So question I've been getting a lot lately in the comments is how did I get
into this? Specifically food history, I'm not a chef or a professional cook, I'm
not a historian so kind of a weird topic for a YouTube channel. Well it all
started with the Great British Bake Off specifically the fantastic history
segments that they used to have with the old host Mel and Sue. Mel, Sue I miss you
so much please, let's have lunch. My favorite episodes were always the
episodes where they would make some dish from history and then Mel and Sue would
go discuss the history and it always kind of, it was like it brought a bit of
history into the tent and I decided that I wanted to recreate some of the
historic dishes that they were doing because well I don't really have
anything in common with a medieval king or a Victorian social climber. If I made
something that they would have tasted and then tasted it myself it I felt like
it would create this kind of imaginary line through history so I could feel a
little bit of what they felt. Unfortunately before watching the Great
British Bake Off I didn't know squat about cooking, I didn't even know that
you were supposed to add salt when heating up the water to boil pasta so I
had a bit of a learning curve but I decided to teach myself how to bake
mainly through the wonderful Master Classes that Mary Barry taught. Anyway
the episode that really got me geared up to learn how to bake was an episode
where they mentioned a certain medieval cookbook and I cannot find it probably
it's you know not available here in the United States and at some point I
watched it when I was either over there or took it off the internet. Anyway the
book that they mentioned is this The Forme of Cury, England's first cookbook.
It''s a collection of recipes from around the Year 1390 "compiled of the chef
maester cooks of King Richard the second king of England after the conquest". So
today after you hit that Like button we are going to dive into the wonder that
is The Forme of Cury, and make one of its quintessential sauces galantine this
time on Tasting History.
So the sauce that we're making today galentine appears several times in The
Forme of Cury, and each time the recipe is a little different.
There are actually two recipes specifically for its use on pork and
neither of which is the same so the recipe I'm going to use today is for
kind of the base sauce which could then be modified for use with beef or fish, or
chicken, or pork, or a lamprey if you've got that laying around. Really, whatever
you want. So in modern English the recipe reads
"galantine: take crusts of bread and grind them small. Do hereto powder of
galangal, of cinnamon, ginger, and salt mix it with vinegar and pass it through a
strainer and serve it forth. Now I don't know a ton about sauces but they usually
have some sort of liquid in there which other than vinegar this doesn't actually
mention any liquid and it's gonna be kind of a stringent if the only liquid
in the sauce is vinegar but whenever the sauce is mentioned elsewhere in The Forme
of Cury it usually is made with either wine or the blood or juices of whatever
meat it's going to go on so we're gonna add those in. So the meat that I'm going
to use for this is pork shoulder but you can use anything but you do want
something that's going to give off quite a bit of juice to help you make the
sauce. So what you're going to need is a cup of liquid. First get as much juice as
you can and then top it off with wine red white doesn't matter then about two
pieces of stale bread. You could also toast it but if you're
cooking something in the oven the best way to make it kind of stale and dry
real quick is just leave the bread out on top of the oven while you're cooking,
and it'll be good to go by the time you're ready to make the sauce. This is
my cat by the way, Cersei say hi. She's been in a
mood she just got a little brother, and she ain't thrilled. So the next
ingredient is a little hard to find so I'll put a link in the description to
where you can find it online and that is galangal or galingale and that is
actually where the sauce gets its name, so we want to use a liberal amount. So
I'm taking one piece and grinding it up which makes about one and a half
teaspoons. It's definitely worth getting because one, smells wonderful and two,
we're going to be using it in some upcoming recipes.
Then 1/4 teaspoon of cinnamon and 1/4 teaspoon of ginger so for all of the
spices I used heaping quarter teaspoons and heaping teaspoons because we really
want to showcase the spices flavor and we will get into why in a little bit.
Then some red or white wine vinegar to taste. I used about two and a half
tablespoons just to give you an idea and then some salt again to taste so first
take your bread and crumble it up as fine as you can then whisk together the
crumbs the galingale, the cinnamon and the ginger. Then in a saucepan over a low
flame heat your drippings in the wine if you ended up using any then add in the
breadcrumb and spice mixture and whisk together then add in the vinegar and a
little bit of salt and let it simmer for a few minutes. About 5 minutes just to
reduce down. Now while that simmers let us take a look at where this lovely
little recipe came from, The Forme of Cury. So the 14th century is kind of a
renaissance for cooking or at least writing down recipes because between the
fall of the Western Roman Empire and the year 1300 we don't know that much about
what was being eaten by Europeans. We have some information but no detail, no
real recipes then in the 14th century we have hundreds and hundreds of recipes
with surprising detail coming at us from the kitchens of European royalty. The
bulk of the recipes come from just three manuscripts. The first was the French
"Le Viandier de Taillevent". Followed by the Italian and written in Latin
"Liber de Coquina" or Book of Cookery. Finally near the end of the 14th century we have
from England The Forme of Cury, or the Method of Cooking. Now the title The Forme
of Cury didn't really become a thing until the 18th century when Samuel Pegg
compiled all the recipes into one book. Before that they were just manuscripts
that didn't completely match each other exactly but the most famous and probably
the oldest is a six metre long vellum scroll kept at the British Library with
a hundred and ninety-six recipes on it. It bugs me that they didn't add four
more to just make it an even 200 recipes, but maybe they ran out of room on this
scroll I don't know. Now we don't know the names of any of the master chefs who
created these recipes but we do know that they would have sat in the center
of a massive kitchen wherever King Richard happened to be because he was
itinerant. He was always moving around from castle to castle, and they would
have sat there barking orders to an army of between two and three hundred cooks
as they scalded, boiled, plucked, deboned, roasted, baked and sauced dishes for
hundreds if not thousands of guests of the king all the while a scribe would
have been scribbling down whatever the master chef told him to put down. All of
the recipes and whatever the king liked and didn't like compiled all those
recipes, and you have The Forme of Cury which is why the recipes don't always
match. They were probably made by several different master chefs and several
different scribes over the period of about a decade. Anyway it's really
fitting that England's first cookbook be made by the chefs of Richard II because
say what you want about dear king Richie, and there is plenty to say, but
he was an infamous gastronome. Food and feasting were always a big part of any
court culture in medieval times but King Richard II took it to a whole new level.
