St Hildegard’s Cookies of Joy

I have long been a fan of St Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th C German nun, musician, mystic, healer, and – it appears – cook. I recently came across this article in Atlas Obscura, and decided that cookies of joy, a medicinal wafer to dispel melancholy, needed to be tested.

From Physica: “Take some nutmeg and an equal weight of cinnamon and a bit of cloves, and pulverize them. Then make small cakes with this and flour and water. Eat them often. It will calm all bitterness of the heart and mind, open your heart and impaired senses, and make your mind cheerful. It purifies your senses and diminishes all harmful humors in you. It gives good liquid to your blood and makes you strong.”

The Atlas Obscura version of the recipe was definitely suspect, as it included sugar (virtually unknown in Germany at that time), and used egg whites rather than water, as well as honey, salt and butter. Since I want to serve these cookies to my friends as treats, not medicine,, I retained the honey, butter and a whole egg for flavour and mouth feel.

Recipe:

• 3/4 cup butter, melted
• 1 egg
• 1/2 cup honey
• 2 1/2 cups spelt flour
• 1 Tablespoon cinnamon
• 1 Tablespoon nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon cloves

Mix together the butter, egg and honey. Add in the flour and spices, and continue stirring until the ingredients are thoroughly blended together. The dough should be quite stiff. I refrigerated the dough for an hour, but Hildegard probably just added enough flour to make a very stiff dough. Her version would been much more “medicinal”, with lots of spices and just enough flour and water to make tiny wafer “cookies”. It isn’t clear whether Hildegard baked her cookies, but I suspect she probably did, until they were very dry; they would have been easier to store for longer periods.

Roll out the chilled dough to about 1/4 inch thick, then cut with a cookie cutter or cut with a knife into small squares. Bake in a preheated 375F oven for 10 minutes. Parchment paper lining on the baking sheet may help keep the cookies from sticking, if you like to use it. Allow cookies to cool completely, the store in an airtight container. I made almost 3 dozen cookies, 2 inches in diameter.

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More Greek Bread Experiments

Today I sat in on William Rubel’s presentation on ancient Greek breads, baking while I listened.

I redid Cato’s cheese bread, all with feta and a mix of white and whole wheat flour. I made some really thin on a pan in the oven (crispy cheese cracker result), and some in my tagine, which is a good substitute for a clibanus. You can see a picture of a reproduction one here, from food historian Sally Grainger’s Roman kitchen. I flipped one bread over while cooking, but left the other to cook only on the bottom. The one that wasn’t flipped looked different and felt softer while warm, but now that they have cooled, both are equally hard. I also tried toasting it directly on the cooking element. This had accidentally made my Indian flat bread puff up nicely years ago, but mostly just toasted it and my kitchen smoke this time.

The next recipe was using barley flour with water and some honey that had been heated with a few rosemary leaves. the barley flour was fun to work with. It felt super smooth when preparing the cakes, but the larger one cooked on a pan cracked a lot. The smaller, thin one puffed up a bit, so it feels like a pita. Both the thick and thin versions baked in the tagine are a little softer, but not remarkably so.

Clockwise from top: large barley and honey bread baked on a pan; cheese bread cooked directly on the stove; thin cheese bread cooked on a pan; small cheese bread cooked in the tagine without turning over; thin barley and honey bread cooked on a pan; thin barley and honey bread cooked in tagine; thick barley and honey bread cooked in tagine.
Centre: large cheese bread cooked in tagine.

The next recipe was the boletus bread, that is supposed to look like a mushroom. This one was challenging, as the little flower pot I used to bake was fatter than I would have liked, and it was hard to get the bread out, despite using parchment paper at the very bottom and oiling the pot well. it is made with white flour and sourdough, and has poppy seeds baked at the bottom to simulate the dirt found on boletus mushrooms. next time, I would give it a lot more time for the sourdough to work, or even use a commercial yeast.

I had been having fun with the tagine, so whipped up a mix of white,, whole wheat and barley flour with dried yeast and water to see how it would bake up. The loaf is a bit dense, and would have benefitted from more rising time, but I’m not unhappy with the quick experiment.

Wheat baked in the tagine on the left, boletus bread with the flower pot used for baking on the right.

As the seminar continued, William mentioned that Cato’s cheese bread can also be made with barley flour. Oops! I had completely missed that and all my feta cheese was gone. However, I had some cottage cheese and reasoned that a fresh cheese might also work, so I did a batch to see how it would taste. Instead of using a whole egg this time, I just added a bit of egg white. He also spoke about the many different shapes of bread that have been documented from ancient Greek statuettes and other images, so for fun I made one of them too. My daughter wanted to cook a pizza while the last of the tagine items were in the oven, so the temperature got raised to 425F from the 350F that had been used for everything else. these breads are sweeter and without the salty cheese taste, so I think it would be mote pleasant as a breakfast food.

The two barley cheese breads on the left were baked on a pan at 350F, and the two on the right were baked in the tagine at 425F.

Overall, the least satisfactory was the boletus bread, and the feta cheese cracker is the one that would most likely appeal to modern palates. I am now very full, but have lots of options to take for a planned picnic lunch on Saturday.

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Cato’s Cheese Bread

In preparation for an upcoming historic bread discussion, I made three bread experiments based on a recipe that Cato the Elder, a Roman writer, included in his book “On Farming” (De Re Agricultura), translated by Andrew Dalby.

“75.Libum to be made as follows:2 lb. cheese well crushed in a mixing bowl; when it is well crushed, add in a libra of bread wheat flour or, if you want it to be lighter, just half a libra of durum wheat flour, to be mixed well with the cheese; add one egg and mix all together well; make a loaf of this, with bay leaves under it, and cook slowly in a hot fire under a crock.”

I used 200 g of feta cheese, 100 g of unbleached white all-purpose flour, and approximately half a beaten egg. I mashed them all together using a mortar and pestle to get a fairly smooth dough; more mashing and kneading would have been better, but I was hungry. In fact, I was sufficiently hungry that I completely missed the instruction about using bay leaves.

I had seen a lovely video of this bread being cooked in a Greek oven, where the bread puffed up beautifully due to the heat. The oven was made using cement pavers to give a floor, three walls and a roof, and the bread was cooked on a flat pan balanced on a metal tripod over a hot fire made of small sticks. I didn’t have such an oven, so I tried three different methods.

First, I cooked a flattened round bread in a dry frying pan. The second time, I cooked it in the same frying pan covered with a lid, try and simulate the crock mentioned in the original recipe. The third bread was baked in a 350F oven. You can see the three results below.

Clockwise from top left: cooked in an open frying pan, cooked in a frying pan with a lid, baked in the oven.

I preferred the baked version, even though it took the longest to cook. It had a crisp outside layer. Next time, I will experiment with a hotter oven, to see if I can get it to puff up. My second choice was the one cooked without a lid, as it also had some crispness.

In addition to trying with a hotter oven, It would be interesting to try cooking the bread in in a tagine, as I think that may be more like the lidded container of the original recipe. I would also like to try making smaller, thinner loaves that might be more like modern crackers.

The bread is rather salty because of the feta, but is delicious spread with honey.

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