A Year in the Life of Medieval England by Toni Mount

Author:Toni Mount [Mount, Toni]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amberley Publishing
Published: 2016-05-22T04:30:00+00:00

3rd – Strawberry Season

This is the season for strawberries. In medieval times, strawberries were planted in garden plots but produced fruits just the size of a fingernail, like wild strawberries but very sweet. They were often eaten fresh from the plant because they didn’t keep for long. Medieval doctors seemed to think strawberries were very bad for you, perhaps because the brief glut of fruit meant folk ate far too many in such a short time, leading to stomach upsets. The fruit was blamed for this ill, rather than human greed. Here is a fifteenth-century recipe using strawberries:

Take strawberries and wash them at this time of year in good red wine, then strain them through a cloth and put them in a pot with good almond milk. A-lay it with amyndoun [wheat flour] or rice flour and boil until it thickens. Add raisins of coraunce [currants], saffron, pepper, plenty of sugar, powdered ginger, canel [cinnamon], galingale, point it with [a dash of] vinegar and a little white grease, colour it with alkanet and drop it about, plant it with grains of pomegranate and then serve it forth.

T. Austin, Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books c. 1430–1450

I am slightly mystified by the instructions concerning saffron and ‘point it with … a little white grease, colour it with alkanet …’ Medieval diners loved brightly coloured food, and this dish should have been a bold red but saffron would have turned it more orange (or ‘tawny’ as they would have said). Alkanet was a herb used for blue colouring, so you can imagine its addition would produce a muddy colour instead – not very attractive at all. The instructions are none too clear, so I wonder if it was the ‘white grease’ only that was meant to be dyed blue and used as little cubes to dot about the dish. Personally, I would leave out the grease altogether and use the bright blue alkanet flowers – also in season at this time – along with the jewel-like pomegranate seeds to decorate this summertime dish.

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