Food Matters

The potato is indigenous to Chile and the Andes. Everyone thought the potato came from Virginia, and that was because when Sir Francis Drake stopped in Virginia to pick up English settlers, he had potatoes from Cartagena in Columbia on board and introduced them to England. It had reached Spain around 1570.

Rumour says that the vegetable found its way into Ireland by virtue of the looting of a ship’s store from a wrecked Armada vessel around 1588. Alternatively, the Irish claim Sir Walter Raleigh brought it.

The potato was initially not widely used in England, but the Irish took to them whole heartedly. They were easier to grow than oats or barley and easier to hide in an underground store when soldiers prowled the land. 

By the 17^th century potatoes were grown in Lancashire and by the 18^th their use was spreading through the rest of the UK, at first as a garden and later as a field crop, even reaching the highlands of Scotland.

At first they were used as a delicacy and if they were of the sweet potato variety, almost a sweetmeat, but it was not long before they became the traditional boil, roast or fried vegetable we all know. By that time the use of pottage had declined, or the potato would undoubtedly have become the main pottage ingredient.

Staff of Life and all that

Do you know what pottage is?

In medieval days pottage, bread and ale were the backbone of  everyone's diet. We are told by Andrew Boorde (1542) that "pottage is made of the liquor in the which the flesh is sodden in, with putting-to chopped herbs, and oatmeal and salt."

 The object was to  produce a semi-liquid  but thick spoonmeat.
Cereal pottage was based on the breadcorn of the region - rye, wheat, or a combination of the two, often called maslin; barley, oats or dredge-corn (again a mixture of the last two). These might be ground at home with a hand quern or in a mortar. Both resulted in rough grain. Later this became illegal as it was said to deprive the manorial mill of its dues.

Once this was done, the  mixture was washed and then boiled until it was tender and brown. Some recipes had the grains boiled, cooled and then mixed with cows' milk and a beaten egg stirred in. This earned the name "Frumenty." Rich folk ate it with venison or porpoise. Poor folk ate it as a breakfast or supper dish, with little else but for milk or a little cream or butter if it was to be had. Gruel was oatmeal boiled in water.

In Scotland the cereal pottage was brochan - the old Gaelic word for oatmeal porridge, and sometimes eaten with kail and/or onions. The dalesmen of the Pennines and the Welsh ate a similar oatmeal or oatmeal and barley mixture. In the south of England oatmeal became a favourit thickener for meat and herb pottages as well as breadcrumbs or "amidon," a wheat starch very much like Cato's amulum of sixteen hundred years before.

"Drawn  gruel"  contained lean beef, boiled and pulled to draw out the gravy, and with  the addition of oatmeal, parsley, sage, and salt. "Forced" gruel had pork added, once it had been worked to a pulp in the mortar. Eggs were sometimes added, but considered rather extravagent.

Rice from the south of Europe was added to pottage, too. It came with the spice ships from the Mediterranean and the Countess of Leicester used 110 pounds of it in four months during 1265. In a smaller household, the record show only 3 pounds of rice used in the whole year 1419.

How things change

Around the year 1000 things were very different. Archaeologists who sift through latrine pits and peer down microscopes tell us that the toilet paper of that time was  moss. They report that human stools were looser then, probably due to the higher vegetable content - and the fact that gut infections were most likely rampant. Dog poo, on the other hand, hasn't changed much in a thousand years.

Latrines were sited close to the houses with total disregard for the attendant flies and odours, often only metres from where food was prepared. Parasites were common, probably due to the fact that five baths a year was considered excessive by the Anglo-Saxon population. Danish invaders were thought extreme when they bathed and combed their hair every Saturday night.

Even the Danes had no idea of germs, bacteria and infections but everyone knew that diseases spread from one person to another, hence the horror of leprosy. Bread, that staple of the diet, was often a week old when eaten and required to be softened by dipping it in the grain and vegetable broth that was the staple of the Englishman's diet. Everything was eaten, down to the spines of fish and apple pips and cherry stones. No food wastage in the 10th century, though given that the methods of storage available - things could be dried, smoked, pickled - many foods must have been well past their best, possibly spoilt or contaminated. Which brings us back to the contents of the latrine pit....

Changes

More cloudy days. Yesterday (27^th June) we did what I call the monastery circuit. We walked up the hill to the Gite Rural, along the top road towards the monastery and then down the hill to meet the road to Laurent de Batons. We met two other dog walkers, one Dutch, one English and Tom whizzed by in his van. By the time we walked along the bottom road it was ten past nine and starting to get really warm. Tim has been quiet all day after that walk but it totalled on 7,200 steps on my pedometer.

