Recipes from Medieval Europe | Make Your Own Viking Beer

today we are going to examine what is probably the oldest cookbook in medieval europe or very nearly so it exists in four different manuscripts two are in low german one in danish and one in icelandic they can be dated somewhere around 1300 or maybe even a little earlier it's called the le bellas de arte coconaria and as you can probably tell the title and the recipe titles themselves are in latin now what this suggests is that it's a translation of an older work that no longer exists and was written out for a variety of patrons who wanted to serve elegant meals with imported ingredients and by imported i mean in particular spices that came from india and what's now indonesia things like cloves and cinnamon and nutmeg and pepper and these traveled across the entire new world to get to iceland which had just been settled by vikings a few centuries before now clearly they kept up trade contacts with mainland europe now in many respects these recipes resemble those of later better known medieval cookbooks like the form of curry in england and even the libre de senso v in catalonia that's because medieval aristocratic cuisine was very international there was a small landed military elite who mostly wanted to imitate each other they were rarely educated so i can imagine these were the kind of texts that might have been copied out by a clergyman or a learned secretary and brought to these far-flung courts with explanations on how to use these exotic ingredients and at the end of one of the manuscripts the translator or maybe even the copyists wrote in latin this little book on culinary art is finished thanks be to god let the copyist go play amen and you can you can almost picture this person sort of dictating in his monks cowl you know and the recipes themselves are terse um they have no literary pretensions and so we will have almost completely free hand with the measurements and the cooking times exactly as a medieval cook would who probably you know heard these read out loud and had to then figure out how to prepare them and his master may very well have been among those who maybe went to the holy land fought in the crusades and made it home now and wanted some reminder of his adventure and what better way than a thick spicy sauce to go in his haunch of flesh and there are also internal clues that suggest that this is meant for a noble audience interestingly the recipes are all for meat fowl and fish and then sauces to go with them there's no fruit or vegetables and people sometimes assume oh that must mean because medieval people didn't eat them and it's true actually physicians warned people about the cold phlegmatic humors that could arise from fruits especially but i think their relative scarcity in cookbooks is more that these were not really items of prestige or luxury especially if you could grow them at home but almonds on the other hand those are imported from the south and they feature here especially almond milk which was used during lent and fasting days as a milk substitute that's not a modern invention surprisingly enough so i'd like to point out that the language of some of these manuscripts is very close to old english and a speaker of modern english can almost make out what they mean for example and stacker them well one should take bream and pike or other fish and roast them well now what exactly the author means by roast should not be confused with baking though there are recipes for pies they also have oven technology and baked bread but i think by the roast what he what we would think of as grilling on the other hand as you'll see the sauce is made from the drippings so i think this this should be in a pan over a fire what's called hunter style fish and obviously you don't hunt for fish so i think this means the sort of dish that could be prepared easily and quickly outdoors while on the hunt of course which is exactly what a nobleman did when not fighting wars so the recipe also says to baste with the oil mentioned earlier and what um that's the base for the sauce the only oils that are mentioned before are walnut oil or almond oil both are actually made from scratch by pounding the nuts and wringing out the the oil through a cloth and again the logic is that these would be appropriate for lent so we're going to base the fish while it's roasting with the oil and when that's done we'll we're told to take of the oil and blend it with vinegar and wring it through a cloth in other words we're straining out any solid bits and as for the type of vinegar it seems unlikely that this would be a vine based you know wine vinegar since that would have to be imported this far north so it doesn't seem likely that they would import olive oil since they're making nut oil so my guess is that it's made from something either beer or apple cider or maybe even mead combined with the nut oil these make a really interesting dressing but not an expensive one and this is a recipe you can easily do away from home now the question is why would they be using imported spices but not oil and vinegar and i think it must be that though the weight and the long distance wouldn't really make these profitable um though we know they certainly imported wine and in fact even in beowulf they drank ale mead and on a few occasions wine and interestingly everything goes wrong when they drink wine which is a you know a foreign kind of drink but let's compare that one to a recipe for mustard and we're told to grind the mustard seeds and add a third part of honey and a tenth part of anise and twice as much of cinnamon and regarding the provenance here the mustard and the anise they actually can be grown