Almond and Cardamon Cirlettes 2017

This is documentation that I wrote for the 2017 Ice Dragon A&S Pentathlon. I've done this recipe several times beforehand but this time I used a different sugar.

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Almond and Cardamon Cirlettes

This particular recipe came from Cosman’s Fabulous Feasts, where she did not give it’s source or it’s original recipe. 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 sweetened 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. [1]

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. [2]

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. [3] 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.”[4]

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.[5]

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. [6]

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. [7]

Knowing that this recipe did have a basis in history, I tried it; although I did not stick, 100%, to Cosman’s recipe:

Ingredients:

1 Cup, salted butter

2/3 Cup, piloncillo sugar

1/2 Tablespoon, Clover honey

1 beaten egg

2 1/2 Cups, Hodgson Mill whole wheat pastry flour.

2 Teaspoon, fresh lemon zest, minced

2 Tablespoons, fresh squeezed lemon juice.

3/4 Teaspoon, ground cardamon seeds

1/2 Cup, sliced, chopped and smashed almonds

Procedure and explanation:

 First of all, I am not a baker, so my method will most likely shock any reader who knows what they are doing. I will first explain why I used each ingredient, then I will explain how I made the circlets.

I do not care for currents, so I omitted them. Currents, raisins and dried fruit were not only a way of showing off one’s wealth via a baked good, but were much cheaper than sugar. Look at Digby’s Small Cakes, above: 1.5 pounds of loaf sugar and 3 pounds of currants. These cakes would have been very sweet. [8]

I used minced lemon zest because I prefer fresh zest to powdered peel. It is more than likely that the average housewife would not have been able to afford a fresh lemon, and would have resorted to dried peels. But, as I am a Lord, and can afford the finest ingredients for my cooks, I procured a fresh lemon for my circlets. 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. I used a modern zesting tool [9] to zest [10] the zest [11] from the lemon. I then minced the zest with a knife.

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 versus 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. I do not want to take time, in this paper, to discuss the nature of honey collection in the middle ages. We, modern people, are quite used to flower specific honey, because we have an industry devoted to moving bee hives to specific fields in order to get a specific variety of honey. In the middle ages, a variety of plants grew near one another in the fields (wheat in one strip and field peas in the strip next to it); apple orchards next to fallow fields. Bees collect where there is nectar, and if they have dozens of choices, they will collect from as many of those choices as possible. I used the last clover honey in one small “bear”. I did not want to open up a bottle of wild flower honey. I used the honey that was most convenient at the time I made these circlets.

I used one normal, large, grade AA chicken egg because, as the say in France, one egg is un oeuf.

The almonds were of normal, pre-sliced variety that I smashed up into smaller bits. I measured out 1/2 cup into a ziptop bag and pounded them with a mallet until I had small pieces. I could have used a mortar and pestle but I did not want to risk making almond paste. And using the mallet was quicker. And more fun.

The cardamon seeds were ground with a mortar and pestle. I did my best to ground them into powder. This took longer than I had expected, even with only 3/4 of a teaspoon of seeds. I could have used an electric spice grinder, but I was stubborn enough to insist that I grind them manually.

I used piloncillo, or Mexican un-refined sugar, because I feel that it is very close to the common sugar that was used in the time period. Piloncillo comes in hard, dark brown cones, or in bricks: period inventories and shopping lists mention sugar loaves as well as references to “sugre blanche”, “white sugar” or “candy sugar”. Which indicates that there was a difference between the varieties of sugar. Furthermore, many cookbooks use the word “sugar” in most recipes but calls for other varieties of sugar in some: “good white sugar” “lump white sugar”, “white sugar” “pounded white sugar”, “white manna of sugarcane” and “Sulaimani sugar”.

Balducci Pegolotti, an early 14th century Floretine trader, listed various types of sugar in his handbook...five kinds of loaf sugar, in order of quality: mucchera, cafetino, bambillonia, musciatto and dommaschino. The colour and cost of the loaves varied widely. A sugar loaf looks a little like a bomb. [12]

The Arabic sources from medieval times describe raw sugar as red (sukkar ahmar) rather than brown. A cone-shaped loaf of sugar, also called an ubluj, typically had a white upper section and a red or dark lower point. Tricks...were clearly employed by the sugar merchants to hide the red part, and present the illusion of an entire white cone. [13]

We expect our sugar to be white, uniform crystals, readily available at a moment’s notice. And while the market is offering organic, “unrefined” sugar (turbinado, cane crystals, raw sugar) it is still processed and packaged to be easily scooped and measured.

Sugar itself was exported in solid conical loaves of various sizes, since a cone-shaped mould was in standard use wherever sugar was refined. We tend to think of sugar as a pure, white and unvarying substance, but the difficulty and expense of refining meant that until the mid 19th century there were many more grades of sugar than today, and that a batch or loaf of sugar was by no means always white - and if it looked white on the outside, it may have been brown within. [14]

Piloncillo is un-refined, crystallized, sugar-cane juice, loaded with molasses. This is not the same as modern brown sugar which is processed, refined, white-sugar mixed with molasses; processed so that it can be easily spooned out. Piloncillo cones and bricks, like period sugar loaves, [15] are hard and are either added whole to a hot liquid, or placed in a dish and scraped with a utensil. I used this type of sugar 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 Hodgson Mill whole wheat pastry flour, which is stone ground, un-beached flour with no additives and containing some of the bran and germ of the kernel. [16] I picked the pastry flour because it contains less protein than bread or all-purpose flour. I am certain that modern pastry flour is “harder” than wheat flour was even a hundred years ago. But, this flour fell into the recommendation of Christina Krupp and it is as close as I can get to what was available in period.

