Camp & Kitchen, Do it yourself

Cooking like in the Middle Ages: Mead vegetables with starter and dessert

Medieval cuisine was varied and extremely tasty. Not only do many cookbooks dealing with medieval recipes bear witness to this, we can also experience it ourselves when we recreate them. We would like to introduce to you today: mead vegetables with starter and dessert. It’s rather simple, but it tastes (and smells!) just wonderful. At the bottom of this post you will find a video in which Christin and Stefan cook this medieval dish, give tips on the storage kitchen and philosophize about medieval ingredients.

Note: Alcohol evaporates away during the cooking process it is said, but in fact, it is not possible to determine exactly how much remains in the pot after cooking. This depends on the amount of alcohol used and the cooking duration and temperature cooked at. If you have guests, please note that if alcohol was used, especially for recovering alcoholics, the taste can be problematic, even if alcohol is no longer present.

Inhaltsübersicht

Ingredients to serve four people

Starter

curd
1 spoon Skyr
Fresh herbs
Salt / pepper
Bread

Main

Some oil
1 Stick of celery
4 parsnips
1 bunch carrots
1 Leek
4 – 5 spring onions or 1 onion
Broth or homemade stock
1 litre of Mead (or VET for vegetarians)

Dessert

500 g Skyr
200 g blueberries (or other berries)
150 g walnuts
Possibly honey

Instructions

This medieval dish is cooked relatively quickly. It took us about an hour to do this, but you could maybe be faster. The only thing that is really important is that in the end the vegetables are cooked through.

The above quantity is sufficient for four people. If you leave out the starter and dessert, about 2-3 people will be fed.

Step 1: Prepare vegetables

First, you prepare the vegetables for the main course, because it takes the longest. Remove the top layer of the carrots and the parsnips and cut both into large pieces. Peel the celery and add it to the parsnips and carrots.

Now put oil in a pot over the fire. As this heats up, you peel the onions, cut them into narrow strips and then put them in the pot. If they are nicely simmered, season them first with salt and pepper, then cover them with a dash of mead and add a little vegetable broth or stock at the end. The onions should now be covered in the mead, so you should pour regularly if necessary as it evaporates. Don’t forget to stir!

Now you cut the leak and put it in a separate bowl. Then add the carrots, parsnips and celery to the onions in the pot and pour more mead. The vegetables should be around two thirds covered and should be stirred regularly. If required, water can also be used instead of mead. Cover the pot with a board or lid and let it simmer for about 15 minutes with regular stirring.

Mittelalter Rezept Vorspeise und Nachspeise

Step 2: Starter and dessert

In the meantime, you prepare the starters and desserts. For the starter, mix the quark with a spoonful of Skyr and season it with fresh herbs and a leek onion. The whole thing is served with fresh bread.

For dessert, add the berries to the Skyr. If you use blueberries, we recommend sweetening the desert with a little honey to taste. Then crack the nuts, crush them a little (for example, with an axe head) and add them as well. Stir in, and you are done.

Step 3: Final touches for the mead vegetables

By now, the vegetables should be almost cooked, so that the leak can be placed into the pot too. The mead vegetables dish is now nearly complete and no more mead is required. Simmer the vegetables without a lid now until about 1 cm of liquid is still in the bottom of the pot. Finally, you try a little to see if the dish is ready!

The equipment used

Here we briefly put together the equipment that we used or which you can see in the video and on the pictures.

The cooking place

Cooking utensils

Hint: Do you need help to find out, which equipment you’ll need for your first medieval camp? Take a look at our blog post on the subject of equipment for the medieval camp. We summarized the most important things you’ll need for your camp in order to fully equip it, or which alternatives are available.