Middle age sausage recipe wanted along with good ideas..

[vagreys]

I'm glad you confirmed that oriental spices certainly were available (for the rich) in the middle ages. When I read André suggesting that (for example) pepper wasn't available, my eyebrows lifted quite high! I've seen transcriptions of recipes from the middle ages that used a surprising amount of spices, far more than we'd use today for example.

André's portrayal of the availability of spices is reasonable for the commoner of the early Middle Ages, who was much more likely to use salt, locally available herbs and seeds, onion, garlic, wild celery and lovage, etc., on an everyday basis. We forget, sometimes, how diverse the availability of locally-grown herbs and spices was, as a result of Roman occupation, and monastery gardens. Many temperate herbs and seed plants were imported (and in some cases naturalized) with the Romans and monastic outposts, and became common over hundreds of years.

The Forme of Cury is a royal cookbook, and almost all cookery manuscripts were the product of a wealthy household choosing to spend a fair amount of money on the writing of a manuscript to preserve their favorite or most elaborate kitchen creations. We don't find the everyday dishes in these mss. One wouldn't waste the parchment or scribe's time writing down the recipe for that age's equivalent of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. While theories abound about the use of spices, at one level it is clear that, at least in some cases, the liberal application of spices was intended as conspicuous consumption and ostentation.

Bringing us back to the topic, this was also true of feast day forcemeats and sausages, which were often redolent of spices and aromatics - a delight for the nose as well as the palate.

[grisell]

When the Royal Ship Kronan, sunk in 1676 in the Baltic Sea and found in 1980, was excavated, one of the finds was a seaman's chest. In a small box in the chest lay two heads of garlic, one piece of ginger and three peppercorns. That gives a perspective of how valuable spices were in those times. Also, I read somewhere that noblemen sometimes carried a small silver cylinder containing a nutmeg. The lid of the cylinder was a grater.

[vagreys]

...Also, I read somewhere that noblemen sometimes carried a small silver cylinder containing a nutmeg. The lid of the cylinder was a grater.

There was a cottage industry in Venice, where women would carve oak galls to resemble whole nutmegs. Shipments of nutmegs to England were sometimes adulterated with these oak galls, replacing as much as half of the nutmegs ordered with oak galls. There were probably some unlucky English noblemen going around grating oak sawdust into their food!

[NCPaul]

That kind of thing could never happen today (even with EVOO). Tell us more teacher. Why do you think German sausages ended up so much different than Italian ones for instance? Was there a lot of cross influences at this time? I love sausages and their history as well (and I don't mean when I ate them).