#history of cooking
As the autumn comes to a close, and the cold of winter sets in, I figured it’d be a great time to make a simple savoury treat from medieval Georgian cuisine - stuffed apples! Though savoury stuffed apples are commonly found in the Caucasus region, this isn’t exclusive to Georgia! Armenia, and parts of north-western Iran, western Turkey, and Azerbaijan also have regional variants of this dish!
In any case, let’s now take a look at the world that was! Follow along with my YouTube video, above! If you like what I make, consider supporting me on Patreon!
Ingredients (for 4 servings)
4 large tart cooking apples
honey
ground cinnamon
ground nutmeg
water
1 cup rice
butter
Method
1 - Prepare Apples
To begin with, we need to prepare our apples. Do this by slicing the top off of about 4 large apples, before carving out the middle - leave about a finger’s width of a wall.
Drizzle some honey in here, and sprinkle a little ground cinnamon inside. Honey was used in the civilisations of the Caucasus for millennia, and was an important part of many people’s diets in the medieval period.
2 - Prepare Filling
Next, pour a cup of rice into a bowl, and pour some water over this. Rinse the grains until the water runs clear. When it’s cleaned, keep the grains just about submerged, and bring the pot to a boil. Cook your rice for a few minutes until they fluff up. When they’re done, let them cool down a bit, before mixing in a handful of raisins or sultanas, along with some freshly-grated cinnamon, and some freshly grated nutmeg, or mace.
Both of these spices were commonly found in the kitchens of the region in the medieval period, thanks to Georgia’s proximity to the silk road and spice trade.
3 - Assemble Stuffed Apples
Take your hollowed apples, and fill them to the brink with your rice stuffing. Place a dollop of butter over this, before placing the lids of your apples back on top.
Place your apples onto a deep tray, and pour about a cup of water into this. If you want, you could add some more aromatics or spices in here - such as mint, rosemary, or cloves! Then put the tray into an oven preheated to 350F or 175C for about a half an hour, or until the apples puff up and turn golden.
Take your apples out, and serve up alongside some roast meat and vegetables! Spoon over some of the baking liquid, to rehydrate the rice a little too!
The apples are quite tart, but with a deliciously sweet undertone. The flesh is melt-in-your-mouth, and pairs very well with the texture of the fluffy rice. This pairs really well with roast lamb and pork, and is a fantastic (and easy) side-dish for any feast you’re preparing for!
Today, I’ll be taking a look at a Roman recipe, recorded by Apicius, which was likely eaten at contemporary roadside eateries in the Roman Empire - the simple isicia omentata - or what is basically a Roman burger patty! The end result is like a spiced and fragrant meatloaf!
In any case, lets now take a look at The World That Was! Follow along with my YouTube video above! If you like my recipes, consider checking out my Patreon!
Ingredients (for 5-6 burgers)
500g minced meat (beef, pork, lamb would be most fitting here)
100g breadcrumbs
2 cups wine (white or rose would work best)
100g pine nuts
50g black pepper
Method
1 - Soak the Breadcrumbs
To begin with, we need to soak 100g of breadcrumbs in a cup or two of wine. This is to add some moisture to the finished isicia, and to help pad out the meat. In antiquity, stale bread would have been used here, as it was a simple way to make the most out of every loaf of bread.
If your breadcrumbs look a little dry, add a bit more wine until it’s all damp.
2 - Mix the Ingredients
Now we need to place 500g of minced meat into a bowl, along with our soaked breadcrumbs. Keep in mind that the texture of minced meat today is more cohesive than what would have been made in antiquity! A mortar and pestle would have done the work on finely-chopped pieces of meat, becoming what’s known as “forcemeat”. But modern ground meat works well!
I used beef here, but ground pork or lamb (or even goat) would have been used in antiquity. The original recipe simply calls for “meat”, so to the readers of the time, the kind of meat would have been obvious! (such as hamburgers today being made from beef)
In any case, mix everything together in a bowl. Toss in about 100g of pine nuts, and 50g of whole black peppercorns, mixing to combine.
3 - Form the Isicia and cook
When your mixture is combined, take a small handful of it in your hands and form it into a patty. Each one should be about 1/5th of the mix (based on how I made them anyway, you can make them larger or smaller than mine). Place each one onto a frying pan with a little olive oil, and let it cook away over high heat for about 5-10 minutes, before flipping them over and letting the other side cook for the same amount of time. (The time it takes to cook them depends on how thick you make them)
When they’re done, serve up on a bed of arugula or rocket, or another edible green of your choice, and eat alongside a bit of bread!
