I have had three bottles of walnut husks in liquid in my cupboard for years. I finally broke one out this week to try dyeing with it. The first thing I learned was that I have probably done it wrong from the beginning. I should have used the green husks when they were fresh. Undeterred, here is what I did.
First, I estimated how many walnuts had been in the jar to start; using the estimate of one nut per 20 grams of fibre, I should have used five nuts for 100 grams of fibre (my skeins were 50 g each). I had more nuts (maybe 7 or 8), but decided that was close enough. Some of the husks had been partly dried when thrown into the liquid, and it appears that you need a lot more dried than fresh walnut to get a good colour. In any case, I needed a dye liquor that was almost black, so I poured the liquor into a pot, added more water, tied the husks into a piece of cheesecloth, and boiled s for a good 90 minutes. Then I removed the husks, added skeins that I had previously soaked (no mordant), let them boil gently for another 90 minutes, and then allowed the water to cool overnight. After pulling out the wool, rinsing and letting it dry, I had a very nice brown colour.
However, I had read that a darker brown was possible with an iron after bath. After digging around the internet a bit, I learned at such an after bath could be created by soaking iron nails or other metal in a mix of water and vinegar. When you have a nice dark reddish liquid (something that can take weeks), you can use that as a mordant or as an after bath. Naturally, that was too long to wait, so I threw a cup or so of vinegar into a rusty cast-iron pot, heated it, and added one of the skeins of wool. Iron can damage the fibres, so I cooked it for only 20 minutes, then pulled it out and rinsed. The result is a slightly darker brown that definitely has more of a black than the reddish tone of the original.
I made this once, decades ago, but have long since lost my research notes. When I found a package of fava beans in my pantry, I decided it was time to try it again, as it fit well with a planned discussion on pandemic cooking.
Horsebread was a bread made with dried peas and/or beans with coarse flours, used to feed horses and sometimes people – the poor or in times when food was scarce. There are references to horsebread in The Horse in Medieval England, Gervase Markham, and The Tudor Housewife; you can read details on various sources here: http://ilaria.veltri.tripod.com/horsebread.html.
I boiled a half cup of fava beans for about half an hour, then allowed them to soak for a day and a night. In the meantime, I added flour to my sourdough starter, and let it ferment. The next step was to grind the beans, then added them to the sourdough and added salt. I normally use about 1 tsp of salt in every loaf of bread, and it looked like I would have enough for two loaves. After a good kneading, I left the dough to rise for a couple of hours, then formed it into loaves and let it rise again before baking at 350F for 50 minutes or so. My big cheat was to use white flour instead of barley, rye, or whole wheat flour, or adding bran. I don’t regret it though, as it was quite tasty.
I had hoped to show you a lovely picture of Fancy eating my horse bread, but she was a right pain tonight. after an hour of trying to catch her in the rain, I gave a little piece to one of the other horses. Apparently, she thought it was strange as she chewed it like gum for a while before swallowing.
Thia project dates from August 1992. At the time, my friend Etaoin had the idea of getting dyers from all over to take home a pre-prepared package of dyer’s camomile and a 50g skein of wool, dye it and record exactly what they did, then mail it back to Etaoin. She would then prepare samplers for each participant, with pieces from each kit. I know I did one kit way back in the day; I don’t know how many others completed them because I never got a sampler back.
I put the yarn in an enamel pot with about 2 grams of alum and tap water and let it soak overnight. The next day, I drained the water and added fresh tap water along with all the chamomile and let it simmer on the stove for several hours (possibly as long as four hours, since I got distracted with paint night and only noticed it was still on when I went to clean y brushes and saw how much water had evaporated). I let the yarn soak in the water overnight and most of today, then rinsed it and hung it to dry. I am pleased with this gold colour.
I used the madder I had been soaking since late October (https://siglindesarts.wordpress.com/2020/10/27/madder/) and this is how the experiment turned out. I poured the madder liquid into a pot and weighed the madder root. I had 150g, so I took an equal amount of wool and soaked it overnight in a pot of tap water with 50g of alum. I heated the mixture but didn’t allow it to reach a boil, and once it was warm I let let it cool naturally. The next day, I poured out the alum water, added the madder water, tied the madder roots into a piece of cheesecloth, added enough water to cover, and heated the water. I kept it well warm, but well below boiling (the instructions I had found said to het to about 60C; I really need to invest in a thermometer). I let the pot simmer for about two hours, then let it cool naturally and sit for another full day. In retrospect, I should have used less wool, because I didn’t account for the water weight of the soaked madder. Still, I am not displeased with the resulting pink.
The monthly paint night continues and tonight’s model was Walter, a 1500’s German. He had feathers in his cap and a very nice set-up, including a skull off to one side (so appropriate for the period). I needed to simplify a bit, so this is whaaat I was able to do in 2 1/2 hours. Oil on board.
The Art of Cooking by Maestro Martino of Como (University of California Press, 2005, p. 57a, offers a recipe that is very similar to modern salami. The main differences are that many modern salamis include red wine and/or garlic, and they are dry hung rather than smoked. However, I suspect that the smoking in Martino’s versions may well be achieved simply by hanging the sausages near a fire in the kitchen, rather than using a special smoke house.
When you wish to make good sausage with pork or other other meat – Take some lean meat and some fatty meat trimmed of all its sinew and finely chop. If you have ten librae of meat, add one libra of salt, two ounces aof well-washed fennel seeds, and two ounces of coarsely ground pepper. Mix well and let set for one day. Then take some well-washed and trimmed intestines and fill with the meat and then smoke to dry.
