Notes for ROUS pie, first, easily supportable version.

These are just some links I want to save, some quick notes on the whole ROUS pie thing; it works kind of in conjunction with having finally made the Sage Onion Fava concoction to my satisfaction and, while looking for the recipes that were going to support it as a Reasonable Substitution For Vegans Seeking Nosh for SCA Events, got reminded of the ROUS Pie Project.

Because I found a receipt that makes me want to laugh: "If you want to make pies that have the flavor of cheese." Circa 1300 France, the very basic steps are thus: grind roe and bread with almond milk, and put it in your pies to give the flavor of cheese.

I've been working the geeze gravy thing for a while, and haven't yet come up with anything that is significantly better than any other nootch fake cheese sauce recipe online, although I'll eventually get around to sharing them here, if only to ensure that I always have access to them. And, of course, every Lent, folks in the Middle Ages would become experts at substituting out all animal products aside from sea creatures. But it makes me laugh to find this recipe--apparently, I'm not the only one ever had this issue.

Oysters in Gravy is popular across centuries and cuisines, and, if you are willing to use the word unguent as a loose synonym for gravy, wipes out 2 of the 4 letters--the other 2 then become easy, using the "For to make fysche tartes owt of Lent" (here) from form of curry: Rice and Spices. It's a simple as pie redaction/recipe bash/compatible cookery bit. I still want to do it as an Oyster/Eeel/Shrimp/"Rarebit" pie, but I want to see what I can do with the limits imposed by these two recipes, as well.

One of the things that's kind of a kick about the medieval cookery database is that it's done by hand, so you never can be sure that you've found everything you mean to find. It pops you up a lot of treasures when you don't expect it, but one of the reasons I had to save the links is so that I can go back and print off a hard copy of the recipe sometime in the next few days. I have found, much to my chagrin, that I sometimes need months to again find a recipe in the data base if I wasn't paying attention to the keywords I used to find it the first time.

Geeze Gravies and Grocers, part 1: Grocery stores.

Milwaukee is not a small place. I have occasionally forgotten that, because I grew up in Chicago, which, in all its immensity, easily dwarfs large numbers of the world's cities. I was reminded of the fact that Milwaukee is not all that small when I was hunting for a particular product.

There isn't much cookery going on right now, as mentioned in last post, but that has got to change. I have to eat, and when I saw my food bill this month, I realized that I can't keep this restaurant eating thing up. Sure, I have no time to cook, and yes, it's given me a reason to try a number of restaurants I've been meaning to try, but the plain fact is that I am a social servant in this culture, and so I never have the luxury of spending all the money I might feel like spending.

For a very long time, I have been trying to make a vegan, no-soy-cheese substitute sauce that will stand in for cheese in pre-1601 recipes. The standard vegan substitute in this situation is nutritional yeast, and, while the nootch certainly does impart a flavor that works and is distantly like Parmesan cheese, my blackened Laurel heart will not rest until I can come up with a sauce that will be cheese tasting and comprised of verifiable pre-1601 ingredients. You can make an argument for nootch based on the idea that yeast was certainly used for cookery in period and that it is occasionally written about in a way that you can pretend implies adding it strictly for flavor, but the plain fact, as far as I can tell, is that nootch as a specifically produced food is pretty recent on the "inventions in cookery" timeline.

This is not true of fermented tofu. Somewhere out in the world there are a bazzillion cooks who, when presented with the same challenge, might have said "Oh, yeah, I know just what to do!" and reached for their jar of doufu-ru, but I had to learn it existed. Tofu is not something I ever loved even when I was eating whatever soy jumped on to my plate, so the chances of me stumbling on this stuff became tiny, tiny, tiny the moment I realized I was going to have to cut unfermented soy out of my diet. 99.99% of the tofu on the American market is your garden variety bean curd that, as useful as it is to the general vegan/non-ovolacto piscetarian, is something that anyone with thyroid issues is not going to be able to touch.

Fermented tofu, according to this article, appears in the written record in China in 1578 CE. And so, having stumbled across the existence of the product thanks to surfing teh internetz, I stumbled around the Milwaukee area trying to find it.

And that brings me round to the point.

I suspected I could find the product in one of the many Asian markets in the area. What I wanted to know was if I could find it elsewhere--the Asian markets most likely to have a wide selection of products tend to be more on the north end of the metro area, and thus, a bit out of my way.

In Outpost? Nope. If it's not at Outpost, then there is little point in trying the more standard grocers in the area, although I did give my favorite Sentry a brief run through, just in case. Nope.