The finished isicia are super light and flavourful! Each mouthful has a bite of heat from the peppercorns, along with a sweet, nutty flavour from the pine nuts! The breadcrumbs soaked in wine gives us a bit of sharpness, depending on the kind of wine you used.
While it’s unknown exactly how these were served in antiquity, it’s not unlikely that they were paired with bread and edible greens, as both of these would be readily available and filling sides for a meat dish like this! Based on earlier Italian cuisines (i.e. Etruscan), stale bread may have been used as a plate of sorts, which would then have been eaten after the main dish (the stale bread turning soft when soaked with the oils from the meat).
Today, I’ll be making a simple cherry pudding recorded in the 14th century AD - from the region of the Holy Roman Empire! Cherries were (and still are) a very popular fruit to eat, given the extensive range at which they can be grown. The original recipe is recorded in The Forme of Cury - a 14th century English manuscript - but the origin of this recipe likely comes from a central European source, given the variety of recipes recorded here.
In any case, let’s now take a look at The World That Was! Follow along with my YouTube video, above. Consider supporting me on Patreon if you like my recipes!
Ingredients
500g fresh ripe red cherries
200ml red wine
100g white sugar
1 tbsp unsalted butter
100g soft white breadcrumbs
salt
Edible flowers (e.g. clover, lavender, etc)
Method
1 - Prepare the Cherries
To begin with, we need to wash, de-stem, and stone the cherries. Do this by cutting into them carefully with a knife, before using your thumb to dig out the stone. Do this to about half a kilogram of cherries.
When your cherries have been stoned for their sins, place them into a bowl, along with 100ml (or a cup) of red wine - I used a merlot here, but a sweet dessert wine would work nicely. On top of this, also add about 50 grams of white sugar. Mix and mash everything together until it forms a very thick, lumpy soup.
2 - Cook the Pudding
At this stage, place a tablespoon of butter into a large saucepan or pot. Place this over a high heat until it starts to melt. At this point, place your breadcrumbs and cherry-wine mix into the pot, along with another 50g of sugar. Mix everything together. If it’s looking a little dry, add in another cup of wine. Put this onto a medium-high heat and let it cook away for about 10-15 minutes. Keep the whole thing stirring as you cook it, so nothing sticks and burns onto the pot.
3 - Cool and Serve
The pudding should thicken up considerably, and act like a porridge when it’s done. Let everything cool a little, before spooning into a bowl of your choice. The original recipe claims that you should decorate it with edible flowers.
The finished pudding is super sweet and flavourful. The breadcrumbs soaked up the cherry juice and wine mixture and became fantastically smooth, with a sharp undertone (thanks to the wine). If you wanted to make an alcohol-free alternative, you could use some grape juice instead!
The pudding itself can also be used as a pie or tart filling, and firms up quite nicely if baked.
Today, I’ll be taking a look at another recipe from 13th century Syria - and the anonymously written Scents and Flavours Arabic cookbook - the creamy chicken Jurjaniyyah!
The name Jurjaniyyah is derived from an Iranian region - Gorgan - which suggests that this was an imported culinary style, rather than a local recipe! Either way, it’s a fairly simple and tasty dish!
In any case, lets now take a look at The World That Was! Follow along with my YouTube video, above!
Ingredients (Serves 4)
500g yoghurt
½ tablespoon flour dissolved in 1 tablespoon water
½ tablespoon honey
2 tablespoons mustard seeds
ground cumin
250g chicken thighs (or cut of your choice)
Method
1 - Bake the Chicken
To begin with, we need to cook our chicken. To do this, season a few thighs of chicken with salt, pepper, and freshly-ground cumin. I’m cooking the meat separately to the sauce, which is unusual for meat-based recipes in this time period - but this is seemingly how the dish was intended to be prepared!
In any case, bake or roast your chicken at 200C for about 30 minutes, or until it’s cooked through!
When it’s cooked, take it out of the oven and let it rest while you make your sauce.
2 - Make the Sauce
Next, we need to make our sauce. Start by placing 500g of Greek yoghurt into a saucepan. Into this, toss a slurry of 1 tbsp flour and 1tbsp water - this will help prevent the sauce curdling as it cooks. Place this over a high heat, and stir it. Contemporary Arabic cookbooks emphasise that you should stir this in a single direction, to reduce the risk of curdling. So stir it until you start to see bubbles forming at the edge.
At this point, turn the heat down to medium, and let it foam up and froth away for about 10 minutes.
3 - Assemble Dish
After 10 minutes, pour in a tablespoon of honey, and a couple of tablespoons of mustard seeds. The original recipe describes the dish as being very pungent, so you can adjust this by increasing or decreasing the amount of seeds you add here!
