PACIENTES CON MIH
7.5 Análisis de las asociaciones de la MIH: Contribución a la clarificación de su etiología
7.5.1 HSPM y su asociación con la MIH: Valor predictivo de la HSPM
The contents of English feasts changed little from the latter Middle Ages into the sixteenth century. In a book on carving printed by Wynkyn de Worde, menus were included for different times of year. The following was what should be served from the Feast of St. John the Baptist (June 24) to Michaelmas (September 29). The first course included a pottage, greens, gruel, frumenty (wheat) with venison mortrus (sauce pounded in a mortar), legs of pork with green sauce, roasted capon, and swan with chawdron (a spiced sauce of giblets). In the second course were pottage with roasted mutton, veal, pork, chickens or glazed pigeons, herons, fritters, or other bakemeats (pies).5
Starches
87. RICE WITH ALMOND MILK
Italy, 1470 (Martino, 35)
To make ten servings, take a pound of almonds and clean well so they are white. Then take half a pound of rice and wash it two or three times with tepid water and place on the fire with clear water and let it cook well. Then remove them and set to dry. Then pound the said almonds well, moistening and sprinkling on top often with a bit of cool water, so they don’t get oily; then temper with cool water and pass through a sieve and place this milk to boil in a pot adding half a pound of fine sugar. And when it begins to boil place in the rice and put the pot over the coals far from the fire, stirring often with a spoon so it doesn’t burn up, and let it boil for half an hour. Similarly, you can cook this rice with
the way to rid it is this: remove the minestra from the pot, be careful not to touch the bottom, and place it in another clean pot. Then take a white cloth and fold it three or four times And bathe it in cool water. Then squeeze out the water and place the cloth thus doubled over the pot of minestra, and let it stand for a quarter hour, then bathe another time and replace over the pot if it is necessary, and in this way the smoke will be removed. I haven’t found a better remedy to remove smoke. The same works with faro.
Beginning in the fifteenth century, rice was grown extensively in Italy, especially in the north. This is the ancestor of a modern risotto, though the cooking technique is entirely different and the final dish is quite sweet. Since it is called a minestra, which means a kind of thick soup, it should probably be slightly liquid rather than firm. This recipe also provides a good reminder that even professional chefs could ruin food sitting on the fire. Martino’s directions for saving a burnt dish echo Rupert of Nola’s (see recipe #37, Royal Fava Beans), in the section on vegetables, though it is actually much simpler. There are other indications in his cookbook that he learned a great deal from the Catalan cookbook author and several recipes labeled as Catalan come directly from Rupert.
88. TO MAKE TEN PLATES OF “MACCHERONI”
Italy, 1549 (Messisbugo, 52)
Take 5 pounds of white flour, and two white breads grated. Mix it well with the flour. Then have some boiling water ready. Mix in three eggs and make a dough that is not too tough nor too soft. Let it rest a bit, then cut it into pieces about the size of a chestnut. Make your macaroni on the back of a grater. Cook them in the boiling water until done. Add a bit of salt, and take 2½ pounds of grated hard cheese with an ounce and a half of crushed pepper. Mix it together. When you want to serve it, place the cheese below and above, plus a pound and a half of fresh melted butter on top. Then cover with the other plates and put them in a hot oven until you’re ready to send it to the table and set them down. If you put a bit of sugar and cinnamon over it, it will be better.
These are clearly dumplings, more closely related to modern gnocchi than hollow tubes of pasta, and this was probably the original form of macaroni, which by this time meant something quite different in various parts of Italy. The procedure for forming them involves pressing and rolling the lumps of dough along the sharp side of a cheese grater creating a pointed surface that absorbs the butter and cheese. Baking between two plates was also a com- mon procedure, the upper plate being inverted and then in this case, several other plates being heated and used for service as well. A covered casserole also works. As for the quantity called for, apart from the fact that a standard pound troy weight was 12 ounces rather than 16, this still is enough for more
than a dozen servings. The exact proportions of each ingredient really don’t matter, but 2 cups of flour to 1 of crumbs, enough boiling water to form a stiff dough and one egg yield a good dumpling that will hold together.
89. TO MAKE RAVIOLI FOR MEAT AND LEAN DAYS,FOR 10 PLATES
Italy, 1549 (Messisbugo, 57)
Take beet greens well washed and chopped, and place in a vessel with 6 pounds of good grated cheese and 2 pounds of fresh butter and 20 eggs, and one ounce of pepper, a half ounce of ginger, an ounce of cinnamon, and two grated breads passed through a sieve, and a half pound of raisins, and knead everything together. Then have half a pound of white flour spread on a table, and with this mixture make your ravioli as large or small as you wish. Then let them cook in water, on lean days with butter and a little saffron in the water, and let them cook quickly so they don’t break. Then serve them with good cheese grated over, and for meat days cook them in good broth with saffron, and raisins in the dough, and when they are cooked take cheese, sugar and cinnamon mixed together, and when you wish to serve sprinkle cheese below and above, and when you want to vary it you can make them without beets but with a bit of povina cheese.
