this hot haversack of pulp over the bowl to drip overnight. I hook it over a cupboard handle and then in the fridge to keep the fruit flies off. However you do it, make sure things are securely tied – those bags can be pretty weighty.

Day Two

By now, the liquor should have stopped dripping, but give it a squeeze just to see if you can get any more out. Don’t worry of the juice has gone cloudy, this is common with medlars.

Measure the volume of juice and pour into a heavy based stockpot. To this, add your granulated sugar in the ratio of 500g sugar for every 600ml of juice. Turn the heat on and stir until the sugar has fully dissolved. At this point, clip on your sugar thermometer, if using. Turn up the heat so that the syrupy mixture can boil hard. As you wait for this to happen, pop a saucer into your freezer. Skim away any scum that is thrown up.

Let the syrup boil for at least twenty minutes and check the temperature – pectin sets at 105°C. Sometimes jellies don’t always set, so it’s best to double-check with the wrinkle test. Remember that sauce in the fridge? Take it out and drop some of the jelly onto it. Let it cool for a couple of minutes. If it wrinkles when you push it with your finger, all is well and the jelly is ready to be potted into sterilised jars.

(Sterilising jars is easy: place on a baking tray and pop into an oven preheated to 125°C for at least 25 minutes. I usually put mine in as the jelly is coming to a boil. Any rubber seals can be scalded in boiling water closer to the time.)

Use a jug to pour the jelly into jars, don’t overfill here, a gap of one centimetre below the rim is good. Some jars have a helpful maximum fill line on them. Seal with the lids as soon as you can. Be very careful here!

The next day, the jelly should be set, but sometimes it takes a few days, especially if vinegar was used.

The jelly will keep for 6 months unopened, once open keep in the fridge.

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November 12, 2017 · 4:58 pm

Forgotten Foods #7: Openarses

I’m continuing my mediaeval-themed posts with a somewhat infamous forgotten fruit: the openarse.

This unusual fruit is a member of the Rosaceae family which contains within its members familiar apples and pears as well as the less familiar, such as quinces, rosehips and sorbs; and like many of the cultivated varieties within this group, they made their way over here from Asia Minor. They quickly nestled themselves into the English mediaeval orchard, becoming an essential fruit crop.

The openarse looks superficially like a russet apple’s withered twin; all squat, rough and green-brown. Turn it over and you’ll see how it gained its name. The calyces, usually small and tightly puckered on the underside of an apple or pear, are very large and lobular, protruding somewhat, giving it a definite rusty sheriff badge appearance. They also sometimes called grannies’ arses. Nice.

According to Jane Grigson in her Fruit Book, the ‘English name openarse, gradually and politely, …was superceded by the French-derived medlar.’ That said, the French also call them dogs’ arses. Trust them to be more vulgar us!

During the mediaeval period, medlars were widely cultivated in England, reaching peak production in the 1600s. They were a useful fruit because they store well, ripening up quite a while after picking. At first, however, they are rock hard, sour and terribly astringent. Picked in late autumn (some say to wait after the first frost) and stored in a cool, dark place, they begin to soften and sweeten. This controlled decay – called bletting – converts starch to the fruit sugar fructose and reduces the acid and tannin levels dramatically. It’s quite nice to see the fruits bletting at different rates and times; some blet on the tree, some take weeks post picking. You can see how this steady supply of ripening fruit would have been extremely important to mediaeval people during winter (see this post on mediaeval feast and famine for more information).


A bletted medlar

The traditional way to eat the fruit is to squeeze your openarse between your fingers so that the pulp can be either picked or sucked out. The medlar was considered very good for digestion and so would be taken after a meal with port (science is revisiting these ideas and has provided some experimental evidence that it is indeed the case). The taste is pleasant, lying somewhere between tart apple and sweet prune. Because the medlar was generally eaten in this way, recipes don’t tend to appear in old cook books; the only common recipe is for medlar jelly (which will be the subject of the next post). However, I did find one for a medlar tart in Thomas Dawson’s 1596 book The Good Housewife’s Jewel:

To Make a Tart of Medlars

Take medlars that be rotten and stamp them. Then set them on a chafing dish with coals, and beat in two yolks of eggs, boiling it till it be somewhat thick. Then season them sugar, cinnamon and ginger and lay it in the paste.

Thomas Dawson was a contemporary of William Shakespeare, and an openarse can be found in a Shakespeare passage. From Romeo and Juliet:

Now will he sit under a medlar tree,

And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit

As maids call medlars, when they laugh alone.

O Romeo, that she were, O that she were

An open-arse and thou a pop’rin pear!

A pop’rin pear, by the way, looks rather like a cock and balls. O! the camp bawdiness of it! I’m going to have to lie down.

Amusingly, the prudish Victorians replaced ‘openarse’ with ‘et cetera’, which – if you didn’t know of the replacement – makes no sense at all and, more importantly, spoils the joke.

