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Medieval Cuisine - Yahoo Recipe Search
Food.comThe British have always been fond of highly spiced food, a taste which can be traced back in our cooking to medieval times and which can be seen today in our pungent commercially prepared sauces and mustards. This tasty curried broth belongs to the early nineteenth century and is part of the heritage of the British Raj. British people who spent years in India grew to love the local spicy food and brought back their favourite recipes which were adapted in the Victorian kitchen. "Pepper Water" was the nearest thing to soup in the cuisine of India, and indeed the word mulligatawny comes from the Tamil words molegoo (pepper) and tunes (water). It was originally a vegetarian 'sauce', but the British added meat and various other ingredients to create a variety of mulligatawnies, which were popular in India and Ceylon, but had an extremely bad press back home in England! A basic peppered water was flavoured with various other ingredients, then the soup would be served with side bowls of cooked rice, lime wedges, grated coconut, snippets of fried bacon, quartered hard-boiled eggs and sliced chillies. You helped yourself to what you wanted - a meal in itself. I serve mine with Raita and Chutney, and sometimes hard-boiled eggs, you can add whatever you like to the basic soup posted below. This recipe was taken from The Memsahib's Cookbook and has been adapted to personal taste.Food.comI have lots of wonderful wild purslane growing in my garden, and apart from adding it to salads, it is extremely useful in keeping the weeds down! Although purslane is rarely seen on our own tables today, this pretty herb has a long and interesting history. English medieval cooks and gardeners loved purslane; in fact, it is often known as the “Elizabethan Salad Herb” in the UK, as it was extremely popular as a form of greenery during that era. I absolutely love it in salads and remember eating it in Cyprus when I lived there – my Turkish Cypriot friends picked it from wasteland where the local Turkish word is Semizotu. It is thought that the genus name, Portulaca, is from the Latin porto and laca meaning ‘milk carrier’ in reference to its milky sap. The species name oleracea is Latin and means ‘potherb’. Native to Persia and India, it was introduced into Europe by Arabs in the 15th century as a salad herb. Purslane makes an excellent edible ground cover and in many countries, it is cultivated as a vegetable, though many unknowingly consider it a weed. It was once believed to offer protection from evil spirits. Purslane is very nutritious and is rich in Vitamin C and alpha linolenic acid (one of the Omega-3 fatty acids).which the body converts into the essential fatty acids known as EPA: almost 3 percent of purslane by weight consists of alpha-, beta-, and gamma-carotene and lutein. Not only is it easy to grow purslane in your home garden, it is hard to keep it from overrunning other plants. When the plants are young, they make a tart but succulent addition to salads with just a little washing and dicing. After the plants are mature, they are best parboiled in salted water for 1-2 minutes before adding them to salads. In New Mexican cuisine, purslane is known as verdolagas, and is commonly fried with onions, added to pinto beans, or used as a herb in potato salads.
