Cherry Red

The English madrigal-writer Thomas Campion wrote about an intense crush on an untouchable woman.

There is a garden in her face
Where roses and white lilies blow;
A heavenly paradise is that place
Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow.
There cherries grow that none may buy,
’Til “Cherry-ripe” themselves do cry.

Compulsory floral face aside (‘I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,/ But no such roses see I in her cheeks,’ says a more honest man), the nudge-nudge connotations of the cherry are ample and obvious, and this song, published in 1617, suggests that innuendo changes little over the centuries.

As part of my mission to bring the good news of the past to my present friends, I mentioned this song the other evening, and the collected company did indeed find the tone to be obvious. Such is the patience of my friends in relation to my cooking experiments that I felt they had at least earned a smutty joke.

The goal of the evening was to make the most modern medieval meal possible. The three main components of the Modern British Diet – potatoes, chocolate, and tea – were of course not readily available to a fifteenth-century gourmand. But inspired by the almost-medievalism of Sam Gamgee, I decided to make a variation on fish and chips for six people, using a fifteenth-century recipe, my own imagination, and copious quantities of spice.

The following is a true account of how much easier it was to make summer pudding before the invention of the fridge.

Samon roste in Sauce (London, British Library MS Harley 4016)

Take a Salmond and cut him rounde, chyne and all, and roste the pieces on a gredire • And take wyne and pouder of Canell and drawe hit thorgh a streynour • And take smale myced oynons and caste thereto and let hem boyle • And then take vynegre or vergeous and pouder ginger and caste thereto • and then ley the samon in a dissh and cast the sirip theron al hote and serue it forth.

While one of my lovely assistants finely sliced two onions, I put about 450ml of white wine into a deep frying pan with some cinnamon (I used about a teaspoon, but I do like cinnamon) and gently heated it until that silvery film of bubbles began to grow along the bottom of the pan. We added the onions and stirred continually over the same heat for about 5 minutes, until they softened. Then we added a hefty glug of cider vinegar and a teaspoon-ish of powdered ginger, and kept stirring while the wine reduced.

Mmm, oynons.

In the meantime, in the absence of a gredire, we had put salmon fillets into the oven at 160°C for around 10 minutes. When the cooking was finished, the saucy onion concoction was dolloped onto the salmon. It really wasn’t very difficult.

Genuine Fake Medieval ’Taters and Peas

Frozen peas are extremely easy to prepare and I won’t patronise you like that. For potatoes, we used a swede: first it was peeled and cut into pieces of orange-segment size and shape, then parboiled for around 7 minutes, then put into an oven with some oil, salt and pepper at about 180°C, initially for 20 minutes.

Where we got a bit creative was in the addition of a poudre douce/poudre fort crossover mixture. For this, I mixed the following in a jam jar:

– 1 part cinnamon
– 1 part mace
– 1 part nutmeg
– ½ part ground cloves
– ½ part black pepper
– ¼ part Demerara sugar

After the first 20 minutes in the oven, some of this was mixed into the swede with a touch more oil, and then returned to the oven at a slightly lower heat for 20 more minutes. We also mixed the powder into the cooked and drained peas.

Not entirely ‘Fish and Chips’.

Chyryse (Forme of Cury)

Take almaundes, waisshe hem • grynde hem, drawe hem vp with gode broth • Do þerto thridde parte of chiryse, þe stones take oute and grynde hem smale • Make a layour of gode brede & powdour and salt and do þerto • colour it with saundres • Make it so þat it be stondyng and florrish it with aneys and with chelberyes and strawe þervppon and serue it forth.

I assumed that this was some sort of summer pudding, mostly because the instruction ‘make a layour of gode brede & powdour and salt and do þerto’, although it could be read as ‘make a layer of breadcrumbs’, seemed to be lacking a necessary verb. Ergo ‘make a layer of fresh bread with unspecified powder and salt, and put cherries on top.’ This ‘powdour’ could be squished cherries. Or my old favourite, poudre douce. Or indeed anything. Basically, this recipe is for people who already know what they’re making, and I am not one of those people.

An executive decision was made: summer pudding.

So I halved and stoned about 650g of cherries and added them to about 300ml of white wine [‘gode broth’, chortle chortle], with some star anise, a pinch of powdered ginger and a few teaspoons of sugar, and simmered for about 10 minutes before adding three heaped tablespoons of powdered almonds, like the maverick I am. This then simmered for a further ten minutes.

We had a small loaf of white bread, cut the crusts off and lined a bowl with the slices. The instruction about dyeing with sandalwood was altogether ignored, likewise the salting. Before doing the cherries thereto, I removed the star anise, then did the mixture thereto, folded the topmost slices of bread over to form a sort-of lid, covered it with tinfoil and put it in the fridge for the best part of an hour and a half.

Mmm, gloop.

