Sunday, November 1, 2009

Catching Up and Getting Things Off My Chest

It’s been nearly a month since I’ve posted, mostly because I’ve been really busy, but also because I’ve been annoyed at myself for writing my last post. I could go back and change/delete the offending bits, but that strikes me as very ‘trollish’ (the internet kind, not the live under bridges kind). So in the interest of full-disclosure . . .

It’s really just that penultimate sentence, “Neolithic Farming figures that yields of 300 kg/hectare (2.47 acres) were well within reason for pre-historic Europe.” Who cares what Neolithic Farming says about yields? Those are Neolithic, not medieval. They are using techniques not common in the middle ages in Europe (intensive agriculture of small plots, using a variety of crops, entirely by hand; at least that’s the thesis of the book).

Now admittedly, I had Neolithic Farming on my brain since I had just read it, and the post was written pretty quickly one evening, but still. I want to hold myself to a higher standard.

And now back to our regularly scheduled program . . .

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Planting Day - Supplemental

I harvested what is probably the last of the red, summer wheat today. There is still a little bit of green wheat out there, but I’m expecting the birds to eat it before its mature enough to harvest. We’ll see.

The total is 4.5 ounces of wheat out of 115 sq. feet of garden. So if we follow the math out we get:
1 pound = 16 oz. which would need a garden 3.55 times larger = 409 sq. feet
1 acre = 43,560 sq. feet which would produce 106.5 lbs

These number might be quite a bit off, since we’re dealing with quite a small sample and projecting those numbers very big.

According to Neolithic Farming in Central Europe: An Archaeobotanical Study of Crop Husbandry Practices a person needs about 660 lbs. (300 kg) of wheat/year or 3300 lbs. (150 kg) for a family of five. That would be 6.2 acres / person or 31 acres for the family.

Which says to me that my yield was pretty low, which is hardly surprising considering my lack of skill, the patch of the garden (maybe one-fifth of it) that didn’t grow anything, probably because it was under the tree, and the poor weather for the season.

Neolithic Farming figures that yields of 300 kg/hectare (2.47 acres) were well within reason for pre-historic Europe.

All in all I’m very pleased and ready to try again and see if I can do better.

Friday, September 4, 2009

Meadmaking Update - 10 weeks in

The short update is that it’s chugging along slowly but surely. It’s been ten weeks and I’ve racked it twice. Racking is when you transfer the proto-mead from one container to another, leaving behind the dead yeast and other residue. It has continued to bubble steadily, which says that the little yeasts are still doing their thing.

The specific gravity is 1.100, which means it hasn’t changed much. It tastes very good; still quite sweet (even a little too sweet for me) and not very strong. So I’ll let it keep going. I’ll post updates as they develop.

As a non-medieval aside, I’m also making Apricot Wine, which was too bland, so I added apricot juice to it as I bottled it, which then just settled out in the bottom of each bottle. We’ll have to see how that turns out. And I’m about to try making Blackberry Wine, as my neighbor kindly offered the bounty of his bushes for a share of the wine.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

New Book - Neolithic Farming

I’ve had the opportunity to look at and flip through Neolithic Farming in Central Europe: An Archaeobotanical Study of Crop Husbandry Practices by Amy Bogaard.

This looks to be a fabulous book full of all sorts of the in-depth, technical information that I have been looking for. It references numerous European experimental farms and the results that they have had using a variety of proposed medieval, ancient and pre-historical techniques. It talks about yields, crops types and methods.

This is definitely one that is going to be read and re-read.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Planting Day - 21 Weeks in

Like in the last picture, some of the wheat is a nice, harvestable, tan, straw color, while some of it is still very green and growing. So all of it was certainly not ready to be harvested. But there were two issues.

First, I was worried about mold. I’d gotten sooty mold on my winter wheat from letting it sit out on the stalk longer than it should have. I didn’t want that to happen here and some of those dry stalks had been ready to harvest for quite a while.

Secondly, some of the stalks, especially those that had fallen over after the rain storm of a few weeks ago, were missing some or all of there wheat berries. Under them was the chaff that belonged to the ear, and I first thought that the seeds were falling off the stalk. But when I looked more closely, there were no seeds on the ground. So I immediately blamed the squirrels that are always chittering around the back yard and even came inside to rant to the wife and kids about how those damn squirrels were eating all of my grain. When I went out the next morning to go to work, however, there was a flock of little birds (wrens?) sitting on the fence above the field. They were easy to scare off, at least temporarily, but I think they are the grain-eating culprits.

So I wanted to harvest those ears of wheat that were ready. I’m not sure if this phenomenon is normal or not. Gies and Gies in Life in a Medieval Village make a big deal about the September harvest and about how quickly it had to be done and the labor shortages associated with the harvest. You think of people out in the fields with scythes, mowing down all the wheat, not taking time to select some stalks and come back to others. So I wonder if this particular harvest is a bit odd because of the dry summer and the hard rain about 2/3 through. (I also have some questions about the Michelmas harvest, but I’ll save this discussion for a later date.)

Following the technique I used successfully on the winter wheat, I went out there with a large plastic bowl and my kitchen shears and snip, snip, snipped. I quickly determined that for an ear to be ready for harvesting, the entire ear had to be tan with no bits of green. Otherwise the wheat berries were soft and unready.

Once I had all of the ears that I could get, they went into the old pillowcase. The red wheat needed more beating than the white, winter wheat did, but they did eventually all separate from the stalk and husks.

Then I got an old bed sheet (that matched the pillowcase!) and poured the contents of the pillowcase onto the center of the sheet. I recruited my reluctant daughter and we spent 10-15 minutes tossing the wheat and chaff into the air. I was downwind, so all the chaff blew in my face, and it all worked surprisingly well. The hard seed kernels fell straight back onto the sheet, while the stalks and husks were whisked away into my hair.