Place your chicken on a plate, and ladle on some of your sauce. Serve up warm and dig in!
The finished dish is super fragrant, and each mouthful of the sauce has a sharp bite of heat thanks to the mustard seeds. In a sense, it’s almost like horseradish! But overall, it’s more fragrant than it is hot - and acts very creamy!
Mustard seeds have been cultivated throughout the Near East for millennia, and had a variety of uses besides the culinary field. However the popularity of this seed as an ingredient seems to have increased following the occupation of the region by the Roman Empire - as well as subsequent empires and caliphates.
How and why a Persian recipe was recorded in a Syrian cookbook that charts local, regional tastes could suggest that this dish was popular enough at the time of writing in the region that it felt right at home alongside other dishes (such as my chicken with blackberry sauce)
It’s been a whole year since I started this project, and seeing it grow to the size it is today is amazing - I never imagined that it would ever get this popular! So to celebrate, I decided to take a look at some roast duck - based on some Sumerian cuneiform fragments.
In any case, let’s now take a look at The World That Was! Follow along with my YouTube video, above!
Ingredients
2kg duck
ground cumin
ground coriander
salt
pepper
1 leek, chopped
1 onion, minced
2 cloves garlic
750ml water (or stock)
butter
Method
1 - Prepare the Duck
To begin making this roast duck, we need to prepare our duck. I’m using a whole bird here, but you could just as easily cook this in pieces - it’s up to you! Start by scoring the breast with a knife a few times, to increase the seasoning surface area. The original fragment claims to be dealing with an unnamed bird, so I opted for duck - as wildfowl would have been a staple for Mesopotamia. But chicken or squab would have also been eaten around this time.
In any case, season your bird of choice using some salt, some freshly ground black pepper, some ground cumin, and some ground coriander. Rub this into the meat with your hands if you can handle it. Though I’m going to be dry-roasting this, it’s likely that the meat would have been boiled in a stew or soup broth for a while before being roasted in an oven.
2 - Roast the Duck
Place your seasoned bird breast-side down on a roasting rack. And then place this into the centre of an oven preheated to 200C / 400F for about two hours (based on a 2kg bird of course), flipping this over about 30 minutes before serving so the breast meat roasts perfectly. When you’ve flipped the bird, go and prepare your soup.
3 - Prepare the Soup
To pair with this, I made a quick and easy leek and herb soup. Start by chopping a leek into segments as thick as your thumb or so. Also chop an onion in half, and mince each half.
Toss some butter into a pot and put it onto a high heat. When the butter melts, toss in your leeks and onions. Return the pot to the heat, and let everything sauté away for a few minutes until the onion turns soft and translucent. At this point, toss in a few shakes of cumin and coriander, along with 750ml of water (or a soup stock of your choice). Into this, add some thyme and mint sprigs.
Let everything cook away for about 20 minutes, or until the leeks are practically falling apart.
Fish out your herb sprigs, and serve up alongside your duck!
The finished roast is super succulent, and very flavourful. The seasoning on the duck gave it a sharp zesty flavour, which paired very nicely with the herby, minty flavour of the soup. The meat itself has a lovely crisp skin, and tender flesh. This is a reconstruction of a fragmentary recipe from the Yale Cuneiform collection - others have postulated that it is separate to the pigeon stew recipe fragment, while others have claimed it to be a continuation of it. I chose to do a simple roast here, as ovens for cooking and baking would have been able to do this with little modification in antiquity (such as the use of a spit or shaft of metal or wood to cook the meat over a naked flame.
Today, I’ll be going back to the Hellenistic Period, to the Hasmonean dynasty of Judea. The recipe in question is a simple honeyed-hens, recorded by Seleucid accounts of a feast held by one of the ruling elite. Though the original recipe refers to it plainly as chicken with honey, I’m going to be recreating it today based on our knowledge of contemporary dining habits!
In any case, let’s now take a look at the World That Was! Follow along with my YouTube video above!
Ingredients
4 chicken thighs
salt (to taste)
pepper (to taste)
ground cumin
ground coriander
2 tbsp wholegrain mustard
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp honey
2-4 cloves garlic
Method
1 - Prepare the Chicken
To begin with we need to season our chicken. Do this by sprinkling some salt, some freshly ground black pepper, some ground coriander, and some ground cumin on top of your chicken, before rubbing it in with your hands. In antiquity, chicken would have been eaten, along with wildfowl like duck, and even doves or pigeon. Any of these birds would work well here, but chicken would be the easiest meat to deal with today.