Some historians actually credit him with kind of making that turn from the
raucous medieval feasts of the Normans and the early Plantagenet Kings into the
more refined occasions that you'd associate with later Kings
like the Tudors. Je made sure that everyone washed their hands before the
feast began, and he introduced the handkerchief to dab your mouth of food
instead of wiping it on your sleeve like I do.
He also popularized the use of spoons. It's said that every member of the royal
household carried one on them at all times and many of the manors that we
still adhere to today like no belching at dinner, no elbows on the table, and not
talking with your mouth full were strictly adhered to at King
Richard's Court. Now a medieval feast, whether it was Richards or anyone else's,
was not just about food. It was about politics, it was a way to show off your
wealth to everyone around you often by showcasing a vast array of dishes and
The Forme of Cury has a vast array of dishes. It has plenty of
recipes for pork, and beef, and chicken just as popular then as they are today. It
also showcases dozens of different species of fish and fowl and other sea
life, and really focuses on game which could only be hunted by the king and his
courtiers. Then there are recipes for things like whale and porpoise which
would have been available only to the wealthiest of diners. It also eschews
commoner ingredients like butter and replaces it with precious olive oil
which would have had to come all the way from near the Mediterranean or a fine
refined white lard called white grease, sounds pretty fancy. Now as
impressive as porpoise and white grease might have been, the best way to show
your wealth in medieval England was with spices and The Forme of Cury is
absolutely riddled with them: cinnamon, mace, clove, galangal, long pepper,
ginger cubes, grains of paradise, spikenard, caraway, the
list goes on and they weren't just used for their flavor but for the color as
well. Many recipes are tinted red with sandalwood or gold with precious saffron.
There are almost no recipes that don't showcase spices and usually it's two or
three at least. In a few weeks we're going to make hyppocras which is a
spiced wine from The Forme of Cury which uses no less than nine spices, very
expensive drink I've actually had to take out a second mortgage just to make
it. And based on the notes from the Royal Spiceries these spices were used in
copious amounts, a lot more than we typically use today especially in
Western cooking. The dishes were probably more akin to the highly spiced foods of
modern India which makes sense, that's how you were going to show your wealth. A
little ground pepper ain't gonna impress nobody. Now the chefs also created their
own secret spice mixtures probably similar to the Colonel's 11 herbs and
spices, the most notable in The Forme of Cury were powder fort and powdered-douce,
and while these would have varied from chef to chef most historians think that
powder fort had a ginger or a pepper base and powder douce had a sugar base,
and that is the ingredient that really makes The Forme of Cury stand out when
compared to the other 14th century manuscripts. Well the French Viandier
mentioned sugar eight or nine times, it is present in a third of the recipes in
The Forme of Cury, and not just in what you would think of as desserts because
the concept of desserts being sweet and entrees being savory that hadn't really
been developed. In fact the whole idea of dessert was just in its infancy then and
so sugar is treated like any other spice. Youu were just as likely to find sugar in
a tart as you were rubbed into a roast goose and that's why most medieval
sauces read more like American barbecue than a French Bearnaise sauce but by the
smell of our Galentine I don't think it's going to taste anything like either
of them, so let's check on it. So once your sauce has reduced down to the
thickness that you want give it a taste and tweak the salt and the vinegar if
you need to then pass the sauce through a strainer just to make sure you get rid
of any galingale bark, so here we are. It smells really nice, very like kind of
perfumey with a little bit of citrus in there maybe. Let's give it a shot. Hmm, first
of all, I did that pork amazingly just throwing that out there,
that's wonderful that's really, really nice. Such an interesting flavor and in
the best way possible, interesting because I was worried that it was going
to have a eucalyptus flavor because the the galingal kind of kind of has a
eucalyptus camphor scent, but it doesn't. It's there but it's so mild, it's
more of like this kind of citrusy notes coming through and then the cinnamon
playing off of that really, really nice, and I could see this being used on
absolutely anything: chicken, fish, pork, beef, doesn't matter even just like
vegetables. It's just a really nice sauce, I'd say be careful on on the vinegar
because it could easily tip over into vinegary. Really, really good now if you
want to see more recipes from The Forme of Cury I've made a playlist I think
right down here with all of The Forme of Cury recipes that I've done here on
Tasting History. So make sure to hit that Like button, and I will see you next time
on Tasting History.