Disgustingly healthy! Apple sauce is a medieval relic. It was a popular dish, considering the many recipes for apple sauce that can be found in medieval cookbooks all over Europe. Some of those recipes are rather unusual, like the following recipe for apple sauce with … fish liver! The recipe’s title is ‘appelmoes in de vastene’ (apple…
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Divine wine
An exquisite drink from the seventeenth century Straight to the recipe During the seventeenth century a meal was often concluded by drinking spiced wine to stimulate the digestion. Hippocras was such a drink, which was already known during the Middle Ages. But there were other kinds of spiced wine as well. Vin des dieux (‘wine of the gods’) is such a spiced wine,…
Stockfish with peas, apple and raisins
Straight to the recipe An ode to dried food A very medieval tasting recipe. It’s an ode to dried food, except the onion all ingredients are dried. This makes it an excellent dish for end of winter. The recipe was meant for fishdays or for Lent. If you prepared it for a fishday you could use butter, but in Lent when…
The original Waldorf Salad
Straight to the recipe An American classic from the nineteenth century Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, cooks and maître d’s who served at the courts of kings and nobles set the tone in culinary developments. But this all changed with the rise of restaurants and -later- hotels. Who today knows the men or…
Medieval applesauce from England
Greasy! Elsewhere on Coquinaria I have published a recipe for Apple Sauce for Lent. On this page is an English recipe with different versions for meat days and fish days, called apple moys. The Dutch name for apple sauce is appelmoes, so to me (being Dutch) that sounds very familiar. This apple sauce is special…
Red cabbage the Dutch way
Straight to the recipe A nineteenth-century recipe with apples and apple syrup Originally I had planned a completely different recipe for this month, but then I noticed this old-fashioned recipe for red cabbage in a Dutch cookery book from the middle of the nineteenth century: Betje, de goedkoope keukenmeid. (Betje, the Cheap Cook). It is the…
‘Split nuns’
Stuffed eggs from early sixteenth century The oldest extant Dutch cookbook in print dates from 1514. It is titled Een notabel boecxken van cokeryen (A noble cookery book). The recipe on this page is taken from this book wich has 175 recipes in all. Stuffed eggs have allways been a popular dish. This particular recipe is called ghecloven nonnen,…
Medieval apple fritters
Straight to the recipe In the Netherlands apple fritters are traditional food on New Year’s Eve. I have chosen an English recipe from the fifteenth century to see how it would have tasted in the past. It could just as well have been any other medieval cookery book, as apple fritters were popular food in the Middle Ages. Fritters on…
Jane Austen’s Apple Pie
Straight to the recipe Or: Plagiarism and Hackwork Who does not love apple pie? At least, good apple pie, because there are tearooms in museums or train stations where I have seen very sad, sometimes even partially defrosted prefab apple pie. Like apple sauce, apple pie is one of the basic, primeval dishes of European cuisine (here is a medieval…
Chinese tomato soup
The secret ingredient in this soup is apple sauce. This soup is sold in many Chinese restaurants in the Netherlands. The recipe is very popular with children (no doubt because of the apple sauce), and very simple to make. How simple exactly depends on the stock you use. It is not necessary to make Chinese stock for…