Medieval

How to make Quince Cheese

9th December 2016 by Regula 1 Comment

I’m not the biggest fan of sweet desserts after mains, I prefer an afternoon tea where the treats become the star of the show. That way you can enjoy them to the full and they do not become that thing you eat last when you’re actually too full to enjoy it. For an afternoon tea you can dress up, wear a hat, and pretend to be a lady of good breeding. Drinking tea with your pinky in the air, back straight, having polite conversations and enjoying the experience of eating from fine bone china. I’m also a sucker for a multi-tiered cake stand, and for clotted cream – lots of it.
Cheese and biscuits are my choice of afters and with a decent fruit cheese and port this quickly becomes my perfect kind of dessert.

Fruit cheeses are reduced jams or pastes. Centuries ago they were served after dinner as a digestive and they were often prescribed by apothecaries to cure minor ailments. The fruit paste was often pressed in a mould with fancy engravings and could look rather stunning. Moulds of this sort are rare to come by, I only know one person who has a mould and I believe he even carved it himself.

Although fruit cheeses should be thick and hold their shape, they should still be spreadable. You can make them into small cake trays for a nice shape or just in a large tray, you can then cut squares of the fruit cheese to wrap them and keep them. They are the most delectable accompaniment to blue cheese, but they can also be eaten all on their own, as a sweetie. A nice idea if you want to know what your child puts in its mouth, factory made sweets can contain all sorts of horrible additives. But it’s still sugar, make no mistake, to call it healthy would be wrong, but eaten and treated as a treat it is just fine.

My favourite fruit cheese is made of Quince. Quince are usually cooked and conserved. They look like otherworldly lanterns, large yellow pears with a strange downy covering. Raw they are considered quite unpalatable because of their tartness, but they are high in pectin which makes them ideal for making jams, jellies and fruit cheese. The pectin is most strong in the pips of the fruit, often ground up pips would be used to set other jelly like creations. But this is something I would not recommend you do as the seeds contain nitriles which turns poisonous when it comes in contact with your guts enzymes and acid. A few pips from your batch of quince are fine, just don’t chuck in a jar of ground up pips.

Quince and quince cheese was popular all over Europe since Medieval times. In Spain they call it ‘Membrillo’, in Italy ‘cotognata’ from the Italian word for quince ‘mele cotogne’ quince apple, the French call it ‘cotignac’ or ‘paté de coing’ from the French ‘coing’ for quince. Quinces are responsible for the word marmalade as their Portuguese word is ‘marmelo’ and they were made into fruit cheeses named marmalades. …

The Rise of Rice Pudding – a History and a 14th century recipe

11th April 2016 by Regula 5 Comments

Yesterday, 11 april, I was asked to come on the BBC One Breakfast television program to talk about the history of rice pudding in light of the sudden craze for rice pudding – and that I have just written Pride and Pudding, a whole book about pudding. So how has rice pudding got itself back on our menu’s and in our hearts?

Rice pudding now as its own restaurant in Manhattan, New York dedicated to rice pudding – called ‘Rice to Riches’. The BBC journalist contacting me told me that Waitrose executive chef, Jonathan Moore, said that after visiting Manhattan’s rice pudding-only shop recently, Jason Atherton’s Michelan star restaurant, Pollen Street Social, and Berner’s Tavern in London have both re-invented the classic dessert. He also said sweet, savoury and embellished versions are becoming more ‘extreme’, with options at The Rice Cream Shoppe in Greenwich Village including gluten free and vegan versions. Waitrose also reported that sales of rice pudding have risen by 8% year on year.

I’m sure that in this modern day and age with dishes that look like works of art, we are all craving for something real and honest. Something which just isn’t pretending to be more than it is. Something so humble it conjures up memories of your nan, your mum or the auntie who made it especially when you were visiting. I have faint memories of my mum making rice pudding and I can remember the impatience for it to cool off and develop that glorious yellow skin which was really, the best part of the pud….

We shall drink Lambswool on the Twelfth Night

5th January 2015 by Regula 16 Comments

Although I was brought up with a lot of Pagan traditions, living in the city of Antwerp meant that some customs were harder to follow than others. As city dwellers far removed from any orchard or field, we were ignorant to the traditional rites surrounding harvest and sowing time. If there is no nature to honour, no field to gather around the cleansing fire, the feasting quickly becomes part of the past and forgotten.