Early evening the thunder storm began just as we were sitting down on the bolly to eat our lapin casserôle. Tim was frightened, but then became so interested in the rabbit stew that he ignored the thunder crashes. Later still the rain started, but it wasn’t the full on rainstorm we’ve seen here in other years.

 I’ve intended to try cooking rabbit for a ong, and finally did so. I followed a recipe in the Slow Cooker recipe book and marinated the meat in fruity red wine. It turned purple in colour and looked truly revolting, but frying it improved the colour to a dark brown – nothing like the photo in the recipe book! How they got it to be golden brown after a red wine marinade, I have no idea. After four hours in the slow cooker on the bolly it smelled delicious. We found it very tasty. Not unlike a meaty chicken, but not as dry.

Farmers were rushing about collecting hay bales while the thunder crashed. It has rained through the night and today the pool is rather full and the fields are greening up almost as we watch. I doubt we’ll go far today, but I should get lots of editing done.

Orange, anyone?

Someone recommended a book called Medieval Underpants as required reading for all historical fiction authors, so I duly got hold of a copy and read it on my Kindle. Basically it is an American author advising American authors that if they wish to write about European History, they must do the research, otherwise they have UK readers in hysterics. I'm not saying she doesn't address English writers as well, but the slant of the book is more geared to Americans.  There's lots of good things to learn if you are beginning in the field, but after ten years, probably more than ten now, if I stop to think about it, learning the hard way...the only thing that had me worried was oranges.

Yes, oranges. I have a character pick one out of a bowl of pears in October in 1543. A dreadful nagging doubt seized me. I was happy enough about the pears - but decided to look up oranges in my book Food and Drink in Britain by C. Anne Wilson written about 1973.
She was most reassuring. Essentially what she says is: Strange and exotic fruits began to arrive in Britian through trade with southern Europe - oranges, lemons and pomegranates. The original home of citrus fruits was India but they travelled east through Persia. Arabs brought them to Spain. Crusaders tried them around Jaffa in 1191. The fruits began to arrive in Britain about a hundred years later.  Fifteen lemons and seven oranges plus 230 pomegranates arrived on a Spanish ship to Portsmouth in 1289 for Queen Eleanor, formerly a princess of Castile.

Those oranges were the Seville orange, the bitter type that makes marmalade. An Italian vessel brought a large consignment to the Port of London in 1420. Housewives learned to use them in cooking along with currants, prunes, figs and dates. Pine nuts, and walnuts arrived. Almonds were consumed by the royal household - 28,500 pounds of them in 1286. Poor folk ate them in pottages over the days of Christmas, but wealthy household ate them at other times. Apples and pears taken at the end of a meal were usually roasted and eaten with sugar, comfits, fennel seed or aniseed.

By the sixteenth century oranges were coming into the country regularly, both the bitter and sweet variety. Sir Francis Carew began growing them, certainly before 1562,
in Croydon. So I think I can relax and leave my single orange where it is. And then of course there's Nell Gwynne and her oranges int he next century....

Beware Mondays

Mondays are peculiar days in France. We went to Perigueux on a Monday and found everything closed. Thinking to enjoy a birthday celebration meal before we packed up and drove home, we drove to St Foy le Grande on La Dordogne and found the chosen restaurant closed. Of course! It was Monday. Hasty scratching of heads. Where to eat, if it was Monday?

St Foy offered nothing and the countryside south of the river, around Ligueux, Saussignac and Monestier, though beautiful, offered only closed auberges and restaurants. We drove into a golf resort hotel, which was open - but would not accept us because we were not resident. So, about six restaurants later, we arrived back in Bergerac, where we'd started, heading for the tourist area of the old town. Surely that would be open?

It was, and we had a very nice meal in a restaurant opposite the poissonnerie. I chose lotte saison and hoped it was fish. Whatever it was, it looked delicious, tasted wonderful and when I checked in the dictionary next day, discovered it had been monkfish of the low season. I'd been lucky with my starter, too, in ordering a tartine de legumes. It arrived as an artistically built mound of fresh vegetables: a baby carrot, a slice of red pepper, and paper thin slices of something yellow that may have been fennel, but might not. Something equally thin, almost transparent with faint pink stripes on white, a baby tomato cut precisely so that the inner structure formed the shape of a tiny tree. Delicious!
But the moral of the tale is this - in the Bergerac area of France (I cannot speak for other areas) the food is good, but almost impossible to get on a Monday night!

I thought you might enjoy a pic of me in my tree-felling gear!