I did one batch as pure beef and double batch with a mix of beef and pork. For each 1 lb of meat I added 1.5 oz salt, 1 1/2 tsp fennel and 1 1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper. I decided to add Fermento to each batch since my meat would be sitting in the refrigerator, rather than in a warmer spot such as my kitchen counter; I wanted some fermentation, but not the risk of bacteria! In the pure beef mix I used 1 oz Fermento per pound (the maximum recommended) but in the beef an pork mix I used half that amount (the minimum recommended). Then I put the meat in covered containers in my refrigerator for a day. I put them into casings, which I pricked thoroughly with a pin to prevent bacterial growth, and hung them up to dry for a day or two before smoking. Following an afternoon in the smoker, the pure beef salami has a nice firm texture and is slightly darker than the pork and beef salami. The pork and beef, with its higher fat content, still feels a bit soft so I will air dry it for a few more days. They taste good though.
Today would have been Feast of the Hare, my medieval group’s biggest event each year. The theme was to have been 14th C Italy in the time of plague, inspired by the tales of Boccaccio. I was to have cooked lunch. In a fit of goofiness, I had planned to serve macaroni and cheese, with bologna sausage along with some more sensible things. I couldn’t serve the full meal to a crowd, but I could make it at home.
Both recipes are from The Art of Cooking by the Eminent Maestro Martino of Como. Although Martino wrote in the 15th C, one of the earliest references to macaroni appears in Boccaaccio’s Decameron, in the third story from the eighth day. The same story also has a reference to sausages.
Roman-Style Macaroni (p 67) – Take some white flour, and add water and make aa sheet of pasta slightly thicker than that for lasagne, and wrap it around a stick; and then remove the stick and cut the pasta into pieces the size of your little finger, and then end up with the shape of thin strips or strings. Cook in fatty broth or in water, depending on the season. But they need to be boiled when you cook them. If you cook them in water, add some rest butter and a bit of salt. When they are done, place on a platter with some good cheese, and butter, and sweet spices.
I interpreted this as taking about a cup of flour and added enough water to make a dough. I rolled it out into a flat sheets and then experimented with options for wrapping it around a stick. Cutting it in thin strips and wrapping it around chopsticks to get macaroni with a hole in the centre was a failure. I worried a lot about ruining my good chopsticks when the dough dried completely. I decided that it made more sense to hang the sheets on wooden racks like those pictured in the Tacuinum Sanitatus. Another option might be to wrap the strips of pasta around the sticks so that they look similar to fusili when dried. In the end, I simply sliced most and hung it to dry (I really need to get myself a pasta drying rack). However, I did wrap some and it is mostly working, though the pasta does get squashed a bit when trying to remove it from the chopsticks. Hopefully it will work better once more fully dried.
Once they are partly dried, they are easily sliced into smaller pieces. Then I boiled up some in water with a bit of salt, drained them, added some butter, and sprinkled with poudre douce and Parmesan cheese.
Rather than making veal Mortadella (the modern version was probably the original Bolognese sausage, according to the notes in Martino) or Martino’s good Bolognese Sausage (spiced only with salt and pepper), I decided to make the King of Meats. The recipe is similar to the Mortadella though it uses good spices instead of Mortadella’s parsley and marjoram. According to the notes, this recipe was originally called cervelatta, but had become known as Re delle Carni (king of meats) by the end of the seventeenth century.
How to Prepare King of Meats with Pork or Young Veal – Take some lean meat trimmed of all its sinew, in other words, from the haunch, and some good pork fat or veal a fat. Then take some good aged cheese and a bit of fatty cheese and some good spices and two a or three eggs and take the necessary amount of salt; and carefully mix all these things together and make them yellow with some saffron; and take some large pork intestines and clean well, making sure that they are thin and that no fat has remained; and fill with the mixture and press it into the intestines, making the sausages as long or as short as you like, and they should be boiled within two days because after that they will no longer be as good. Nonetheless, they can be conserved for fifteen or twenty days, or longer, if properly handled.
I used 1 lb of ground pork, about 1 1/2 tsp of salt, 1 tsp poudre fort, 1/4 tsp saffron, a large egg, 2 oz of mozzarella cheese cut into small pieces, and 1/4 c Parmesan cheese. Once they had been stuffed into casings, I boiled them. They kept the flavour nicely with no further treatment, but the sausage is also delicious when slices are fried.
Back in the 1960s, my family visited Italy and bought a little calfskin coin purse with a clever closure system. I played with it as a child and eventually the leather was so fragile that the whole thing started to fall apart. Somehow, though, it never got thrown out and this week I finally made myself a replacement using the original hardware.
the purse style seems to have been very popular, as I was able to find examples all over Pinterest, Etsy, and from Florentine manufacturers still selling them today. Some even have the gold fleur de lys and fake Queen Victoria coin closure of my 1960s purse.
it was an interesting exercise as had to find a way to secure the original snap (the river had broken away from the fragile original leather). I ended up gluing it to a patch, then stitching the patch in place. The triangle is narrower than the original, so if I ever make it again I will need to remember to cut it wider. Mine doesn’t lay as flat as the original, at least in part because it is made of thicker leather than the original. Calfskin would have been lovely, but I had to work with what I had.
The original purse Modern examples still being soldMy completed purse
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