#Tudor food

[scifrey]

Videos to Watch if You Enjoyed "Cling Fast"

How Much Booze Did Medieval People Really Drink? - Dr. Eleanor Janega teaches us how to booze it up, White Horse-style.

Could You Make a Living in Medieval London? - Another great Eleanor Janega video about occupations, scandals, and the every day lives of every day folks in Medieval cities.

What Was Life Really Like For A Medieval Peasant? - the last of the Eleanor Janega videos about what kind of life Hob Gadling would have lived before he met his Stranger.

A Tudor Feast - domestic historians and archeologists Ruth Goodman, Alex Langlands, Peter "Fonz" Ginn and Hugh Beamish - under the supervision of Marc Meltonville of Hampton Court Palace's Tudor kitchens - prepare and serve a tudor banquet at Haddon Hall in Derbyshire. Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four

Who Do You Think You Are: Danny Dyer Learns Tudor Etiquette - A segment from the Ancestry.com series following actor Danny Dyer as he explores his royal roots.

Who Would Be King of England Today According to Henry VIII's Will? - chartmaker Matt Baker takes us through the royal family tree from Henry the Eighth to the present day, if his edict that the next monarch in the event that his three children (Mary, Edward, and Elizabeth) produced no heirs, then the crown should next fall to the children of his youngest sister. And not, as actually happened, go to James of Scotland.

Royal Myths: Elizabeth I and the Spanish Armada - Dr. Lucy Worsley talks us through the propaganda and fibs that have sprung up around Good Queen Bess, and whether or not she really did declare that she had the stomach of a king.

Dancing Cheek to Cheek: The Devil's Work - Another great series by Dr. Lucy Worsley, chief curator of Royal Historic Palaces, but this time she's joined by Strictly Come Dancing's Len Goodman. They trace the history of dance in Britain, and this episode features some rowdy Medieval and Elizabethan numbers.

Turn Back Time: Tudor Monastery Farm - This series sees Ruth, Alex, and Peter return to the Elizabethan age, this time spending a year on a farm worked by peasants and serfs in service to the church.

The Tudors' Bizarre 12 Days Of Christmas Ritual - The Tudor Monastery Farm Christmas special.

Hardwick Hall: A window onto the Elizabethan world - Sheffield Hallam University gives a great look at Hardwick Hall (more glass than wall), the estate home of the wealthiest woman in Britain at the time, and the kind of place Hob would have aspired to build.

Tudor Food & Etiquette Explained in 14 Minutes - Quick and dirty explanation of where your napkin goes and who the 'chairman of the board' was.

Tudor Houses Explained in 10 Minutes - Not particularly engagingly presented, but a video chock full of visual examples of different kinds of Tudor houses and buildings.

Modern History: The Knight - Jason Kingsley introduces us to the concept behind Modern History and in particular their first series, “The Knight”. Jason has been fascinated by history his whole life, in particular the medieval period and the life of knights. (This is the first video of a playlist).

Royal Armouries - Elizabethan Swordsmanship - a demonstration by weaponsmasters at the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds. (I recommend turning on closed captioning for this one, as the sound was recorded live with no mics.)

Getting Dressed - Tudor Royal Household - a nice, even-paced and well produced video showing what it was like to get dressed in queen Katherine Parr's household.

Dressing Up a Tudor Man - my personal heroes at Prior Attire show us what the blokes were wearing at the time. Keep in mind that this is 40 years too early for Hob and Dream's disastrous Shakespeare-ruined feast. (I recommend turning on closed captioning for this one, as the sound was recorded live with no mics.)

And just for the fun of it:

Medieval Pickup Lines from the folks behind (I believe?) Whores of Yore, and Top Tudor Historian Rates Famous Movie Scenes, wherein Dr Nicola Tallis, British historian and author of three books on the Tudors, rates scenes from five blockbuster movies set in the Tudor period. (I love how scandalized she gets.)

If you want more, I really recommend anything at all featuring Doctors Lucy Worsley, Eleanor Janega, and Ruth Goodman (search their names on YouTube and you'll find a wealth of clips, full episodes, and even playlists.)

[thejoyofseax]

Féile na nÚll Menu & Analysis

I had really meant to publish the menu before the event, but ingredient acquisition took more time and effort than expected. In particular, chestnut flour, which I wanted as a thickener for various gluten-free dishes, just could not be found anywhere I tried. I didn't find that out with enough lead time to order it online. Almond flour substituted, and was fine.

Anyway. Here's the full menu, which fed varying numbers of people, but I think about 45 for the feast.

Travellers' Fare (Friday evening): Beef stew with bread and butter (vegan stew on the side, plant butter available, GF bread available).

Saturday Breakfast was produced by the inimitable Lady Meadhbh Rois inghean Uí Chaoimh.

