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As the use of the dinner plate replaced the medieval slice of coarse bread, it became increasingly popular to serve food in a sauce. The bread-thickened sauces, the black sauce and the yellow sauce, had been common since medieval times, and such sweet, dark spiciness was still popular, but the popularity of the first of the lighter and more modern flour-thickened sauces, the white béchamel sauce, had also spread to middle-class households.
BLACK SAUCE
Boil a hen or a carp in blood mixed with vinegar and water. Remove the meat from the liquid, thicken with grated gingerbread or rye bread, and season with chopped salted lemons, black pepper, cinnamon and saffron. Finally adjust the taste towards sweet or sour with sugar, honey or vinegar.
YELLOW SAUCE (also called Hungarian or Polian)
Boil chopped onion, apple, wheat bread and green parsley in a mix of water, white wine and vinegar. Use this soup for boiling your meat or fish unless it is already boiled. Season with pepper, saffron and sugar, and garnish with salted lemons.
WHITE SAUCE (in the new French style)
Boil a hen in beef stock with a chopped onion, vinegar and sliced fresh lemons. Remove the meat, thicken with fine flour, and season with mace, and ginger. Finally stir in some butter and garnish with chopped parsley. Comment: Beef stock was made like this: Beef stock is boiled on the bones and stringy meat with onions and roots until the meat may be easily pulled apart. Sieve, cool. Skim off fat, boil to concentrate
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It was characteristic for the cooking of the time that the fish, poultry and meat in the dishes for the family would have been prepared not just in various ways, but in several ways. A piece of salted pork could thus be soaked, boiled briefly, and cut to cubes and fried, before being mixed with a sauce and baked into a pie, or it could be soaked, boiled until very tender, and pounded to a paste in a stone mortar, before being mixed with eggs and other ingredients, shaped to meatballs and fried or boiled again.
DUCK WITH TURNIPS
Place a cleaned duck in a lidded pot on a piece of fat pork rind, and add carrot, onion, cloves, salt, pepper, and chicken stock. Seal the lid with a flour paste and bake or simmer in a cauldron for an hour. Sieve the sauce and skim off the fat. Fry turnips in this fat, and serve them with the duck. Smoked duck and salted goose are also good this way, and so are squabs.
PORK ROLLS WITH CAPERS
Soak thin slices of salted, streaky pork in cold water. Chop capers, onion, and anchovies or red-spiced salted herrings, and fry this in butter along with grated bread and salted lemon. Stir in beaten egg until you have a paste. Spread the paste on the pork slices, roll, and place in a pie dish. Spread more grated bread on top and bake until golden. Serve with yellow sauce or mustard.
PORK IN YELLOW SAUCE
Boil a piece of ham or loin of pork. Grate wheat bread and peppercake into a pot and bring it to a boil in sweet wine. Add sugar or honey to taste, and also pepper, ginger, clove and saffron. Cut peeled apples into quarters, and braise them in a pot with yellow raisins, saffron, pork fat and a little wine. Serve the meat—whole or in pieces—garnished with the sauce and the apples.
RICE PUDDING
Wash rice and mix with finely chopped fat pork, whole pepper, cream, salt and marjoram. Fill into clean pig intestines or stomach, and boil well. Serve with apple sauce.
BEEF IN BLACK SAUCE
Soak a piece of salted beef and boil it until tender. Take chicken blood and beef stock, and boil it with chopped apple and onion. Sieve and add fried onions, pepper, and cinnamon. Add the meat cut in pieces, and boil again. Season with vinegar, and serve garnished with apple or almond compote, and small black raisins.
The servants would most likely get anything left of the dishes above in addition to their gruel, but a simple meal of broth with bread and the boiled meat from the broth making was also possible. On days when the household had little time for cooking—such as washing, baking or slaughtering days—a cold meal of boiled eggs, or slices of cheese or sausage with bread and beer might be served to the servants as well as the family.
BOILED MUTTON
Soak a leg of mutton, and boil it until tender. Take some of the cooking liquid and boil it to a sauce with vinegar and sage leaves. Cut the meat from the bone, and cook the pieces again in the sauce before serving.
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The most common preservation methods of drying and salting meant that long soaking and boiling were often necessary to make the food even marginally eatable again, but the long and complicated preparations were also a matter of preference. Not only was elaborately prepared food with minces and stuffing an indication of status, but food in its natural state was considered coarse and unhealthy, so even lettuce was usually cooked, and what was called a salad consisted of boiled vegetables in a marinade.
SPINACH THE HUNGARIAN WAY
Finely chop onion and mix with raisins in a pot. Add spinach and sour wine, and boil. Season with salt and sugar, and add some butter or olive oil. Good with fried salmon.
FRESH PEAS IN WHITE SAUCE
During the brief season for green peas this dish was as popular then as it is today.
Take fresh peas from their pods, and put them in a well tinned pot with good beef stock. Bring to a boil and add fine flour mixed with butter and finely chopped green herbs. Boil for a few minutes and serve warm. Smoked or salted pork may be cooked along with the peas or served beside them.
