Greens, part 1

[bunnyjadwiga]

So, I'm teaching a class at Pennsic called "Sallets and Green Pottages" on the uses of green herbs in period food, specifically as raw salads and boiled pottages or salads.
I'll start out with a list:
- Parsley
- Arugula
- Dandelion
- Chervil
- Borage
- Spinach
- Lettuce
- Kale
- Cabbage
- Beet Greens / chard
- Sage
- Turnip Greens
- Savory
- Mint
- Purslane
- Chickweed
- leaf celery
- rue (not recommended)
- Tansy (not recommended, used mostly in egg dishes)
- marjoram
- Fennel
- violet leaves
- watercress
- leeks
- scallions
- chibols (chives or green onions)
- rocket
- sorrel
- cress and swine cress
-

This is an excerpt from Wel ende edelike spijse, C. Muusers (trans.). 15th c.
The original source can be found on Christianne Muusers's website.

Greens. Boil them and cut them. Then bray pepper, sage, parsley and some bread crumbs, tempered with the [boiling]water of the greens. Mix it in a pan and [add] a cup of wine.

This is an excerpt from Le Viandier de Taillevent.
The original source can be found on James Prescott's website.

Watercress greens. Take your watercress, boil it with a fistful of chards, chop it, brown it in oil, and then (if you wish) boil it in [almond] milk. On meat days boil it in meat stock, or with butter or cheese. If you wish, eat it raw without anything else.

This is an excerpt from Le Viandier de Taillevent.
The original source can be found on James Prescott's website.

Of other small pottages. Small pottages such as greens of chard; cabbages; turnips; leeks; veal with Yellow [Sauce]; pottages of scallions without anything else; peas; milled, pounded or sieved beans with or without the pod; pork intestine; soup with pork pluck (women are mistresses of it, and each knows how to make it); and tripes – these I have not put in my viandier, for one knows well how they should be eaten.

Das Kochbuch des Meisters Eberhard, G. Balestriere (trans.) 15th c.
The original source can be found on Mark S. Harris' website.

In summer, which is from St. Urbanus' Day (25 May) to Our Lady's Day the first (8 September), you shall eat food that does not nourish you too much nor is too filling, such as goat meat, the meat of a young lamb, a suckling calf or a ram less than a year old, and young, small greens such as boiled penet or lettuce, and perhaps for vespers, if you want, you may eat raw lettuce with vinegar at that time.

Late period
This is an excerpt from The Good Housewife's Jewell, Thomas Dawson, 1596.
The original source can be found at Chef Phains - Free Cookbooks.

To make a Sallet of all kinde of hearbes. Take your hearbes and picke them very fine into faire water, and picke your flowers by themselves, and washe them al cleane, and swing them in a strainer, and when you put them into the dish, mingle them with Cowcumbers or Lemmons payred and sliced, and scrape Suger, and put in vineger and Oyle, nad throwe the flowers on the toppe of the sallet, and of every sorte of the aforesaide things and garnish the dish about with the foresaide thinges, and harde Egges boyled and laide about the dish and upon the sallet.

See also: http://adamastorshire.co.za/chronicler/stormtidings/archive/cookery/salad.html

Of all the salads we eat in the spring, the mixed salad is the best and most wonderful of all. Take young leaves of mint, those of garden cress, basil, lemon balm, the tips of salad burnet, tarragon, the flowers and tenderest leaves of borage, the flowers of swine cress, the young shoots of fennel, leaves of rocket, of sorrel, rosemary flowers, some sweet violets, and the tenderest leaves or the hearts of lettuce. When these precious herbs have been picked clean and washed in several waters, and dried a little with a clean linen cloth, they are dressed as usual, with oil, salt and vinegar.
The Fruit, Herbs & Vegetables of Italy. An offering to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, by Giacomo Castelvetro. The original is in Italian and written in 1614

Gervase Markham's The English Huswife (1615)
Your simple sallets are Chibols pilled, washt clean, and halfe of the green tops cut away, so served on a fruit dishe, or Chines, Scallions, radish-roots, boyled Carrots, skirrets, and Turneps, with such like served up simply; also, all young Lettice, Cabage lettice, Purslan, and divers other hearbes which may bee served simply without anything, but a little Vinegar, Sallet oyle, and Suger.
(Chibols are a kind of spring onion, a cross between an onion and a leek. )

Comments

[thalionar.livejournal.com]

now I'm hungry :)

[montuos]

Me, too! :-9

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

Mmmmm... lawn weeds.... :-9

I actually adore good flavorful mixed greens. At some point I was on a site talking about lawns (damned monoculturalists, think grass is the only good lawn plant there is) and discovered that most of the plants they listed as "common weeds" that they didn't want on lawns were things I really likes in my salad. Ever since then I've used "assorted lawn weeds" as a synonym for Spring Mix and other good flavorful mixed salads.