I used salted butter because that is what I had in the house. Butter was salted in period in order to preserve it. Most period recipes, that I know of, do not call for a specific type of butter (salted or unsalted) although I have come across a few that called for fresh butter. Since I used salted butter, I did not add any salt into the batter, even though salt was not called for. I know enough about baking to know that while one cannot taste a pinch of salt in a baked good, one can taste its absence. 

My Method:

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. It was at this step that I ran into my first problem. The sugar. If I had used granulated sugar, I could have whipped the butter with the sugar by hand, the crystals acting as little knives, tearing the butter’s fat apart. Unfortunately, the piloncillo sugar that I used is nothing like granulated sugar. The cone that I used was hard and sticky. Normally, one would scrape or shave the sugar off of the cone and then mince the slices with a knife. My sugar was so cold that I was having trouble (and a potential safety issues) slicing the cone. Most of my usage of this type of sugar is to dissolve it in hot liquid or to microwave it for a few seconds and then crush it with a mallet. The heat and smash method did not work and this recipe did not have any additional liquid into which I could dissolve the sugar. [17]

What I ended up doing was to chop up the sugar with a cleaver into chunks, then add those chunks into a pot along with the butter. I then slowly brought the butter-sugar mixture up to a simmer and held it there until the sugar had dissolved. I killed the heat and stirred the mixture while I assembled the other ingredients. I also added the honey to the hot liquid to completely dissolve it.

I added the ground cardamon, almond pieces, lemon zest, lemon juice and flour into a mixing bowl, then I added the hot butter, sugar and honey mixture and folded the one into the other. Then I cracked open the egg and started to beat it. I will say that I did not add it to the other wet items because I did not want to cook the egg. [18] While the flour was absorbing liquid, I cracked open the egg and started to beat it with a modern whisk. Once the egg was fully whipped, I mixed it into the batter: I made a depression in the center of the dough, poured in the egg, and used the cut and fold method to integrate it.

I let the dough sit on the counter for 30 minutes, then turned on the oven. While the oven was heating, I used a teaspoon to measure out equal sized blobs. I then rolled the blobs into small balls and placed them on a sheet pan lined with parchment paper. The dough was very sticky. I then baked them at 350 degrees until they turned “golden blond,” which took fifteen 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. I was actually surprised as the dough was a dark brown; I was expecting it to get darker as it baked.

After fifteen minutes, I left the circlets cool for an hour before disposing of any that appeared to be substandard. I will admit that I was tempted to declare them all to be substandard and find a proper place to dispose of them. [19]

[1]  Cosman

[2] Page 500
[3] Toussaunt-Samat, page 501
[4] Page 501
[5] Recipe 171
[6] Toussaunt-Samat, page 242[7] Page 185
[8] To many, currents are sweet. I think that they taste like bitter lumps of death.
[9] A kitchen tool designed to remove thin strips of the zest of a fruit.
[10] The act of removing the zest of a fruit.
[11] The outermost layer of the skin of citrus fruits, where the fruits oil glands are located.
[12] Richardson, p101-2
[13] Sato, p69
[14] Richardson, p101
[15] Davidson, Gitlitz, p16
[16] That makes these cookies healthy.
[17] I discovered, while I was typing this up, that many people in Mexico keep a dedicated box grater just to break down large amounts of piloncillo sugar. Well, the more you know.
[18] Actually, I forgot about the egg until after I had mixed everything else together.
[19] Alright: I ate six of them to “make sure” they were good.

Bibliography

Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook. Kitab al tabikh fi-l-Maghrib wa-l-Andalus fi `asr al-Muwahhidin, li-mu’allif majhul. The Book of Cooking in Maghreb and Andalus in the era of Almohads, by an unknown author: 13th Century Al-Andalus Cookbook. translation is by Charles Perry and others

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.

Davidson, Linda Kay; Gitlitz, David M. A Drizzle of Honey: The Life and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews. Macmillan. 2000

Did You Know It’s Period? - Modern Medieval Food. THL Rowan Houndskeeper. Stefan’s Florilegium: DYKIP-Food-art - 5/29/09

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

Galloway, J. H. The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from Its Origins to 1914. Cambridge University Press. 2005

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 17 Jan 2005 09:03:18 -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.

Richardson, Tim. Sweets: A History of Candy. Bloomsbury Publishing. 2008

Roberts, Teresa. Did You Know It’s Period? Modern Medieval Food by HL Rowan Houndskeeper. Stephen’s Flogiorun. 2008

Sato, Tsugitaka. Sugar in the Social Life of Medieval Islam. Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands 2014

Serjeant, R. B.; Bidwell, R. L. Arabian Studies. Cambridge University Press. 2005

Toussaint-Samat, Maguelonne. History of Food, Barnes & Noble Books, New York. 1998. Translated by Anthea Bell.

Wood, George Bacon; Bache, Franklin; Remington, Joseph Price; Sadtler, Samuel Philip. The Dispensatory of the United States of America. Grigg & Elliot. Philadelphia. 1918.

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Observations from 2017:

I needed something quick and easy to make so that I would have five entries for the Pentathlon. I already had this documentation (I had already published it on this blog), these cookies were easy to make and I had wanted to try them, again. This time I used a more period sugar and they turned out delicious. I might not have won my category but I brought home no cookies. The winner had an entire plate left over after the judging: that means that I truly won, 'cause my entry was better tasting. 

Or she made more than I did. Could be either one, who can tell. I have more almonds and sugar, so I might crank out another batch just for me and my friends.