BEETROOT IN SOURCREAM
Take round beetroots of an even size and remove the leaves. Boil the roots until tender, let them cool, and remove the skin. Chop the leaves, and heat briefly in a pot. Add sour cream, but do not boil. Add mustard to the cream, and pour this over the roots.
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Raw fruit was considered unhealthy, and—aside from a few berries and cherries—fruit was usually cooked before being eaten.. During the summer season there would be the various berries both wild and from the gardens, and as few of these dried well for storage at least some of them would probably be served as a compote or in a jelly during their brief seasons. In the autumn grapes, wild damsons, plums and prunes would ripen, and most of this harvest would be dried and stored for treats during the winter. Just before the first freeze was expected, the storage apples and pears would be picked and either dried or stored fresh on trays in a cool cellar to last as long as they could for the winter.
Of these fruits, apples were by far the most common, followed by grapes in central and southern Germany, and these two fruits were those most commonly preserved for storage. Preserving fruit mainly meant drying at the time, as sugar was so expensive that even a prosperous household would buy it only for special occasions. Preserving berries in a mix of honey and alcohol was also done, but such would be regarded more as a medicine than as a dessert.
STRAWBERRY COMPOTE
Press strawberries crushed with sweet wine through a sieve, and sweeten to taste with sugar or honey. If the dish is too runny, it may be made thicker with crushed wheat bread or peppercake.
RASPBERRY COMPOTE
Heat raspberries with grated wheat bread until the juice is released. Sieve and heat again. Serve with sugar on top or bake it into a pie. It is equally good cold or warm.
BERRY JELLY
If a stiff, clear compote is wanted for decoration, the berries must be boiled with quinces or green apples, and the juice allowed to drip through a fine cloth. Boil again until a drop remains hanging from your spoon, and let it set on a glazed platter or in a mold smeared with a few drops of almond oil.
DRIED CHERRIES
Place cherries on a grid, so that they do not touch, and place in a warm oven. When dried they keep well. When wanting to serve the cherries, this is a good way: take equal parts water and wine, and heat the cherries in this. Sweeten with sugar. Fry bread in butter, and serve the cherries on top of the bread.
APPLE PANCAKES
Mix flour to a batter with milk or wine, and add thinly sliced apples, currants, and sugar or honey. Bak
e in butter in a frying pan, and serve with more sugar or honey.
BAKED APPLES
De-core apples and fill the hole with butter, cinnamon, and sugar or honey. Bake in a lidded pan heaped with coal. If bread is being baked in the house, the apples may also be wrapped in fine dough, and baked in the oven once the bread has been removed. This is also a good way of cooking quinces.
APPLE FRITTERS
Make a thick batter of fine wheat flour, beer and eggs, dip rings of fresh or dried apples in the batter, and fry in ox or pork fat. The batter may also be made thicker, and fried as balls, before being eaten with a sweet applesauce.
PEAR FRITTERS
Peel firm pears, dip them in a thin batter of flour and egg, and fry in butter until fine and brown. Grate peppercake and bring to a boil in sweet wine. Season with cardamom and serve with the pears.
CHEESE FRITTERS
Grate fresh, fat cheese, and mix with egg, ginger, mace, saffron, currants, crushed almonds, and wheat flour or grated wheat bread. Fry in fat and serve quickly.
BLACK CURRANT REMEDY
Mix black currants with honey and cover with brandy or aqua vitae. A spoonful of this mixed into a mug of hot wine is good against a cold in the body or head.
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The same dishes that were served to the family at the mid-day meal could also be served in the evening either as cold leftovers or freshly prepared, but the most usual combination would be to serve any leftover meat or fish combined with a fresh pie or another delicate meat dish. Some families also had soup for their evening meal.
BEEF WITH GARLIC
Boil beef in good beef stock with peeled garlic, grapes and parsley. Season with salt. Serve the meat in slices on a platter with the sauce poured over.
MEAT PIE
Soak salted meat for at least a day. Cut the meat to pieces, and place it in boiled and cooled sour wine for several hours. Chop the meat finely and mix with the marinade, saffron, cloves, cinnamon, grapes, raisins and chopped ox marrow or pork fat. Place it in a pie dish and cover with more spices, raisins and grapes. Press a lid of fine dough on top, brush with egg white, and make a hole in the middle of the dough. Bake and when half baked pour in stock spiced with saffron. It is well to place a layer of boiled, peeled eggs or chicken meat in the middle of the minced meat.
CHICKEN PIE WITH QUINCES
Remove the cores from the quinces, and chop one finely. Mix the chopped quince with salt, ginger, cloves and pepper, and place it inside a big chicken. Place the chicken on a layer of bread-crumbs in a big pie dish surrounded by the rest of the quinces and a little white wine. Sprinkle more of the spice-mix on top as well as many small cubes of butter. Cover with a lid of fine dough, brush with beaten egg, and bake for at least two hours. The baking time becomes shorter if the chicken is half-cooked and the quinces softened in butter before being baked in the pie.
The dish below is in the new French style; notice that this is not a sweet dish.
EGG PIE WITH APPLES
Fry peeled apple boats in butter, remove from the heat, and add fresh raw eggs—beaten or unbeaten—to the pan. Cover with a lid and surround the pan with coal. Bake, but not too hard, pour off any liquid, and sprinkle with salt and ginger.
