“Lemonwhyt” is a dish in the book Fabulous Feasts, one of the mainstays of SCA cooking. It was published a long time ago, and the standards of historical accuracy were not what they are now.

It’s basically a rice mould with a lemon flavour and pleasant yellow colour. If you stick frozen peas in it late in the cooking, they gleam like emeralds. I used to do these in children’s beach buckets as castle moulds, and they looked fabulous. They were delicious, too, and cheap to make if somebody had a lemon tree. I always made it if we had vegetarians coming.

The last time I did it was in 2001 for the Torlyon Principality Feast. We did it in castle moulds, and I made up little flags with the arms of all the groups in Lochac!

I haven’t made this since then, as it’s really not period. There are plenty of rice-mould dishes in primary sources, but I’ve never seen one with lemon.

Maybe I could do a “Misrule” feast of tasty dishes we now know are inauthentic — I can think of a few.

[I bought a sandcastle mould to make one of these up, but it hasn’t happened yet, and I didn’t want to delay the blog any longer. One day.]

You can do other rice moulds that are period. The classic is “blankmangere”, made with chicken breast meat, good stock and a little spice. I have done it once in castle moulds. The taste was OK but I wouldn’t rush to do blankmangere again; maybe for a White Feast.