My daughter’s middle school social studies class has been preparing for this all month: today was the Medieval Feast. Lords, ladies, jesters, knights–and she chose to be the master chef. Others brought bags of apples and peas.
We baked a big Tart of Spinnage (courtesy of The English Huswife, 1615, by Gervase Markham) with adaptations. 1615–that’s Shakespeare and Elizabeth I, the early modern era, not the medieval. Still, some of the recipes were probably conserved, and some of the styles of flavoring as well. The fact that sugar is added to this one is reminiscent of Elizabeth I’s infamous sweet tooth, but it also makes the normally savory spinach a dish more in keeping with the earlier recipe collections so favored by Renaissance Faire participants.
Medieval recipes from the 1300s and 1400s indicate heavy use of cinnamon, ginger, mustard, pepper, galingale, and grains of paradise for the aristocratic classes, at least for their feast dishes. Fruits were routinely added to both meat and fish “Parma” tarts–those tarts, full of eggs, were probably much like today’s quiches.
But the recipe my daughter’s teacher e-mailed me had no eggs. The binder, an interesting choice, was “cast cream” or sour cream. Sour cream bakes up well in cheesecakes–labaneh, a Middle Eastern/Near Eastern version, is a lot thicker and bakes up even more nicely. I’ve made mini-cheesecakes from nothing but labaneh, sugar and lemon rind stirred together and baked in cookie crusts, and they came out beautifully. So I wasn’t too worried about the tart filling firming up enough.
The original recipe also contained no spices other than sugar (maybe I mean “flavorings” rather than “spices”), pepper and salt. Spinach, sour cream, sugar, pepper, salt…bland? Odd? Would the signature combination of vegetable and sweet get lost in the mix? No knowing. But for a medieval version, especially for a classroom tasting, we were going to have to do something slightly different, more purposeful.
A spinach tart with sugar? It was going to be a gustatory challenge for the class and its guests, a flavor combination we no longer encounter very much. Might as well make it interesting, and preferably good.
Which is why I adapted it to a sweetened tart of greens like Swiss chard. Versions of this are still served today in Nice (tourte de blettes or Swiss chard tart) and parts of Italy (torta di verdura or tart of greens) as a dessert. The filling often contains raisins and pine nuts as well as Parmesan cheese, and the pastry is often sweet and dusted with confectioner’s sugar before serving. If it were awful, surely people like David Lebovitz wouldn’t be putting versions of it on their blogs. Novelty value can take you only so far. And his version contains a layer of apples on top of the chard…
The last thing I thought about was the learning experience for my daughter, the nascent (though not Re-nascent) master chef. The recipe her teacher sent home indicated “pastry shells”. As though you could go to the store and buy them.
No baking powder or soda allowed in the medieval era. No food processor. So my daughter cut up the butter and cut it into the flour with a pastry blender–once she realized the blades weren’t actually sharp–and then mashed it together with her hands, which was a lot more efficient. She made the spinach filling we decided on–very close to the assigned recipe, but with a bit of cinnamon and nutmeg, and a grating of lemon peel. In place of raisins, she put the extra bits of apple in the filling.
She fit the pastry to the pan, pricked it out, filled it, and topped the spinach with a layer of finely sliced Granny Smith apples–most apples were probably tarter in those days than they are now.
Dame Felidae demonstrates her knife skills
Then she placed the top layer of dough onto the tart, pinched it shut, slashed it in her own design and “endored” or gilded it with egg yolk/water glaze. We baked it in a (horrors! modern!) oven and thawed the “spinnage” out in the microwave before squeezing it, but other than that I think we were pretty much in the spirit. Continue reading
Filed under: baking, cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, Desserts, haute cuisine, history, kid food, Odd food, Vegetabalia | Tagged: cooking with kids, medieval cookery, sweet spinach tart, Swiss chard tart, torta di verdura, tourte de blettes | Comments Off on Medieval in LA: Sweet Spinach Tart
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