FIRST COURSE

Chicken pies – with onions and turnips. Looked great.

Fartes of Portingale – boiled balls of minced lamb with currants and dates, in a mustard sauce (mustard + vinegar mixed to runny consistency). Very popular. My notes say 500g of mince made 17 fartes.

Salmon rostyd in sauce – salmon with verjuice and onion. Tasty. From MS Pepys 1047, via somebody else’s recipe.

Little tarts of spinage – spinach and apple in little muffin trays.

Potage of leeks – own recipe, 1 can of white beans with 2 leeks, some celery, and a dash of vinegar to finish, serves 8.

Sweet potatoes – roast them, slice, add oil, vinegar, and we added a little mustard. Went down well and would do again for the right feast. Recipe is in Gerard’s Herbal of 1597.

SECOND COURSE

Fritours of figges – a period recipe, similar to several in Forme of Cury, which we pinched from Pinterest. You make a spiced fig mix, wrap in pastry, then pan-fry with some honey. Yum.

Tarte of prunes – period recipe (A Propre new booke of Cokery) but we thickened with rice flour rather than bread, for the gluten-intolerant. Makes a black tart. One recipe says to scatter caraways; we used colourful candied fennel comfits from the indian shop for a great visual effect.

Apple and orange tarts – written up here.

Shrewsbury cakes – written up here.

Eccles cakes – recipe from the Web; we had cutouts in tiny star shapes which looked pretty flash; they were delicious.

Suckets of carot – sticks of carrot boiled in sugar syrup to candy them.  I used several different colours of carrots, boiled them in separate batches, then mixed the suckets at the end.  Looked great in shot glasses, tasted like sticky fruit.  Would do again, occasionally.

Jumballs – little pastry knots, tasty and attractive.

A white leach of almonds – kind of like a blancmange, OK but not exciting, a good balance for the richer desserts.