Saturday Lunch: Chicken soup (vegan soup alongside), bread, fruit.

Feast: Roast pork (vegan nut roast on side), Frumenty (rice on side), apple sauce, green sauce, meat pies (mushroom pie on side), creamed leeks (with fake cream), buttered turnips (with plant butter), roasted onions, purple carrots (with plant butter), olives, anchovies, apple pies, blackberry and apple pies (all pies with GF/vegan versions as well, where possible).

Sunday breakfast: Porridge with cream and fruit, stewed apples, boiled eggs, cold ham, and various leftovers, mostly fruit pies.

The emphasis here wasn't on any particular production of period dishes, but on making sure everyone got good solid food. It's also an entirely plausible English Tudor menu, including the frumenty and green sauce as dishes that didn't make it through the Early Modern. As far as I can make out, everyone enjoyed it (although nobody ever tells the cook they didn't). The coeliac and vegan/vegetarian folk expressed particular approval, which was important. Anything I could make GF and vegan was made so (plant butter and almond flour are the two main tricks here).

Gabrielle and Katie were in the kitchen every hour I was, and possibly a few more, and a great deal of credit for the weekend's food being on the tables on time is due to them. Katie also set in, with very limited prior experience, to making pastry for the non-gluten-free pies, and produced some of the best I've ever encountered. She's been designated Head Pastrychef in Perpetuity as a consequence. There were also many other kitchen helpers, who've been thanked appropriately on Facebook. The relevant note here is that we had 4-5 people in the kitchen at most times, which was more than enough, and kept everyone relaxed. The SCA Kitchen playlist (85% mine, 15% Gabrielle's) was also helpful.

So. The first thing that I want to improve is the gluten-free pastry. Making it vegan as well was trivial; replace the lard/dripping with plant butter, and it's absolutely fine. Any fat will do for that, it seems, although since the traditional use for the pastry is the raised pork pie, the meat fats help match the taste. The gluten-free flour, however, could only be persuaded to make a paste, not a pastry - trying to roll it out into sheets simply didn't work. It would take the form of a sheet, alright, but if I went to pick it up, it just broke. An experimental version that Gabrielle and I did before the event could be sort-of lifted into place on baking parchment, but it broke over the contents of the pie. In theory, with a very dense, relatively smooth pie filling (such as a meat pie that's been well-packed), you could get a coherent crust, but I don't know what would happen to that as the contents shrink in baking. Xanthan gum appeared to make zero difference.

So we've some more experimentation to do there. One suggestion is to use an egg or two, which will take it away from being vegan - but a vegan pastry, using plant butter instead, should not be a problem to produce as an ordinary cold pastry. Various things will be trialled.

The green sauce came out particularly well. Órlaith did her usual superlative job of chopping herbs, primarily sorrel and mint, with some basil and thyme, some black pepper, and garlic salt. The liquid base was about 2 parts olive oil to one part white wine vinegar. We only made a small amount, but nearly all of it was eaten. Green sauce is basically a table condiment for the latter end of the SCA period in Western Europe, and I have vague plans to make and bottle some at some stage, to see how it keeps and matures in the longer term.

I made far too much of the frumenty. Bulgur wheat isn't terribly expensive, so I don't feel too bad about it, and the carbohydrates are absolutely the area in which to over-provide. But for my future reference, about 400g of dry bulgur will provide enough for about 30 people without difficulty.

The roasted onions were surprisingly popular. I think we did 11 whole onions, and only one and a half came back to the kitchen.

The meat pies disappeared in their entirety, as far as I can tell. One was a combination of minced pork, minced lamb, and whatever vegetables were to hand; the other was filled with the remnants of Friday's beef stew. I was very pleased to be able to integrate leftovers into the feast; I am completely certain that a rolling use of leftovers in subsequent days' dishes was a standard feature of any period cookery, and we don't often get to do that over a weekend.

The purple carrots were entertaining. I can't detect any difference in taste from orange carrots, but they stain everything they touch a nice shade of purple-blue. I'll get them again if I can just for that.

Overall, I'm pleased with how things came out, and I'll do either of the Arabic or Pre-Norman Irish menus I had partially worked out for next year.

[beautifulgiants]

History Hit - what did the Tudors rest at a total banquet?

[gwydpolls]

Time Travel Question 46: Early Modernish and Earlier

These Questions are the result of suggestions from the previous iteration.

This category may include suggestions made too late to fall into the correct earlier time grouping. Basically, I'd already moved on to human history, but I'd periodically get a pre-homin suggestion, hence the occasional random item waaay out of it's time period, rather than reopen the category.

