Travel sausage

This is another of Volker’s translations, this time from Johann Coler’s Oeconomia ruralis et domestica. a popular book on the topic of managing a wealthy household. It first appeared between 1596 and 1601 and Volker is working from a 1645 edition.

How you can make good bratwürst

(Marginalia: To make bratwürste well)

It happens at time that a good man must travel and cannot get anything to eat at the inn (Herberge). Who now finds himself in such a bad hostelry can have good bratwürste prepared in his household that he may take along on such travels and then bring out (herfür suchen) in an emergency. He should have them made thus:

Ten pounds of pork, a pound of good salt, fennel and pepper each four Loth, cloves and pounded sage each one Loth, chop this very small, also customarily (more solito – original Latin) add fat meat and mix the aforesaid (spice) powder into the meat with the salt. Mix it well together and let it stand in the mixing trough for one night. Then fill it into guts and hang them up. When you wish to eat them, just peel off the skin, cut the sausage into vinegar and eat it. Then bring out your bottle carrier (flaschen Futter) and take a good drink or two or three of good Rhenish wine. Lie down overnight in a good soft bed and sleep well and late, you will not be sick from this.

Volker helpfully provides information on weights and measures in use i that area at the time: The exact weights are not readily on hand, but since the author lived near the town of Rostock, I would begin with the Lübeck pound of 484.7 grammes, at 32 Loth to the pound. That would give us 4.847 g of pork to 484.7 g of salt seasoned with 60 g each of fennel and pepper and 15.1 g each of sage and cloves.

This this recipe has much more salt than is usual, so it is easy to see why the instructions about cutting the sausage into vinegar and drinking with plenty of wine were included. Once they are well dried, if I were camping rather then eating them in a town (as implied by that soft bed), I would cut them up as the basis for a soup stock, adding water and vegetables. Given the saltiness, it was far more experimental sausage than I wanted, so I cut the recipe by 2/3.

• 1.6 kg pork
• 160 g salt ( I substituted some of this salt for a curing salt intended for dry cured sausages, for extra food safety)
• 20 g fennel
• 20 g pepper
• 5 g sage
• 5 g cloves

The recipe itself was fairly straightforward. I chopped a pork should into chunks and ground it using a coarse grinding attachment on my electric grinder, Cutting by hand would have been more authentic, but time was a consideration.

I then added the spices to the meat and mixed them thoroughly, before putting the meat into casings and hanging them to dry.

I pricked holes in the skin to ensure there were no air bubbles, and left the sausage to dry in an unheated but well insulated part of my basement. After just 11 days, they looked like this:

I cut off a little slice to test. It was salty, as expected, but the fennel and cloves went a long way towards balancing the flavours. I rather regret testing early in the morning, as I can’t justify eating it with large quantities of good Rhenish wine, and had to settle for a mug of tea instead. This will be a lovely addition to the soup pot next time I go camping without a cooler.

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Medieval and Victorian Sugar Plums

These are quite different things, and honestly, I think I would prefer the medieval version. However, the season for fresh prune plums is long past, so the medieval version will need to wait until another fall. In the meantime, I made a Victorian version, which is more of a no-bake treat of dried fruits and spices. This article describes them quite well.

I mostly followed the recipe ground on A Canadian Foodie, though I didn’t put any whole spices in the centre of my sugar plums.

• 6 ounces slivered almonds , toasted
• 4 ounces prunes
• 4 ounces dried apricots
• 4 ounces dried figs
• 1/4 cup powdered sugar
• 1 tablespoon anise seeds , toasted
• 1 tablespoon fennel seeds , toasted
• 1 tablespoon caraway seeds , toasted
• 1 tablespoon ground cardamom
• Pinch kosher salt
• 1 cup crystal sugar

1. Place almonds, prunes, apricots, and figs into bowl of food processor and pulse 20 to 25 times or until fruit and nuts are chopped into small pieces, but before mixture combines into a ball
2. Combine powdered sugar, and one tablespoon each of anise seeds, fennel seeds, caraway seeds and powdered cardamom with salt; blend in blender, food processor, nut grinder or coffee grinder to as fine a powder as possible
3. Add powdered mixture to fruit and nut mixture and combine well with clean hands
4. Roll fruit-nut mixture into Sugar Plum balls, then roll in crystal sugar and set on parchment covered cookie sheet to dry a bit before storing in an air- tight container.

