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Almond and Cardamon Cirlettes
This particular recipe came from Cosman’s Fabulous Feasts, where she did not give its source. She listed this as a cake, although it is more of a modern day cookie than cake. The recipe given was as follows:
Ingredients:
1 Cup, butter
2/3 Cup, brown sugar
1 beaten egg
2 1/2 Cups, flour
1/2 Teaspoon, powdered lemon peel
3/4 Teaspoon, powered cardamon
1/2 Cup, ground almonds
1 Cup, currants
Procedure:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cream butter. Blend in sugar, beating with a spoon until frothy. Whip in beaten egg. Stir peel, cardamon, sugar, almonds, and currents into the flour. Beat the dry mixture into the sweeten butter. Chill dough for at least one hour. Using well-floured fingers, shape the dough into small balls (one inch in diameter) placing them one inch apart on greased cookie sheets. Bake seven to ten minutes until light golden. Cool on racks.
I have since learned that Cosman’s book is not very accurate and she does not list reference. However, this recipe does not appear to be terrible difficult to make nor out of period. The first step was to find some documentation for the ingredients. I was surprised that it shared a chapter with turmeric in History of Food.
Although is has a rhizome like ginger and turmeric, cardamon (also known as amomum, particularly in the middle ages), the third essential ingredient in curry powder, is grown only for the seeds inside its fruit capsules ... and Dioscorides classes it among medicaments in the Materia Medica of AD 65.[1]
There are plenty of references to the use of cardamon in ancient Greece and Rome, not only as a spice, but as an offering to the gods. But was it used in the middle ages? Yes. When France’s King Jean le Bon was captured and held for ransom in England, the record of his household expenses showed that a list of the spices purchased for his prison diet included: Cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, sugar and cardamon, just to name a few. [2] Toussaunt-Samat also wrote that the King’s widow, Jeanne d’Evreux, ate no cardamon if we go by an inventory of her household taken in 1372. Toussaunt-Samat goes on to say that the French were, "Never so fond of cardamon as the English."[3]
Were such spices used in cakes? Yes. From The English Hus-wife, published in 1615:
To make Fine Cakes. Take fine flowre and good Damaske water you must have no other liqeur but that, then take sweet butter, two or three yolkes of eggs and a good quantity of Suger, and a few cloves, and cardmund and mace, as your Cookes mouth shall serve him, and a lyttle saffron, and a little Gods good about a spoonful if you put in too much they shall arise, cutte them in squares lyke unto trenchers, and pricke them well, and let your oven be well swept and lay them uppon papers and so set them into the oven. Do not burne them if they be three or foure days olde they bee the better. [4]
The use of butter, sugar, and eggs to make pastries date back to the Romans. The late middle ages saw a craze for almond cakes such as the pignoulat In the sixteenth century, many French convents started making cakes and macaroons to be sold to raise money for the poor. There was even a law enacted in France in 1718 that ruled that only a pastry cook could use butter, sugar and eggs in making cakes for sale. [5]
Kenelme Digby, himself, offered several recipes for "small cakes:"
EXCELLENT SMALL CAKES
Take three pounds of very fine flower well dryed by the fire, and put to it a pound and half of loaf Sugar sifted in a very fine sieve and dryed; Three pounds of Currants well washed and dryed in a cloth and set by the fire; When your flower is well mixed with the Sugar and Currants, you must put in it a pound and half of unmelted butter, ten spoonfuls of Cream, with the yolks of three new-laid Eggs beat with it. One Nutmeg; and if you please, three spoonfuls of honey. When you have wrought your paste well, you must put it in a cloth, and set it in a dish before the fire, till it be through warm. Then make them up in little Cakes, and prike them full of holes; you must bake them in a quick oven unclosed until golden blonde. Afterwards Ice them over with Sugar. The Cakes should be about the bigness of a hand-breadth and thin: of the cise of the Sugar Cakes sold at Barnet. [6]
Knowing that this recipe did have a basis in history, I tried it; although I did not stick to Cosman’s recipe:
Ingredients:
1 Cup, butter
2/3 Cup, un-refined, organic turbinado sugar
1/4 Cup, Clover honey
1 beaten egg
2 1/2 Cups, King Arthur band Artisan, Organic all-purpose flour (flour from hard red what, unbleached)
2 Teaspoon, fresh lemon zest, minced
2 Tablespoons, fresh squeezed lemon juice.
3/4 Teaspoon, crushed cardamon seeds
1/2 Cup, chopped and sliced almonds
Procedure and explanation:
I do not care for currents, so I omitted them. I used minced lemon zest because I prefer fresh zest to powdered peel. Not wanting to waste the lemon, I squeezed 2 Tablespoons of juice out and added that to the mix to increase the tangy, lemon flavor, balancing out the sweetness of the sugar. As honey is hydroscopic, that is: it absorbs water, it will keep the cakes moist and soft for a much longer period of time. I will assume that Digby recommended adding such a small amount of honey to his cakes (three spoonfuls of honey vs a pound and a half of sugar). I used clover honey from my pantry. I did not want to use anything with a stronger taste, such as buckwheat honey, for fear I would cover up the other flavors of the cakes.