in europe and obviously the honey too but it's the cinnamon that comes from what is now sri lanka that makes this a noble dish the herbs are ground mixed with the vinegar put in a cask and it will last three months and many of the recipes seem concerned about how long you can keep a dish or a sauce around and i'm not really sure why you would need to make this in advance though it's a really interesting mustard and maybe you know might even improve with age but but the sauce for lord includes these things cloves nutmeg cardamom pepper cinnamon ginger toasted bread vinegar uh and this one lasts for half a year [Music] so now we're going to cook from the labelis and it will seem strange primarily because it's a pie but it has bones in it now keep in mind uh we're meant to be uh they were meant to be a form of preservative the pie itself i mean the sealed dough keeps out the oxygen and these are medieval recipes um sometimes they have a deer inside i've seen some with oyster shells and everything so these can be used to make pasties of fish or foul or actually anything but this one specifies a young chicken and we could cut it in two we could keep it whole whichever way i'll i'll leave that to you but i think you could easily use a little game hen that's what we found for this and uh it'd be very pleasant serving for one person just a tiny little pie with a game hand inside so what we're going to do is we're going to take this little chicken and we're going to cover it with the um the leaves and i just have some fresh sage here um and of course you would want to salt it right now it doesn't specify that but salt in and out and maybe even put some sage leaves inside the cavity like that and then i'm gonna wrap take this take off the stems put some sage in like that just leave these whole and then i'm going to wrap this in bacon okay and they don't i don't know what exactly kind of bacon they had but this will do fine i'm gonna bring that over here i think three maybe let's give it one more why not be generous okay put that aside okay so for this recipe i'm going to use rye i think it's appropriate for the region northern europe and scandinavia and iceland of course but also because rye was used in these early pies because it doesn't break when you bake it and the pie this is going to be really strange doesn't include fat and that's led most scholars to conclude that the crust wasn't actually eaten that it's just kind of a a coffin a coffer to hold all the contents and act as a preservative so it's really kind of odd through the course we're going to actually follow different types of pies and see how they're made um eventually they will have a fat in them eventually butter will go in so we'll see that that evolution happened very slowly and interestingly but to start with it's not a um it's not an edible crust probably although you know once you put it in here and it's got the bacon and everything i think it probably will taste very good and my sort of you know experience with all this seems to say well if someone's gonna go to the expense of growing um a grain are you really gonna throw it away and throw away the crust you're gonna make it you know as edible as you possibly can so so let's just make this crust for this and i'm going to wrap it in this and there's really not much more to it but let me show you how to make a fairly simple medieval pie early medieval pie i should say by the time we get to the it's really not until the 15th century that you find butter in the crust and something that looks like a crust that we would eat um and then sometimes lard and sometimes suet or other type of fat but this doesn't have it in there at all so okay i'm not sure this is going to be big enough i mean you do want this fairly thick so it's not going to fall apart but let's see all this cover our little bird okay i think this will work okay [Music] and we're just going to need a little top for this right on top and actually i have one little part here that came out let me just fix that we want this nicely sealed up so this would normally be baked right on the floor of a brick oven um but you could use a baking stone that's what i've got in there to get the same effect um or put a piece of parchment down i put this into a baking pan just because i think it's going to probably leak some grease from all that bacon and i don't want it to go into the up floor of the oven but the um but the the dough of course is gonna take the shape of the chicken and the beauty of this dish is that normally if you were to bake a chicken all the juices would just run out you'd have you'd have to make a sauce from those like right a modern baked chicken if you throw it in the oven but here we'll let this cool down to room temperature after baking and the juices should remain um within and be absorbed by the dough and i think it might actually be edible we'll see what happens but for the moment i'm going to put in the oven and i'm going to give this at least an hour to bake and i think because we want the bacon to cook through and the whole chicken and everything together so into the oven it goes [Music] to go with these recipes i'd like to walk you through a fascinating archaic technique i know a lot of people do really serious home brewing nowadays and most people either buy the malted barley or they might buy a pre-made liquid wart and very reliable yeasts and hops and use all sorts of fancy equipment and airlocks and things like that to make make the beer taste good right and that's exactly what we'll not do in this episode i've done this a few times and actually the first time i did it with a kit from the chemist boots in england when i was only 13 years old