That all actually happed about a week and a half ago, on August 23rd. I went out again yesterday and harvested more, though it is still sitting in the pillowcase. There is still quite a bit left green in the field, and I have probably only harvested about half.

I forgot to take pictures of any of that, so I will make sure to take pictures next time I harvest.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Threshing

I really didn’t have a good idea about how to do this step. I had the lovely ears of wheat (ok, maybe not so lovely as they has spots of mold on them) and they were all stuck together with their long awns poking out and their thick husks. I needed to get rid of all that -- get them separated and lose all of that chaff.

I of course, could do it by hand. It’s not that hard. Tear off a kernel from the ear. Squeeze/roll it between your fingers until the husk falls away or the wheat seed falls free. Easy to do, takes forever. Really only feasible when sampling to see if they’re ready to be harvested.

Do I do it the medieval way? Lay it out on a large tarp or clean floor and beat it with a flail? It would work I supposed, but I really only had a small amount. I was very worried about being too violent and loosing some of what I had.

So, with a little hint from our old friend the internet, I compromised. I feel that it has a medieval spirit but is better suited for my small harvest. I took an old pillowcase (a modern concession, it should have been a linen sack or something) and threw the wheat ear into it. My original intention was to beat the bag with a stick, and thus feel like I was threshing properly. But it was immediately apparent as I tried to find a good way to seal the open end of the pillowcase, that the easiest way to do it was to bring the wheat to the stick, rather than the other way around. So, holding the bag closed with hand and wielding it like a blackjack, I beat it against the side of my porch for a few minutes. To excellent effect!

Large pieces of stalk and chaff were easily removed by hand, the grains being heavier they rested at the very bottom of the sack. Once these large pieces were removed I poured what was left into a pan and considered winnowing. I was still worried about losing anything, so I didn’t want to take it outside and throw it into the wind. I also didn’t want to go through the laborious task of doing it by hand.

I eventually came up with the plan to float the chaff off. I filled the pan with water. The light chaff floated tot he top and I scraped it off, leaving fresh, clean wheat kernels at the bottom. After three goes with this to get every last bit I laid the berries out on a towel to dry so that they would not sprout -- no malting yet!

Here it is -- the fruits of almost a year of watching this grow in my little pot:


Monday, August 17, 2009

Sooty Mold

Saturday, I harvested my winter wheat. I should have done it two weeks ago as they were hard and ready to be reaped, but I was busy and threw out my back and never quite got around to it.

There was also the problem of how to do it. Do I get a scythe? What else would I cut them with? Do I cut at the top or the bottom of the stalk? How do I winnow and thresh? Etc. I eventually decided to cut them just below the ear of grain with a pair of sharp kitchen scissors. Hardly medieval, I know, and surprisingly time consuming.

When I got out there to finally do it though, the tops of the stalks were covered in black spots. I cut them anyway and then went inside to do research about the spots. Here’s a picture of the harvested ears of corn:


Once at the computer, I found a website, The Guide to Wheat Diseases and Pests, which was very good at diagnosing my condition. It is a Black (or Sooty) Mold.

From these two websites: Wheat FAQ (USDA) and Weekly Crop Update it appears that it is not a serious problem and the wheat is still usable.

Now I just have to figure out how to thresh it. It’s not a big deal doing it with my fingers but it would be prohibitively time consuming to do it for a lot of grain. So I’m going to try a few different things this week and see how it goes. I’ll keep the events posted here.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Planting Day - 19 Weeks in

How long did the Red Wheat say it needed to grow? Checking back to the Bountiful Harvests website, I see that it says 17-19 weeks.

Well here we are at 19 weeks:



We had a hard rain a few days ago and it bent/knocked over many of the wheat stalks. That probably has something to do with my shallow planting, since my winter wheat were not so affected.

As you can see in the picture, some of the wheat is tan and dry, looking ready to be harvested and some isn’t. How can you tell if it’s ready? Several websites I have read have mentioned a fingernail test: apply pressure to a kernel with your fingernail and if it doesn’t leave a dent in the seed then it is ready to harvest.

Applying that method, some of them are ready and some of them aren’t. Considering what has happened with my winter wheat, I will harvest the ready ones this week and leave the green ones to fully mature.

What happened to my winter wheat? I will explain all tomorrow.

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Planting Day - 16 Weeks in

I’ve been very bad about posting but the summer has been very busy -- in a non-medieval way. Real life, I’m afraid, has reared its ugly head and kept me away from reading and medieval projects. Hopefully that will change soon.

The big news is the wheat. Thanks to either a good deal of rain (it’s been a dry summer here) or some more time to grow (probably some of both, really) the field is doing much better.

Three weeks ago I reported that there were 31 ears of corn on the stalks of wheat. A week later, there were 74. A week after that there were 111. After being away at the Oregon Shakespearean Festival for most of the following week, I returned to find an explosion of wheat seeds. There are currently over 200 stalks with sheaves of wheat atop them (that’s where I lost count).




Last year’s very experimental winter wheat is now dry as a bone and the kernels are hard. I couldn’t crush the one I tried to in my teeth. I’ll give them a few more days to make sure, then I’ll try harvesting. More on that to come.

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Planting Day - 12 Weeks In

I went out the other day and weeded again. It took 90 minutes or so. I made several interesting discoveries.

First off, there was a patch where no wheat was growing. Since I weeded at a different time than I usually do (in the late afternoon), I noticed that this bare patch matches almost exactly the shadow cast by one of my big maple trees. So, one mystery solved.



Secondly, I didn’t bury the seeds very deep. In fact, I just sprinkled the wheat seeds across the topsoil. The roots have not penetrated the newspaper or spread out horizontally very much. Now that the stalks are growing, some of them have very little connection to the earth. Some have fallen over and others I have accidentally pulled out while weeding. So next time, I will bury them.