However, there is a grocer in the Milwaukee area, a place of legendary status in this metro area, a place that is considered so upscale that a number of my former acquaintances will only shop there because they imagine it adds to their "high-class" cache: Sendiks. I've only shopped there a few times, never particularly impressed either positively or negatively.

I have an impression now, though.

Sendik's sucks.

It sucks like a suck ass sucking thing of suckiness.

I swear to dog, it has got to be by the good will and generosity of the people of Milwaukee that this local chain continues to thrive--kind of like the same way people kept buying Van Heusen shirts because they were "American made" long after it had become very clear that Van Heusen had shipped its manufacturing overseas. Only a willingness to believe the bluff could explain why anyone thinks this is a chain full of unusual and finer foodstuffs for the tony crowd. That may have been true a long time ago, but it is not true now. Is there a place for Sendiks in the Milwaukee market? Sure. If they are offering a selection of things Joellen Average will never otherwise try at a price that isn't too much for her family to bear, great: I'm all for wider experiences for everyone. And if she gets her little ego boosted, well, as long as she doesn't cross my path, it's all good. But is it the establishment it's reputed to be?

Oh, hell, no. I saw nothing there that I could not find elsewhere--with one exception: the despair-inducing deli section.

Well, let's be fair--I'm not going to like anything with mango in it. I'm especially not going to like it if the "crab" turns out to be that shitty fake crab crap with the allergy-provoking egg ingredients in it. So if your special crab salad has eggs and mangoes in it, I'm going to get sick eating it.

Which I did.

If that was all, I'd shut up. But the cabbage salad sucked. The sushi--not something you'd even begin to expect would be fabulous in a grocery story--was just sad, and that was just a vegetable roll. What the hell would it have been like if there was seafood in it? I have long understood that too much wasabi ruins the balance of delicate flavors an amuse-bouche of sushi can provide, but for the first time ever, I was extraordinarily grateful for the wasabi--it changed the awful vegetable roll into a nice crispy crunchy base useful for transporting the fabulous flavor of horseradish into my mouth.

Gak. Sendik's, I am so done with you.

After that trip, I abandoned the immediate vicinity search and went to a north side Asian grocer. Milwaukee's near north side is not the nicer area, but it's not bad. A lot of rural Wisconsinites find it terrifying, and people have left my place of employment after one visit to a home on the north side, too nervous to look past their lack of familiarity with the urban experience and notice that "lack of expensive houses" does not equate with "radically terrifying and vastly dangerous area of horrific poverty."

I found the above jars at Rhino Foods. I popped it open, and, yay! It does taste remarkably like bleu cheese. Yay.


I'll soon be popping some into a non-cheese sauce, hereafter described as a geeze gravy, to determine how it will work as a flavoring agent in a non-dairy béchamel--essentially, what all vegan "cheese" sauces turn out to be. Yes, every vegan food writer talks like he or she has just invented the Best. Vegan. Cheese. Sauce. Evah. whenever they bust out their recipes (hence my thinking of them as "geeze" gravies), but all this tells me is that American cooks really lack in some basic skills. I am eternally grateful to my Junior High School Home Ec teacher for teaching me to make a white sauce. Little did I know at 12 years old that I was being given a key to a cookery kingdom.

Chianti? You think?

There are a limited number of bean varieties available to the average American consumer in the average grocery store. Furthermore, there is plenty of misinformation to be found on teh internetz: one of my favorite falsities is a statement made in some news paper story on the resurgance of the fabulous fava bean that flatly proclaimed that no other bean was ever eaten in Europe prior to the arrival of New World varieties.

Well, there's a food writer whose going to have an "eh, ah, OOPS!" moment one day.

Fava beans are something that I have had some difficulty in finding around here. I keep looking for canned broad beans or fava beans or whatever, but they just have not been about in the stores I frequent--and don't even think about dried fava beans in the local Sentry.

But, as has been said before, I often shop at my well-beloved Outpost Co-op, and one day some number of months ago, I looked up in the bulk food aisle and saw dried fava beans.

At last. I found them.

So I do my research, and then I research a little more, because I've never cooked them before--I can't even be certain I've eaten them, beyond in my own home made seitan. When all my research is done, I have come to understand that the beans need to have their tough brown skins removed before eating.



It took me days to get what would evenually be about 1.5 cups of beans from dried brown pebbles to skinned beauties ready for cooking. I loved the smooth feel and the look, but other food writers were not kidding when they said the skins were tough to remove. Some of the fava beans, even after 3 days of soaking, never softened enough to be peeled.

