A Recipe That Needs Help

by Master Richard the Poor of Ely, OP

It is no secret that there are no finer cooks in the East Kingdom than
those in Ostgardr.  I would like to draw on their expertise in
redacting a recipe that I found.  It was scribbled on the back of a
page of music that was presumably torn from a period choir book.  You
know them; they seem to turn up everywhere.  It was not possible to get
any information on the origin of the recipe.  The language and style
indicate fifteenth century England.  My best transcription is as
follows:

To make a Floffer-Notter: Of bread tak a payre of slices and cover one
well with paste of pea-nottes ygrounded.  Do therto Marsh Mallow Fluff,
and serve him forthe.

The first part is easy: take two slices of bread.  I note in passing
that in his Morale Scholarium, John of Garland tells the student,
"Always serve two pieces of bread."

The "paste of pea-nottes ygrounded" presents our first difficulty.
What the heck is a pea-notte?  On the face of it, they presumably refer
to dried peas.  But the emphasis on the "Notter" in the name of the
dish suggests that nuts of some type were included.  I would guess that
some oil-bearing nuts were added to the dried peas to help make a paste
rather than a powder when they were ground, so they could cover a slice
well.

The marsh mallow (Althea officinalis) has long been used both in the
kitchen and the pharmacy.  What a "Fluff" of marsh mallow is isn't
obvious.  The word means anything light, airy, or lacking substance.
My primary herb reference  (Dr. Stuart's Encyclopedia of Herbs and
Herbalism by Malcolm Stuart) says that the major constituent of marsh
mallow is mucilage, so my intuition tells me that a Marsh Mallow Fluff
would be some typve of froth (like a syllabub, perhaps) based on an
extract of the herb.

The preparation of this Fluff is a complete mystery; its solution will
no doubt also reveal how you "do therto" the Fluff, and what happens
with the other slice of bread.

Anyone out there want to try and tackle this?


from the April 1997 Seahorse (move to cooking page?)