The good news is that 31 stalks have ears of grain on them. We finally got some rain about a week and a half ago, and it looks like more could still be ready to produce some grain.


My pot of winter wheat seems to be done growing and is turning brown. The wheat kernels are still soft and green on the inside. I pinched one off and squeezed it between my fingers and it gushed a white paste.

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Meadmaking

So today (and by today I actually mean Monday, June 22nd) I headed off to the local brewshop. I bought bottle brushes, yeasts and a automatic siphon.

But I suppose I should take about my meadmaking history, my credentials, so to speak. I was first introduced to mead about 10 years ago by a gaming buddy of mine, John. He brought a bottle over that was just heavenly. As I’ve already mentioned, I have a very sweet tooth, and his mead was the first alcohol that had really tasted good to me, without being mixed with syrup or hidden by soda.

The next time he made a batch he invited me over to help and most of what I remember of that day was watching a gigantic pot of honey water boil while we scrapped scum off the top. Once it cooled we mixed in some freshly squeezed orange juice, making it actually not a mead, but a melomel.

John later moved across the country and when he left he gave to me all of his brewing supplies, since they were so large to try and ship. I gave it a try on two occasions. The first time I made very young mead (I was impatient in my youth) that tasted strongly of yeast and was pretty harsh. The second batch I decided to let age longer, but I think I let the vapor lock dry out and the must went bad.

So today, armed with a new and quite wonderful book, The Compleat Meadmaker, by Ken Schramm, I decided that I wanted to give it another try. The summer has been very busy, but I felt like I needed to get the mead going over the summer, since we don’t heat our kitchen/laundry room over the winter, and the yeasts need the room temperature to be in the 60s.

So I’ve been looking around for good prices on honey. WinCo had orange blossom honey for $3.24 / pound, but could only sell them in little 2 cup jars or in the industrial 40 lb. buckets that they got them in. I only need 18 lbs. for this recipe, so it was a bit of a conundrum, but eventually I decided to get the big bucket and have enough honey for two batches.

The recipe I’m going to try in the Sweet Show Mead on page 164 of The Compleat Meadmaker. 18 lbs. of honey, 4 gallons of water (bottled spring water), and some modern yeast energizer and nutrient. The yeast I used was two packages of dry Lalvin D-47 yeast.

I heated one gallon of water to boiling in a large stock pot. I then added the 18-20 lbs. of honey (using a sterilized soup ladle). This took a lot longer than I expected and by the time it was all in the temperature in the pot was 110°, while it was supposed to be about 150°. The recipe wanted the honey water to sit at 150° for a while to kill any bugs in the honey. So I heated it up on the stove to 150°. No problem.

The next step, was to pour the hot honey water into the rest of the water. There were two important sub-step to this:
Don’t pour the 150° honey water on yourself (which I managed to succeed at).
Use refrigerated water so that it would reduce the overall temperature of the honey water to 80° so that the yeast could be added at a happy temperature for them.

Well, I had forgotten to buy the water until just a few hours before starting, so it wasn’t very cold and only dropped the overall temperature of the must to about 125° -- way too hot for the yeast. But, not anticipating this, I had already proofed the yeast -- poured it into some warm water to re-hydrate it and get it going. The instructions on the package had been very adamant that the yeast should bloom for 15 minutes and no longer.

It took something like three hours for the honey water to cool down to 85°. I was worried that the yeast might not be good anymore. Maybe they had woken up, found nothing to eat and starved to death. But I pitched them in anyway, and the stirred the heck out of it, to aerate the stuff as much as possible. Then I sealed it up, attached the vapor lock (a water-filled valve that lets CO² exit the airtight container, but doesn’t let bacteria-filled air in) and waited.

By bedtime it wasn’t doing anything but in the morning it was bubbling away.

It started fermenting with a Specific Gravity of 1.140. That’s a little higher than expected, so I probably put in more that 18 lbs. of honey. I want a sweet mead anyway, so that shouldn’t be a problem.

More details as things develop.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Sorry for the delay

Life has come to a head and I haven't been able to post about the meadmaking on Monday. Nothing bad is happening, just a lot of projects coming due at once. My roleplaying game, Ellis: Kingdom in Turmoil, which I try not to talk very much about here, is coming along _very_ well and I am doing a lot of playtesting and final refining. But it has taken me away from writing about mead and wheat.

The short of it is: the mead did get started and it is bubbling away in the kitchen right now. Due to a few small errors it took much longer than planned and I did worry that I had bloomed the yeast too soon. But I had no reason to fear. By morning those little guys were eating their way through the honey maying wonderul CO2 and ethanol.

More tonight or tomorrow as things calm down.

--Tim

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Hi honey! I'm Home!

I just got back from WinCo, a local chain of discount supermarkets. I have a 40 pound bucket full of honey. That's $123.50 of honey.

The meadmaking will start tomorrow!

Friday, June 12, 2009

Working the Fields

So if the heavy plow is turning over the ground, all of those weeds and grasses are being flipped under 4-8 inches or soil. That’s a lot deeper than my inch of topsoil and newspaper.

Just as a quick experiment, I recently broke out the shovel and dug down 6 inches or so and flipped over the turf. It’s been 10 days now and nothing has grown up there, whereas with the newspaper I had dandelions poking through within a few days.

Quoting from The Carolingian Economy which is in turn quoting from a capitulary from the year 800 from the town of Le Mans in Western France:

Every man holding a quarter of a _factus_, must be plowing his lord’s land a whole day with his beasts and thereafter his lord may not ask him to do handiwork service [such as carpentry or weaving] during the same week. And he who has not enough beasts to do this in one day shall complete the work in two days; and he who has only four infirm beasts, incapable of plowing by themselves, has to join other beasts in order to plow the lord’s land in one day and thereafter shall do one day of handiwork services in that week. And he who cannot do anything of these and has no draft-animals shall work three days (in a week) with his hands for his lord from dawn until sunset and his lord shall not ask more from him.