In some cases a culture lasted a really long time and I grouped them by whether it was likely the later or earlier grouping made the most sense with the information I had. (Invention ofs tend to fall in an earlier grouping if it's still open. Ones that imply height of or just before something tend to get grouped later, but not always. Sometimes I'll split two different things from the same culture into different polls because they involve separate research goals or the like).

Please add new suggestions below if you have them for future consideration. All cultures and time periods welcome.

[icedmaraschinocherries]

eating like kings 🏰

[cieuxgris]

The Tudors (2009): The Northern Uprising

[simona-a-marinkova]

Bank holiday weekend in Southampton

Southampton is a port city in south England, just 2 hours train ride from London Waterloo. It was last minute decision to go there over the bank holiday, and it worked out well. It’s worth visiting for couple of days. The city is well kept and there is a lot of development going on – loads new flats buildings, restaurants, shopping mall and modern Ocean village (marina). We got there with the…

[possiblytracker]

now christmas foods have been available in stores for a little while i have finally taken the liberty of buying several different brands of mince pie to compare and figure out which one i need to stockpile for the trying months ahead

[imwritesometimes]

hell week intensifies

[quotesfrommyreading]

In modern times, views have ranged back and forth about the benefits of breastfeeding as opposed to those of formula milk. Today, though, twenty-first century mothers are assured by medical practitioners that 'breast is best'. Hundreds of years before the development of formula milk, it was not so much a debate about whether breast was best for Tudor babies, as whose breast was best.

Most writers on the subject considered breastfeeding to be the mother's duty. 'It were fit, that every mother should nurse her own child,' asserted the author of The Nursing of Children. There was nothing so good to nourish a child, agreed the influential physician Dr John Jones, than its mother's own milk. For other scholars breastfeeding created an unbreakable bond between mother and child, with Erasmus going so far as to liken wetnursing to 'a kind of exposure'. It was a mothers' duty, said Thomas More, and only 'death, or sickness' should prevent it. Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln, put it more forcefully in the early seventeenth century, when she wrote a tract – ostensibly addressed to her daughter-in-law – on the godly duty of 'every mother' (as she declared) 'to nurse her own children'.

The countess acknowledged, among other common objections, 'that it is troublesome; that it is noisome to one's clothes: that it makes one look old'. But she pooh-poohed these, since 'all such reasons are uncomely, and unchristian to be objected', as 'they argue unmotherly affection, idleness, desire to have liberty to gad from home, pride, foolish finesse, lust, wantonness, and the like evils'. In any event, she assured her reader, 'behold most nursing mothers, and they be as clean and sweet in their clothes, and hold their beauty, as well as those that suckle not'.

It was the greatest regret of the countess, who had been a Tudor mother herself, that she had been discouraged from breastfeeding. 'I should have done it', she candidly told her reader, but had been overruled by another's authority. She had also not considered properly 'my duty in this motherly office'. Now she knew the correct path, but lamented that 'it was too late for me to put it in execution'. It was unnatural to send a child to be nursed, she declared, both for the mother's own child and also that of the nurse, and she warned: 'be not accessory to that disorder of causing a poorer woman to banish her own infant, for the entertainment of a richer woman's child, as it were, bidding her unlove her own to love yours'.

Yet, while poorer Tudor women had little choice but to feed their children for themselves, most upper-class women did not nurse their own babies. All but a few mothers of Lady Clinton's class employed wet-nurses. Elizabeth of York would certainly have been aware of the debate surrounding maternal breastfeeding, but social pressures – to cede the daily care of the infant and to quickly return to fertility – were the more powerful drivers. There was no question of her, or a great many other Tudor mothers, nursing their own child.

  —  The Lives of Tudor Women (Elizabeth Norton)

[alanianatkinson]

LOCAL ELECTIONS, TUDOR STYLE

When you hear Tudor, what comes to mind? Tudor, England; houses with thatched leaf / hay / straw roofs; white walls with black lines drawn on them. The weather would be semi-gloomy to cool-cold, the roads (yes “roads”. Not “streets”. We are talking about England of Great Britain, not U.S.A.), narrow and winding, carved and dividing miles and miles of green countryside. Tudor USJ 4 – close. Tudor…

[yaymiyas]

THE TALK

warning: yandere!isekai!crown prince, he is very mean in this, female reader

a/n: this is TECHNICALLY not a part two to the introduction but it sort of is….. it jumps from the conversation to the breakfast……..enjoy! ALSO ALSO ALSOOOOOOOO technically its female reader bc you got reincarnated blah blah

looking at the fragments of bacon he didnt want to eat, he let his fingers drum against the edge of the white plate. the fact that you, the daughter of a whore, lover to none, and nuisance to all, was right beside him made his food hard to swallow. the two of you sat in the dining room, and while he sat at the very end of the table with his back facing the door to the kitchen, your usual spot would be that of the opposite side. right across from him, back facing the entering door, but it seems after the poison didn’t hit quite deep enough in your veins, it did affect your brain because, for some reason, you thought it was brilliant to sit directly next to him. you weren’t as talkative as he would have thought of you, ever since you have learned of the activities he had decided to partake in, you started to demand his attention. at first, it didnt bother him much, since he himself started to believe that he was focusing solely on gracie that your suspicions were bound to grow, and grow they did.

