In Medieval Europe May was considered the lustiest month of the year,
and so to usher in this May Day I'm making a Tudor era salad of herbs and flowers.
Tudor salad and the randy history of May Day this time on Tasting History.
May Day is still celebrated in some places but now it's more of a vestigial holiday,
but not that long ago it was one of the most anticipated days of the year.
It marked the beginning of the year's best fresh produce being available,
and part of May Day celebrations included eating green dishes,
not always naturally green. Often they would actually dye non-green foods green just to stick with the theme
but in the 1596 edition of Thomas Dawson's 'The Good housewife's Jewel' there's no need to use any dye
"To make a salad of all kind of herbs. Take your herbs and pick them very fine into fair water,
and pick your flowers by themselves, and wash them all clean, and swing them in a strainer,
and when you put them in a dish, mingle them with cucumbers or lemons paired and sliced,
and scrape sugar, and put in vinegar and oil, and throw the flowers on the top of the salad, and of every sort of the aforesaid things,
and garnish the dish about with the foresaid things, and hard eggs boiled
and laid about the dish upon the salad."
So this recipe calls for herbs and whenever I use the word herbs,
and I say it in my American accent without the h-,
I get a number of comments from my fellows across the pond in England
saying "You're saying it wrong" so I decided to look at history and see
why don't I say the ancient herbs.
Well it turns out that Americans don't drop the h-
but English people add the h-, and it's a fairly recent edition and done by mistake.
See it didn't happen until the 19th century when dropping your h's was a mark of being working class,
hence Henry Higgins insisting that "In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire hurricanes hardly happen".
So people not wishing to sound working class decided to make sure they pronounced their h's.
Now in words like hour, honest, or honor the silent h- remains silent because of course it remains silent.
It'd be silly to pronounce it, but poor herbs got caught up in the fervor and so people started pronouncing the h-
but regardless of how you pronounce it or how you pronounce it the term back in the 16th century
meant all sorts of green things. Not just what we think of as herbs,
but all sorts of different green vegetables.
So you can pretty much go ahead and use any greens that you want,
but looking at other recipes from the period to inform what I'm going to do I am using a mix
of spinach, dandelion greens, mint, tarragon, and as the song 'Scarborough Fair' suggests
parsley, sage, rosemary,
though I'm not using thyme because the leaves are really tiny and not very practical for a salad.
Some other greens that you might want to use if you can find them
are things like borage and summer savory but those are kind of hard to find in most places today,
at least fresh, and you don't want to use anything dried for this.
Then you'll want some cucumber or lemons, but I'm going with cucumber or cow cumber as he puts it.
Some slices of hard boiled egg and fresh edible flowers.
Now you want to make sure to get edible flowers like from a grocery store where sometimes they'll have them. Don't go to a florist,
you don't know what they've been spraying on them. You don't want to poison yourself.
You can grow them at your home but make sure that they're edible flowers,
and that you're not using any pesticides for the dressing.
For the dressing what you'll need is a half cup or 120 milliliters of olive oil,
three tablespoons or 45 milliliters of vinegar. It doesn't specify vinegar and they would have had several kinds available to them,
but white wine vinegar and apple cider vinegar were probably the most common at the time, so I'm using the latter.
Two tablespoons or 25 grams of brown sugar
and a pinch of salt. So it's just a salad so the process is pretty darn simple.
First mix the olive oil and vinegar, then whisk in the brown sugar until it's as dissolved as it's going to get,
and then add in your salt and there's your dressing.
For the salad go ahead and remove some of the stemsfrom the greens and herbs,
and toss them in a colander, then rinse and strain.
As they dry peel the cucumber, then slice it thin and toss it in with the greens.
Then set it on a dish with some of the hard-boiled egg and plenty of fresh flowers.
Now the entire time that I was making this dish the only thing I could think was the warning that we got from Homer and Bart Simpson.
"You don't win friends with salad. You don't friends with salad!"
But on May Day that's not the case. In fact eating fresh greens was part of the celebration and
one of the tamer parts of the celebration.
So give this video a thumbs up make sure you Subscribe to Tasting History,
and let me tell you how our ancestors once celebrated May Day.
Like most holidays May Day has some murky origins, but they do go back all the way to the ancient Romans.
Starting on April 28th, and lasting for six days the Romans celebrated the festival Floralia
marked by wearing colorful garments, dancing in the nude, gladiatorial games,
and sacrifices dedicated to Flora the goddess of flowers.
And Suetonius says that when the Emperor Galba was praetor his celebration included elephants walking on tightropes.