The emphasis is mine and shows that even with the heavy plow some people were still working the fields by hand. It implies that a day’s worth of plowing was equal to 3 days of hand turning the soil, though plowing could be much more efficient and this may be simply as much work as a lord could get out of a peasant and still allow him to take care of his own fields (especially since how much of the day is not specified for the plowmen).

So I think I have to call my first field a failure. I mean it’s been a lot of fun and I am very happy with it. But the experience isn’t medieval enough. I’ll keep posting about it and continue talking about the experience.

The important question though, is what do I do to fix it next time? What can I do to make my experience more medieval? I could plow, but I don’t have access to a team of oxen, horses or even a tractor. And the space I have is really too small for that anyway.

I could use a sod cutter. A sod cutter is a modern piece of equipment used to remove grass in those strips that you can buy from landscaping stores. They work essentially like a plow except that they have a moving blade that cuts horizontally under the level of the ground. Here’s a video showing how they work:



The problem with a sod cutter is that they all have a pre-set cutting depth -- which is 2.5 inches. While that is great for grass and gets the majority of the grass roots, it won’t get some weeds and if you just flipped that over you’d have a dense web of roots pointing up. I don’t think that would work.

So, I have bought myself a very nice spade and will do it, like in the quotation above, by hand. I have marked out a 600 square foot section of the lawn and I have plans to make a sowing tool. I’ll plant that section this fall with winter wheat and see how it goes.

You can trust that I will post all about it (and what it does to my poor old back) when the time comes.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Plowing Videos

A quick one of a hand plow pulled by two draft horses.


Here’s a three-horse team tearing up a field. There are some good shots of the sod being turned over and of the smooth, flat path the plow has left behind.


A close up of what is happening to the soil during plowing. It’s done with modern equipment, but shows very well what is happening to the ground.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

The Truth About Plows

OK, so the simplest plows are nothing more than a blade attached to a frame that can be pulled by people or animals. They have been around since pre-historic times and function like I mentioned yesterday -- they carve a shallow scratch or furrow and leave an undisturbed strip of ground between the furrows. So several passes over the field, usually at right angles to each other, were necessary to fully ‘till’ the land.

The heavy plow is more complicated and does much more. It consists of four main parts, the coulter, the plowshare, the moldboard and one or more wheels at the front of the plow.

The coulter is a vertical blade that cuts into the turf. It creates a slit in the ground that the plowshare can get into to do its work.

The plowshare is an iron or steel piece of the plow that dips under the sod and has a horizontal blade that cuts the earth parallel to the top of the soil. It essentially cuts out the top layer of the ground in one long strip and feeds it up to the moldboard.

The moldboard is a curved board that takes the turf cut by the plowshare and pushes it to the side, at the same time flipping it over. This takes that strip of sod and inverts it, dirt-side up off to the right side of path of the plow. All of the grass and weeds are now root-side up and are effectively buried under inches of earth.

The last important piece of the heavy plow is a wheel or set of wheels, whose height can be adjusted, which allows the farmer to set the depth at which the plowshare is cutting.

This is obviously much more work for the animals pulling the plow than the scratch plow. The horizontal blade of the plowshare is dragging through the ground 4-8 inches under and encountering a lot of resistance. In his book, Medieval Technology and Social Change, Lynn White Jr. talks a lot about the ramifications of the adoption of the heavy plow, making these important points:

  • That the plow required the pulling force of 8 oxen
  • That these large teams of oxen required a lot of effort and coordination to turn around, which changed the shape of fields to long strips
  • That few farmers could afford 8 oxen of their own, so peasants had to form alliances in order to come up with enough animals to pull the new plows
  • And that with this change came an essential change in philosophy: whereas peasants had once held an amount of land theoretically able to produce enough food to feed themselves, they now held land in proportion to how much they could contribute to the plow-team. Man was now no longer part of a natural cycle, he was now part of a ‘machine’ that exploited that cycle.

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Unthinkingly Plowing Through Life

You know, it’s amazing how when you think you know how something works, you stop paying attention. Whenever the subject comes up in a book or whatever, the brain just turns off and says, “I already know this, I don’t have to pay attention any more.”

An example of this has come up this week in regards to the wheat project. I’ve been thinking a lot about my little 115 square foot plot and all the weeding I’ve had to do. If it took me 2 hours to weed 115 sq. ft., that would mean it would take me 758 hours (63 12-hour days) to weed an acre.

I’ll admit that I’m slow and that this is the first time in my life that I’ve really done this, so with the sort of practice makes perfect that you get from doing a job all your life let’s say that you could cut that time down by a factor of five (which is probably generous). Even then it’s taking you two weeks to weed an acre that will then need to be re-weeded after a one or two week’s worth of time. That means that one person would be continually weeding a half or a full acre.

So during the season, a family of four (ages 10+) would be doing little all day but weeding 3 acres. That does not pass a reality check. Or it just barely does if you take the few acreage figures in the polyptychs, and cut them in half, figuring them to be fallow. But only barely. And even though it may have been possible, that doesn’t mean it was done or that it even needed to be done.

I could also be doing things wrong. In an effort to save the wheat and the newspaper’s integrity, I have not been using a trowel or other tool to try and get out the weeds’ roots. This is certainly making me weed more often, but since the newspaper technique isn’t historically accurate, the problem remains, probably on a larger scale since the newspaper is actually working in large areas.

Let’s go back to my initial paragraph. I’m not a farmer, nor have I ever spent any time on a farm. I have always known that fields get plowed. I know that the scratch plow used in the Mediterranean world was unsuitable for the heavy soils of northern Europe. I know that in the second-half of the first millennium AD a newer, iron-shod or iron-constructed plow was invented and revolutionized farming in the north. But I never really thought about what that meant to the ground.

