Another Purslane Recipe

I weeded the purslane in my community garden plot today. Some people think that purslane is a weed, but they are very, very wrong. In fact it was eaten as a vegetable, both raw and cooked, in the eastern Mediterranean; it can still be found in Middle Eastern grocery stores in season.

Mind you, the grocery purslane is enormous compared to what is in my garden. That would make the tedious task of pulling leaves off the stems much simpler.

Today’s recipe is number 628 from Treasure Trove of Benefits and Variety at the Table, a Fourteenth-Century Egyptian Cookbook translated by Nawal Nasrallah: Clean the purslane as described above (ie discard the stems and use the leaves and the tender tips), and boil it. Fry a [chopped] onion in sesame oil, and add the purslane to it. Fold in vinegar sweetened with sugar or bee honey, if you like, in place of the vinegar, use the juice of sour unripe grapes (ma’hisrim) or lemon juice.

I used about a cup of purslane leaves, 1/4 of a yellow onion, 2 Tbsp white vinegar and 1 tsp honey. The final result was slightly sweet and sour, and definitely worth doing again (withh bigger leaves, if possible).

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Defining the Middle Ages

The Society for Creative Anachronism , like many other organizations, has been seeking to improve its diversity and inclusion. In the case of the SCA, this has meant being more welcoming of research and persona development from all parts of the world pre-1600.

The intellectual logic has not been well laid out (beyond the obvious need to be more inclusive), so I was delighted to discover historian Alex West and his blog recently.

The first articles I read were about medieval Indonesia, and I was hooked. He brings scholarly attention to questions that have long intrigues me as an amateur.

I still remember my excitement when I travelled to Malaysia almost 30 years ago, and discovered some of its pre-1600 history and its connections to Europe before the age of exploration. Subsequent travels and research have had me dig into the history of parts of North, Central and South America, Central Asia and Afghanistan, Africa, and Indonesia.

I knew there were connections within each of the two hemispheres (Africa/Eurasia and the Americas), and I knew that things in both changed quickly and profoundly following the arrival of Columbus in the Caribbean. I knew that there were many possible definitions for medieval, depending on your perspective about what is most important: printing press, a particular conflict, changes in art or world views, certain discoveries, etc.

Alex spells out, very clearly, how he defines medieval and modern, and why. He has a clear end date for medieval, though the start date is more fuzzy. He doesn’t have a good name for what happened in the Americas, though clearly they were as internally connected Africa/Eurasia.

For me, this has been really helpful to understand the move to studying the global Middle Ages in the SCA. Read the article. Subscribe to his blog or follow him on Twitter. You won’t be disappointed.

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Scrubbing pots

As someone who loves to cook, I also need to be prepared to scrub pots. I have written about my naalbinding Pot scrubber in the past.

Parico Gallico, who does Iron Age re-enactment, did this great little video on cleaning her wooden kitchen items. In it, she mentions a scrub brush just like hers in the Musée nationale archéologique in Saint Germain en Laye, just outside Paris. I didn’t see it on display when I was there, but apparently photos do exist, so I have written to ask for copies. In the meantime, here is the modern brush I use, which is very comparable.

8 inch long wooden scrub brush with natural fibre bristles, on a black countertop

The most fun piece of cleaning equipment may be my chain Mail scrubber. Mine is stainless steel with a hanging loop from Lee Valley Tools, but it has a pre-1600 antecedent. Volker Bach, in The Kitchen, Food, and Cooking in Reformation Germany, quotes two sources. Hans Folz wrote a Hausratbuch (list of necessary domestic equipment) around 1500. His list includes a panczer fleck (piece of mail) with which you scrub away the dirt. The second source is a poem by Meistersinger Hans Sachs in 1544, which includes a piece of chain mail to scour pots.

8 X 4 inch rectangle of stainless steel chain mail, nestled in a black iron pan

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