An Anglo-Saxon miscellany

Just a couple of recipes to finish off my gourmet trip back in time to Anglo-Saxon England, before I move onto the Middle Ages in my next post. 

The first one is taken from The British Museum Cookbook by Michelle Berriedale-Johnson (London: British Museum publications, 1987), an interesting collection of recipes from different periods of world history.  A straightforward and tasty recipe that uses barley as the central carbohydrate, it probably represents the type of dish eaten on a special occasion in a typical Anglo-Saxon household – the problem of many early recorded recipes is that they do not necessarily represent what the general population would have eaten, but rather what the nobility and court ate (as published cookbooks were few and far between and emanated from the kitchens of wealthy households; moreover there are no existing recipes written down from the Anglo-Saxon period).  The typical Anglo-Saxon peasant diet is likely to have been mainly vegetarian and composed of bread, beans, peas and root vegetables typically cooked into a ‘briw’ (a soup, broth or stew).  But this would have been, depending on availability, occasionally supplemented by cheese, fish, poultry and more rarely by red meats.[1]  Berriedale-Johnson’s dish is a barley and vegetable ‘briw’ but with the addition of chicken (though she suggests replacing the chicken with veal, hare [if you can source one] or rabbit [though rabbits were not native to England until after the Norman Conquest]).