for weeks, months, up until the poisoning you were all up on him. he was certain that you were attempting to skin him alive and wear him as a coat it was all mildly unpleasant but more irritating. saer never had a taste for you; rather, he actually hated you. to no one’s fault but his own fathers, he was forced to marry you out of pregnant promises. your father, sir tudor, wasn’t the poorest dope saer’s father has ever seen, but he was the loyalist. he worked on the gwynn estate, doing a multitude of things for the family, automatically gaining the trust of the duke and then the king himself. at the time, king gwynn was more fascinated with how a man with such little knowledge could become his most loyalist man, but that he did. following the pregnancy of both the queen and your mother, he decided that the best course of action was to marry his second unborn son off to the unborn daughter of a freeloader.

an icy shiver runs down saer’s back, forcing him to shake his shoulders and head. looking up from your half eaten plate, raising your head to the sudden movement. he was quiet the whole time, poking at the small slivers of bacon like they were the nastiest things on earth. you werent surprised that he wasnt talking; no, you were actually relieved. it wasn’t because he wasnt attractive or anything, he certainly does look like the main lead; its just the talk you had prior to the breakfast that was replaying in your head. cynthia and amanda didn’t give you much information, since, from the looks of it, they didn’t want to say too much. either their heads were on the line or yours were. you never thought about asking tily, even though she was the one that brought you down here. it just felt too weird knowing she was the one who weirdly had something against you. from your fading memories of ‘obsession falls’, you remember reading online forums and tweets about the whole thing. it seemed like the only real crime edina committed throughout the whole book was wanting her husband to love her. she did everything he had asked of her, from the way she talked to her style of clothing, even to what letters she can reply to. in olden standards, she seemed like the perfect obedient wife. this might have been your first mistake, but you didn’t read too much on saer or his backstory, so you never really understood the reasoning for his hatred of his wife, but you knew it was deep and it was boiling.

clearing your throat, you believed it was a better time than ever to clear the air and get to your point. you never understood why edina allowed things to get as deep as they were, but she was made just to be killed. it sucks that no matter what you do or say, saer will always hate you because you are edina.

“saer,”

“ae.”

that stupid nickname. shutting your eyes tightly and fighting back against any light to seep through, you sighed heavily. the whole time, saer had been watching you carefully. even though it was from the corner of his eyes, he was indeed trying to calculate your next moves. it was kind of silly that your sudden change in physical response is making him antsy, but how can anyone fault him? the last time the air-headed cunt decided to change the way she was reacting, gracie was suddenly engaged to alastair and smiling in his face about it. it was enraging. other than the fact that you were in his life to begin with, knowing that the reason he couldn’t slit the throat of his ex best friend was all because you decided to breathe. those two minutes were the longest two minutes of his life. he watched as your head dropped down on the table, making a very sudden and loud noise with it. saer had sternly told any and all servants to leave the two of you be if any loud, disruptive noises were heard. he even double checked that he sent your nosey maids, cynthia and amanda, home around that time. he knew that if they were present in the building, you weren’t going to eat that poison.

it was infuriating to watch them care about someone as lowly as you. not just them, anyone. reading gracie’s letters, asking how you’ve been and to see you before she even utters a word about him, was beyond hurtful. it felt as if his whole world was falling apart, all because you decided to have superpowers and not die. this was the only way to get back at you. he has tried strangling you. he has tried slaying you. each attempt was caught by either maid, cynthia, or amanda. it made him sick to see you get dotted on. seeing the frilly outfits they were making you wear, as if you were a porcelain doll not worth anybody’s touch. you were disgusting. a disgusting being that deserved to die. so why. why were you here? why were you looking at him like he had done something wrong. 

“enough with the causalities, i would like a divorce saer.”

[dazedbe]

90s documentaries are wild, I came here to learn about Tudor cooking and suddenly they’re doing a ghost investigation with a dude that looks like this

?????

???

[cieuxgris]

The Tudors (2007): Message to the Emperor

[simona-a-marinkova]

Bank holiday weekend in Southampton

Southampton is a port city in south England, just 2 hours train ride from London Waterloo. It was last minute decision to go there over the bank holiday, and it worked out well. It’s worth visiting for couple of days. The city is well kept and there is a lot of development going on – loads new flats buildings, restaurants, shopping mall and modern Ocean village (marina). We got there with the…