It’s particularly funny/odd/disconcerting because I’ve just finished re-reading Medieval Technology and Social Change and it has my highlights in the section on plowing, so I really have no excuse for not having internalized this information.

I know that seeds need to go in the ground to grow. So I figured that was what a plow did -- made furrows in the ground for seeds to go in. But, as I am discovering in my own back yard, it’s not that easy. What about the wild grasses and weeds that are already there? Surely you’re not pulling those out by hand?

After a little bit of research, I have been educated as to what a heavy plow with a moldboard really does. And I will discuss that, tomorrow.

Monday, June 8, 2009

Planting Wheat -- 9 weeks in

I have my first ear of seeds in the Red Wheat!





The close-up is a bit blurry, but hopefully you can see the grains there. I examined them just the day before and I swear there was nothing there. I really think that those all grew in 24 hours (48 tops!).

Here’s a look at the whole plot:



Some small few have grown tall while most of them are still just grass-like little clumps.

My bucket of winter wheat had been stagnant for a while. Nothing had changed, no new ears of grain had appeared. Then in the middle of last week I watered the bucket on a whim and now there has been quite a bit of growth. Every single stalk has seeds now, even one stalk that had fallen over and was laying down flat.

Sunday, June 7, 2009

Roman _Libum_

So I made the Libum last week. The recipe that was in Around the Roman Table: Food and Feasting in Ancient Rome was pretty weak, but I was able to play with it and fill it out. Here’s what I did:

Ingredients:
  • 1 2 lb. container of Ricotta Cheese ($4 at my local mega-mart)
  • 2 pounds of whole wheat flour (I weighed it out and then forgot to measure that in cups) I only wound up using about 1 1/3 lbs. of it.
  • 1 egg
  • 1.5 teaspoons of salt
  • 2 tablespoons of melted butter

Dump the Ricotta into a large mixing bowl. Add the salt and the egg. Stir in as much of the flour as you can before your arm gets tired (or be smart and use a mixer -- I didn’t think it would get that stiff). Pour the mixture into a greased bread pan. Smooth the top with a spatula and perforate the top many times with a fork. Brush on the melted butter. Cook in a 350 degree oven for 1 hour. The dough will rise a small amount and brown on the top.

The family had a few slices that night and were quite pleased. The taste is subtle and mild, and it has a dense cheesecake-like texture. The next day I took the leftovers to a small party and everyone enjoyed it. Many thought it needed something to spice it up -- strawberries, cheesecake and chocolate were suggested. Another friend commented that he thought it would be good to slice up and deep fry.

Friday, May 29, 2009

Some Latin Measures

This is more for me than for any other reason but as long as I’m making a crib sheet, I might as well post it in case it is useful for someone else. I will add to this as needed.

Hectare -- a modern measure of area, equal to 2.471 acres or 107,639 sq. ft.

Roman Modius -- a measure of volume, often used to measure grain. I will use 8.73 liters as the size of this unit. It is interesting to note that it is often translated as “about two gallons”.

Carolingian Modius -- According to Verhulst and Grierson-Blackburn, it is suspected that in 793-4, Charlemagne increased the size of the official modius by 50%. This would make the new modius equal to about 13.1 liters.

Bonarius (aka Buonarius, pl. b(u)onarii) -- a measure of area used in the Carolingian Empire, given as 1.38 hectares (or 3.41 acres) in The Carolingian Economy (Cambridge Medieval Textbooks)
, by Adriaan Verhulst. “The normal occupancy of a mansus is one tenant [family] and it’s legal size is 16 bonarii.” p. 45. 16 bonarii is 54.56 acres.

Iornales (aka Iurnales) -- this word appears not to be a unit of measurement, but rather a vague word meaning “plowlands”.

Thursday, May 28, 2009

And Another

I got my other shipment of books from Kalamazoo today, this time from The University of Chicago Press. I got The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England, but I probably won’t get a chance to read that one for a while, and it’s not quite appropriate for this blog.

The other one though, is quite pertinent to what goes on here: Around the Roman Table: Food and Feasting in Ancient Rome. It contains over 150 recipes reconstructed for the modern cook.

With a quick glance I’m both very impressed and disappointed. The recipes appear to very weak. They do not give good quantities and measurements (though they are better than the original latin), nor do they give good substitutions for hard-to-find ingredients, like garum. On the up-side, there is a lot of good additional information and detail both on the recipe, the ingredient and its relation to Roman culture.

There was one recipe that stood out and grabbed me and I may try it out over the weekend. Called Libum it is a flat bread simply made by combining white flour with ricotta cheese, then baking the cheese dough. It sounds simple and it sounds good. I’ll post how it turns out.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Two 15th Century Cookery Books

While I was at K’zoo I ordered three books and the first one arrived today -- Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books. It is the re-print of a copyright-free text available online here.

I guess I didn’t pay too close attention at the con, because it was quite a surprise that it is in Middle English. That’s not a major problem to translate, but I was taken a bit aback. It makes me happy that I found this website a few weeks ago:


If I get really into this, I could see myself translating and adding modern measurements to many of these . . .

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Planting Wheat - 7 weeks in

After my last post I was really going to try to post every weekday. As you can tell, that hasn’t happened. I’ve got four separate entries half-written and I just need to find time to finish them.

I spent another hour plus weeding yesterday and the field looks good.



The big surprise is my pot of winter wheat:



I don’t know if you can see it in this pic, but most of the tall stalks have ears of seeds. Yes they do! I have grown grain!



In this close-up you can see the sheaf and and the spiky awns coming off of each grain. They are still quite green and the other stalks don’t have nearly as many rows of grain as this one, but I am very pleased.

Yeah, wheat!

Monday, May 18, 2009

Carolingian Economics

[And he manages to get the post in on Monday with 18 minutes to spare. Phew!]