This pasta is also closer to a kind of gnocchi because there is no actual sheet of dough enclosing the filling. The mixture is merely rolled in the flour spread on the table. The povina was a buffalo cheese, probably similar to mozzarella. Any green will work in this recipe, and in fact the word bieta was used generically for any green leafy rabe, chard, or similar plant. The 10 plates that Messisbugo speaks of must have been enormous, and clearly each is meant to serve an entire table. It is also clear that when potatoes were introduced to Italy, they merely replaced the bread crumbs in recipes like this, much as corn replaced native grains in polenta. Like many of Messisbugo’s recipes, variants are given for days when the church permitted meat and for Lent or Advent when meat was forbidden, but apparently butter was not.
90. TO MAKE PANCAKES
England, 1588 (The Good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchen, 59)
Take new thicke Creame a pinte, four or five yolks of Egs, a good handful of flower, and two or three spoonfuls of Ale, strain them altogether into a faire platter, and season it with a good handful of Sugar, a spoonful of Synamon, and a litle Ginger: then take a frying pan, and with a ladle out to the further side of your pan some of your stuffe, and hold the pan aslope, so that your stuffe may run abroad over all your pan, as thin as may be: then set it to the fyre, and let the fyre be verie soft, and when the one side is baked, then turne
Unlike modern pancakes, the batter for these is very thin and when fried becomes crisp. They are more like crispy sweet crepes than the fluffy risen pancakes of today.
Pancakes were traditionally eaten on Shrove Tuesday, the day right before Lent when people had to use up forbidden foods such as eggs, butter, and other dairy products. The word “Shrove” comes from the verb “to shrive,” meaning to confess one’s sins and be absolved. In England there is also a traditional pancake race held on this day, going back to 1445 in the town of Olney in Buckinghamshire. The legend goes that a woman was cooking pancakes when she heard the church bell ring and ran to church with the hot pan in her hand, still wearing an apron. The race reenacts this.
91. FRIED FRESH BUTTER
France, 1555 (Livre fort excellent de cuisine, xxiv)
Take a stale white bread and make very fine crumbs, take 2 ounces of starch, 2 ounces of sugar and a bit of cinnamon and pound as much fresh butter as these drugs or more, then form into a kind of loaf of butter. And soak with flour, egg yolks, a little rosewater, sugar, salt, without adding water, then soak everything together with this batter like for wafers. And when it is soaked melt a bit of fresh butter and place in your pan as if you want to make maleffrain then place your loaf of butter in your pan on the said crust and envelop it with grease. And turn it from one side to the other and make it cook. Serve hot with sugar on top.
This recipe is similar to one found in a fifteenth-century version of the
Viandier but differs in some respects and is a little harder to follow. It seems as if the author intends that the entire loaf of crumbs and butter be soaked in the batter, which will form a kind of crust on the outside keeping the contents within. There were also similar recipes that roasted the butter on a spit. The word maleffrain does not appear in historic French dictionaries and may be either a typesetter’s error or a slang word for some kind of fritter. Interestingly, the author calls the spices “drugs,” which is also how they were used.
Eggs and Dairy
92. EGGS ON THE GRILL
Italy, 1470 (Martino, 76)
Beat two fresh eggs very well and heat and empty pan enough so that it is very hot and toss in these beaten eggs. Let it go around the whole pan the
way you make a frittata very thin like paper. When it seems to you well cooked fold in the four sides so that it is square like a little frame. And place this on the grill, breaking onto it as many fresh eggs as it seems to you it can hold above, heat it below and above gently the way you do a tart, sprinkling over sugar and cinnamon. When it seems to you that the said eggs are firm, lifting them from the grill, you will bring them to the table, thus they will be in their little frame.
This can be done on a very moderate barbecue grill with the lid covered. If the eggs are broken very carefully directly onto the frittata, they will not slide off. Clearly Martino is trying to invent as many fantastic new ways to serve eggs as possible. In one of the Martino manuscripts it even describes how to cook eggs on a piece of paper as a kind of trick. Parchment paper, rolled and crimped along the entire edge so that it can hold a little oil, is place on hot coals or above a candle, but not too close. In this an egg is gen- tly cooked.6 Strange as it may seem, water can also be boiled in a paper bag.
The bag must be folded into a container without any glued seams below, so a regular paper bag will not work. But if the water does not leak out, it can be held directly over a flame. The water prevents it from catching on fire.
93. TO MAKE EGGES IN MONESHYNE
England, 1540s or 50s (A Proper Newe Booke of Cokerye, Biv)
Take a dyshe of rosewater and a dyshe full of suger, and sette them upon a chafyngdysh, and let them boyle, than take the yolkes of viii or viiii egges newe layde and putte them thereto, every one from other, and lette them harden a little, and so after this maner serve them forthe, and case a lyttle synamon and suger upon them.
