Kill it with fire: The Worshipful Company of Cooks, Part One

The smallest of all the Livery Companies had to be the Worshipful Company of Cooks of London. Yet they did exist, so while the clay bread oven I just built is curing (more on that later) we get an excuse to play with food and fire in their name and I get to try my hand at some period recipes.

I've really been looking forward to this one.

If nothing else, this project gives me a chance to post an image from Bartolomeo Scappi instead of my muse/nemesis Jost Amman for a change. Scappi (died 1570) was the personal chef of six popes. His renown, however, is mostly for his magnum opus: Opera di Bartolomeo Scappi, Maestro dell'arte del cucinare, divisa in sei libri (roughly: "The Work of Bartolomeo Scappi, Master of the art of cooking, in six volumes"). Scappi's Opera (as it's known) is at once a gossipy memoir of life as the Vatican chef and a manual of instruction for the state of the culinary art, circa 1550-1570. It contains over a thousand recipes/preparations, and is probably the most thorough accounting of the renaissance kitchen that we have available to us.

It also includes a large number of drawings depicting kitchens both inside and outside and all the implements that one could hope to reproduce. Best of all, you can download it free from the Internet Archive. http://archive.org/details/operavenetiascap00scap



Scappi, unfortunately, was decidedly not English. So we'll be using his 'Opera' as one of many resources as we work from period or near-period English recipes wherever possible. Additionally, we'll be using some of the resources produced by the fine folks who put on the cooking demonstrations for the Historic Royal Palaces. Between Scappi and the fine folks at HRP, I think we're in good hands.

But before I get to all that, I have to learn to cook with fire.

Looking at that engraving up there, it seems simple enough:

1. Light fire. 
2. food over roaring fire. 
3. Eat and repeat.

But nothing is ever as simple as it seems at first blush. If this project teaches me nothing else, it will teach me that.

Can you hear me humming "Smoke gets in your eyes"? 

Yeah...

A word about cookware and safety...

The Elizabethans didn't know a thing about bacteria or food poisoning. Their grasp on metallurgy was

pretty good, though, and getting better all the time. Yet they used some metals and alloys with furious abandon that we now understand to be catastrophic to your health. They practically poured lead on their breakfast cereal.

Lead isn't really a relevant worry here since its use is so constrained in modern manufacturing. The place most Elizabethans encountered it was in the glazes of their ceramics and as a potter I can control for that pretty easily. My main deviation from the period is eschewing bronze entirely. Those cauldrons you see in all the paintings? Most of them were cast in the same manner as church bells and from mostly the same materials.

The biggest problem with bronze (aside from weight and expense) is that it's an alloy mostly consisting of copper. In the period it might be blended with lead or zinc, neither of which are good eats, but even modern bronze has its problems and perils. 

I use copper all the time because I have some copper cookware in my kitchen and it tends to be lined with tin if it's intended for household use. But all my cauldrons are cast iron, which is most assuredly not a period metal. Why the deviation? Because cast iron is easier to clean and care for, less expensive, and even if I screw up completely, it won't poison anyone.

Is that really a danger? Sort of... certainly more of a problem than I'm willing to bear on my conscience. When copper comes in contact with acids it can create a chemical reaction that forms what's known as verdigris.  That's the green patina that forms on copper as it weathers. And it's poisonous.

Scrupulous cleaning can keep you safe and the folks at Hampton Court Palace use bronze cookware that was made for them (I believe) by the folks at Historic Castings.

Thermal mass is the key here. As far as I can tell, the choice of metals for my cookware doesn't change the results and the transfer of heat from fire to food doesn't change all that much.

Speaking of cleanliness, I have pots to clean...

More later.

- Scott

I've a bone to pick with my butcher...

"What I really need is a bovine metatarsus," I said.

The butcher was silent for a moment, staring at me as if sizing me up for a styrofoam tray and wondering if he had enough shrinkwrap to do the job.  Finally, he said, "You want a what?"

"A cow's metatarsus. It's the lower leg bone," I explained. "Any is good, but front is best because they'll be a bit more manageable."

"Soup bones are over there." He gestured vaguely toward the meat cases.