Industrialisation has brought us wealth and the choice of matching shoes with handbags on a regular tuesday morning. It has brought the technical bits and bobs we all love and loathe. The big world has become smaller and the challenges bigger. The lucky few still live outside of the ever growing concrete cities. We follow their lives on Instagram with a sense of nostalgia, as if we have ever experienced living surrounded by trees and liberating fields and forests, and then tragically lost it.

But that is what it is, we have lost something, and most of us can feel it. There have never been more depressed people, nor have there ever been more people who are unhealthy because of their eating habits, eating too much rather than starving, but malnourished nonetheless. Our daily bread is soiled with adulteration, slowly making us ill. Animals are kept away from fields and live their ever shortening lives on the concrete floors of factory farms to keep the cost of your daily need low, fruit is left on the trees to rot because farmers can’t afford to harvest it, the price a farmer gets for his milk hasn’t gone up in 20 years (based on Belgian farms) so milk is being sprayed onto the soil of the farmland where the cows can no longer roam freely because of bureaucratic nonsense about fertilizer. Small scale generation long fishermen turn their boats into flower beds because the fishing quotas set out to protect fish stocks have made it so that only the big destructive factory fishing vessels can make a living, scooping up the fish only for part of it to be actually consumed and the rest turned into animal feed because their nets just catch too much for it all to be sold and cooked by us humans. The fisherman that could have made his day by catching one Dover Sole, now has to trow it back, while the big monsters take and take and kill the sustainable fishing industry.

We got lost as humans, because we lost part of our human nature.

Let today be an Epiphany.

The Epiphany is the Christian feast that concludes the twelve days of Christmas. In Pre-Christian pagan traditions this marks the time for Wassail. The practice of ‘wassailing’ meant singing and drinking in the apple orchards on the Twelfth Night to awaken the trees, to warn of the evil spirits and pray for a good harvest in the autumn. It could be that the feast of Wassail comes from the Celtic festival called ‘La Mas Ubhail’, the Feast of the Apple. Wassail comes from ‘waes hael’ meaning ‘be thou healthy’ or ‘be whole’, a salutation in Old English. During the feast these words would be addressed to each other and to the oldest apple tree in the orchard.
A drink traditional to Wassail is called ‘Lambswool’ and it is very possible that ‘La Mas Ubhail’ got phonetically Anglicised, to ‘Lamasool’ and later ‘Lambswool’. In historical books we often see that a lot of words were written down phonetically, resulting in a number of different ways to note down one single word.

Robert Herrick, a mid 17th century poet mentioned the custom of Wassailing and Lambswool in his poem about about Twelfth Night, we also get an idea of the recipe too:

Next crown the bowl full With gentle lamb’s wool Add sugar, nutmeg and ginger, With store of ale too; And thus ye must do To make a wassail a swinger

Give then to the king And queen wassailing : And though with ale ye be whet here, Yet part from hence As free from offence As when ye innocent met here.

The drink Lambswool is a mulled ale, poured over hot apple puree, although some people swear by whole apples, or apple pieces cooked in spiced cider or ale. However, as far as a drink goes, you can’t swallow a whole apple, nor can you swallow apple pieces so it is most probable that the recipe containing whole apples is just derived from the recipe made with apple puree. It is possible that the soft puree resembled a lambs fleece to people in the old days, resulting in giving it the name of what they associated it with, lambs wool.
Another reason for thinking that an apple puree was used it that this is the end of the season, so the apples which are left in times before refrigeration and fancy techniques to keep fruit from ripening, would not have been the prettiest of the bunch. An hot and spiced apple puree fortified with ale would be warming on a january evening, and would allow people to prepare it in a kettle rather than an oven which is used for the recipe with whole apples. Remember this is a country dish and ovens were a privilege for the well-to-do. But the sugar in the dish also tells us this wasn’t a drink for the poor, it could have been a special treat from the lord of the manor, or from the farmer to his farm labourers.

