makingandknowing - Zhao - Reconstruction of Blewmanger

Reconstruction of Blewmanger

Name: Wenrui Zhao (partner with Tianhe Lou)
Date and Time: 19 Sep 2015, 10am-5pm
Location: Tianhe's flat in Bronx
Subject: to reconstruct blewmanger

BACKGROUND:

This recipe is taken from the book The good husvvifes Iewel, published in 1587. In the title page, it reads:
Wherein is to be found most excellent and rare deuises for conceites in Cookery, found out by the practise of Thomas Dawson.
Wherevnt is adioyned sundry approued receits for many soueraineoyles, and the way to distill many precious waters, with diuers approued medicines for many diseases.
Also certain approued points of husbandry, very necessary for all hunbanmen to konw.

It reminds us that the book’s potential readers probably were those of middling rank who were able to read but had to cook on themselves rather than servants. Thus this book may be a kind of cheap handbook, providing practical information on husbandry.

Now we can find three editions of the book, separately published in 1587, 1596 and 1610. It also had a sequel called The Second Part of the good Hus-wiues Iewell in 1597. So we can presume that this book was so popular at that time that it got reprinted again and again.

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II. BLEWMANGER:
The first question after we received the recipe was: what is blewmanger? We wanted to understand it from a etymology perspective. There is a medieval dish called Blancmange which is still being served today. Although the way of cooking Blancmange has changed, the word has preserved, which literally means ‘white dish’ derived from French. So blewmanger is a ‘blew’ dish, then what is ‘blew’? Blew in medieval English can mean blue, but can also be derived from Proto-Indo-European *bʰlēw, which means “yellow, blond, grey”. Our common sense makes us more inclined to think it means ‘yellow’ in this context, rather than blue.

Ingredients:
The recipe mentions five ingredients to make the dish:

Eggs (12 or 16)
Cream (a pint)
Rosewater (a little)
Sugar
Biscuit

While there is little contention as to what eggs were in the 16th century, all the other four ingredients need to be re-considered in their historical terms.

Cream: all the cream sold in the supermarket now is pasteurized, and most of them is sour-cream, which is also fermented. Both the technology of pasteurization and fermentation was not available in the early modern time. Taking sour-cream directly from the shelf of the supermarket, and using it as an ingredient will undoubtedly lead to a not authentic 16th century dish.

So to restore the authenticity as much as possible, we decided to make cream by ourselves. In the same book where the recipe comes from, there is another recipe about how to make cream:

“TAke a gallon or two of milke from the Cowe and séeth it, and when it doth séeth, put thereunto a quart or two of morning milke in faire cleansing pans, in such place as no dust may fall therein, and this is for your clowted Creame”

But the next question is: what kind of milk shall we use? Back then, it was raw milk that was used to make such dairy products. As it is illegal to sell unpasteurized raw milk except if the sellers have special permission, we have acquired low-pasteurized, unhomogenized whole milk, which is the closest modern substitute for the late medieval raw cow milk.

We then heated the milk, let it cool down, and took the solidified substance as the “cream” for out dish.

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Rosewater: It is a curious fact to us that rosewater is frequently mentioned as a cooking ingredient in many recipes of the book, yet there is no mention at all about how one can make rosewater. This lead us to wonder whether rosewater is a ready-made ingredient one could easily buy so didn’t need to make by oneself, or it was such a common ingredient that did not need any more introduction?

Our research shows that rosewater was originated from Middle East, and to this day is still a common ingredient in many middle eastern dishes, such as Turkish delight. It was made by distilling damask roses.

Even though we tried very hard, we could not get damask roses, which is a kind of garden rose that is not commonly sode in flower shops. Therefore, we just picked a random bouquet of pink roses.

The distillation equipment is another issue. It was not quite possible to source a sophisticated distillation equipment with the time and budget restriction, so we created a home-made primitive equipment. Basically in the centre of the pot where we boiled rose, we put 2 cups. We then covered the pot with its lid, and on the lid we put some ice cubes. So when the water was boiled, it would generate steam, and when the steam got in contact with the cooled surface of the lid, it would turn into drops that would fall in the cup. Those drops collected in the cups would be our ‘rose water’.

However, we found two problems with this process:

Firstly, it is not a very efficient method. Only a small quantity of drops were collected.
Secondly, the roses we bought did not have a strong flavor or fragrance. The ‘rose water’ we made was quite bland.

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Sugar: we chose the refined white sugar, as our research shows that in around 1500 Florence, most sugar purchase at retail level was refined white sugar, and the more refined it was, the more expensive it would be.

Biscuit: The blewmange is supposed to be a spread on a ‘biscuit’. However, what is biscuit is another problem. We found in a 17th century English cooking book Archimagirus Anglo-Gallicus; Or, Excellent & Approved Receipts and Experiments in Cookery, 1658 a recipe on how to make biscuit:

“Take the yolks of two dozen of egges, two handful of Anniseeds, a little yest, one pound of butter, one quart of creame, foure pound of fine wheat flowre, work all these together in a paste, and make it up in long rouls being something flat, then lay them upon papers, and set them into the Oven and bake them, (but not throughly) then let them stand a day or two, then cut them into slices, and rub them over with small beaten sugar, then lay them upon papers, and set them into the Oven, until they be hard.”

Considering it is too complicated a process and our limited, we abstracted the information into the 2 main essential characteristics of the biscuits: crispy and sweet. So we used a packet of modern day biscuits that satisfy these 2 criteria as our base for the blewmange spread.

III. PROCESS:
Original texts:
“To make Blewmanger. Take to a pinte of creame twelve or sixteene yolkes of egges, and straine them into it, and seeth them well euer stirring it with a sticke that is broad at the end but before you seeth it put in suger, and in the seething tast of it that you may if neede bee put in more suger, and when it is almost sodden put in a little Rose water that it may taste thereof, and seeth it well till it be thicke, and then straine it againe if it hath neede, or else put it in a fayre Dish and stirre it till it be almost cold, and take the white of all the Egges, and straine them with a pinte of Cream and seeth that with suger, and in the ende put in rosewater as into the other, and seeth it till it be thicke enough, and then vse it as the other, and when ye serue it ye may serue one dish and another of the other in roules, and cast on biskets.”

Our process:
We proportionally reduce the amount of the ingredients used (i.e., 3 eggs, ¼ pint cream)

crack three eggs and separate yolks from whites
whip egg yolks/ whites, pour in ¼ pint (144 milliliters) of cream and 25 grams of sugar, and stir them together
keep stirring while seething the mixture until it gets thick
put it aside till cold and serve it on biscuits

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IV. ISSUES TO CONSIDER:
The measurement:
In the process of making the dish, we were confused by the definition of “a pint of”. In fact, the measurement in 16th century slightly differs from today. It is assured that one pint is always one-eighth of a gallon. However, gallon’s conversion with metric system has changed. People may feel confused by British gallon system before 1824, since there was no standard around the country. At last, we had to adopt an online chart showed as below (this measurement shall be called ale gallon, but there is also other gallon system at this time such as wine gallon).

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Heating:
In the recipe, there is no note that we should keep stirring while seething the mixture. Nevertheless, when we were heating we found that without doing so it would be easily overcooked, especially the mixture with egg whites. We assume that this is the effect of modern apparatus, which is able to heat the mixture quickly.

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Separation of egg yolks and whites:
The author of the recipe took it for granted that every reader should know how to separate egg yolks and whites. But we didn’t. We even failed several times. This reminds us again that readers of this book were familiar with cooking, that this is a handbook of practical use.

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Reconstruction of Blewmanger

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