Charlemagne ruled over the Kingdom of the Franks from 768 to 814 AD. He was crowned Emperor of the Romans on Christmas Day in the year 800. His reign saw a number of reforms and steps toward civilization. He standardized coinage, standardized writing scripts, and encouraged his underlings to be organized and efficient.

Part of this latter effort led to the creation of polyptychs (or polyptyques), theoretically standardized books of accountings and inventories of the royal and ecclesiastical estates of the Empire. While they aren’t standardized or organized by modern standards, they do list things like: how much land they control, how many people work that land, what sort of obligations to they own to the estate, are they free or slaves (or in-between), what is grown on those lands, etc. They bear some similarity to the Domesday Book of 250 years later.

The University of Leicester has a wonderful website that details ten of these documents, both in the original medieval Latin and translated into English. A truly stunning resource that likes of which one does not expect to find for free on the internet.

One of my purchases at Kalamazoo, The Carolingian Economy by Adriaan Verhulst, has led me through them quite nicely, reading every nuance to get as much information as possible out of their sparse words. Reading them myself I’m left wanting more. In places they are so precise, listing tenants off by name, for example, or counting off exactly how many animals people own. Yet at the same time they are so vague, using words like “plowlands” instead of acres or similar unit of actual measurement.

They do often say something like “enough land to sow 20 modii of grain”, which could be used to get some raw numbers. I think in the future, I’ll play with some of these and see what I can come up with.

Friday, May 15, 2009

Trencher Denying

If there’s one thing that people know about Medieval bread is that people used to use bread instead of plates and eat off of it.

This is a great bit of SCA theater that really draws you into the era. I mean, it’s great to be able to do something so very easy that is also very alien to our modern sensibilities that it pulls us into that fantasy world and out of the modern. And eating your stew off a stale slice of bread does this very well.

But I’m going to call shenanagins. At least for the common folk.

It just doesn’t seem practical to me, and practicality matters to people living in a marginal environment. Certainly people used bread to soak up and mop up every last bit of soup, porridge, pottage or broth. Certainly, soup, stew or broth (or even milk, ale or water) were used to soften and flavor stale or fresh bread. A lack of waste would be the goal.

Trenchers seem wasteful to me. Or at least you have to be very careful to not be wasteful. If you pour soup or stew that is going to be liquid enough to soak into the whole trencher, some is going to soak through onto your table/eating board/bowl. If it is thick enough to not soak through, there are going to be large parts of the bread (ie. the edges and corners) that don’t get softened.

Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, in her book, The History of Food, claims, “Soup, in fact, derives from ‘sop’ or ‘sup’, meaning the slice of bread on which broth was poured.”

My Webster’s (Third New International Unabridged) Dictionary says for the etymology of Sop: “a piece of food (such as bread) dipped or steeped before being eaten” and “the liquid into which food is dipped before being eaten”. For Sup, it gives several different meanings: From the Old French soupe meaning “a piece of bread soaked in broth, soup” but under another definition, from the Old English, Old Norse, Old High German and Middle High German, “to sip, to drink, to swallow”.

Even going with the Old French definition I don’t think that proves that Soup = Trencher.

Now we know that trenchers were used by the nobility and maybe even during festivals, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Everyday, common usage by everyday, common folk is what this blog is about and how this look at trenchers should be taken.

I'll post more evidence for this as I find it.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Planting Wheat - Weeding (6 weeks+)

I spent an hour and half weeding the rest of the plot. It’s not the most fun I’ve ever had, but it has a certain charm that is growing on me -- assuming the weather is right. It could be hard on the knees (but I have knees pads) and it could be hard on the back (less so if it was planted properly in rows).

One thing it did give me was a very close-up look at what is happening at the ground level. There are spots where seeds just didn’t germinate. I can still see the seeds lying there on the soil. There are spots where they grew quite well and taller than in other areas. I have no idea how to explain the difference nor did I see any patterns.

Here’s a picture of the garden (compare it to yesterday’s pictures):



All of the green visible in this picture is wheat.

And here is a patch that grew well:

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Planting Wheat - 6 weeks in

I just got back from the medieval congress at Kalamazoo. It was a fun time, an educational time and an exhausting time. I met good people (though not as many as I wanted to) and I can’t wait to go again, although that night not be for a few years if my daughter really does go to Germany as an exchange student.

If anyone is interested in my experience at Kzoo 2009, it can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. It’s mostly not about living history, so I didn’t feel like I should post directly here. Over the next few days though, I should get the specifically food, mead and daily life bits and post about them here.

I also visited my parents who live in an RV but who spend some of their summer visiting my aunt in rural Indiana. There I got to see mile after mile of corn fields (maize, that is), still filled with the stubble of last year’s harvest. I was told it was still too wet to plow and plant this year.

But that means that I haven’t even looked at my own wheat field in two whole weeks, and what a lot has happened in those days!



The weeds have taken over! The wheat is still there but definitely needs help. I spent nearly an hour today pulling them out, and that is a pretty tedious job. I did about a third of it in that hour and the results are obvious.



My little planter of winter wheat has really taken off. The picture's not great, but these stalks are now over a foot long.



I’m going out right after this to finish up since it is supposed to rain this evening.

Sunday, May 3, 2009

Serendipity

I just got an email from Bountiful Gardens advertising some of their new items up for sale. Among them was this book:

Booklet #33: Grow Your Own Grains by Carol Cox, 2008, 28 pp

Ecology Action Research Papers,

At last! Basic grain raising and harvesting on a small scale, appropriate for a home garden. How to grow and use barley, oats, cereal rye, triticale, wheat, amaranth, corn, millet, quinoa, rice, sorghum and teff. Carol Cox is the Garden Manager at our Ecology Action Research Mini-Farm in Willits, and has been growing all kinds of grains for many years. A working paper.

I think I’ll put in an order for that one . . .

Friday, May 1, 2009

Planting Day, 2 weeks later

I have shoots!



