Is that Unholy bag of chips a little too tempting?
Are you filled with unrighteous regret after binge eating on the couch?
Well not anymore! Introducing the Medieval Saint diet.
You'll be performing miracles in no time when you eat this medieval salmon with green sauce.
So thank you to Bright Cellars for sponsoring this video as we explore the diet and miracles of Saint Columba
this time on Tasting History.
So this is the first episode that I am recording after getting back from Scotland
and while we were there we visited the amazing island of Iona.
The island is the birthplace of Celtic Christianity in Scotland when it was brought over from Ireland in the 6th Century
by Saint Colum Cille better known as Saint Columba not to be confused with Saint Colombo,
and this guy Saint Columba... well he's got stories, and many have to do with food, and they're just-
they're fantastic and so I figured I needed to do an episode.
So Columba was born in Ireland in 521, supposedly the grandson of the semi mythical
High King Niall of the Nine Hostages.
They had such cool names back then.
Anyway Columba got into some hot water when he made a copy of the Gospels,
and he wasn't supposed to. It ended up causing a pitched battle and a lot of people died,
and so Columba felt bad and he took off and left Ireland,
and sailed until he found an island where he couldn't see Ireland anymore.
That was the Isle of Iona. There he built an abbey but not before expelling all of the snakes from the island
just as Saint Patrick had expelled all of the snakes from Ireland,
but in an effort I guess to outdo Saint Patrick he decided to
also expel the women. See he wanted cattle on the island but he said
"where there is a cow, there is a woman, and where there is a woman there is mischief."
So he made all the women live on a different island just a little ways away, and even today that island is known as
Eilean Nam Ban or the women's Island.
So no ladies but his fondness for cows does give us a glimpse at something that Saint Columba might have eaten.
The monks made butter and cheese, and it's likely that they also ate beef at certain times,
though as a monk beef or any kind of meat was definitely an indulgence and so
seafood was his main source of protein and he did seem to like seafood.
He was a fan of seal meat. There are actually several stories about people trying to steal his seals,
and in one story when he was with some fishermen after they had caught five fish in their net
"Saint Columba said 'Again cast the Net in the river, and you will quickly find a great fish which the Lord has provided for me."
And that fish was a salmon, and since I'm not about to eat a seal it is salmon on the menu today.
The issue is that while I've covered Medieval dishes on this channel many times before
they're almost always from the very late Middle Ages when recipes really started to be written,
but Saint Columba lived at the very beginning of the Middle Ages only about 150 years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire,
and while it is wrong to call these the Dark Ages especially in and around Ireland
they are definitely the dim ages when it comes to writings about food.
So using two later medieval recipes we can kind of put together a dish that Saint Columba might have eaten.
First the Registrum Coquinae suggests "If you want to simmer salmon, add wine and parsley and it will be good."
And so it will but it'll be even better when served with the 'Liber Cure Cocorum' green sauce or verde sauce.
"Take parsley, thyme and ounce, and grind take white bread grated by kind.
Mix all up with vinegar or wine, season it with powder of pepper fine."
So most of these ingredients would have been available around the island at the time.
The only things that would have needed to be imported would be the pepper and the wine,
and while the spice tray definitely wasn't as robust as it had been during ancient Rome
nor as it would be later on the Middle Ages, pepper never really stopped making its way into Europe.
And the wine would have kept flowing from the south as well especially if you were involved in the Church,
and even if there wasn't any wine and all you had was water if you're Saint Columba it didn't seem to matter.
One time when there was no wine for communion "Columba picked up a pitcher and went to the well to draw water..."
He called on Christ to do as he had at the wedding at Cana and turned that water into wine which he did.
"Columba returned from the well to the church and put the full picture down beside the altar.
'Here you have wine' ". Unfortunately despite my continued best efforts
I have been unable to turn water into wine so my wine will be coming from today's sponsor Bright Cellars.
I love being introduced to new wines from Bright Cellars, and we've been working together for
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In this box I got Apostate Zinfandel from Sonoma Valley which I'm really excited to try
but as much as I like the new wine sometimes I like the old wines the things that they've already
sent like this it has wonderful flavors of dark berries and baking spices and it's really perfect
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Though here in California I think we still got a little while to go but I'm already feeling the holidays spirit.
So to get started with Bright Cellars visit the link in the description and for a limited time
Bright Cellars is giving viewers of Tasting History 50% off of their first six bottle box.
Just visit the link in the description to get started today now.
While the red is perfect for sipping you're going to want something white
to poach the salmon in so I am using this Colorfast Riesling so I don't end up with dark purple salmon.
Now Reserve about a half cup back for the sauce but everything else pour into a large pot to poach the salmon.
I'm using about two pounds or one kilogram of wild salmon.
I prefer to leave the skin on when poaching so the fish stays together better and just makes life easier
even if you don't want to eat the skin because it's not going to crisp up like if you were roasting it.
Then you also want to add a handful of torn parsley leaves then add a bit of water just enough to make sure that it will cover the salmon.
