Cookbook Challenge part 9

It’s quite a while since I posted anything. I have still done a couple of cookbook challenge meals, just got behind with writing them up while I was busy with work and holidays. Feel free to follow me on Instagram too if you are interested in what I’ve been doing and eating – it’s apricots_in_manchester

For this week’s meal I went a long way back in time …

I have a few books of historical recipes and some books that are just old, but I think this one goes back the furthest. Of course, as we’re talking about prehistory, there are no records of what people were actually eating at the time. The author gives suggested recipes based on the foods known to have been available and that she has developed through experimental archaeology. There is a lot of information on the foods eaten in different periods of prehistory at the start of the book, so it’s worth reading if like me you are interested in how food preparation developed over time.

I was aiming to make some dishes that may have been eaten in Northern Europe and Britain in the Bronze age – approximately 3,500 years ago. People would still have been hunting and collecting whatever foods were around them, but would also have domesticated animals and started cultivating grains.

There are lots of suggestions in the book for foraging for wild vegetation, but there is limited opportunity for that in the Manchester suburbs, so I kept to ingredients that were readily available in my garden or in the supermarket. As I don’t eat meat, I looked for dishes using vegetables, milk and grains, which must have been the case for prehistoric people a lot of the time as well.

I started off by making some barley bread with beer. The beer is supposed to make the bread lighter, instead of using yeast. I couldn’t find barley flour, so I used barley flakes and ground them up in the food processor. That made quite a coarse flour, but possibly finer than prehistoric people could achieve using stones to grind flour. The beer was St. Peter’s Golden Ale, brewed in Suffolk, which I chose mainly because I liked the bottle! I have no idea what prehistoric beer would have tasted like. There are some beer recipes in the book, but I didn’t have time to wait a few days for it to ferment. This one tasted good anyway, It contains hops, which apparently were used in Europe in prehistoric times, but weren’t introduced to Britain until the sixteenth century.

The finished bread was fairly dense, although I think the beer had lightened it. The texture was also quite crumbly, a bit like a scone. The flavour was quite good though, especially with some salted butter.

I needed something else to go with the bread, so I made some soft cheese. This is very easy, you just add vinegar to hot milk, stir until the curds separate and then drain off the whey. You end up with a ricotta style cheese which I flavoured with salt, garlic and chives. It was actually really tasty and probably the only part of the main course that my sons liked.

The main course was a lentil stew. For this I didn’t exactly follow a recipe, but put together ingredients that should have been available in Europe at the time, including lentils, onions, leeks and various herbs. I found it quite difficult to make this taste good. We often eat this type of vegetarian stew, but usually we might add potatoes, peppers, maybe chilli, cumin or other spices – none of which would have been available in prehistoric Northern Europe. It ended up tasting fairly wholesome and was very healthy at least. It was also a very dull brown. Do you think prehistoric people would have bothered with a parsley garnish? If I was there I definitely would have!

Now for dessert. There is no way of knowing if people would have had something sweet to finish their meal, but they would undoubtedly have sought out sweet foods for the extra energy they provide. There are cave paintings in Spain dating back to Neolithic times showing human figures gathering honey, for example.

I cooked apples and blackberries sweetened with honey and made a crunchy topping with hazelnuts cooked in butter and more honey. Served up with a big jug of cream. This went down very well – you can’t really go wrong with fruit and cream can you?

Would our prehistoric ancestors have eaten anything like this? I have no idea, but it tasted good so I’m going to assume they might have done.

I did enjoy reading about prehistoric cooking and trying to recreate these recipes. I can’t say any of them are likely to reappear on our table any time soon, except maybe the cheese which was fun to make and when I worked it out was less expensive than buying flavoured soft cheese. A few more spices would be good for my next cookbook challenge though, I think.