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Sauerkraut Using a Late Period German Recipe

According to Volker Bach, who is the translator of this recipe, Johann Coler’s Oeconomia ruralis et domestica was a popular book on the topic of managing a wealthy household. It is based largely on previous writings by Coler and first appeared between 1596 and 1601. Repeatedly reprinted for decades, it became one of the most influential early works of Hausväterliteratur. Volker was working from a 1645 edition for this translation, and he notes it is the earliest recipe for sauerkraut that he has found.

To lay in (einzumachen) a sour cabbage

Strew a small handful of salt on the bottom (of the cask), then form a layer of shaggy (zoettichten) cabbage over it, cut on a zoetteleisen (cabbage slicer) or a cutting board. Caraway and salt is strewn on the cabbage and then, if you wish, you lay halved or quartered heads of cabbage on top, but it must be laid down forcefully and close together. You can do this and then strew salt and caraway on it again. Then lay down another small layer of shaggy cabbage and stamp it with clean feet until the juice runs up though the toes as is the custom in some places. But if you think that it would disgust you that it is stamped with feet, you may take a wooden masher and mash it with that until it releases its juice. Continue thus, lay down another layer of cabbage with salt and caraway strewn on, and sometimes also a handful of juniper berries strewn into it, until your tun or barrel is full. But you must always mash or stamp it when a layer has been laid down so that it gives off its juice. When it is full, lay down boards on the cabbage and put stones on the boards that are as heavy as you can lift so the cabbage is weighed down and ever more juice pressed out. When you have later cooked it and want to serve it, arrange a couple of bratwurst sausages or fried herring around it on the bowl or on top of the cabbage and then eat of it and see how you like it.

For this recipe I bought a very large cabbage and sliced it thinly with a knife (I don’t trust myself with a mechanical cabbage slicer). I then layered kosher salt with sliced cabbage, caraway and juniper berries in my pickle pot. At the end, I mashed it with a potato masher, but didn’t get much juice, so I added brine to cover the cabbage. Finally, I weighed it down with my earthenware weights and let it ferment. I checked every couple of days for mould, and scooped out anything that didn’t look appetizing.

After ten days, I scooped the cabbage into jars and processed them in boiling water for about 20 minutes. This is obviously not part of the original recipe, but I don’t have a storage area cold enough to keep sauerkraut in a crock for extended periods, or enough people in my household to eat it quickly.

This is not my favourite sauerkraut, but it was quite acceptable once it had been rinsed and heated, then served with homemade bratwurst and mustard from Dutch Eenen Nyeuwen Coock Boeck (1560), which can be found here. I used white wine vinegar instead of white vinegar for this batch of mustard.

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Hen with Horseradish

The last thing I pulled out of the garden before winter was horseradish. Usually it just gets turned into sauce to accompany roast beef, but this year I wanted to see what medieval recipes I could find. A quick search turned up this:

LXXIX – Hen with horseradish. First boil the hen in clean water so that it’s nicely tender and soft. Take the horseradish and cut it in small pieces or grate it on a grater. Pound a handful of peeled almond and add that. Then make this to taste, not too thin or thick. Then put baked simle slices on a plate. Put the hen over it and then put this horseradish over it. [Koge Bog (Denmark, 1616 – Martin Forest, trans.)]

I made this exactly as recommended, except I used three bone-in chicken breasts instead of a whole chicken, and my horseradish had a little vinegar in it. I didn’t time how long it took to cook the chicken, but I ensured that it was cooked through. Rather than boiling it in a saucepan on the stovetop, I boiled it in an earthenware pot from Tosten’s Pots. This worked remarkably well.