TENDERLOIN SAUSAGE
Finely chop a fresh tenderloin, and mix carefully with egg, salt, pepper, ginger and saffron. Shape to elongated balls, and let them simmer in an inch of water until firm. Remove them and serve with the cooking liquid either as it is or used as a base for one of the sauces above. The spiced meat paste may also be stuffed into clean intestines before being boiled. Such a sausage may then be cured in a strong brine, and hung to be smoked in the chimney. Instead of being served in a sauce such a sausage is very good with soup or a dish of cabbage.
HEN IN HORSERADISH
Peel and crush almond, and mix it with peeled and grated horseradish. Place the meat from a boiled hen on toasted wheat bread, and spread the horseradish paste on top. If the paste seems too dry, a bit of the cooking liquid from the hen might be added.
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For the servants, the evening meal would most likely be the leftover boiled meat from the mid-day meal turned into a stew with lots of coarse vegetables, such as cabbage, kale, roots and onion, and with plenty of barley or oat to make it filling. If such a stew had been their main fare for the mid-day meal, it would also be quite normal to dilute any leftover stew into a soup for the evening meal, along with the usual bread and beer
CABBAGE STEW OR SOUP
Boil bones from a pig in water for several hours along with the coarse green leaves of leeks, the stalks from parsley, the top of parsnips, and any other greens you might have. The bones may be from a freshly slaughtered pig, or from salted or smoked pork. Sieve the soup, and scrape any bits of meat from the bones. Return the soup to the fire and add the meat, along with chopped head cabbage, leeks, thyme and carrots. The dish may be made thicker with oat meal or cracked barley, and it is equally good as a soup or a stew. Serve with rye bread and mustard.
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Nearly all modern European dishes could be made the kitchens of 1632 if the household had access to the ingredients—from pancakes and pot roasts to the Yorkshire Puddings made by pouring batter into the tray with hot drippings beneath the roast. But the traditions for how the food was acquired, cleaned, preserved, cooked, spiced, etc. had their basis in the medieval traditions, and would seem quite strange to a modern American.
Take a thing like cleaning. A 1632 kitchen would probably seem dirty to a visiting American, what with its open fire, sooty walls, and dirty floor and tables. But what has to be remembered is that one of the processes that differed the most between then and now is how water was acquired. Water in 1632 might not be good to drink unless boiled, but it was still needed for all the usual tasks of cooking, cleaning, and washing. And every drop had to be winched up from a well and poured into buckets for carrying or barrels on a cart before being carried, pulled or driven to the house and poured into the big water barrels inside or outside the kitchen. It would then be ladled into smaller containers when needed. After use, the dirty water would be carried out of the house and thrown on the ground or in the open gutter. It was not that the technology wasn't able to make water-pipes and various pumping systems, and in several places in Europe experiments with indoor water was taking place, but this was not something people in general had either heard of or would consider a possibility for them.
Standards of cleanliness and sanitation are sure to increase with the spread of new technology and knowledge about how important hygiene is in keeping people healthy. Freezers and refrigerators, along with knowledge about nutrition, are also sure to replace much of the salted meat with fresh and add more fresh vegetables to everybody's diet. However, a lot of people are also going to want the food they are used to, and an American staying with a local family—or in an inn—should definitely expect pea mush and black pudding rather than meat loaf with potatoes.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Mathematics After the Ring of Fire
Written by William Truderung
The Ring of Fire was an event that shook the world of 1631 to its foundations. One of the disciplines destined to be revolutionized is mathematics, which was still in its infancy at the time. This article looks at what changes the coming of Grantville would be likely to make to the mathematics of the day.
European Mathematics Before the Ring of Fire
In many ways, the mathematics of the early to mid seventeenth century resembled our own. The modern Hindu-Arabic number system was in regular use, almost completely replacing the old Roman system that used "I V X L C D M." Decimal fractions were also coming into use, and most of the common symbols for arithmetic operations were at least known, if not yet common. Algebra texts used letters to represent constants and variables (although the use of "x y z" to represent unknowns would not reach print until 1637) and many basic functions, such as the trigonometric functions and the logarithmic function (t
o base 10 as well as base e), were known. Many of today's techniques were already in use, such as proof by induction, and the method of exhaustion. Infinite series and continued fractions were being used, and imaginary and complex numbers were understood, if not yet fully accepted (even negative numbers were regarded with considerable suspicion at this time). The slide rule, both circular and straight, had already been invented, although this invention was not described in a book until 1632, and the first logarithmic tables had been published in 1617. Early steps toward generalization and abstraction were being taken, such as the efforts by Desargues to generalize geometry beyond what the ancient Greeks did. A number of foundational ideas were "in the air"—the first book on coordinate geometry was within a few years of being published (although a number of mathematicians had independently discovered the basics by this time), and the problem of infinitesimals, limits, and the calculus was an active area of study. Even the first book of mathematical puzzles and recreations for a popular audience had been published, in 1612. Of course, the mathematics of the age was rudimentary compared to that of today, but it had already assumed modern form.