A-Z of unusual ingredients: verjus – Telegraph

This week, V is for verjus: a sour medieval staple that is suddenly having a revival.

It’s commonplace for recipes to come and go in the cycle of food fashions. But for a stock ingredient to disappear from recipe books, only to be resurrected centuries later, is almost unprecedented.

This is what has happened to verjus. The acidic juice made from pressing unripe grapes or crab apples was something of a storecupboard staple in medieval kitchens. …
See on www.telegraph.co.uk

Cranberry kuchen (cake) recept

Traditional recipes for kuchen exhibit a splendid disregard for calories and cholesterol. A single cake might contain eight or ten egg yolks and a pound of butter. A memorable recipe in a wonderful old cookery book of my mother called for sixteen egg yolks—a recipe for a heart attack, but surely a good way to go. This recipe is substantially more heart-healthy.
See on susaneatslondon.com

Zeppolle and Zabaglione, circa 1570 (from Bartolomeo Scappi)

I discovered the cookbook of Bartolomeo Scappi this summer at a medieval food lab (yep, I’m a dork), and was so diverted by the wonderful recipes in the book that I quickly added a few of them to my queue. … Although Scappi provides much more detail about his methods of cooking, as well as proportions for ingredients, these recipes fought back a little. It took a few tries, and even now, I’ll probably take another crack at them to try and perfect the recipes. For those unfamiliar with these dishes, they are traditional Italian desserts. Zeppole are like little fried doughnut holes, and Zabaglione is like a thick alcoholic pudding.
See on www.innatthecrossroads.com

The recipe for Hippocras, ‘wine of the gods’

See on Scoop.itHistorical gastronomy

During the seventeenth century a meal was often concluded by drinking spiced wine to stimulate the digestion.Hippocras was such a drink, which was already known during the Middle Ages. But there were other kinds of spiced wine as well. Vin des dieux (‘wine of the gods’) is such a spiced wine, and even today the recipe can be found on the (French) internet.
See on www.coquinaria.nl