I sorted through various bean recipies in various pre-1601 sources, and was not wildly enthused by any of them, but since it was clear that I was going to have to cook the beans first, I popped them into the pressure cooker, covered them with water, sprinkled in a little salt, and let them go.

... Just a little too long. ::sigh::

By the time I opened the pressure cooker, the fava beans had cooked to the "perfect for pureeing" stage. I sprinkled in some olive oil, some poudre fort, and mashed them.



They were okay. The dish was not a sufficient return on my effort, but it was not terrible. Fava beans were not the delish treat I had been lead to believe, but I would make this again if it did not require so much effort to prepare the beans. I put the remainder of the dried fava beans (about 3 cups worth, actually) into the freezer, figuring that it would be some long while before I would want to work with them again. The best thing that came from that experiment was the realization that I had come very close to the water:bean ratio needed for the pressure cooker--throw in pre-soaked beans and then cover with 1/2 to 1 inch water.

And a few days go by.

Now, I have not had much time for cookery--or much of anything else--in recent months, and so, when Wednesday last came along and I needed some supper, Angelique and I went off to a restaurant I had tried several years ago but never really got to know, Sharazad.

On a whim, I ordered the app combo, noting that there were quite a few vegan appropriate items thereon, in addition to the spinich pie (quite free of feta cheese). In the app was a dish called foule--a dish I'd never met, a dish of fava beans. I was eager to try it, hoping that it would be inspiring.

It was, all right. The damn brown skins were right on the beans. Frak! All that time and effort, and the skins are perfectly fine to eat.

Other things I noted: I really like their baba ganooj, more than I like the same dish from Abu's Jerusalem of the Gold (which recently changed hands, totally wrecking the bizarre charm of the former interior). The adas majroush (lentil soup) is very nice, and the next time I go, I think I will be adequately fed via the app plate and the soup. There are a number of fish/seafood dishes on the menu, but I'll likely work throiugh all the vegan things, first. I can get a decent fish meal lots of places in town, but a decent vegan meal is a rarer thing.

And I'll be damned if I peel another dried fava. Feh!

Seitan bake part two, or, Mock Beef y-Stywyd

I made a first try at seitan with a typical pre1601 European flavoring profile here. This entry is the follow up, describing how it was completed for consumption.

My initial thought was to make a savory pie, mostly because I love savory pies as a handy dandy meal. Mmmmm... Medieval pot pies.... But, of course, most medieval meat pies have fruits rather that vegetables in them--if there is something other than meat in there at all. While I am certain that I will eventually come up with a tasty pot pie substitute, the work I want to do for same is many layered, and I still have work to do on the other components before I start experimenting with the entire concept.

And so I thought about how I might make the seitan work as a tasty meat like substance on its own.

And I remembered Beef Y-Stewed.

I love modern beef stew, but the above mentioned recipe is really about cooking lesser cuts of beef in an excellent broth. We have served a similar dish at feasts in the past, cheap cuts of beef slowly stewed in red wine, spices, and apricot preserves, a delicious dish based on the redaction work of Michelle Santy/Amytis de Fontaine. However, I have never bothered to redact this myself - as much as I enjoy it, I have preferred ways to prepare inexpensive cuts which do not involve cooking with 1/2 bottles of red wine. Call it a quirk, but I prefer wine and beer as flavor enhancers rather than primary ingredient-I'd simply rather drink the wine. :-)

However, I also remembered the delicious beef prepared according to Amytis' method, and so it seemed to me a good way to explore the second cook session for the seitan. The results?


Mock Beef y-Stywyd at the 6 o'clock spot, with apples, walnuts, and peas.

Mmmm Mmmmm Good. This did not taste like Edouard Halidai's Beef y-Stywyd, of course, but it did not taste like unsweetened cinnamon bread, either. Instead, it tasted like a bit of meat that wasn't quite identifiable, very mild, made better with a long stew in a good broth. Not as powerful as real beef, but certainly acceptable and something I plan to do again and again. And, as an accidental bonus, it's a recipe that relies on bread, especially when considering how the recipe is described in late and just post period versions. You can look at this recipe and say, heck, the only thing we left out was the meat. We subbed big chunks o' super dense bread for the beef.

