From: colette@morgan.ucs.mun.ca (Colette Goodyear)
Subject: Recipe--Herbelade
Organization: Memorial University of Newfoundland
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 13:16:47 GMT

Here's a medieaval recipe for people to try.  My cook's Guild
got together last night and cooked these up.

The recipe is taken from _Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books_, 
edited by Thomas Austin (Early English Text Society:  London, 1888).
It comes from Harleian MS 279, dated around 1430.

What follows is my rough translation of the recipe.

Recipe XXXI  Herbelade

Take butts of pork and cut them into pieces and set it over the fire: and
boil them in clean water.  When they are boiled enough, lay them on
a clean board, pick out all the bones, chop it small and put them into a
clean bowl.  Then take hyssop, sage, parsley (a good quantity), cut them
small and put in a clean pot.  Take a little of the broth that the pork
was boiled in and draw through a strainer and add to the herbs and let it
boil.  Then take out the herbs with a skimmer from the broth and add
them to the pork in the bowl.  Chop dates small and add them.  Add
raisins of courance, and pine nuts and draw through a strainer yolks
of eggs and sugar and powdered ginger and salt and colour it a little
with saffron.  Mix it together with your hands.  Then make fair round
pie crusts and harden them a little in the oven.  Then take them out
and with a dish in your hand, fill it full of the stuff, then set it 
in again and let it bake enough and serve forth.

____________________________________________________________________

Since a herbelade is known for its quantity of herbs, the direction
to take a "good quantity" of the green herbs was strictly followed.
From reading the recipe we assumed that the dish is a sort of quiche
although an argument could be made that the egg yolks are first boiled
hard and then mashed through the strainer.  I prefer the first assumption
because you have to add saffron for colour and I can't think of any
other way of it doing that unless it's added to a liquid (i.e. raw
eggs).

Ingredients   (Makes one 9-inch pie)

1/2 cup of chopped pork
A handful of fresh parsley, chopped
Half-handful of fresh sage, chopped
Half-handful of rosemary, chopped (we didn't have any hyssop)
1/2 cup coarsely chopped dates
1/2 cup raisins
1/2 cup pine nuts
4 medium size eggs
1/4 cup sugar (heaven knows how sweet this dish is supposed to be so
               we played it safe, the dates and raisins add quite a bit
               of sweetness to it)       
1 tsp ginger
2 threads of saffron, crushed into 1 tsp of water
 
Bottom crust for one pie

Follow the instructions as given in the translation above.  Bake at 350
for about 40-45 minutes (until eggs are set).  We used whole eggs
instead of just the egg yolks (I couldn't bear the thought of throwing
away egg whites and there are similiar recipes that use the entire egg).
We also found that it is not necessary to bake the pie crust before
adding the filling but we were using a modern pie crust (white bleached
flour, cold water) , not
a medieaval one (less finely ground flour).  We'll use a properly period
pie crust next time.

There's a lot of room for experimenting with just this recipe.  Enjoy!

Colette Goodyear
Memorial University
colette@morgan.ucs.mun.ca
Newsgroups: rec.food.historic