Cooking in Østgarðr

The Crown Province of Østgarðr has a long and honorable tradition of cooking. This page is to serve as a showcase for cooking, feast preparation, recipe reconstruction, etc. carried out by Østgarðrians.

Cooking Workshops

Discussion

• There's an Østgarðr Cooks' email list; visit Østgarðr Cooks or email ostgardr-cooks-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.
• Likewise, there's an East Kingdom Cooks' Guild e-mail list.
• There's also an email list for SCA cooks around the world; visit SCA-COOKS to sign up. (The URL notwithstanding, the list is not specific to Ansteorra.)
• A similar group is the SCA Food and Feasts discussion group.
• Most recently, a Yahoo group named SCA-AuthenticCooks has been formed, with the goal of discussing not only historically authentic recipes but historically authentic practices and mindsets. In other words, not to be a modern cook who cooks authentic medieval dishes, but to be an authentic medieval cook.

Medieval Supper Club

As of winter, 2003, a number of people have expressed an interest in a Medieval Supper Club, in which each member hosts a medieval dinner for the other members at least once per year. Not an official SCA function, but should be a good opportunity to test recipes, practice preparing for a smaller gathering than the typical SCA event, and exchange some good conversation. Contact Lady Andrea if interested.

Østgarðr Feasts

I'd like to include menus and selected recipes from as many of Østgarðr's medieval feasts as possible. If you've cooked a period feast in Østgarðr in the past and have this information handy, please contribute it. If you're putting on such a feast in the future, please consider making the information available here.

• Twelfth Night, Jan. 1995, by Gideanus Adamantius Tacitus.
• East Kingdom Baronial Dinner at Pennsic, August 1996, by Andrea MacIntire.
• An Evening in Alsace, Jan. 17-18, 1997, by Andrea MacIntire.
• Valentine's Day, Feb. 15, 1997, by Rufina Cambrensis and John Elys.
• Agincourt, November [but I'm not sure what year; 1997 or earlier -- webmaster], by Andrea MacIntire
• Re-Opening Digbie's Closet, Mar. 27, 1998, by Alexandre Lerot d'Avigne.
• Crown Tourney, May 2, 1998, by Gideanus Adamantius Tacitus.
• Midsummer Frolic, June 20-21, 1998, by John Elys and Rufina Cambrensis.
• The Cheese Farmers' Harvest Festival, Celtic Silliness, March 18, 2000, by Andrea MacIntyre.
• A Platina Dinner at Østgarðr Commons, June 16, 2000, by Andrea MacIntyre.
  This page was selected as the Gode Cookery Site of the Month for August, 2000.
• Medieval Supper Club (in Lent), Mar. 23, 2003, by Brekke Franksdottir.
• Lunch at the Northpass Arms Tavern, 2003, by Andrea MacIntyre.
• Whyt Whey's Yule Event, Dec. 6, 2003, by Alexandre Lerot d'Avigne.
  • Planning for Yule
  • Focusing on Yule Menus
  • The Yule Menu
• Goodies prepared for guests at John Elys's Laurel vigil, 2003, by Andrea MacIntyre.
• Coronation of Kelson II and Geneviere II, by Dietrich von Schwelgengrüber, 2 April 2005
• Coney Hop, by Ibrahim al-Rashid, 17 Feb 2008

Articles and Other Documents by Østgarðrians

• The Old East Kingdom Cooks' Guild: documents about the (now-defunct) Kingdom-wide Cooks' Guild founded in 1974, by Brekke Franksdottir.
• Some Recipes of al-Andalus: an article on vegetarian Arabo-Andalusian dishes, by Stephen Bloch (John Elys, formerly Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib), from the Fall, 1990 Tournaments Illuminated.
• Camp Cooking Without a Cooler: an article by Deborah Peters (Rufina Cambrensis) from the July, 1996 Seahorse
• The Pilgrim's Picnic Basket: an article by Phil Troy (Gideanus Adamantius Tacitus) from the Spring, 1996 Tournaments Illuminated.
• More Cooler-Free Camp Cooking: an article by Deborah Peters (Rufina Cambrensis) from the July, 1997 Seahorse.
• On the Road with Cooler-Free Camp Cooking: an article by Deborah Peters (Rufina Cambrensis) from the July, 2002 Seahorse.
• A statement of philosophy from Phil Troy (Master Gideanus Adamantius Tacitus).
• On Preserving Food with Honey, by John Elys and Rufina Cambrensis.
• Mushroom Pasties after the Menagier de Paris, by Alexandre Lerot d'Avigne.
• Bored? Cooking for the Next Generation!
  Class notes for one of Lady Andrea MacIntyre's cooking classes for kids
• The Vassal with the Vessel, an article by Lady Andrea MacIntyre on the Great Cooking-Pot Experiment.