that was my first batch of beer and the kids are fine but rarely as good as what the pros can do so i think you know the same thing is true with wine and it's you know wine is actually much easier to make i do that with grapes every fall it's just a few bottles are pressed by hand but i think um you know beer is a lot more complicated um and what i want to capture here is is something that readers of the labelis would have had in the 13th century in northern germany or denmark or even in iceland and to start the one big difference is that they would have used wild yeast and we're going to do that too they didn't use hops at this point either more common was a mixture of herbs called kraut and it's actually the same word as kraut which means just vegetables it would usually contain mugwort that's artemisia vulgaris which is a bitter and acts as a preservative maybe also they'd had yarrow or henbane which is hallucinogenic and a whole series of other herbs which were actually kept a secret because someone was granted the exclusive right to sell this kraut for to the beer makers but we'll just stare with stick with mug wharton as you can tell from the name in english it's for the mug it's for ale right a few other things to keep in mind through most of the middle ages beer was made in the home on a very small scale and almost always by women in england this would be called the alewife who might run a small operation out of her kitchen um or maybe even a small tavern-like operation uh gradually commercial operations increased in scale and once they started using hops they could actually ship beer much further it was done say in the hanseatic league cities in germany up through the baltic sea and then finally the dutch also get very good at large-scale professional brewing another thing to keep in mind is this was not the light lager that we're familiar with which is you know bottom fermented and a cold cellar this is actually top fermented meaning the yeast will be floating on top so we would call this ale to start with we also need to malt the barley and for this you need whole grains not pearled barley but what looks like this is just barley okay and to make the malt what we're gonna do is just soak these in water overnight i'm just gonna fill this whole thing this is about two and a half pounds of barley um so obviously i'm making it on a very very small scale this is gonna make i don't know how much it may be a couple of gallons um we're just gonna soak this and then in the next morning you will drain this off and then keep changing the water ever for about two or three days um i also gave you some wheat here just so you can see the difference wheat is looks very very different from barley it's a much smaller and you can use wheat to make beer but the barley actually changes the enzyme when it's sprouted will actually help to convert the starches in the grain into sugar so you want to keep them not too wet and then the sprout end you can see if you look at these very closely they have little rootlets that are sticking out of them and they also have a sprout okay that's in there so this has just been three days sitting um you can see they're still just a little moist um i just kept them in the house you don't have to put this outside or anything and there's one has just escaped but you can see so when the when the root end is about the same size as the grain itself you can see that right there then that's ready to make into malt and you can also actually add oats sometimes rye is added to it or wheat and that's going to give it a different flavor darker color so in northern europe this would have been done over a very low flame with smoke and that would of course flavor the beer exactly as it does in whiskey um and of course you know whiskey is just basically distilled beer so what i suggest you should do is put it in the oven at about 200 degrees and leave it overnight and it will completely dry out but you don't want to actually cook the grains through or else you prevent the next stage from working properly so they should just get lightly lightly toasted and the level that you will make that malt will um will of course determine the color of the beer and so let's let's uh just try to malt this right now i'm going to put this on a very low heat and all i really want to do is toast these i think maybe i can fit this whole thing in there we just want to stir this around until it gets nice and toasty and then we're gonna grind it up okay i think that's just as much as that's gonna handle so to make sure i'm not burning them you know what i think i'm going to get a second pan going and if you can smell this it's already getting this lovely toasty aroma how interesting the person who does this would be called a maltster and they would their job would be to rake you know a ton of malt a ton of grain at a time and the advantage of this is that once it's actually parched like this you can make um beer any time of year so it's very different from wine wine you'd need to make when the harvest is ready everyone has to you know you have to press all the wine and put it in bottles or casks to start with this is very different you can actually keep the malted barley around which is i think why you know most um home brewers buy malted barley or they buy what's called the wart which we'll um we'll get to in just a few minutes but let's watch this process carefully some of them are actually already getting a little toasty maybe there okay i'm gonna take these off now [Music] i'm going to set up this hand mill right here this basically replicates a hand kern which would have been used from prehistoric times really to grind wheat even before wheat was