The weeding has gotten more difficult now since I can’t reach across the garden to reach all of the weeds I need to get to without trodding in the garden. But I don’t want to step on my nice little sprouts, so I’m treading carefully, leaning farther out than I should and straining my back in interesting and unexpected ways. Planting in orderly rows with paths between them definitely has its merits!

One thing I do notice is that there are some patches that are putting up a high density of little shoots, and there are other patches that seem devoid of wheat. I am very curious to know whether this represents poor sowing or some other effect. Maybe some patches are growing faster than others due to light or soil? Maybe some areas got more water than other? Unlikely that one. But I’m curious.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Medieval Bread, Myths and Misconceptions

This topic is actually what made me want to start this project: that modern people are so willing to turn pre-modern men and women into knuckle-dragging imbeciles who are not just non-technological, but non-common sensical.

Take this quote in answer to a student’s question about medieval bread for a school report (Posted on Yahoo Answers):

...all bread in medieval times was a flat unlevened bread as yeast had not yet been thought of as an ingrediant to make the bread rise. it was baked in kilns fired by wood, most prominent households would have one in the house when the bread was baked the under side became a lot harder than the top part of the bread , the harder part was given to the servents and children while the upper part given to the more important members of the household, thus they became known as the upper crust still used as a name for a class system to this day you will often hear people of more importance called the upper crust...

Besides indulging in perpetuating that awful e-mail meme, “The Bad Old Days” it is neither helpful to the student nor accurate. The discovery of yeast, leavened bread and wine/ale/mead is lost in history but even the Romans recorded that the Gauls skimmed yeast off of their ale to make bread rise (Pliny, Natural History XVIII-26).

One website I found (that I now cannot, for the life of me, re-find) asserted that since the earliest medieval text to mention salt in a bread recipe dated to the 15th-Century, salt must have been unknown or unavailable to earlier bakers. This is another one of those over-simplifications that so annoys me.

Salt? Unavailable? Unknown? Salt was a prime medieval commodity, required in large quantities for the preserving of meat and fish. Extracting salt from seawater or mining it was a major industry. A little salt goes a long way in flavoring and lightening a loaf of bread.

Even good articles talk about medieval ovens in such a way as to imply that there is no other way to cook dough. To we modern Americans, it may seem like bread must be cooked in an oven, but that is simply not the case.

Every village house would have had a fire pit/area for cooking and heating. Bread, even leavened bread, can be cooked on that fire -- either fried above it or by immersing a both under the coals, dutch-oven-style. These methods make a lot of sense to me. A specialized oven seems to require a lot of wood and resources to operate. There must be another method, smaller in scope, more personal, that the oven evolved out of.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Planting Day, 1 week plus

Since my last post, I’ve gone out twice to weed some more. Those weeds grow like . . . weeds. Really fast. For the most part I’ve just been content to rip the heads off the weeds as I try to get them out. There are a few places where the newspaper has deteriorated enough to expose patches of grass. I’ve been trying to rip out what I can and place newspaper as best I can back over them.



This, though, is all the problem of converting a lawn to a garden.

The wheat itself seems to be doing well. Here are a few pics of sprouting seeds:




So far, that darn lawn has been the biggest obstacle. I suppose next year I should do it properly and actually dig up and till the soil.

Friday, April 24, 2009

Bread

I have a bread machine. It makes great bread. But what it does inside that that plastic box has always been a mystery to me. A wonderful, fragrant mystery that fills the house with such wonderful smells.

Part of this whole experiment is removing those mystery processes between ground and belly.

Last Election Day I tried making a loaf of bread and was pretty impressed by the result. Don’t get me wrong, it tasted like jogging shoe, but I actually made bread!

Since then, I’ve wanted to make good bread. Recently I was at my local used bookstore and found a book called The Tassajara Bread Book. I was convinced it was a small press, never-be-able-to-find-another-copy-of-this-great-book, but here it is on Amazon touted as the best bread baking book ever.

And it is.

I’ve baked several loaves of their basic bread recipe (using fresh ground flour) and have found it to be good, but not perfect. Earlier this week I made a few changes to the recipe and the two loaves (yes, their basic recipe is for four, so this is smaller too) and it turned out perfect. The recipe looks something like this.

3 cups of Water
0.5 cups of Honey
1.33 cups of Powdered Milk (the next time I make it I’ll try leaving this out)
4 cups of flour
1 Tblspn of Dry Active Yeast

Whisk these ingredients together and leave for an hour to rise. Then add (by folding, not stirring):

1 stick of Butter (melted)
0.5 cups of Honey (if you don’t have my sweet tooth, leave this out)
1 Tblspn of Salt
6 cups of Flour

When the dough becomes too dense to stir, knead it on a floured tabletop until it no longer sticks to the table.

Let rise an hour, punch down. Let rise another hour. Cut into two pieces and place into bread pans or roll into balls. Let rise for 30 minutes. Cook in a 325-350 degree oven for 50 minutes.

See, this blog isn’t always about growing wheat. ;)

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Book-hoard

I mentioned the other day the lack of books about peasant life. Here are the few that I have found and read. When I start to run low on things to talk about, I’ll write up some reviews of these books.

Life in a Medieval Village by Frances Gies and Joseph Gies

Anglo-saxon Food & Drink by Ann Hagen

Lost Country Life - How English Country Folk Lived, Worked, Threshed, Thatched, Rolled Fleece... by Dorothy Hartley

Peasants and Landlords in Later Medieval England by E. B. Fryde

Medieval Technology and Social Change by Lynn White Jr.

Feudal Society: Vol 1: The Growth and Ties of Dependence by Marc Bloch

Feudal Society Vol. 2: Social Classes and Political Organization by Marc Bloch

The Medieval Economy & Society by M. M. Postan

A Medieval Home Companion: Housekeeping in the Fourteenth Century by Tania Bayard

To the King's Taste: Richard II's Book of Feasts and Recipes Adapted for Modern Cooking by Lorna Sass

A History of Food by Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat

Marc Bloch’s books are classics in the field and I haven’t read them since college. I think I’ll take them with me on the plane to Kalamazoo and give them a good re-read.