Just for Fun...

• An exercise in culinary reconstruction, by Rufina Cambrensis and John Elys.
• A recipe that needs help, by Richard the Poor of Ely.

Other Cooking Pages We Like (not necessarily by Østgarðrians)

• Prof. Thomas Gloning's enormous collection of pre-1800 cookbooks, full text on the Web.
• The Middle Kingdom Cooks' Collegium, which includes a bunch of interesting articles and recipes.
• Terry Nutter's Culinary History Page
• Robin Carroll-Mann's Brighid's Kitchen, a collection of translated and/or redacted recipes, largely from 16th-century Iberian sources
• Someone's Bibliography of Historical Cooking (I can't find the person's name, although Phil thinks it's by Judy Gerjuoy, aka Mistress Jaelle of Armida)
• Greg Lindahl's SCA Food Page, which includes among other things many sections of Cariadoc-and-Elizabeth's Miscellany
• Serve It Forth!, a quarterly hardcopy newsletter on pre-17th-century cooking.
• A Food Timeline developed by Morris County Library, New Jersey, USA
• Regia Anglorum's Beehive Oven Page
• Personal page of Jules Hojnowski (ska Catalina Alvarez).
• Alia Atlas's Workroom
• The SCA-COOKS mailing list (To subscribe, send mail to majordomo@ansteorra.org with body "subscribe sca-cooks". Despite the email address, it is not an Ansteorra-only list!)
• World Spices, a mail-order spice merchant recommended on the SCA-COOKS mailing list (no, we haven't ordered from him yet ourselves).
• Food Heritage Press's Books on Medieval Cookery (When last I checked the list, it included no "clinkers" and a number of "must-haves", which, fortunately, I already have.)
• Stefan li Rous's Florilegium, a collection of lots of articles from the Rialto (the Usenet newsgroup rec.org.sca) and various SCA-related email lists, sorted by subject. Many, but not all, are relevant to food. The quality of scholarship varies, and you will frequently find three messages in the same file flatly contradicting one another, so you have to assess the information yourself... sorta like Real Life....
• The Olde Cooking Page. An extensive and well-organized collection of recipes and bibliographic information on historic cooking. It covers a broad time period, from classical Rome to the 19th century, including ample information on the SCA's period. Since the page maintainer is Swedish, there's more Scandinavian stuff than you might find elsewhere.
• J.L. Matterer's Boke of Gode Cokery, a collection of medieval recipes, modern interpretations of same, photographs of same, historical commentary on same, etc.
• Another article on camp cooking without a cooler, this one by D. Arthur Glenn.
• Have you ever wondered about the instruction in medieval recipes to "draw it through a strainer"? Cindy Renfrow (author of Take a Thousand Eggs or More) has collected some 16th-century pictures of strainers (now hosted at ostgardr.org).
• Jeff Berry's Hitchhiker's Guide to Ancient Cookery, formerly known as the Caer Galen Cook's Corner.
• Cheap Cooking, a site discussing ways to save money on ingredients, appliances, etc. Could be useful if you're trying to cook Coronation on $5/person.

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We can't endorse all the pages on the Medieval and Renaissance Cooking Webring, since pages are added to it all the time, but the maintainer of the Web ring has set a list of standards that look reasonable to us.

Copyright statement

Worked-out versions of medieval recipes are the intellectual property of their creators. If you wish to reprint any of these recipes, please include the creator's name and send a courtesy copy of your publication to the creator. If you reprint the medieval originals, please include all the relevant bibliographic information; the recipes are in the public domain, but many of the translations and editions are not.

This page last modified at 09:07:47 AM EDT on Wed, Apr 9, 2008.

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