"All you have are ham bones and ox tails. I need a meta... a leg bone,"  I insisted. "From a cow."

"Why?"

"Can I just come back there and look?" I craned my neck around the corner toward the door of the walk-in cooler, just out of reach of curious customers. "I grew up on a farm. I'll wear gloves, a mask, whatever I need."

"We don't do that kind of thing here; we're a grocery store."

"It's for a project." I gave him my best academic look on the off chance it would make a difference. "It's educational."

He shrugged and averted his gaze, obviously hoping the strange man with the cow leg fixation would just go away. Finally I did.  No use asking him to direct me to a proper butcher. I knew when I'd been beat.

This was going to be harder than I thought.

The part about growing up in farm country is true. I'm from a small town in rural Missouri. The part about growing up on the farm was stretching it a bit since it was my grandpa's farm, but suffice to say that I was around a lot of cows and a lot of dairy farmers from an early age.

If I needed a cow bone in Missouri, I'm pretty sure a couple of phone calls would get me one without too much fuss. May be true here too, and I just don't know the right numbers to dial.

Tacoma, Washington (where my wife and I work) is not in dairy country. It's a city, urban by any definition, and the butchers around here don't get whole sides or ever really see the whole cow. They're mostly in the backs of grocery stores. Which more properly categorizes them as meat cutters, I think (feel free to check me on that) as opposed to butchers in the classical sense -- their meat comes precut into primals from the packer and they slice it into steaks or grind it or whathaveyou.

All of which means no legs.

No pinner's bone.

I should explain. As I explained yesterday, a pin maker used a bone as a sort of specialized tool bench for making pins. The metatarsus of a cow or sheep were preferred because they are large and dense and can be grooved in many directions to allow for different dimensions of pin.

In all honesty I have no idea whether or not it matters whether I use a pin or a block of wood or the anvil of my vise. They used a bone, so I want a bone if I can get one.

One of the biggest obstacles to period crafts as a general rule is the simple fact that modern urban-dwellers do not have the access to the same materials as our early modern predecessors. Now, as then, every part of a butchered animal is used from hoof to moo, but that doesn't mean I can get at it. At least not very easily.

So I called around and discovered what happened to all of them. It's the dog's fault.  The first pet store I called said "Yeah, we have cow leg bones. C'mon over and take a look!"

Frickin' dogs.

So after work, to the pet store we go. There, I find a display of procine and bovine bits sawn down to manageable sizes for all walks of dog. About half of them are bleached white and filled with some sort of meaty corn syrup goo (yes really) and I didn't want anything to do with those. The rest were apparently smoked with a bit of the meat still on them and I bought a selection to experiment with.

A lot of things in the Elizabethan world were made of bone and horn, so this is going to be a learning experience that will pay dividends later on.

I bought two sections of a sliced-up joint because the pinners apparently liked to slice planes off the bones to make a more stable work surface (one of the reasons they favored the lower leg bones, no doubt) and a hunk of a bovine metatarsus, just because I could.

They cost me about $6.00 and I didn't even need a dog to share them with.

Tomorrow evening I will go outside and see if I can clean them with a nice, gentle boil or if I'm going to have to try something more drastic. It's going to be cold, but the Engineer insists that bone boiling is not an inside task. Bother.

I'll let you know how it goes.

In the meanwhile, here are some resources on pinner's bones:

• A pinner's bone cataloged at the UK Finds Database: http://www.ukdfd.co.uk/ukdfddata/showrecords.php?product=24059
  
• Another pinner's bone at the Museum of London, probably turned up by a Thames mudlark and recorded at the Portable Antiquities Scheme: http://finds.org.uk/database/images/image/id/230498
  
• An article about bone objects - including pinner's bones - posted by the York Archeological Trust. http://www.dighungate.com/content.asp?id=176

- Scott

Make a Joint Stool with Peter Follansbee

If you've been around period woodworking for any length of time, the name Peter Follansbee will keep cropping up. He's an historical joiner that works with Plimoth Plantation and is the author of numerous articles on the history of woodworking, including the recent "Make a Joint Stool from a Tree: An Introduction to 17th Century Joinery" which is near the top of my Christmas list.