Verdict

The onions’n’sauce was really quite delicious and, as a bonus, because the onions were softened in the wine rather than being fried, nobody’s hair or clothes smelled like frying afterwards. This concoction would probably also go nicely with trout, or a similarly oily fish. The spiced peas and swede were also popular – one of the first-timers gave the standard ‘Wow, this tastes really medieval’ remark, but then had second helpings of everything. I think this means it was nice. I’m not convinced that peas and poudre douce are natural bedfellows, but they were a damned sight better than runner beans.

The cherry gloop was actually extremely tasty – subtle levels of anise and almond, not too sweet, and still warm enough when we ate it to feel like rather more than your bog-standard summer pudding. My fingernails were stained for several days, but such is the price I pay. With regards to the bread: if this is the correct recipe, the thing should stand longer. There was no time for colour seepage and, in the absence of sandalwood dye, the paleness of the pudding was quite off-putting. Several more hours of sitting would have dealt with both the bready texture and the colour, although the entire thing was polished off very quickly. But since I’m not even sure whether the recipe was right, I won’t worry too much.

Next week: Sir Lucan loses his rag when three guests are on three different exclusion diets.

Like Father, Like Son

Sir Galahad, ‘best knight of the world’ and general prude, is one of only three knights to achieve the quest for the Holy Grail, that eccentric and oft-skipped episode of the Arthurian Cycle. In Malory’s version, at the end of the Tale of the Sankgreal, we read

And whan he had seyde thes wordis sir Galahad wente to sir Percivale and kyssed hym and commended hym to God. And so he wente to sir Bors and kyssed hym and commended hym to God and seyde, My fayre lorde, salew me unto my lorde sir Launcelot, my fadir, and as sone as ye se hym bydde hym remembir of this world unstable. (f.408r)

Then he kneels down to pray, and promptly dies.

Galahad is not renowned for his human empathy. His last-minute attempt to convert his absent father to the path of chastity showcases his overall approach to humans: we are sinners and chatterers, and must be killed or converted. But the respectful ‘salew’ (ME ‘saluen’ from OF ‘saluer’) establishes that Galahad and Lancelot might have had a relationship outside the mere knightly league tables and seating arrangements of Camelot. What Galahad is saying is: ‘Tell my father I said hi.’

Familial relationships are at the very heart of the Morte D’Arthur: brothers of course, not least the artificial Brotherhood of the Round Table. Birth brothers are often lumped together, be they good (Safer, Segwarides and Palomides) or bad (the Black, Red and Green Knights), and the utterly devastating episode of Balin and Balan casts a long shadow over the Morte’s beginning. Sisters who fundamentally influence the narrative are found in Percival’s nameless sister and the terrifying Queen Morgause. But issues of parenthood – fatherhood in particular – are of special importance, oddly enough for a text in which everyone appears to be the same age. Whether in the blood feud between the sons of King Lot and the sons of King Pellinore, the perfection of the traitorously-conceived Galahad, or Arthur’s bastard son/nephew with his half-sister Morgause, the Cycle’s central characters are all touched by the sins of fathers or fathering. If the Orkneys were alive today, they’d all be on Jeremy Kyle.

Aftir þe breche, heren we þe paternite teste hys ende.

Arthur’s own supposed status as the second-favourite son of Sir Ector sets up the entire Sword-in-Stone plot, and his gratitude to his foster father is genuinely touching:

said Arthur, ye are the man in the world that I am most beholdyng to, and my god lady and moder your wyf that as wel as her owne hath fostred me and kepte. […] God forbede I shold faille yow. (Caxton, ch.6)

Sir Ector’s chief wish after this is that Arthur should support his natural son Kay. As a kindly counterpoint to the absent, aloof Uther, Ector is without a doubt Arthur’s ‘real’ father, a status unfortunately overshadowed by the Cycle’s interest in blood. Although Disney depicted him as cruel and lazy, Sir Ector is one of the few completely blameless characters in the Morte. T.H. White writes him as a pleasantly archaic, sporting sort of old codger, with lines like,

When I was their age I was doin’ all this Latin and stuff at five o’clock every mornin’. Happiest time of me life. Pass the port.

Obviously, it’s not all sunshine and rosé, with the central struggle of the Morte arising from Arthur’s inability first to nurture and then to control his son Mordred. But today we should saluen us to fathers modern and medieval, present and absent, living and dead. In the words of Geoffrey of Monmouth, on the subject of Arthur’s ancestors,

Nempe ego dilexi te semper ut patrem; nec adhuc a proposito meo divertor. [Certainly I have always loved you as my father, and I have not yet turned from this my opinion.] (HRB, II.xi.)

How Does Your Garden Grow?

