Instead of my Claire Chats video this week I have made a “Tudor Cooking with Claire” video. One of my favourite desserts is trifle, so I was drawn to the recipes for “fools” in Tudor cookbooks.
As I explain in the video, the recipe I use is a combination of Gervase Markham’s “A Norfolk Fool” and Peter Brears’ modern renditions of a Norfolk Fool and “Elizabeth Cromwell’s Fool. Here’s the recipe I used:
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Thank you to Tudor Society members Dawn Hatswell for alerting me about this programme which airs on BBC Two at 8pm on Wednesday 19th July 2017. It’s part 1 of a 3 part series looking at sweet makers in different historical periods.
Here is the BBC’s blurb for the Tudor episode:
“Four modern confectioners step back in time to discover what life was like for their Tudor predecessors. They’ll explore how our national sweet tooth developed, and how the tables of the aristocracy boasted fantastic displays of sugar craft which showed off their owners’ wealth and status.
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Rioghnach O’Geraghty, a medievalist with a strong interest in the spices which were used during the medieval Tudor period, is this month’s expert speaker and she is joining us on the chatroom to answer your questions on Friday 20th January at 11pm UK time.
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In my latest Tudor Cooking with Claire video I’ve made a recipe from Thomas Dawson’s 1594 book The good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchin which presumably was the inspiration for the drink butterbeer in the Harry Potter book
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Many medieval and Tudor cookbooks and recipe manuscripts have been transcribed and are available to read online or in books. Here are links to those I have found so far. I hope you find them useful.
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I was lucky enough to be given a bagful of quinces by some friends so I decided to look in my medieval and Tudor recipe books for some quince recipes and found this one. I hope you enjoy it and do let me know if you try it and what you think. It really is delicious and is disappearing fast in our household.
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For today’s Tudor Cooking with Claire video, I’m making a recipe dating back to the 15th century called Pears in Compote, or, as it’s written in the manuscript, Pears in Compost!
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I love strawberries so when I saw this Tudor/Stuart strawberry tart recipe I just had to give it a go. It was delicious and takes very little preparation and time.
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For today’s Claire Chats I’m sharing a “Tudor Cooking with Claire” video that I have just done. In it, I make “My Lady of Middlesex’s Syllabub” recipe from the book The closet of Sir Kenelm Digby, knight, opened. It’s a really simple dessert and you can tell your guests that it’s an authentic Tudor recipe.
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In today’s Tudor Cooking with Claire, I am cooking a 16th century recipe for Fried Rice Cakes.
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One of my favourite comfort foods is rice pudding so I decided to look through my medieval and Tudor recipe books for a 15th/16th century version. Unfortunately, what was known as a “pudding” back then was food cooked in animal intestines, i.e. sausage skins, like black pudding and sasages today. In Peter Brears’ book Cooking and Dining in Tudor and Stuart England, he gives a recipe for “Rice Puddings” which involves packing cooked rice mixed with milk, mace, suet, currants, nutmeg and cinnamon into sausage skins and boiling.
After doing some more digging, I then found that a rice in almond milk recipe was included in a manuscript from the 15th century and that various websites had modernised it for use today. The original recipe reads:
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