The sugar and rosewater are the cooking medium into which the egg yolks are carefully and lightly poached while keeping them separate. They are reminiscent of a full moon, hence the word Moneshyne in the recipe name. A century later, cookbook author Robert May has several recipes of the same name that are what we would call “sunny side up” fried eggs, which he serves with fried onion rounds. But he also has a variant of this recipe scarcely changed except that it is clarified somewhat. A syrup of rose- water, sugar, and sack (sherry) or white wine is brought to the boil and the egg yolks are dropped in with some ambergris, turned, kept separate, and cooked until hard.7
94. JASPER OF MILK
France, 1555 (Livre fort excellent de cuisine, xxiv)
everything together and let it boil. And when it is cooked and you turn it out onto a napkin to press until it is cold, from one day to another is cold enough. Then cut in little slices and fry in butter. Serve hot with sugar on top and bring to the table and it looks like jasper.
Jasper is a green and white mottled stone, thus this dish is a kind of surprise or subtlety. The white powder the author mentions is sugar and ginger.
95. FRITTATA SIMPLE, GREEN, FILLED AND DIFFICULT
Italy, 1549 (Messisbugo, 110)
Take ten eggs, because this is typical, and beat them very well with a little salt, and when they are well beaten, add in a little water, then put in a pan six ounces of fresh butter and when it is melted throw in the egg and cook your frittata, the water will make it soft, then put on top pounded cinnamon so it will be prepared. If you want it green put mint, parsley and other oily herbs in pounded finely with a knife, following the way mentioned above to cook it. If you want it filled you put in fat grated cheese or povina, and raisins inside, and pine nuts, and onions finely chopped, and fresh fennel, and use sometimes one thing or another. And if you want it fussy, follow the directions given first, add prosciutto finely chopped or three or four ounces of mortadella, following the directions for cooking the others, and on top of all of them a lot of pounded cinnamon goes well.
The variations offered here clearly let the cook add whatever is at hand. A frittata is unlike an omelet in that it is cooked in one layer and is not stirred or folded in half. The texture is thus more firm. One can, if feeling adventurous, slide the fritatta onto a plate when nearly done and then put the pan on top and flip the two so that the other side can be browned. There is no indication that this was done in the past though. For the cheese, a hard grating cheese or a soft mozzarella work well, as will practically any cheese.
Sauces
96. CAMELINE SAUCE
Italy, 1470 (Martino, 43)
Have some raisins pounded very well. Have two or three slices of bread toasted, then soaked in red wine, more or less depending on the quantity that you want to make. Pound together the aforementioned things. Then take a bit of red wine, some sapa and verjuice, and whoever doesn’t like verjuice can make it with vinegar, making it sweet our sour according to what pleases you. Pass all this composition through a sieve, adding then enough good cinnamon, a bit of cloves and nutmeg pounded.
This was a standard sauce through the Middle Ages, used with many types of meat. Its name has generated a good deal of discussion. It was often assumed cameline had some connection to canella (another name for cinnamon or cassia) because that spice was often included, but not always. It has also been suggested that the sauce is brownish like a camel. Perhaps it was meant to resemble the cameline flower, golden in color, though the sauce is definitely dark brown. Unlike sauces based on herbs, such as a pesto, this can actually be made as well in a blender as by pounding it, and sieving is unnecessary if you are using seedless raisins and ground spices.
97. WHITE AGLIATA (GARLIC SAUCE)
Italy, 1470 (Martino, 48)
Take almonds cleaned very well and pound them, and when they are half pounded place in the quantity of garlic that you want, and pound it together sprinkling on some cold water so it doesn’t become greasy. Then take the interior of white bread and let it soften in light meat broth or of fish depending on the season, and this agliata can be served and adapted for all seasons, both meat and fast days as you wish.
The agliata was also a common sauce for centuries before Martino was writing. It takes its name from garlic, or aglio in Italian. It absolutely must be made in a mortar. A cup of peeled blanched almonds, one garlic clove, and a slice of crustless white bread soaked in broth will made enough sauce for two.
98. HELL SAUCE
France, 1555 (Livre fort excellent de cuisine, xxxiiiv)
Let your pigs feet boil until well cooked in good bouillon. And when they are well cooked, take them and place them to roast on a grill. Then chop them into large morsels in a plate with green sauce over them. When your feet are cooking golden on the grill, take onions chopped fine and place them in a plate and stew them with verjuice. And when they are stewed enough, add a bit of mustard, then take your pig’s feet divided in pieces and place it on a completely hot plate with live coals on top, and then put your tart sauce on top and serve it at once to the table.
This is not exactly a sauce, but a kind of joke. One won- ders how it could have been edible, or what effect it was meant to have. Presumably the meat and sauce would be brought to the table sizzling on the platter, creating a dra-
server would most likely have been very dexterous in removing the edible portions from the hot coals.
99. SAUCE FOR ROAST BEEF
France, 1555 (Livre fort excellent de cuisine, xlixv )
Let your beef roast, stuck with cloves, and when it is half cooked, douse your beef with vinegar and place your pan beneath to save the vinegar. And place in fine spices and crushed pepper and a bit of toasted bread if you like, and put in a bit of sage to strengthen the flavor, and let it boil. If the vinegar is too