To my mind, one of the most touching instances in Richard II – a sob-worthy play if ever there was one – is the moment when Queen Isabella curses the Duke of York’s gardener for allegorising the political violence rife in England, storms off with her retinue, and the gardener says after her,

Here did she fall a tear; here in this place
I’ll set a bank of rue, sour herb of grace:
Rue, even for ruth, here shortly shall be seen,
In the remembrance of a weeping queen. (III.iv)

Like the admission of the nameless amateur herpetologist at the end of Anthony and Cleopatra, for some reason Shakespeare’s minor characters and their naturalist hobbies appeal to me, both because their brief interjections allude to fully-fleshed characters in well-rendered worlds, and because ‘natural philosophy’ was a well-respected pursuit in the medieval and early modern periods. The tending of gardens and tending of the state are attractively overlapping concepts, and one suspects that Richard’s kingship would have been rather more successful had he been a little less of a pampered child-star, a little more of a patient, practical gardener.

In a period where chemical medicine and chemical flavourings had yet to be invented, gardens were the source of culinary, medicinal and aromatic materials, and from which one had to fill a pie, furnish a salad, fix a hangover, and scent ones hair. Unlike Tudor knot gardens, which may have smelled stunning but were in essence ornamental, monastic gardens in the high Middle Ages really were a one-stop-shop.

Brother Cadfael, the 12th-century detective-monk created by Edith Pargeter, spends a good deal of time strolling through the gardens of Shrewsbury Abbey, acting as physician and generally knowing his way around a borage flower. Multiple Middle English lyrics draw on both the dense naturalism of the Song of Songs, and on the associations their audiences may have made about certain sorts of flowers: in British Library MS Harley 2253, we read of a lover that,

Heo is lilie of largesse,
Heo is parwenke of prowesse,
Heo is solsecle of swetnesse.

Lily, periwinkle, marigold. Meanwhile the late 15th-century Boar’s Head Carol recommends that the Christmas hog be accompanied by hefty dollops of mustard – servitur cum sinapio. Lest we forget, mustard is also a plant.

Garden party. Nudity optional.

But in the way that I have a favourite tense (future perfect) and a favourite Gawain synonym for man (hathel), I also have a favourite medieval gardener: Walafrid Strabo, ninth-century monk of Reichenau, and writer of the most charming gardening manual in western literary history. First of all, it’s in hexameters – what a crazy cat! But also, Walafrid writes,

Haec non sola mihi patefecit opinio famae
Vulgaris, quaesita libris nec lectio priscis;
Sed labor et studium, quibus otia longa dierum
Postposui, expertum rebus docuere probatis.

[This stuff has become clear to me not only by common knowledge and rummaging about in old books, but from hard work and study, when I could have spent long days in leisure, but chose instead to learn.]

Ah, possible long days of leisure. Walafrid clearly writes from experience, however Virgilian his verse may be, and all the plants he grows in his south-facing, nettle-free patch have some medicinal use, be it the cooling melon, the soporific poppy, or the laxative rue. He writes of mint:

Sed si quis vires speciesque et nomina mentae
Ad plenum memorare potest, sciat ille necesse est
Aut quot Erythraeo volitent in gurgite pisces,
Lemnius aut altum quot in aera Mulciber ire
Scintillas vastis videat fornacibus Aetnae.

[But if any man can remember all the many kinds and properties of mint, it must be him that knows how many fish swim in the rushing Indian Ocean, how many sparks Lemnean Vulcan lets fly from his vast furnaces in Etna.]

In the grand Catullan tradition of ‘things of which there are many’ – kisses, stars, grains of sand in Libya – the properties of mint seem both humble and deeply unsexy, but Walafrid, both lover and supplicant, lavishes praise and poetry on the most prosaic of plants: gourd, celery; irises that remind him of Apollo’s lover Hyacinth; sage that, unbeknownst to Shakespeare, puts him in mind of civil war.

Naturally, he reserves his strongest praises for the rose:

Debueram viburna rosae pretiosa metallo

Pactoli et niveis Arabum circumdare gemmis.

[I ought to set my precious guelder roses with Turkish gold and the gleaming gems of Arabia.]

He reflects that the rose is as precious to France and Germany, as beautiful and as richly coloured, as murex is to Tyre. He calls it ‘florum flos’, the flower of flowers, the best in properties and fragrance, and then of course turns to a prayer to the Virgin Mary.

Umberto Eco wrote of a ‘new Middle Ages’ in which, following an utter collapse of social order, the artefacts we call civilisation may only be able to survive in hermetically-sealed communities, not unlike the early monastic houses in which the texts of the ancient world were copied and preserved. In rebuilding a broken society, knowing how to work a lathe and shun poisonous mushrooms might be amongst the most valuable skills for survival. I am not a misanthrope and I do not long for a zombie apocalypse – in which I would no doubt be one of the first to die – but our detachment from the land we occupy is both strange and unsustainable. We do not all have the luxury of access to or ownership of a garden, but Walafrid puts me in mind of Waterworld and Kevin Costner’s post-apocalyptic tomato plant: the nurture of something else, however small it is, can save us all, spiritually and medically.