I haven’t read Peasants and Landlords, mostly because it’s later than my preference, but that really shouldn’t dissuade me. Lost Country Life is even later, stressing the conservative and cyclical nature of rural life before the 20th Century, but giving details about farming life on a month-by-month basis.

I almost forgot, I also have a copy of Hesiod's Works and Days that I often pick up, read a couple of pages and then put down again only to not come back to it for a month or so. It too is off-period and Mediterranean rather than Northern European, but is one of the earliest discussions of agriculture, dating to 700-600 BC. This edition is excellent as it has a tremendous amount of notes and comments accompanying the text.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Planting Day, 1 Week Later

It’s been a wet week -- lots of rain, a few grey days. But it was actually dry today so I went out to take a look. There was a lot of green and that was not good. Dandelions had pushed through. Grass had found some cracks in the newspaper. And there were no wheat shoots. Here’s a picture of the dandelions:



I got down and tried to weed them out. The dandelion stalks break with very little pulling. Instead of pulling out the plant by the roots, you just get a handful of crunchy greenery. I guess I’ll have to keep that up for a while, at least until the wheat grows taller than them.

The seeds on the other hand, have just started to sprout. It took a few days longer than I expected, but they are starting. I tried to take a picture of them but all of the close-ups came out really blurry. I’ll try again in a few days.

I don’t know what to do about the grass. I guess I’ll rip it up as it grows. My advice to anyone else doing this though -- use more layers of newspaper (more than 3) and make sure they overlap more than a few inches.

Monday, April 20, 2009

Why Am I Doing This?

I’m really interested in a lot of the details of early, everyday life -- the kinds of things that no one things about, everyone takes for granted and that so many people dismiss our early ancestors for. I want to see early village or farmstead life as a complex system of struggle against nature, time, resources, law, tradition, overlords and invaders. I want to understand the personal, social and technological institutions that help regulate and manage those struggles. I want to see what those coping mechanisms were and how they worked.

I want to understand it because it interests me, but also because I want to write a game about it. Or should I say I want to write a _good_, historically accurate (at least sort of) game about it. I can’t count how many games I’ve seen brag about the “realistic medieval economy” only then to put a general store and a mercenaries guild in every village. Or even more prevalent, to have the common villager be the “damsel in distress” figure, in need of rescue by the daring hero.

I want to understand why people bake bread instead of just cooking the wheat berries. I want to understand to movement away from individual preparing of food (milling and baking) to the communal manorial monopolies. I want to understand early medieval trade, especially in important natural resources like salt and iron. I want to learn more about the shift from Roman-style slave-run villas to the serf-inhabited manor of the medieval age.

But there is so little written about the common man and woman. So little written a the time results in little to write about today. Even if there was a good, definitive book that answered all of these questions, I think I’d still be doing this. I’m loving it. It’s pushing my personal boundaries and forcing me to grow.

Friday, April 17, 2009

Methods and Methodologies

So what am I doing here? I mean, first I said I wanted to re-create medieval life and then in practically the next breath I’m laying down newspaper. So what are my real goals? What am I really trying to achieve here? What am I willing to do and what am I unwilling to do?

There are several keys. First off, I have to succeed. This one is personal and unprofessional and indicative of the hobbyist nature of the project. If I spend weeks working on a project only to have it fail, I stand a good chance of getting disappointed and quitting or taking a break. I don’t want to do that.

So I’m starting off using a modern wheat strain rather than an ancient one. So I’ll use pre-packaged yeast to make bread or ale. So I’ll start off with a steel grain mill. The point is that once I become comfortable using these modern methods, I can always go back to the historically accurate version.

Secondly, if a bit of modernity helps me or is cheaper, and I can’t see any real difference in how it will effect the project, I’ll go with the modern. I may wind up being mistaken about whether a piece of technology makes a difference or not, but I’ll be honest about what I do use and will consider changing the experiment if I later learn that it makes a difference.

For example, while fermenting the mead, I plan to use a glass carbouy. I would expect that this would have been done in a ceramic vessel in earlier times, but I don’t have one and they are probably expensive. I’ll also use modern sterilization methods to make the stuff safe to drink.

There are also a few things that I just can’t do. I don’t have a team of oxen. I can’t even borrow one from my fellow villagers. I don’t have access to a lot of the tools, supplies and know-how that a good Iron Age or medieval farmer had. So I’m just going to do my best, trying to stay away from chemicals.

The last one is also a bit of a personal conceit, but the one that bothers me the most. The results of these experiments will result in food and other products. Those products are going to be consumed and used by me and my friends, so they have to conform to my tastes.

I’m not going to deny it. I have a sweet tooth, like many modern Americans. After years of Wonder Bread as I child, I expect my bread to have a pretty sweet taste to it, so my recipes are going to have more honey in them than they should. In my daily life, I still drink a 6 pack of soda a day, so I’m shooting for a sweet mead.

There’s not a whole lot I can do about this one. I want to enjoy the fruits of my labors. Since this is a hobbyist venture, I _need_ to enjoy it in order to keep it going. I do feel guilty, though, that my palette is far from medieval and so that is going to skew my results.

I will be honest about what I am doing and open to comments and criticism. I’m going to try to post frequently (I’m not sure how long I can keep it daily . . . ).

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Planting Day, 24 hours later

It was another sunny day and I went out to check my work from the day before. Here’s a photo:



The newspaper has turned brown, presumably from soaking up water made dirty from the top soil. The seeds have changed in appearance. Where before they were dry, slightly shriveled little things, they have plumped up and look much healthier. You can compare the picture of the seeds in the package:



With this one of a seed in the garden:



It’s good to see that something is happening so quickly.