The period recipe for this:

Beef y-Stywyd. Take fayre beef of þe rybbys of þe fore quarterys, an smyte in fayre pecys, an wasche þe beef in-to a fayre potte; þan take þe water þat þe beef was soþin yn, an strayne it þorw a straynowr, an sethe þe same water and beef in a potte, an let hem boyle to-gederys; þan take canel, clowes, maces, graynys of parise, quibibes, and oynons y-mynced, perceli, an sawge, an caste þer-to, an let hem boyle to-gederys; an þan take a lof of brede, an stepe it with brothe an venegre, an þan draw it þorw a straynoure, and let it be stylle; an whan it is nere y-now, caste þe lycour þer-to, but nowt to moche, an þan let boyle onys, an cast safroun þer-to a quantyte; þan take salt an venegre, and cast þer-to, an loke þat it be poynaunt y-now, & serue forth. --from Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books, and available with transliteration and redaction at Gode Cookery, here.

I did have to spend some time thinking about the base broth that I was going to use. In the end, I decided on a packet of Campbell's dried onion soup. Why?

1. It's the least objectionable of the commercially made, widely available dried onion broths. No soy, no beef. The only food sensitivity that needs to be watched is the dextrose and the yeast extract. You will have corn products in your food, but you're making fake beef. You can look past the trace corn here. There is a comparison of ingredients in commercial onion soup powders here, if you'd like to look for something else. In any event, it's a strong broth that will at least suggest the flavor of beef.

2. The recipe calls for onions--this is a reasonable broth to doctor up, because the source recipe calls for onions at an undetermined amount.

And so, choice made and path firmly before me.... I began.

First, I placed the sliced seitan in the slow cooker and lightly browned it in olive oil, mostly because I was afraid it would fall apart. It did not. I'd not skip that step, though, as there is little fat in the the seitan, and some small additional amount is needed to give this a satisfactory mouth feel. I added the onion soup, enough water to cover the seitan, and let it slow cook.

Given that the seitan had already been seasoned with a number of spices mentioned as part of the cooking broth in the receipt above, I elected not to add them to the broth.

The seitan and broth cooked until such time as I could smell that it was done. You'll know that point. Your kitchen will smell like tasty onion soup. This actually improved the texture of the seitan immensely--before the braising, it was a little too firm, a smidgen too dry, but upon completion, it was just fine. 

The broth was pretty significantly reduced by this time, and so I removed the seitan and added 1/4 c. red wine, 3 T apple cider vinegar, chopped fresh sage (about 8 leaves with the stem, likely 2 T when chopped) and a teaspoon of dried parsley. I put the seitan back in, let it simmer until the broth was reduced to a small amount of thick sauce (which did not take long, there was not much left after the braising) and served it as you see above.

I decided to serve it with peas and walnuts because I'm still a fan of the complete protein school of vegetarian meal planning, and an apple to get a fruit food group on the plate. 

Further exploration of period and slightly post period beef "stew" recipies are here: I may try to include some of these in the next go round.

The Mystery of Medieval Spice Mixtures

Click on picture to see series of photographs of spices used to make a powder fort.*

Seitan Bake part one includes a generic range of spices: cinnamon, cloves, ginger, long pepper, grains of paradise, and black pepper. These are spices discussed over and over in medieval recipes. I, myself, am not over fond of cinnamon and so tend to make my medieval spice mixtures ginger and pepper heavy. It would be correct to say that I used a powder fort mix in the seitan.

It would also be correct to say that many more (and less) well-researched people have tackled the vagueness that surrounds the contents and proportions of many medieval spice mixtures. I've linked to some of them below, and I would encourage anyone wanting to tackle the issue him or herself be not limited by the ideas of others or the few specific ingredient lists found in the existing manuscripts. Ultimately, you have to eat it. Ultimately, the powder fort of 15th c. France is not the powder fort of 14th c. England, and the powder fort of 14th c. London is not the powder fort of 14th c. York. Similar spices may have been used across all these places and eras, but it is just as valid to add a little something known in period that is not a part of that usual spice range. This is particularly noticeable in the powder douce recipes, which contain a splendid mess of possibilities.

Other people's ideas about the perfect combination of the mystery spice mixes mentioned in medieval cookery manuscripts: powder fine, powder forte, powder blanche, powder douce. Powder may also be spelled as poudre.

