A Yeast Affection: Say hello to my little friends...

This is Figaro.

He's not a special historical breed of cat or anything. He's pretty cool and I've had him a long time, but he's not really sure what to make of my strange hobbies. I suppose after 14 years he's seen me do stranger things than learning renaissance crafting, though if you pressed, I think he'd admit he's a bit giddy that there are now two knitters in the house.

Why am I bringing up my grumpy old cat on a story about yeast?

Because I've spent the last decade and a half trying to keep the furry little weirdo away from the stuff. Fig will move heaven and earth to get to anything yeasty. He's been known to try to drink the water we bloom the yeast in for bread dough. Beer, bread, pizza dough... he'll climb you like a tree to get at it.

You would think it was tuna the way he chases it.

Which is one of the many reasons that I was so happy when my friends Patrick and JoNell offered his kitchen and gear for my foray into beer making. They don't have a weirdo yeast-obsessed cat to contend with and brewing is all about sanitation.

Brewing beer at my place would require straining tuxedo cats out of the mash.

Since most of the ale that the Elizabethans drank was made at home, a little cat fur and a couple of miscreant children in the mix might make it more period, but I think people would object. So we're brewing a cat-less batch first time out.

Beer brewing was a fully-fledged industry by the time Elizabeth came to power, but according to Martyn Cornwell's "Beer: The Story of the Pint" (Headline Publishing, 2003) even as late as 1585, over half of the brewers in London were registered aliens.

Why?

Because hops, that's why.  Traditional English brewing happened without hops, and it happened in the home. The histories tell us that immigrants, mostly protestant refugees from the religious wars on the continent first brought hops brewing to England and it was they that drank most of the production of the breweries they set up once they got to London.

Not to be xenophobic, but we're going to take this opportunity to look into the homelives of the artisans, to step out of the workshops and saunter down the street a bit or up the stairs to enter the world of the Alewife.

The bakery and the brewery is going to overlap for us and these projects will take place simultaneously because the line between bread and brew was a fine one in the early modern world. Both were a calorically-dense cornerstone of the English diet and the ale we're attempting will be, in every sense, liquid bread.

Early modern humans consumed mind-boggling quantities of brew, with estimates ranging from two liters per person, per day, to four for a male and one for a child. Reasons given are still dominated by the "Water was unsafe" school, though that is teetering a bit.

Whatever the case, once you understand the rates of consumption, you begin to wonder if people were loaded day and night. The answer is a low-alcohol, calorie-dense, liquid bread.

In search of a beer you can drink all day without turning into a complete sot (an artisan has to earn a living, you know) led me to this book.

My first foray into this very simple method of brewing will be paved by a book by a fast-rising star of fermented history, Cassandra Cookson and her book "Drinkable History". The book is written in a light-hearted and far too short, but it enforces in the reader a desire to hear Professor Cookson give a lecture on pretty much anything.

Her English ale recipe is simplicity itself: Malted Barley, Oats, water, yeast.  She even outlines how to harvest your own yeast and malt your own barley, though we're going to let that project wait for another show.

My high school teachers taught me that fermentation was mankind's oldest trick, the first chemical reaction that humans learned to control.  Control, but not understand.  The brewers and bakers of the ancient world developed some very strange theories about what was going on in their brews and their bread, but it was mostly written off as supernatural until the 18th century and not really understood until the 19th century.

Yet they figured out that bread and beer were working from essentially the same process, and that the foam atop a vat of brewing beer could leaven bread as well as the funk that occurred naturally on the skins of apples.

Which is the latest example in my new presentation, tentatively titled, Our Ancestors Were More Observant than Us.  And so is my cat.

Later, we brew. In the meantime, like the artisans of old, I need to head off to work.

- Scott

Sick Day: Elizabethan Knitting, Part Two.

Step Two: The knit stitch

There are two types of stitches that are prevalent in the knitted garments that have survived from the 16th century. The knit stitch and the purl stitch.  It's worth noting that unlike modern methods of using alternating knit and purl stitches to create elasticity, in the 16th century, the purl stitch was apparently used mostly for decorative purposes. The earliest example I can come up with of knit/purl ribbing used to add elasticity to stockings is this pair in the Victoria & Albert Museum dating from 1640. Though that child's vest I posted earlier today seems to me to have ribbing around the neck.

I'll let others argue the point.

Of course, now that I know how to do it, it seems a no-brainer. Of course that's the problem with working backward in time, trying to replicate items that predate modern methodology. What seems obvious to us took centuries of trial and error to accomplish.

For instance, three-dimensional knitting also seems to have been a long time coming. That's when you knit a garment rather than knitting a bunch of cloth that you then sew into a garment. Of course some sewing after the fact is inevitable when you're making something like a sweater (or so I'm told) but at times it seems like the early modern knitter saw him or herself as a weaver, making whole cloth to then sew into garments.  By mid century at least, they unlocked knitting 'in the round' which is to say knitting a tube, but things like the foot of a stocking were still knitted flat and then sewn together to form thier final 3-dimensional shape.

of course, all that is just academic if you don't know how to knit.

The Knit Stitch

Today, we're going to knit. Working from our row of cast-on stitches I made yesterday, we're going to insert the empty needle into the loop closest to the point so that they're going in the same direction, one behind the other.

Note in the image below that you can just tell that I have the trailing yarn looped around my little finger. This applies friction rather akin to a belay break in climbing, slowing the yarn as it unspools and maintaining an even tension for the loops we're going to be making.

The empty needle goes behind the needle holding the stitched.

This is sometimes called the "Thrown" method of knitting because you're going to 'throw' a loop of your yarn around the needle in back.

Then, use the point of your needle to pull the thrown loop through the existing loop...

And let the earlier loop slip off the end of the needle.

That's knit one.  Repeat that until you've moved all your cast on stitches to the other needle and you've completed your first row.

Keep going, moving the stitches from one needle to the other with knit stitches. 

The Engineer advised me that at the beginning it's important to work on keeping your tension consistent and try not to skip or drop stitches. This is more important at first than trying to actually make something, unless you want to make a scarf, which can be row after row of knit stitches. 

As you go along, you will begin to recognize the pattern of interlocking loops and you'll know you have it down. That's the basic stitch of historical knitting. At that point, it's time to work on a new stitch, the purl... which we'll do tomorrow.

Obstacles: Knittin' Kitten

One of the best things about knitting is that when you're doing it, everyone wants to help. One of the worst things about knitting, is that when you're doing it, everyone wants to help.

"Everyone" includes the local kitten.

A common obstacle my wife encounters when she's knitting her airy confections is feline assistance. I'm faring no better than she does. Unfortunately, cats make better scissors than they do knitters, but all is not lost thanks to the fact that we're both working with wool.

Wool has the blessed quality of felting when in the presence of moisture and agitation. To rejoin a kitty-clipped section of yarn, simply wet the cut ends (saliva actually works better than water, but water will do if you're squeamish).

Lay the wet ends aside one another in your hands and then rub them vigorously between you hands to bind the threads back together.