Further north the Celtic druids were celebrating their first day of May with fire in a festival known as Beltaine.
An Irish chronicle from around the year 900 describes "Two fires which Druids used to make with great incantations,
and they used to bring the cattle as a safeguard against the diseases of each year to those fires
they used to drive the cattle between them."
And sticking with the flame motif the pagans of north central Europe, kind of where Germany is now, also made bonfires to celebrate.
This later merged with the feast of Saint Walpurga around 870.
The German poet Johann Goethe wrote a poem called
'Die irste Walpurgisnacht' or The First Walpurgis Night which was later set to music by Felix Mendelssohn.
And it talks about the pagans in the Hearts Mountains trying to celebrate their version of May Day
singing "May smiles at us! The woods are free of ice and hoarfrost.
The snow is gone every green place resounds with songs of pleasure."
Then they light their fires to celebrate their ancient sacred rites but
in the poem just as in real life those rites had been banned by the Church,
and so in the poem the pagans dress up as demons to scare off the Christians when the Christians come to break up their partying.
Leaving them to make their fire where "As the flame is purified by smoke, so purify our faith!
And even if they rob us of our ancient ritual, who can take your light from us?"
All's well that ends well, at least in the poem because in reality Saint Walpurga was meant to
battle whooping cough, rabies, and witchcraft. So the fires actually stuck around,
but instead of being around for purification they were around to burn witches or probably just their effigies,
the history's kind of murky on that one.
Now moving up to Medieval Britain people would bring in the May
by going out to the forest on the night before May Day and picking fresh flowers and greenery.
In 'The Canterbury Tales' by Geoffrey Chaucer they gather woodbine and hawthorne leaves.
Then sing in the morning sun "May with all thy flowers and thy green, welcome be thou, fair, fresh May."
Purely innocent, though it does seem that whilst going for a ramble in the woods the young people would often
"stumble" into romantic trysts. For as Owl from Bambi says
"Nearly everybody gets twitterpated in the springtime."
But once they got that out of their system
they would return to the village with all their greenery and flowers to make decorations and garlands
for that most lasting paraphernalia of May Day the maypole.
Now these started out as tall trees stripped of their branches, except those at the very top
and then set up in the middle of town.
And they were huge in the 16th century the pamphleteer, someone who writes pamphlets
Philip Stubbs says that they were often so big that to get them into town
"They have twenty or forty yoke of oxen, every ox having a sweet nose-gay of flowers placed on the tip of his horns,
and these oxen draw home this maypole which is covered over with flowers and herbs,
and sometimes painted with variable colors, with two or three hundred men women and children following it with great devotion."
And if erecting this massive pole is a little too nuanced for you
the men of neighboring villages would then get together and have contests of
whose pole was the tallest.
Then the pole became a place for games and dances and often served as the center of the Mayfair
where merchants would set up stalls to sell their wares.
There's a Welsh poem from the 14th century that talks about this process and it's kind of interesting the way that it's written
because it's written as if writing to the maypole and chastising it for letting itself be cut down,
and all of the birds in it taken away, and stripped of all of its greenery.
"Your form, fast withering, hence to be a bear pole by the pillory!
No bird will sleep, no clear voice sing on your slender summit all the spring. Nor under you will the green grass grow,
where all day long the townsmen go... for commerce, seems it, you were made;
henceforth you'll ply the huckster's trade."
An early comment on deforestation. Now the early Medieval Church was was very much against these rituals
partly because of their pagan roots, or perceived pagan roots,
and partly because it engendered quite a bit of randiness amongst the town people.
And in 1240 the Bishop of London became particularly peeved when he found out that many of those celebrating were his priests.
So for several centuries the Church railed against May Day celebrations until
in an act of "if you can't beat them join them" they started sponsoring the festivities
and even selling ale as a way to raise money for the Church.
And with the Church on its side May Day really evolved in the 15th century with the introduction of the crowning of the May Queen
which was typically a sort of beauty pageant though sometimes it was a May King, and I'm not exactly sure how he was chosen.
It was also a time for pantomimes and music, and by 1437 many Mayfairs in England and Scotland
included plays featuring the characters Robin Hood and his love Maid Marian and a slew of merry men.
Another tradition that really grew at this time was the collecting of May dew.
On the morning of May Day you would go out to the forest, or the pastures,
and collect the dew from the ground and on the leaves
and then put it on your face, and it was supposed to rid you of any blemishes or freckles.