Now you can do shallow poaching if you're using a very thin fillet
but salmon's a little bit thicker usually, so I do a full on poach where it is completely submerged.
So you want to bring the water to a boil before you add the salmon and then reduce the heat
and let the temperature drop to about 175 Fahrenheit or 80 degrees Celsius.
Then add the fish to the water and let it cook undisturbed for 10 minutes during which time you can prepare your sauce.
And this is a really easy sauce to make it takes no time because it is not cooked.
For it you just need a large handful of parsley you want to use a flat leaf parsley because it's going to have more flavor,
and then chop it up as fine as you possibly can. Then you'll need a couple tablespoons of thyme as well.
Then you'll need some fresh bread without the crust. Then about a half teaspoon of pepper as well as some white wine vinegar.
So first grind the herbs with a mortar and pestle until you have a paste.
Then soak the bread in the vinegar and add a bit to the herb so you're not going to need very much bread.
It's better to have more available because that's going to be how you're going to really make it thicker or thinner,
that and the wine.
So grind the vinegar soaked bread with the herbs until it's nice and smooth and then add that remaining wine to create a sauce.
Then finish off the sauce with a bit of pepper and set it aside.
Then take the salmon out of thepoaching liquid and let it cool and you can eat this warm but
Columba probably would have eaten it either at room temperature or even cold. Eating cold food was
often seen as more more holy than eating warm food.
"That's the devil's temperature."
So we've established that Columba was indeed a saint,
and today we have kind of an idea of what a saint would be you know spread Christianity to the Picts,
did a lot of miracles, very devout that whole thing but
if you actually read the lives of the early saints it's often not what you would expect.
'Columbas Life' was written just a hundred years after Columbas death and it is truly fantastic in the most literal sense of the word.
See the point of the work was to catalog all of the miracles that Columba had performed,
and many of them had to do with food and many of them had to do with death.
See, Columba was all about the the prophecies
and usually when he gave a prophecy about you it was time to start putting your Affairs in order.
It was a lot like Bruno,
but while we don't talk about Bruno-no-no-no we are going to talk about Columba.
So Columba spent much of his life on the Isle of Iona living in a hut on a mound of earth
which is actually still there and someone would come by and knock on his door and be like hey you know Columba it's time for dinner,
or I got a question whatever and he would turn around and say something like
"Two men of royal lineage have died today in Ireland of wounds each inflicted on the other."
And inevitably the prophecied death would happen.
I don't think it's quite as impressive as the water into wine but it happened a lot.
One time the monks asked him to have Cronin the poet who had just left a little while earlier to come back and entertain them,
and he said "Why ask such a pointless question?... His enemies have murdered him."
Now some of the death prophecies were just like this person's gonna die and then they did,
but others seem to kind of be a little personal even
used as as a form of punishment and Columba would often incorporate
food into these so we can can see a bit of what people around Iona and Scotland were eating in the 6th Century.
One story tells of a man going by in a chariot and Columba asks his friend who's that guy and
his friends like oh he's a wealthy man very well respected here in the community but Columba responds
that is not how I see him.
He sees him on the day of his death after just having a cow slaughtered.
Then "He will ask for some meat to be cooked and served to him lying in bed with his whore.
But the first mouthful he takes will choke him to death."
It definitely seems personal and it's not even the only time
he predicted the death of somebody who was in bed with a lady of affordable virtue.
Though the term used could also just be a second wife but clearly Columba didn't really approve of that either.
And it wasn't just people that he could kill with a word but also animals.
Once on the Isle of Skye he and his monks were walking through a forest and a boar came running along with hunting dogs in pursuit.
So I guess to help the hunt along Columba raised his hand and said to the boar
"Go no further, but die where you are now."
And the boar just keeled over, quite the miracle.
Actually Columba helped a lot of people when it came to hunting and and getting food.
There were several stories of him turning five cows into 105 cows,
and one man he gives some barley seeds to plant but it's way too late in the season to have them actually grow
but miraculously when it came time for the reaping there was plenty of barley.
Another had to do not with the quantity of food but with the quality of it.
There was a fruit tree near the monastery at Duro and it actually put out a lot of fruit,
but it was bitter and everybody complained that the fruit sucked it was kind of like grapefruit, I'm guessing.
So Columba said "In the name of almighty God, all your bitterness shall leave you,
and your fruit until now most bitter shall become most sweet."
He also gave away some high quality salt in what has to be his most useless miracle.
There was a man whose wife was sick with an eye disease
so Columba gave him a block of salt to hang on pegs on the wall over her bed
but "A few days later misfortune fell, and fire destroyed the entire village including this woman's house.
Marvelous to tell, though the rest of the house was completely burnt...
the fire did not dare to touch the two pegs on which this salt block was hanging."
There are actually several miracles that were overshadowed by subsequent tragedy.
Like when a young man fell off of his horse into a river and drowned.
His body being submerged for 20 days and he had been carrying a book with him so the book was also under the water,
and when they got it out out the entire book had rotted away except for one page
on which Columba had written. Sorry about your son but my autograph still looks fantastic.