Last year I spoke to you about the intriguing Twelfth Cake, a fruit cake elaborately decorated with sugar or wax figurines which was also a privilege for the well-to-do. This cake, which is also mentioned by Herrick in his poem also started of as a humble ‘plum cake’ for the feast of Wassail. City folk picked up on it and adjusted the cake to their festive needs, making it the centrepiece of the table and causing queues in front of bakeries. Because it became popular in the city and with the wealthy, we get our first recipe for it in a 1803 book. A recipe for Lambswool is more difficult to find, as the drink remained in the countryside. So judging from the poem of Robert Herrick, I came up with this recipe for you.

Lambswool

serves 6-8

What do you need

Bramley or Cox stewing apples, 500 gr (peeled and cored about 300 gr)
water, 100 ml
sugar 100 gr
freshly grated nutmeg, 1 teaspoon
ginger powder, 1 teaspoon
a good ale, 750 ml

Method
Peel and cut your apples in small pieces and place in a pot along with 100 ml of water and the sugar and spices. Stew until soft and puree so there are no bits left.
When ready to serve, heat up the apple puree and add the ale while whisking. You should get a nice froth while doing so. Serve at ones.

Are you celebrating the Twelfth Night? Or are you having a slice of King cake, galette Du Roi or Driekoningen taart? Or are you wassailing and drinking Lambswool?

Ancient apple trees in Sussex

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Twelfth Cake for Twelfth Night >

Medieval Chicken Compost

15th December 2014 by Regula 9 Comments

Many people ask me if I come across weird and unappetising dishes in those old British cookery books I collect and devour.

Of course there are always recipes in historical cookery books which might seem odd to us today, but I am quite sure if someone from the 18th century would come and visit us today, he would go home with as much stories about strange foods to tell his contemporaries.
It’s all a difference in how we look at food, and how we approach it. For example, most of us only ever see meat, packed in plastic, neatly arranged in the supermarket shelves. Small independent butchers are disappearing on our streets and so is our connection to the animal that provides us with our much savoured sausage. Only last year a butcher shop in Suffolk was asked to remove his elaborate game displays from the window so children wouldn’t be upset by the sight of dead animals. Man has become disconnected and doesn’t think past the plastic surrounding the factory farmed meat.

I don’t find eating the head of a pig weird at all, people in the past would have been happy to have it. But today it is seen as ‘medieval’ and not very appetising. I must confess I do not have a desire to eat a pigs head any time soon, but many have told me it is exquisite.

I am talking about a Medieval dish with a name that might sound strange to us today, but only because we have given a different explanation to the word, or the word as evolved. Medieval dishes have always delighted me in their inventiveness, and elegance. A pure kind of cooking, with herbs and spices that give your tastebuds a whole other experience.

In the 14th and 15th century the dish with the name ‘compost’ has been the term for any stewed mixture. A ‘composition’ of ingredients. This could have been meat, vegetables or fruit. The French term ‘compote’ very likely derives from the English ‘compost’ which later only meant stewed fruits. The name ‘Compost’ for a recipe can also be found in Flemish Medieval cookery books.
To anyone, this dish must sound intriguing, especially as one would immediately think this was a recipe for creating the best compost to fertilise your veggie patch with.

But no, the etymology of the word might be obscure, we are not making any kind of compost for the garden today.
This recipe for ‘compost’ I am bringing to you today is made with chicken and green herbs, and spices. Another contemporary recipe is made with chickens and some of its offal. Herbs vary in recipes and another ‘compost’ is made exclusively from root vegetables, dried fruits and spices. They are all very clean and pure dishes.

Chicken was always a noble type of meat on a banquet. It was considered more economical if a chicken was kept for her eggs. Killing off a chicken meant killing of your egg factory so chicken would be on the tables of those who could miss a bird, the elite.
This dish is fantastic, it is so pure and simple, it is the kind of dish that just makes my heart skip a beat when I first have a little taste. The dish eats like a soup, and I like to add a nice slice of stale sourdough bread as a ‘sup’ – which was in the past frequently added to thicken the soup and give more substance. This ‘sup’ is also what gave us the term ‘supper’ later on in history. A ‘sup’ could also have been a piece of cake soaked in booze or sauce, the Italian word for trifle ‘Zuppa Inglese’ still gives shows us the link with the ‘sup’.
To make it into an evening meal I added some new potatoes. This of course not ver Medieval as the potato was not known in the Middle Ages, but it is a lovely addition to this dish.