Leave your chicken aside while you go make the sauce.
2 - Prepare the Sauce
Next, we need to make a sauce to go with this. In antiquity, mustard seeds and vinegar would have been the base of several sauces or condiments. You can easily do this here, but a better solution would be to use pre-made wholegrain mustard, like I’m doing.
In any case, toss about a tablespoon or two of mustard into a bowl, along with a good glug of olive oil. On top of this, add an equal amount of honey, along with a few crushed cloves of garlic. Mix all this together into a fairly thick sauce. If you want, you can thicken this over a medium heat for a few minutes until it’s just about bubbling. I didn’t do this, but it turned out well!
3 - Assemble the Dish
Toss your seasoned chicken into a lightly oiled baking dish. Pour over your sauce, and try and spread it around evenly. If you want to, you could place the chicken into a Ziploc bag with the sauce and leave it to marinate overnight in the fridge.
Either way, place your prepared chicken into an oven preheated to 200° C / 400° F, and let it all bake away for 40 minutes, flipping them over halfway through so they cook evenly.
Take the chicken out when they’re browned and cooked through, serve up warm on a bed of edible greens like rocket, and dig in!
The finished dish is super succulent and flavourful. The spices were very floral and nutty, improved by the time spent baking. The mustard and honey mix caramelised at the bottom of the baking dish, which was a delicious bit of sweet heat when serving up!
The meat itself was very tender, with the skin on top crisping up significantly during the cooking process. In antiquity, it’s unknown if birds were divided up into legs, wings, thighs etc, before or after cooking. Though it’s likely that they may have been prepared both as a whole roasted chicken that was then divided up at the table, as well as pre-cut into more easy to manage pieces like I did here. It’s really a matter of personal preference today anyway.
Today, I’ll be taking a look at a staple of Irish medieval cuisine: the humble nettle soup. Late spring and early Summer is the ideal time to make this dish, as the nettle leaves used here won’t have matured fully, and retain a soft, lighter texture than older woodier leaves. Plus they won’t sting your hands as badly as mature nettles. Plenty of Irish families have their own takes on this recipe, and this is influenced by my family’s take on the tradition!
In any case, let’s now take a look at The World That Was! Follow along with my YouTube video, above!
Ingredients
2-3 cups nettle leaves
1 onion, minced
2-3 cloves garlic (or two bulbs of wild garlic, minced)
chives (for decoration)
butter
½ cup milk/double cream
500ml water or stock
salt
pepper
Method
1 - Chop and cook the Garlic and Onion
To begin with, we need to peel and chop a whole onion, before tossing this into a pot with some melted butter. You can of course use oil, but dairy products was (and still is) a major part of Irish culinary traditions - so try and use Irish butter here if you can.
In any case, let your onion sauté away for a couple of minutes until it turns translucent and fragrant. When it hits this point, toss in a couple of cloves of crushed garlic - or some wild garlic if you have any!
2 - Deal with the Nettles
Next, ball up some nettles and chop it roughly with a knife. Be careful, as the leaves and stems of this plant has stinging fibres (which will get denatured and broken down when it’s cooking).
Nettles act like spinach when you’re cooking them, so have about 2-3 times more than what you think you’ll need on hand. Add your chopped nettles into the pot, and let them cook down before adding the rest!
3 - Cook Soup
When all of your nettle leaves have cooked down, pour in 500ml of soup stock (or water) into the pot. Then, toss in about a half a cup of whole milk, or double cream if you have it. Mix this together gently, before putting this onto a high heat. Bring it to a rolling boil, before turning it down to low until it simmers. Let the whole thing simmer away for about an hour.
Serve up hot in a small bowl, garnish with some chives or seasonal herbs, and dig in!
The finished soup is very light and flavourful, but quite filling for what it is! It’s another variation on a medieval pottage, with ingredients that could have been easily foraged in the spring and summer. As it can be made with only a few ingredients, it could have formed the basis of more complex dishes - such as the addition of more vegetables, or meat products.
Given how little the dish has changed from antiquity to modernity, it’s likely that the basics of this soup go back to pre-historic Irish culinary traditions.
TheSzathmary Culinary Manuscripts and Cookbooks collection is an outstanding online resource of over 9300 scanned pages of handwritten cookbooksfrom the 1600s-1900s, from the University of Iowa Libraries’ Special Collections, University Archives, and Iowa Women’s Archives.
Almost all pages, as of January 2019, have been transcribed by a crowdsourcing initiative.
(Image: English cookbook page, ca. 1600s, from this project.)
