Straight to the recipe With Seville oranges Today many people have lost all feeling for what food is seasonaland what is not. Everything is available throughout the year. The bitter or Seville orange is one of the few exceptions. Its season is short, from mid-December to February, and even then this fruit is hard to find…
lemon
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,…
The day all France was vegetarian
Straight to the recipe Jean-Louis Flandrin, who died in 2001, wrote in his posthumously published book L’Ordre des mets that the reformation had such rapid succes in North-West Europe because of the prohibition of butter by the catholic church during Lent. Southern Europe used olive oil anyway, but in the North-West suet, lard and butter were the…
Clean hands
Coquinaria has lots of medieval recipes, but how do you eat these dishes? With your hands! Eating with a fork became the thing to do in upper class European courts during the sixteenth century. Lower classes kept eating with their hands as late as the eighteenth century. Eating your food with fork AND knife is…
Lemonade
Een French recipe from the seventeenth century Straight to the recipe A very simple recipe, because I am in the middle of moving house (summer 2007), and have been very busy. Where does the word lemonade come from? Lemonade comes from ‘lemon’ or the French ‘limon’. Another French word for lemon is citron, which is…