New potatoes are a lovely addition to make it into a main dish, but not very Medieval.

Original recipe from A Noble Boke off Cookry (England, 1468)

To mak composte tak chekins and halve them then tak saige parsly lekes and other good erbes and chop them small then tak a pint of hony and som of the erbes and lay in the botom of the pot and som of the chekyn then tak lard of pork smale mynced and lay it on and cast ther to pouder of guingere and canelle and boille it and serue it.

I brown my chicken before stewing, this isn’t done in the original Medieval recipe, but I find it improves the flavour and the look of the dish, I leave my chicken whole, but you can cut it in half if you prefer.
It might be so that the Medieval cook also browned the chicken, but recipes of that period weren’t complete as they were more often just aide-memoirs rather than clear instructions.

What do you need – serves 4 or 2 very hungry people with leftovers, it is very good the next day.

1 large hen, free range (please, if you can)
1 stalk of leek, chopped
a bunch of parsley
a bunch of sage
a teaspoon of cinnamon, and one of ginger
two large tablespoons of honey
optional, some pieces of bacon fat, for flavour
optional, stale bread, only decent sourdough or other artisan bread

Method

Preheat your oven to 160°C, you can do this just on the hob too, I just prefer to use the oven.

Have a big pot ready, large enough so you can cover the whole chicken with water, but small enough so it fits snugly.

In a frying pan, melt a generous knob of butter and brown your chicken slightly on each side. You just want some color, no crust or full browning. A medium flame on the hob is fine for this.

Place half the herbs and leek on the base of your pot, place your chicken on top and add the rest of the herbs.

Smear your chicken with the honey, doesn’t have to be neat.
Fill the pot with water so the chicken is completely covered, add the spices and give it a stir.

Bring to the boil and let it boil for 5-10 minutes without the lid.

Close the lid and transfer to the oven (or leave on the hob on a small flame) for 45 minutes – 1 hour. Cooking time depends on the size of your chicken, and the quality, a free range slowly grown bird cooks faster than a factory farmed chick. The meat should just not be falling of the bone, so keep an eye on it on those last 15 minutes.

Strain your broth using a colander or something similar, and take out your herbs and veg.
Then, take the meat of the bones and place in the broth. Place some or all of the herbs and veg back into the broth if you like, I do, as I like to eat the whole thing.

Have warmed soup plates ready and place a piece of bread in each of them, pour over the broth and give everyone some meat from the breast and some from the legs.

Serving tip: some nice cooked new potatoes work well to make this a main dish. It is very strengthening and ideal for winter, or on chilly summer evenings. It is also very nurturing when you are unwell.

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To make Ypocras

24th December 2013 by Regula 7 Comments

And then it is suddenly christmas again… it seems only yesterday that it was september and now we are only moments away from januari. It will be march in the blink of an eye and when it’s august you will be wondering where those months have gone to.
When you are a child, the days seem to drag on like weeks and the weeks like months but when you are all grown up… you wonder where that hour of free time went to and when you are finally able to start reading that book you’ve got to read in the summer.

To warm your spirits after the last busy weeks of the year 2013, a year that has brought me excitement, friendship and a new venture of which I will tell you all about very soon – I had mulled wine on my mind.
The sweet scent of the warm wine and spices always transport me back to the christmas markets in Aachen. My parents and I would drive to Germany especially for it each year. Even from a young age I would be allowed half a cup of mulled wine to warm my hands and to bring a rosy blush to my ice cold cheeks. It was one of the highlights of my year, to take in the different scents in the air, the aniseed of the artisan candy being made, the greasy smell of Reibekuchen, the aroma of spices blended with chocolate from the Aachener Printen biscuits and the mulled wine and rum.