FYI: Chaucer mentions openarses in the Canterbury Tales, and the earliest known use of the word goes right back to the 10th Century!

Colour plate from unknown source

Sourcing Medlars

After reading this, I expect you are simply dying to get your hands on some openarse yourself. This will be tricky; they are no longer grown commercially, so you’ll either have to plant one yourself or find a feral tree. If you live in the south of England this may not be an impossible task as many villages grew them in public spaces.

They are lovely trees – they grow untamed, sprawling in any direction they choose. They grow slowly, but still produce quite a large crop, so even a small tree would provide you with a decent glut of openarse. This is definitely the fruit tree for the lazy gardener.

As for me, I know the whereabouts of an ignored medlar tree in Manchester, but I’m keeping quiet about it; I don’t want all and sundry picking at my openarses now do I!?

I’ll stop now.

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September 6, 2017 · 7:34 pm

Mediæval Dining

Whether a large-scale affair, or a small but formal meal, mediaeval dining followed a strict regime, and class and rank were very important. Everyone ate together, but people could not sit anywhere and eat exactly want they wanted and food was not shared equally.

Before dinner was served, the dining area had to be prepared. Most of this work was done by some of lowest-ranking lads who worked hard fetching and carrying. They cut the thick sliced of rough bread to make trencher plates. They would wash, clean and polish cutlery and other tableware ready for the main meal of the day. Those that worked well may have gone on to become servers, carvers, or even butlers. Important men such as knights and other ‘henchmen’ were looked after and fed by the Court Commissariat.

Trestle tables were laid out (we still say we are laying the table day) and covered with a tablecloth and dressed with cutlery and other tableware. When William I dined, he would sit at his chair so the table could be laid over him and then dressed. He obviously liked it snug.

Mediaeval mealtimes as depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry

One task was to remove the cups and other drinking vessels from their lidded storage box. The lid was removed and the cleaned cups were arranged on it, the lid was then placed back on top of the box so they could easily be distributed. This was known as the cup board.

When the room was ready, diners would first wash their hands and then seat themselves appropriately. Typically there were three types of table. The lord and lady would sit with the most important people at the top table, then middle ranking tables for the middle class, and then the lowest junior tables for remainder of the people. Once seated, Grace would be heard and the food would be brought in, but no one could eat until the lord took a pinch of salt from his ceremonial salt cellar.

The first course contained the most substantial dishes such as meat and pies, and following that in the second course, there would be sweet tarts, comfits, small songbirds and other delicate dishes. We kept this tradition in general, except for the birds (though if the fancy takes you, see this snipe post).

Large banquets would have had impressive roasts, but day-to-day this did not happen. For example the mother of Edward IV, Princess Cecill generally served up rather austere boiled beef with the odd roast here and there. On Saturdays, she had fresh and salt fish and butter.

Everyone got some of the first course, but it was not a free-for-all. The top table got a choice of around six, the middle rankers four and the juniors two, and less of it; the lord may have got a whole chicken to himself, but the middle-rankers may just have a quarter to share between several. The lads that were still working hard got some bread and cheese as respite.

Once the meal got going, one might imagine a boisterous scene, but folk were expected to be polite, chatting in a restrained manner with no shouting, burping or farting. All quite sedate, except for the big feasts such as Christmas where tables were set up everywhere to accommodate the extra guests, even in sheds. Those lucky enough to be away from the prying eyes in the main hall could get very merry indeed.

Lovely picture of some Mediaeval dining, showing intricate use of the knife (if anyone knows where this picture is from, please let me know!)

It’s worth mentioning that the types of foods people were eating in England in 1400 didn’t really change that much up right until Tudor times. Many dishes stayed the same, as did the ingredients, although many were easier to get hold of by then. There are some dishes recognisable to us today, at least in name, such as blancer mange and gingerbread.

Setting the Table

Some Mediaeval cutlery (from All About History)

As mentioned above, folk sat at a trestle table covered with a tablecloth that was changed between courses. In front of you there would be a large rectangular piece of very hard bread used a plate called a trencher. There would also be a wooden bowl, used for the more sloppy and messy foods. However you did have to share this bowl between four.

By way of cutlery, only a spoon and knife were available. You usually brought your own personal cutlery. Forks, by the way, were work of the devil. Knives could be used to stab large pieces of meat so it could be torn by the incisors. This tearing of food meant that top incisors wore away so that the they met perfectly in middle, unlike we modern Westerners who all have overbites because most of our food is cut up!

Richard III’s exhumed skull clearly showing how Mediaeval teeth ‘fit’ much better than today (pic: University of Leicester)

If you got into a bit of a mess with all this wrenching of food with your gnashers, you would have to wipe your mouth on the tablecloth because napkins were not invented until the late fourteenth century! When they were introduced, they were large folded pieces of cloth laid over one shoulder.

At the end of the meal, the bowls, trenchers and other unwanted foods were redistributed to the poor by the almoner.

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