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,…
red wine
Game sauce à la Bolognese
With leftover meat from making game stock When you have made a concentrated game stock, you can sometimes save enough meat from the bones to make a tasty sauce. I had six kilo bones of hare and deer. When I had strained the stock I had almost one kilo of cooked meat. Being Dutch, I wouldn’t…
Concentrated quail stock
Quails are small birds, related to partridges. Although -at least in the Netherlands- they are called ‘game birds’, they are actually bred at farms for their eggs and meat. They make a beautiful dark stock. The small birds could be regarded as the replacements of even smaller songbirds that used to be eaten (and in…
Dutch Bishop Wine
Although actually it’s English! The Dutch consider Bishop wine as a typically Dutch mulled wine for Sint Nicholas Eve. But it appears that its origins are not Dutch at all. According to the large Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (Lexicon of the Dutch Language, published in installments from 1864 to 1998), bisschopswijn has English roots. The name indicates the…
Salmon in red wine-sauce
Straight to the recipe A recipe from the French Golden Age The first really new cookbooks since the Middle Ages did not appear before 1650. In France these cookbooks were the first onset to the development of the classical French “haute cuisine”. Up til the middle of the seventeenth century medieval classics Le Ménagier de Paris and Le…