Sometimes the very unlikely of foods and drink can be the ones that have been around for centuries and some recipes never changed very much.
Mulled wine or ypocras as its name was for centuries, has been around since the Middle Ages but mulled spirits pre-date Medieval times. I found a recipe for a fine spiced wine in a Roman cookery book that looks a lot like the recipe for ypocras. It is commonly thought that the drink is named after the Greek physician Hippocrates, however this is not so. It is more likely that ypocras has this name because the herbs and spices were strained through a conical filter bag known as a Manicum Hippocraticum – sleeve of Hippocrates. The Old French name for Hippocrates was ypocrate which explains the etymology of the Middle English name ypocras, hipocras, ipocras, ippocras, hvpocras, hvppocra, and many more variations.

The spice mixture for ypocras was known as ‘Gyle’ and usually contained cinnamon, grains of paradise, long pepper and cardamom pods. These spices were bruised with a pestle and mortar and then left to steep in the red or white wine overnight or possibly even longer to soak up all the flavours.
One can assume that ypocras was used for medicinal purposes rather than for feasting as in recipes it is often mentioned as the perfect tipple after dinner to aid digestion. The oldest recipes therefore include many more herbs which will have given the spiced drink more of a cough syrup flavour than the enjoyable winter warmer we know today.
The first English recipe for Ipocras dates from approximately 1390 and goes as follows:

Pur fait Ypocras,
Treys Unces de canell. Et iij unces de gyngener. spykenard de Spayn le pays dun deneres. garyngale. clowes, gylofre. poivr long, noiez mugadez. maziozame cardemonij de chescun i.qrt douce grayne de paradys flour de queynel de chescun dimid unce de toutes. soit fait powdour and serve it forth.

The recipe is more a list of ingredients and assumes the cook knows the proportions and that a red or white wine is to be used. Sugar was a precious ingredient and only for the lord and master so Ypocras would only contain sugar in the wealthy homes while the common folk sweetened their drink with honey.

Ypocras was common enough to be mentioned in literature as Chaucer wrote In his Merchant’s tale in the 14th century “He drynketh Ypocras, Clarree and Vernage Of spices hoote t’encreessen his corage.” and John Russell’s The Boke of Nurture even contains a ypocras recipe in verse.

Through history we find a vast amount of recipes for this spiced drink, but not only for the spiced wine. Before hops were being used in beer, there was a mixture of herbs known as the ‘Gruut’ that was used to flavour and preserve the beer. Mankind has always been searching for flavourings to tinkle the taste buts.

After the 16th century recipes become more richer including more sugar, oranges, lemons, almonds and apples. My recipe uses cinnamon, cloves, long pepper, nutmeg and clementine juice with a few tablespoons of home made sloe gin. I used raw cane sugar which worked rather well instead of white loaf sugar.
Sometimes I will add marjoram and cardamom like in the first recipe but because of the marjoram it started to taste rather savoury. It is still very pleasant and not a flavour you’d expect in a mulled wine so it is a definite option to add it if you want something different. The long pepper added enough spice so I didn’t need to use the dreaded ginger but if you are a ginger lover, feel free to add it as you please. I would have loved to add Grains of paradise but I had no way of getting my hands on them.

Regula Ypocras

What do you need

2 bottles of red wine, not your cheapest, not your most expensive.
4 buds of long pepper, crushed – email me if you can’t find it, I know where you can get it.
5 cloves1 fresh bay leaf
1 teaspoon of grated nutmeg, freshly grated please
1 stick of cinnamon
100 g raw cane sugar
the peel and juice of 1 clementine
3 tablespoons of sloe gin, or cherry brandy, you can omit this

Optional

1 sprig of marjoram
1 pod of cardamom, bruised

Method
heat up 200 ml of red wine with the sugar and the spices, juice and peel until it dissolves, boil for 10 minutes and then simmer for 5 more. Add the marjoram if you are using it and leave to cool, when nearly cold or cold, add the rest of the wine and the sloe gin and leave to take up those lovely flavours overnight. You can even freeze the wine and spice mixture before adding the rest of the wine.
Strain, bottle and keep in the fridge until needed then gently heat up before use – don’t allow it to boil or you will loose the alcohol and we won’t want that.

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Sloe Gin >
Damson cheese >
Cobnut Brandy >

Jolly Jelly, you know what? I’m writing a book!

