Way later than I'd intended

[norsegirl]

As usual, it's the night before an event and I'm up doing prep work WAY later than intended. Tonight it was getting everything ready for my "hospitality" tomorrow and experimenting with yet another medieval recipe.

This time I tried gingerbread. It's odd stuff.

Three recipes are posted below, and I kinda worked off these:
http://www.godecookery.com/ginger/ginger.htm
http://www.godecookery.com/chaucer/chfeas14.htm
http://www.godecookery.com/friends/frec134.html

My recipe had:
1 cup and a generous squeeze of honey
1 heaping-ish teaspoon each of dried ginger and cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper (I don't have any white or I'd have gone with that)
pinch of saffron
10 oz plain breadcrumbs (because that's how much I had in the container I bought)

It tastes a bit like baclava because of the honey, but not as good because it lacks the puff pastry and the nuts. The texture is kind of hard to describe but I know I've had it before... it's a bit like one of my corn muffins but less fluffy and more moist. Dense, gritty/grainy (which gives it a bit of chewiness, not like bubble gum, taffy or jujube chewy, more like dried apricot chewy, takes some effort to get through it, but doesn't bounce back or stick to your teeth) and moist and soft all at once.

I think next time I'd try white pepper, more ginger and cinnamon and maybe less breadcrumbs just to see what that would be like if it was gooier. For setting out on a table in the Texas heat all day I figured the more solid I could make it and the less melty, the better.

I found it interesting that not one of the recipes specified whether to use dried or fresh ginger. I might try it again with fresh just to see what kind of difference that makes and whether it even works.

Anyway, off to get some sleep so I can function tomorrow at least a bit.

Comments

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

Ginger can't be grown in Europe (except in greenhouses). It requires a 9-10 month growing season that is completely frost-free. Even the Romans imported it from India. It became known (and quickly very desireable) in trans-Alpine Europe after the 10th century, were it was frequently a table spice alongside pepper which suggests to me that was only know it's dried & powdered form.

Perhaps none of the recipes specify dried or fresh ginger because they are only familiar with the powdered form. They would have never seen or used the fresh form.

Today ginger is grown in about dozen sub-tropical countries, including Jamaica (which is where most of the fresh ginger I buy comes from, I think). Some ginger is grown in Ontario, but in pots which are brought indoors in the winter, and it is mostly a novelty.

[eve-the-just.livejournal.com]

Ah, but I'm not looking at a period recipe, I'm looking at a modern redaction (hence the measurements). It seems to me that the authors of those redactions should specify what kind of ginger since the modern cook has access to both and might not have the knowledge that fresh was not available.

[eve-the-just.livejournal.com]

Oh, and thanks for the info. I guess I'll skip that experiment.

[utsi.livejournal.com]

i find that i boil the honey longer in an effort to reach a more 'candy stage'. honey doens't quite behave the same way as sugar though. i used to have a bowl of this around the tt. tavern for ages because it would make so much. i'd press it into a pan in a thin layer , or roll it out and cut into lozenges. then i would toss the pieces in a bowl of sugar. lot easier to eat and store/deal with.

[eve-the-just.livejournal.com]

Tossing it in sugar would have been brilliant. Some pieces stuck to the waxed paper, and I had to stack them very carefully, but your way would have been much easier.

I've been meaning to ask you for your steak and mushroom pie recipe for years now if you wouldn't mind sharing. Your lunch counter was one of the biggest reasons I looked forward to FITP. When my pre-lunch class ended I'd run to the lunch room to try to get as close as I could to the front of the line :) And it was those pies I was running for. If they ran out before I got there I would have been sorely disappointed.

[not-justagirl.livejournal.com]

I've done the same thing and tossed it in the sugar... and I just kept adding breadcrumbs until they stopped sucking the honey up. Made for a less gloopy gingerbread.

[eve-the-just.livejournal.com]

Mine wasn't gloopy at all, just really sticky. Also, the ants LOVED it. They made their way all the way up the table and only attacked that particular dessert of all the desserts on the tray.