Silver lining.
Now these miracles that end up not being quite as helpful as perhaps intended culminate
in a hunting stick. A beggar comes up to Columba begging for food for him and his wife and family,
and so Columba gives him alms but then also gives him a blessed stick.
"Keep this sharp stick carefully. It will not harm any man I believe, nor any cattle, but with it you may kill wild animals and fish."
So he goes home and sticks this stick in the ground and the next day a stag had just impaled itself on it.
It was food for a month and every single night some other animal would get stuck on this holy punji stick.
But his wife who hadn't heard Saint Columba, worried that if a man or a cow fell on the stick
they would die and the family would be punished,
and after quite a bit of nagging the man decides to take up the stick but
the stick has only one thing to do...
...and it's to kill
and it will kill.
He takes the stick and puts it in the house next day their dog is dead.
So he takes it and throws it into the river, salmon kebabs.
Tosses it into the brambles, most animals never go in the brambles,
but goats do and next day he has a goat. He even throws it up onto the roof of the house
and a raven just comes down and impales itself on the stick.
Finally the man takes the stick and chops it up and throws it into the fire.
No more stick and no more food, so it was really less of a miracle and more of a Adam and Eve allegory about not listening to your wife
and if you read a lot of the writings Columba clearly was not a fan of women.
Now while there are plenty more hunting miracles there are also some milk miracles, two!
One is is lovely, the second more disturbing.
The first was when a young man named Coleman asks Columba to bless his pail of milk that he had just filled.
"Columba called on the name of God and blessed the vessel, which at once shook violently.
The peg which held the lid shot back some distance, the lid crashed to the ground, and most of the milk spilled on the earth."
And the kids like, ah my milk what's up but Columbus says
there was a devil at the bottom of the pail and really it's the kid's fault because he should have been a little more aware when filling the pail.
Always check your pailfor devils.
Lesson learned and Colomba's nice enough to refill the pail with with some more milk,
so it's kind of like one and a half miracles.
Now the second definitely more disturbing milk miracle is when Columba
commands a sorcerer to fill a pail of milk.
Not from a cow but from a bull,
and he fills the entire thing full...
and it's not what you're thinking, rather it was cow blood that Satan had drawn all of the color out of leaving it white
looking like milk, not really much better but a little better I guess.
Also I don't really see that it's a miracle as much much as just a weird story.
Now another part of leading a saintly life at this time was not over indulging in food.
Much of the year meat was not allowed and only seafood could be eaten and if you did something wrong
one way to to make up for it was
to change your eating habits and eat very little, and you know not not exciting food.
And there was actually an island where it was all penitence so everyone could come together and
be less tempted to stray I guess.
But when it came to food Columba actually wasn't as strict as you might think.
So one time when he visited this island he lifted all of the penitential eating rules for everyone.
Everyone was very, very happy but one guy Neman mac Cathir
turned down the Saints offer...
Big mistake, big. Hug!
Columba sat him down and said
"Neman, I have allowed a relaxation in the diet, and you refuse it.
But the time will come when in the company of thieves in the forest you will eat the flesh of a stolen mare."
And as we've seen when Columba says something's going to happen
it's probably gonna happen, and after he finally got off of this island
he found himself "Eating just such meat taken from a wooden griddle."
And let us set aside the Impractical nature of a wooden griddle and instead focus on the 7th Century Irish Penitentials
which said "The penance for eating horseflesh, four years on bread and water."
Which means this guy after eating the horse would have been sent back to the island and would have had to do the whole thing all over again.
So as you see food was very important, not just for eating but for using as reward or punishment
but before you go around using food as a weapon I suggest we at least try this salmon with green sauce.
So once the salmon has cooled sprinkle it with a bit of salt and pepper,
and thank you to Dr. Gotwoodz Creations for sending me this pepper mill to end all pepper Mills,
and then pour the sauce over the fish and serve it forth.
And here we are Medieval salmon with verdi salsa.
Let's do it. Now it is slightly chilled but the sauce is not.
So sauce room temperature, fish chilled.
[Chomp]
Hm!
So the fish is very nice just kind of flakes flakes apart and
you do get a little bit of that wine flavor in it but the sauce is definitely the dominant flavor,
and it's wonderful. It's super herby. Herby, sounded like Kermit there.
It's very, very herb forward and which is really nice kind of fresh and light but
then you get hit with that little bit of vinegar. It's not vinegary at all but that little bit in there
kind of cuts through the fattiness of the fish and and just like brightens up the palate.
Also there's a little spice at the very end from I guess from the pepper but I didn't use that much
but it doesn't taste like black pepper when when kind of mixed with all of the other ingredients.
It's really, really nice. This is actually something that I would just make today,
and it really is kind of the perfect Lent time dish for a monk and or any fish day which was a lot of days out of the year.
Now these early medieval monks were very focused on the strict eating rules,
but later on in the Middle Ages you see that the monks start to try to get around these
eating rules so they can eat whatever they want so if you want to learn about that and I suggest that you do
you can watch this video right here
and I will see you next time on Tasting History.