20th August 2013 by Regula 33 Comments

One would think the dark ages were a dark time… Reading books like Umberto Eco’s ‘In the name of the Rose’ certainly leads us to believe that it was.
But the fact is that there was a love for bright colors that can be witnessed in the illuminated manuscripts from that time. On the table brightly colored layered jellies were made by boiling pig’s or cow’s feet into gelatin. It must have taken the cook hours to prepare, deriving the colors from blood, berries, vegetables and Essex saffron, the jellies were decorated and scented as magnificent displays of the cooks talent.
Jellies weren’t the desserts as we know them now, they would be savoury rather than sweet most of the time, sometimes even encasing whole fish for a dramatic effect.
Gelee of fleshe -meat jelly- was a traditional Medieval dish and made by cooking pigs trotters and ears, calf’s feet and chicken in white wine. The jus and fat would then be reduced until it formed a jelly and the meat served with it.
We still have meat jellies today in the form of ‘aspics’, covering pieces of meat, vegetables and sometimes eggs with gelatine made from beef bones.
In culinary school, where we are taught the classic French cuisine we had to prepare a seafood jelly which was a terrible waste of perfect seafood and we also used jelly to decorate meat and fish with delicately sliced vegetables to then lightly cover it in gelatine to protect it from the air. Perfect for when you are preparing a buffet but a little old fashioned if you ask me.
But it is very fascinating to think of it, that a medieval practice of encasing foods in jelly is still widely used today, centuries later. Now the sweet jellies are most popular, in bold colors and fun flavours and shapes, it is still a showstopper on your table as much as it was in the Middle ages.

That showstopper effect was exactly what I had in mind when I bought a vintage jelly mould in a charity shop in Sherborne, a Dorset village that has remained unspoiled by time.
The mould quickly got a life of its own being baptised ‘The Sherborne Mould’ by two charming ladies of the village, enquiries about its use are being made and pictures of the finished product requested. I was glad to see I’m not the only one getting excited about a jelly mould, happiness can be found in the small things you discover in charity shops.

When I write this I’m getting ready to drive off to the – hopefully sunny – south of England. I will be on the hunt for stories and at the same time giving my husband the quality time he deserves. I’ve been a bit absent of late because of the exciting things happening in my life because of this blog. I’m so thankful we are both creative minds and always pursuing our dreams through our creative work. We understand those moments when your inspiration comes and all you can really do is create. Time starts flying as hours become minutes and suddenly you find yourself having to turn on a light because you’re trying to write, or draw in the dusk.

I’ve been working on a project for months and now I feel I should tell you about what I’ve taken on, a project that will take me ages to complete to the level I want it to reach. Yes it is a book, my book, my life’s work.
A celebration of British culinary history, lovingly painted by my warm feelings for Britain.

For this jelly I am using the vegetarian version of gelatine namely Agar agar, it is made from a kind of seaweed.

What do you need

400 ml water
2 packs of Agar-agar (vegetarian gelatine)
2 tablespoons of caster sugar
150 ml Dandelion and Burdock, if you can’t find it, why not use Pimms!
1 teaspoon of beetroot juice (for color)
Mixed berries, raspberries, blackberries and blueberries

Method

Rinse your jelly mould under water and put it in the freezer, this will make the jelly set faster and make it easier to remove from the mould.
Warm the water in a saucepan and add the Agar-agar, stir well so the powder is completely dissolved. Bring to a gentle boil then add the Dandelion and burdock and beetroot juice and let the mixture bubble for a further minute. Leave to stand for a few minutes before pouring the mixture into the mould
Take your jelly mould out of the freezer, add fruit if you like and pour the jelly mixture into the mould.
Leave it to set, in the fridge if you like but it can just as easily set out of the fridge.
To get the jelly out of the mould, prepare a basin with hot water and dip the mould in it to release the bottom part.
Turn out over a plate and decorate as you like.