cultivated people would use a rotary current or a hand current like this without the plastic handle obviously you have a another bigger stone that sits on top of a sort of dome and then you turn it you know with a stick or with a little uh knob but this is pretty much the exact same technology it just has to be bolted down very well okay so here is our malted barley and i'm just gonna feed it into the hopper of this millstone and as you can see what's coming out here is very coarsely ground barley malt i'm just going to poke it through the hopper to help it along they probably i mean you could do this on a big mortar and pestle as well if you didn't have a grindstone like this and i imagine you know once you have animal power you can make a much bigger millstone you can hook up oxen to it or a horse if you have it and then the whole process goes much much quicker but this is i'm gonna just tighten that a little bit obviously with a hand mill this is gonna take a long time [Music] so as you can see this takes a really long time i wonder how many calories you expend in doing this just to get the beer in the end but but you know consider the beer as a food uh you know this is something that men women and children would have eaten and um gotten their calories from and been nourished by so what we're going to do at this point with this remaining grain is we're going to put it into the um into this water this water i boiled i actually didn't boil it i brought it up to about 140 degrees and that means so hot that you can't really put your finger in for more than a couple of seconds you can see i can keep it in there for just about a second or so but what's going to happen is i'm going to put this in here and let this sit for just an hour let me mark the time but this basically sits for an hour and then this is strained through a cloth and then you pour more water at 140 degrees over the grain this is called sparging which will extract more sugars from the grains themselves now at this stage what you have is called wart w-o-r-t bring this up to the boil with a little bit of the mugwort which we have here and whatever other herbs you'd like to use let them boil together for an hour and then strain that to remove all the green stuff and the final liquid you'll cool to room temperature and pour in a vessel big enough to hold it we'll use this stainless steel here a wooden barrel would be ideal actually and today you would add at this point some commercial yeast for the specific kind of beer that you want in the past they used yeast from a former batch or they used ambient yeast to just colonize the liquid like you would do in a sourdough starter and actually if you have a sourdough starter you can use one i have one in the corner there i'm probably going to use that and then you know the next stage will depend entirely on the temperature in the room how active the microbes are in your house but eventually you'll notice these little bubbles rising and iberia roma and then at that point you could actually bottle it but it was not done in the past not until like 15 16th century until they had reliable bottles it would usually go in a barrel and they drank it room temperature and flat so so it's a it's a surprising taste for americans i mean we like cold fizzy beer um but um you know it's actually still very good it's very appealing if you think of it more as food than as a drink refreshing drink you'll also notice that the beer will come out very cloudy because we're not going to filter it as they didn't in the middle ages so the yeast and other particles will still be in there basically so think of it as a kind of nutritious probiotic ferment of grain and this was the typical drink for breakfast actually before you go out into the field to work men women and children all drank beer it was much safer than drinking the water usually and there's um you know some argument among historians whether this was a really low alcohol small beer as it was called you know you might have four or five percent of alcohol in this beer depending on how concentrated the wart is um and that's nowhere near like the strong hoppy ipas you can buy nowadays that go up to 10 but it's still enough to make you a little tipsy and i think we ought to remember also the social context remember no one is driving to work or answering the phone so a little buzz while you're planting seeds or harvesting that's you know entirely socially acceptable even if it's not such a good idea to you know be swinging a sickle while you're while you're a little drunk but but there are of course ritual occasions in the past when you could drink um much more than that the the church um you know also had uh uh church ales or carnivals or feasts of saints days they all involved drinking and if you were a nobleman you might drink beer during the day and then switch to a much more expensive imported wine later with dinner so the distinctions in the patterns of consumption only increase the more trade expands in the later middle ages the more luxury goods are brought in then you might have you know a malwazia from greece or something from the canary islands but um for most people the average everyday drink from the middle ages especially in northern europe would just have been beer so give it a shot on your own and see how it turns out as nicely as ours will you

Channel: The Great Courses

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Keywords: free online courses, online learning, online education, wondrium, free wondrium episodes, history documentaries, math instruction, science documentaries

Id: I-_CzzU22NI

Length: 27min 17sec (1637 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 29 2022