The almonds were of normal, "garden" pre-sliced variety that I smashed up into smaller bits. The cardamon seeds were ground with a mortar and pestle. Some seeds were ground into powder and other were just cracked. The variety of sizes will be a nice change from the homogeneous power that was recommended.
I avoided using modern, refined sugar by sticking with turbinado sugar. Turbinado sugar is what is left after the sugar has been removed from the cane and washed once to remove any impurities. Ordinary, turbinado is refined to extract the sugar from the molasses; which is then mixed together to form brown sugar. I stuck with the turbinado because that would have been closer to what was available in Digby’s time. I used organic branded sugar to reduce any the amounts of any modern pesticides in the finished good to achieve a more "period" taste.
Because of the variety of flour on the supermarket shelves, I did some research to point me towards the right type of flour to use. Christina Krupp posted the following on Stefan’s Florilegium:
I presume you know that flour can vary greatly in protein and gluten content, from very soft to quite hard. ... In period that would have been durum (in Italy and southern France) or northern, Russian, or Middle Eastern wheat (in northern Europe). ... Nowadays, I’d use a bread flour (such as King Arthur unbleached) if making it by hand. If you have a mixer with a dough hook you can use the King Arthur Special for Bread Machines, which is very high gluten. I suspect our modern American/Canadian hard wheats (bred from the hardest Russian/Armenian strains) are even harder than the strongest period flours. But in any case, avoid "general purpose" flours such as General Mills, Pillsbury, etc for this purpose. What King Arthur calls "General Purpose" flour is already harder than the mainstream brands. This is particularly true in the Southern states, which have a preference for softer flour, so the General Mills, Pillsbury, etc meant to be sold there are formulated differently than the same brands sold in New England.
I picked the King Arthur band Artisan, Organic all-purpose flour because it was unbleached and from organically grown wheat. The flour fell into the recommendation of Christina Krupp and it is as close as I can get to what was available in period.
I am not a baking master and I do not claim to know what I am doing, either in period or in modern kitchens. But I have watched a few cooking shows so I have a small clue as to what I am suppose to do. The original recipe called for creaming the butter and sugar. This is a technique that calls for a stand mixer, which I neither have nor think were available in period. Instead I melted the butter and mixed it with the sugar by hand. Once those two were well integrated, I mixed in the honey, the cardamon, the almonds, the lemon juice and zest and then the egg. Once everything was mixed, I added the flour to the mix in thirds, mixing by hand. As time was not on my side, I statched the mix in the fridge overnight. This was the only change to this recipe that I have made in the few years I have made these cakes. The next evening, I retrieved the mix and heated the oven. I used a tablespoon to make fairly standard sized cakes so that they would heat evenly. I rolled them into small balls and then smashed them somewhat flat: about half of the size that Digby suggested. I then baked them at 350 degrees until they turned "golden blond," which took just twenty minutes.
I chose 350 degrees because I had no other reference to go off of. Gercase and Digby could have been talking about a bread oven running at 500 to 600 degrees. Or a simple hearth oven that only gets up to 200 degrees. I kept to the original recipe at 350 degrees. If I had followed Cosman instructions, my cakes would have come out of the oven mushy and sticky. Not good eats, as they say on the Food Channel. By checking on the cakes every five minutes and only pulling them when they turned "golden blond." The "golden blond" description was a very good description: the cakes changed from dark brown to blond very quickly. A few of the cakes had started to burn on their bottoms.
The previous attempts at this cake resulted in chewy cakes. This time around the cakes, once they had cooled, turned out crunchy.
[1] Page 500
[2] Toussaunt-Samat, page 501
[3] Page 501
[4] Recipe 171
[5] Toussaunt-Samat, page 242
[6] Page 185
Bibliography
Black, Maggie. The Medieval Cookbook. Thames and Hudson. New York. 1992.
Cosman, Madeleine Pelner. Fabulous Feasts: Medieval Cookery and Ceremony. George Braziller, Inc. New York. 1995.
Digbie, Sir Kenelme. The Closet of the Eminently Learned Digbie Kt Opened: Whereby is Discovered Several ways for making of Metheglin, Sider, Cherry-Wine, &c. together with Excellent Directions for Cookery: As also for Preserving, Conserving, Candying, &c. First edition, London, 1669. Transcribed by Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson: Prospect Books. 1997.
Gervase, Markham. The English Hus-wife, London: 1615, Cambridge University Library Online.
Krupp, Christina M. Comments recorded on Stefan’s Florilegium. Posted on rec.org.sca on 7 Jan 005 09:0 : 8 -0500. Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks]pretzels [was bagels] [http://www.florilegium.org/files/FOOD-BREADS/pretzels-msg.html]
Matterer, James L. A Boke of Gode Cookery: Modern Recipes for Beginners. 2000
Toussaint-Samat, Maguelonne. History of Food, Barnes & Noble Books, New York. 1998. Translated by Anthea Bell.
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Observations from 2016:
I really need to make these, again. These were very tasty and easy enough for a non-baker to make.
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