Recently, I tried my hand at making a 15th century Italian custard tart (the crust is from the 16th century... sorry) from an interpreted recipe I found on a blog all about medieval food. The dish turned out much better than I expected, and I only screwed it up a little. It was a challenge for me because baking is the kind of cooking I do the least (too much of an exact science for me). But, it was still fun and I was very happy with the results. I'll probably make this dish again too.
All the credit for interpreting the recipe goes to Cassandra Baldassano, who co-runs the blog,
Medieval Cuisine. The original recipe did not include any amounts for the different ingredients, and Ms. Baldassano was who assigned measurements, baking time, and tempterature to the recipe. In fact, none of the recipes I found included any sort of measurements. This makes me think that people in the middle ages must have been pretty decent cooks if they would not have needed recipes to follow to make a dish, especially with baked goods.
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(I didn't get a picture of my custard,
but it looked really similar to this one.) |
Researching the ingredients that went into this custard not only gave me insight to how this dish would have been made in the middle ages, but to how medieval desserts in general would have been made and appreciated. Both the custard base and the crust were relatively simple. The base consisted of eggs, milk, sugar, cinnamon, and rosewater. The crust was made of flour, butter, eggs, and water. In the middle ages, the eggs would have been easy enough to acquire, as most rural people raised chickens or could easily trade with someone who did. The milk, while people did not drink it as we do today because it would spoil so quickly, would have also been fairly easy to acquire. Because of its susceptibility to spoilage, milk was often made into butter or cheese to preserve it. Therefore, butter would have also been easy to come by. All of these ingredients would have been readily available to most people of Europe because they were common and cheap.
However, two ingredients we now take for granted, the sugar and cinnamon, would have been hard to come by in the middle ages. Now, out of the two we only consider cinammon to be a spice, but sugar was also considered a spice then. These were extremely expensive in the middle ages because they had to travel great distances for the Europeans to use them. For example, cinammon had to be imported from India and parts of Asia through the middle east. Because these two ingredients were so expensive and not readily available to the public, they were mostly used by the higher classes. So, this particular custard would have been enjoyed by the nobility of Italy in the 15th century.
This is extremely different from how we experience sweets today. You can get ice cream at any fast food restaurant for only a buck or two, and you'll have it in your hands only minutes after ordering it. We take these foods, and ingredients like sugar and spices, for granted and don't usually recognize that they were not always so available. I wonder how people viewed desserts in the middle ages. They must have been viewed as more of a treat than they are today, considering the rarity of the ingredients that make them desserts. Were they prepared only on very special occasions? How often did the lower class versus the upper class eat desserts? How many of our own desserts are from the medieval period, such as this custard? The history of food is very interesting, and I'm glad I know a little more about it from following this antique recipe.
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Sources:
Newman, Paul. Daily Life in the Middle Ages. MacFarland
and Company, Jefferson, NC, 2001, pp.
3-36.
