Peaeater

Had dinner at Mom's last night and pored over a most wonderful book which she brought back from a medieval conference in Toronto: Pleyn Delit: Medieval Cookery for Modern Cooks.

Full of recipes from olden dayes, the fun was reading the original recipe in Middle English, and then puzzling out what the devil you were actually supposed to cook. The book supplied translations, but they were just best guesses which had to take into account modern ingredients and cooking methods. More convection ovens these days and fewer spits with entire roast boars turned by red-faced cooks eyeing up the scullery maids. At my house anyway.

A couple of my favourites were Compost and Garbage. The "pleyn delit" was in charting the journey of these words to current times.

Compost was a chutney. The modern relation is compote, I suppose, which is stewed fruit in syrup. The base meaning of compost is "a composite" or mixture. But you just don't see many recipes for compost these days. Funny how it's still kind of food-related; only just the rotting kind. 

Garbage was a stew or stock made of all the bits of the chicken you normally throw out: the offal. I've made soup stock like this, but I didn't call it garbage. Although, if you've tasted my "cooking" you would be within your rights to reinstate the old definition.

The best part was, every recipe would go something like "putte ther-to Percely, eek othere erbes and oynons noyt to smal hakkyd & seethe hem wyl", or some such, and always end with "... and serve it forth," which we all agreed conjured up delightfully vigorous mental images of food on its way to the table.