Recently, Peter dropped by the Old Woodwright's Shop and discussed the ins and outs of period joinery with Roy Underhill. The result was woodworking magic and valuable research for this project.  I plan to order his book soon and I follow Peter's blog: http://pfollansbee.wordpress.com/ which is well worth following if you've even a passing interest in either history or turning wood into furniture.

Not sure if I'll make a joint stool since that's obviously been "done" by just about everyone at this point, but there's loads to learn from this book and this video about period joinery.

PBS has several seasons of Woodwright's Shop available to watch online at PBS.org.

 

Watch Elizabethan Joint Stool with Peter Follansbee on PBS. See more from pbs.

Chateau de Guedelon: A medieval castle for the modern era

My friend Jon reminded me the other day of this effort to build a castle in France using artisans pursuing only the period techniques circa 1200 or so.  There was a BBC article updating the world on their progress recently (link below) and it's always something to learn from things like this.

The craftsmanship is amazing, the dedication astounding. It predates my project by hundreds of years, but nonetheless... wow.

Recent BBC coverage:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10440300

The Official Website (English edition):
http://www.guedelon.fr/en/

The article on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu%C3%A9delon_Castle

Some videos from YouTube:

Progress Report: Volunteers and A Growing Library

Research is a drug for me. Mostly because it means acquiring more books and shoehorning them into the groaning shelves of my home library.

Comments on Facebook have inspired me to move forward and post the bibliography of books I've been consulting here on the blog. To keep it from getting lost, it will be added as a "page" (the tabs across the top of the blog).

I will post links when I can to places like Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive where available.

At the moment, my reading is dominated by textiles, blacksmithing, and food.  A reading list that has raised the eyebrow of many a local librarian, let me tell you.

As we get closer to the start of the project, these posts will generally have a single topic, but for the moment, I'm all over the place trying to line things up before January.

In the spring edition of Piecework magazine's "Knitting Traditions" special, The Engineer found a lovely article on knitting and knitted goods of the 16th century, focusing on the 'Monmouth cap', mentioned by Shakespeare in Henry V, it is a knitted and fulled wool cap that was favored by laborers, soldiers, and sailors of the period. Pretty much anyone who needed to keep their ears warm.

I will be learning to knit as part of this and it's all I can do not to cheat and practice ahead of time so as not to make a total fool of myself come time to do it for the project. The Engineer has bravely stepped forward to teach me how to do this.

She is a brave, brave woman.

Looking at the photos in the article, I could wear a cap like this through any shopping mall in America and no one would bat an eyelash.  It's amazing how persistent a simple, elegant design can be.

Speaking of the simple things that haven't changed much, I tagged along when my friend and colleague Cory recently brewed a batch of beer in his kitchen. Other than the occasional brewery tour, I've never really watched the process of brewing up close.

The processes of brewing were pretty much established in medieval times and hasn't changed greatly. As I am finding in many cases, it's mostly a matter of refining the recipes for modern tastes (not to mention production on an industrial scale) but the technology we use in modern brewing is just a surrogate for the exact same processes the monks were using in the 12th century.

Oh, and I suppose we actually know what yeast is, so we have that going for us.

Cory also has a line on a Tacoma brewer that's doing small-batch brewing in barrels! So I'm one step closer on that front as well.  I'm sure we'll be seeing more of Cory in the course of this project. The man knows everybody!

Also, I have a firm commitment to demonstrate the art of the Merchant Tailor. Yes, I am a costumer, but I costume for myself, which is a different animal entirely from clothing another. Therefore, I have prevailed upon Seattle costumer Joel Reid to demonstrate the subtle arts of fitting period garments and discuss with us the foundations of Elizabethan dress. As soon as he has a website available, I shall link to it.

Mental Note: Even more than a list of links, I really need a cast of characters, don't I?

Also, I have several lines on gold/silver smiths, bowyers, blacksmiths, and armourers but cannot announce those folks until I have a hard commitment.  Anyone know where I can find a good 16th century barber surgeon?

Off to do more research before the weekend's honey-do list steals me away!

-Scott