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Raspberry vinegar
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Raspberry and strawberry fool

Fool

7th September 2012 by Regula 22 Comments

I started my second year in Culinary school this week. It’s going to be tough again combining this with my day job as a graphic designer. It always seems that the one day I can’t seem to get away from the office in time is the evening I have Culinary school to rush over to. I love the experience, the knowledge passed on to us by the chefs. I’m the student with the questions, the never ending enthusiasm, with the jokes and the loud giggles. Lessons always end with dinner, bottles of wine are opened and if we’re lucky a fellow student Jean, otherwise known as ‘the butcher’ has brought some of his home made port. We have a good time, have a laugh, a taste and a discussion about food. Our class is always the last to remain in the building and we leave the school grounds with rosy cheeks and a little bit pie-eyed.

The weekend has started and it’s time to enjoy the last of the summer weather. I found some fleshy raspberries and strawberries at a carboot sale in Kent and I decided to prepare a ‘Fool’. When researching this dish I wanted to find out about the origin of the term ‘Fool’. A fool, is a dessert made by blending pureed tarty fruits – most commonly Gooseberries – with sweetened cream but it seems the exact origin of the name of this dish is lost in time.

A lot of modern recipes for Fruit Fools state the dish dates back as far as the 16th century. There is a recipe for Trifle in ‘The Good Huswifes Jewel’ by Thomas Dawson written in 1596. The recipe goes as follows:

Take a pint of thick cream, and season it with sugar and ginger, and
rose water. So stir it as you would then have it make it luke warm in a
dish on a chafing dish and coals. And after put it into a silver piece
or a bowl, and so serve it to the board.
Many historians including me have the theory that this early trifle recipe might have been where the Fool was born. However, this recipe does not contain any kind of fruit so maybe the first fool, wasn’t with fruit at all.

I have found a recipe for a ‘Gooseberry foole’ in ‘The Compleat Cook‘ by WM from 1658

Take your Gooseberries, and put them in a Silver or Earthen Pot, and set it in a Skillet of boyling Water, and when they are coddled enough strain them, then make them hot again, when they are scalding hot, beat them very well with a good piece of fresh butter, Rose-water and Sugar, and put in the yolke of two or three Eggs; you may put Rose-water into them, and so stir it altogether, and serve it to the Table when it is cold.

In this later recipe where indeed is spoken of a Fool there is no mention of cream, in fact many early Fool recipes use an egg mixture rather than just cream.
Gervase Markham as well as Robert May, have recipes for Norfolk Fools, they all have an egg mixture rather than cream. Does this mean Thomas Dawson’s recipe was actually an early Trifle after all?

Then I came across a recipe for a Strawberry or Raspberry Fool in ‘The Compleat Housewife: or Accomplished Gentlewoman’s Companion’ by Eliza Smith written in 1739. This appears to be one of the first recipes of a fool like we know it today. The fruit is squeezed and orange flower water is added, then cream.

Why the word ‘Fool’ is used is not entirely clear, some claim it’s derived from the French verb fouler which is used in the context of pressing grapes for wine with one’s feet.

For this Raspberry and Strawberry Fool I started out from a recipe dated 1823, I found in ‘Good things in England’ by Florence White. This is one of the recipes sent to White when she had called upon the people to send in their British family recipes.
The original recipes states you should pass the fruit trough a hair sieve but I didn’t as I think the interplay of textures is quite lovely.

You can use any fruit for this dessert but it works best with tart fruit, the most popular being gooseberries, however these should be stewed until they are soft enough.

What’s you favourite Fool?

What do you need (for 2)

a punnet of raspberries
a punnet of strawberries

(or another tart fruit like gooseberries which you stew first and then let cool)
500 ml double cream
1 teaspoon orange flower water (optional, used in traditional recipe)
1 teaspoon sugar (optional, used in traditional recipe)

Method
Divide your cream into two equal parts
Bruise 2/3 of the raspberries and all the strawberries with a fork, leave some bits in for texture, you can even add some whole raspberries at the end
Mix them with the orange flower water and sugar (optional, used in traditional recipe)
Stir one part of the cream in the fruit so you get a nice pink color
Now layer the plain cream with the fruit cream you created into the jars or glasses of your choice)
Decorate with some leftover fruits.
Enjoy!

* Why not substitute half of the cream with thick yoghurt for a lighter version of this dish!

Join me next time for some home made Raspberry Vinegar!

Medieval

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