I peeled a handful of almonds and ground them in my mortal and pestle,. I used an approximately equal amount of horseradish, by volume. My grater is rather coarse, so I chopped the horseradish even more finely. Next, I added a bit of vinegar and some of the liquid from boiling the chicken for moisture, along with the ground almonds. For the simle (simnel, a medieval yeast bread of the finest white flour), I substituted small round loaves using whole wheat flour, since I don’t use white flour except for the occasional cookie recipe.

I had read that this recipe would look very dull, with a white sauce on top of a white chicken on a piece of white bread, butI think that attitude reflects a modern, rather than medieval aesthetic. This was clearly a dish for a wealthier household, as it contains fine white bread and almonds. Served by firelight or candlelight in a room with colourful tapestries on the walls, the whiteness would be a lovely contrast.

The only thing I would do differently would be to use a bigger handful of almonds, with more horseradish so I could have more sauce. the flavour was surprisingly mild and I was overly generous the first time I ate it. By the end of the leftover chicken, there was only a tiny bit of sauce that I had to eke out very carefully. Some might want to sprinkle a bit of salt on the dish, or add it to the boiling water or sauce, but I didn’t find it was necessary.

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Spice mixes

Someone asked about my spice mix for yesterday’s meatballs, and I must confess I have no idea exactly what is in it. The bottle is simply labelled “poudre douce”. However it is probably based on the recipe from Menagier de Paris, which you can find here. My friend Michelle d’Enzinas (author of the late medieval cookbook The Big Buttes Book) redacts it as follows:

Poudre Douce
1/2 c raw cane sugar
1/4 c ginger, ground
2 tsp grains of paradise, ground
1 tsp cinnamon, ground
1 tsp nutmeg, ground
1 tsp galingale, ground

I don’t think mine had nearly that much sugar it. I chose it over the poudre fort because I liked the ginger smell, which didn’t come out as strongly in my poudre fort. For both, you can reduce quantities so you don’t end up with jars of it in your cupboard for years. That was another reason I chose the poudre douce – the jar was closer to being empty 🙂.

Michelle’s recipe for poudre fort comes from Libro di cucina / Libro de cuoco:
Poudre Fort
1/2 c long pepper, ground
1/2 c cinnamon, ground
1/2 c ginger, ground
1/2 c black peppercorns, ground
1/4 c mace, ground
1/4 c cloves, ground

Poudre douce at the top, poudre fort below. The lovely plate was made by my friend Kary at Horus Eye Pottery.

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Meatballs

This recipe is from the Nuremberg Kuchenmaistrey, produced around 1490 and translated by Volker Bach. It was the earliest printed cookbook in German.

2. xviii. Item whoever wishes to make good meatballs of whatever kind must chop it very small and add chopped parsley into it. Season it with salt and spices and add a little bacon to it and break two raw eggs into it. Make balls of this and boil them in chicken broth or in their own broth, colour it yellow well and arrange them in it. Such meatballs may (also) be laid into liver galantine and united with it.

• 1 lb ground beef
• 1 c chopped fresh parsley
• 1 jumbo egg (or two smaller eggs)
• 1 slice bacon, finely chopped
• 1 tsp poudre douce spice mix
• Fresh ground pepper to taste
• Salt to taste
• Chicken broth, to cover the meatballs
• 2 tsp turmeric

Mix all the ingredients together except the broth and turmeric. Form small balls by hand (mine were the size of golf balls, and I got 19 from 1 lb of meat. You could make even smaller, if desired). Bring the chicken broth to a boil and add the meatballs, ensuring they are covered. Cook for about 10 minutes, or until the meatballs are cooked through. Add turmeric to the hot broth and stir to dissolve.

Serve the meatballs in a bowl with some of the broth.

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How to tie a pouch

Rosalie was making a pouch recently and I asked her how she worked the strings to fasten it. Here is her answer, which is clear and beautifully illustrated. If you don’t already follow Rosalie, you should. You can also find her on Facebook at Rosalie’s Medieval Woman. And if you have ever been curious about the sex lives of medieval women (and who hasn’t) you may want to buy her book, as well. It was a fun read as well as informative. You can buy it here or at other fine book sellers, in kindle, paperback or audiobook formats.

One of Rosalie’s pouches, with a small inset photo of a medieval pouch.

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