The most famous dew gatherers being King Henry VIII and his Queen, Catherine of Aragon,
who in 1515 rode out to the woods on Shooters Hill to gather up dew to stay young.
Though just a couple years later in 1517 the day was marred by what in England became known as
Evil May Day.
See for several years there had been a growing resentment mainly among
the younger male apprentices of London against what they termed strangers which were foreigners,
mostly Flemish workers, but any one of the 2% of London's population who weren't born in England.
This resentment was fomented just a couple weeks before May Day when a prominent preacher
gave a sermon accusing these foreigners of stealing the jobs of English men.
"They took our jobs!"
Coming out of that there was a plot to rise up against these strangers on May Day
but the word got out and the Mayor of London put in effect a curfew on April 30th.
But that evening a thousand or so young male apprentices formed a mob in Cheapside
attacking foreigners and looting the houses of anyone foreign, and even some prominent royal courtiers from France.
But within just a few hours the Duke of Norfolk entered the city with his own private army and put down the riot.
Many were arrested, tried for treason, and a number were actually executed and
Henry VIII probably would have finished them all off had Catherine of Aragon not pleaded for him to show mercy.
But this blemish on May Day did not dampen the holiday for long.
In fact it became more popular than ever adding things like morris dancing,
and milkmaids parading around balancing tankards of ale in a pyramid on their head,
BUT
then the Puritans came, the Debbie Downers of the 16th and 17th centuries.
A people who considered dancing around the maypole as "a heathenish vanity of superstition and wickedness."
In parts of Scotland "...there was no maypole on the burgh links, or at the abbey-cross,
and no queen of the May or stout Robin Hood to receive the homage of happy hearts
for the thunders of the reformed clergy had gone forth like a chill over the land."
In London a Puritan mob tore down the maypole which gave the Church Saint Andrew Undershaft its name,
such innuendo there,
labeling it a pagan idol. It was "raised from the hooks where on it had rested for two-and-thirty years sawn in pieces and burnt."
And in 1627 across the pond in Boston the Puritanical Myles Standish arrested those who raised maypoles.
In England in 1644 everything that had to do with the holiday was fully banned
until 1660 when it was restored, alongside King Charles II.
And it seems to have come roaring back because just a few years later
the diarist Samuel Pepys went to go see the May Day parade in London
and encountered "many milkmaids with their garlands upon their pails,
dancing with a fiddler before them."
It was also around this time that the somewhat creepy Jack in the Green started making appearances at May Day celebrations.
This was a man dressed up in a conical wicker frame decorated with greenery so that he resembled a tree.
Then those same milkmaids along with chimney sweeps would dance around him.
And these traditions stayed alivethroughout the Victorian era,
and while not as popular today as it was then there are still many May Day celebrations
in towns and villages across the UK, here in the United States,
and other May celebrations in places all over the world.
And often those festivities include feasts of fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, and other produce
just like with our Tudor salad of herbs and flowers.
I mean this has to be one of the prettiest salads anyone has ever eaten.
I'm just going to drizzle some of this on top.
Actually, first just give this a taste.
The sugar gives it a sweetness that you wouldn't get just with like honey because it is sugar rather than honey.
Some other recipes from the time call for honey which would probably dissolve a little better,
but this adds an extra layer of interesting flavor.
Let's give this a try.
I'm going to try to eat a little bit of everything....
just eat a flower...
never just eat flower.
Let's do it.
[Crunch crunch]
It's very refreshing.
I feel like I'm going to be like Yzma with the green spinach in her teeth.
How long has that been there.
What's kind of cool is the the the dressing is lovely but
the combination of different herbs is something that you don't get with most modern salads.
Most modern salads don't have many if any herbs and this-
you know lots of different things and
I know he's not specific in how many or what to put in there but you look at a lot of other salad recipes from the time
and they have very specific herbs, and lots of them 10-12 different ingredients.
The mint is there but it's not overpowering though it could be so
I think that you know it's kind of up to you what goes in and how much of of everything goes in,
but some herbs are going to really dominate like mint, so be careful with some of those,
but overall it's very nice. Very, very light, very lovely
and this is the dressing to use on it. I wouldn't put something like- I mean usually I like ranch or blue cheese,
that's not right for this salad. The salad is- the greens are the flavor. This is what this is what you're going for.
I gotta say...
[eats flower]
flowers don't really have any flavor, I'm sure some flowers do but
these do not. :(
So I hope you have a wonderful May Day, make a lovely salad whether it's this one or another.
Make sure to follow me on Instagram @tastinghistorywithmaxmiller
and I will see you next time on Tasting History.