An article with a basic spice conversation and multiple recipes for Powders fine, douce, and forte:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080131160345/http://www.thorngrove.net/athenaeum/powder.htm

Other recipes for Powder douce:

http://cookalong.blogspot.com/2007/11/on-poudre-douce.html
http://www.practicallyedible.com/edible.nsf/pages/powderdouce
http://recipes.medievalcookery.com/douce.html
http://www.celtnet.org.uk/recipes/mediaeval/fetch-recipe.php?rid=medi-powder-douce
http://www.recipezaar.com/poudre-douce-powder-douce-361645
http://www.livinghistorylectures.com/Powder%20Douce.pdf


Also try: apple pie spice, chai spice blend

Others for Powder Forte:

http://www.practicallyedible.com/edible.nsf/pages/powderforte
http://recipes.medievalcookery.com/fort.html
http://www.livinghistorylectures.com/Powder%20Forte.pdf
http://www.celtnet.org.uk/recipes/mediaeval/fetch-recipe.php?rid=medi-powder-fort

Powder Fine:

http://www.practicallyedible.com/edible.nsf/pages/finepowder
http://recipes.medievalcookery.com/fine.html

Powder Blanch:

http://www.practicallyedible.com/edible.nsf/pages/powderblanch
http://www.celtnet.org.uk/recipes/mediaeval/fetch-recipe.php?rid=medi-blanche-powder

You know, I do think it is time for me to pack up my own blends of these spices just to save some time in prep--right now, I tend to measure them out individually, but it would be faster to mix the spices in the proportions I prefer.

*Use of this image is believed to be consistent with fair use as it is used in a reduced-size format, in a no-profit context, to link back to a series of publicly viewable photos which illustrate the subject matter of this educational post. Attribution for photo is found by clicking back to the photo series.

Blancmange as a savory dish

A Modified Medieval Dinner of Delish +3

Blancmange is a ubiquitous medieval dish, and a careful reading of the many, many, many recipes reveals a lot of different ways to interpret the recipe. My first attempt to do so was straight out of Pleyn Delit and I didn't like it very much.

I needed a quick dinner tonight, though, and something that would appeal to omnivores. Digging through the fridge, I found I had some vegan mushroom soup I had made some while ago, and it occurred to me that this would be a very good way to try blancmange again.

I'd like to say I felt all kinds of clever, but it's not like rice cooked in mushroom soup is any sort of unexpected dish here in the land of hotdish. What I did feel pretty good about was the realization that it would serve as a veganized blancmange, as the soup had been made of equal parts mushroom broth & sweetened almond milk, plus flour, salt, little garlic. So, into the pot it went, one measure of the soup, one measure of water, a teaspoon of Better Than Bullion's no-chicken base, and one measure of rice.

I couldn't believe how good it was when compared to the Hieatt redaction . And it does not taste like your usual Lutheran Church Basement cuisine. Thank heaven. Instead, a hint of savory, a hint of sweet, and what I imagine the flavor profile of blancmange might have been before it evolved into the milk jello of modern cuisine.

That, in and of itself, would be a fine medieval blancmange. Mushrooms instead of chicken and otherwise almonds, sugar, rice. The blancmange is served with asparagus, onions, and a mock chicken breast that had been defrosted and "seared" in olive oil.

Cooking Vegetarian for Medieval Feasts

I have not been the cook for a feast in a long while, but one thing that always irked me was the meat-heavy planning that went into most feasts at that time. One of my proudest moments was the day a vegetarian couple came to me and said, "Oh, thank you so much, this was the first feast at which I have ever had enough to eat and had a variety of things to choose. And it was all good."

(That would be Stone Lion II, many years ago, and the last feast I planned. I've offered a few times since, but there are always others who are hungry for the position, and I let them have it.)

When I started expanding my website to include interests beyond illuminated manuscripts, I put up a small page of recipes that I had prepared as primary vegan proteins at feasts. Very simple legume dishes. It's rarely been accessed, according to the site statistics, but it nonetheless deserves saving, and it is here. I had a good time writing the recipes as if I was writing in period, and I think I may continue that tradition with original recipes meant for period cookery--another good reason to developed this blog's voice here. In any event, I cook these recipes all the time, and will move them here for safekeeping. Where they still won't be accessed much. ;-)

I recently found a link to another page that considers vegans and vegetarians in feast planning, Katherine Rowberd's Medieval food for vegetarians. I like this article, in that she has the same attitude I have: if you pay attention and plan, you can stuff everyone and no one will notice. She has a reasonable essay on planning and a selection of recipes to choose from for cooks who are not interested in researching. I'd eat feasts more often if more Head Cooks followed this advice.

Danial Meyers has listed out a whole swathe of piscetarian & vegetarian recipes on his site, here. Note that this is a site that considers fish as a vegetarian alternative (a la the use of pesco-vegetarian as a vegetarian dietary style). :-)


Gode Cookery has one wild mashed up table of contents for all recipes, here. Sift through them for recipes that support the more restrictive dietary styles. Some are completely medieval, others are not.