A Sterkarm Pud

          If you're like me, you only eat the meal so you can get to the pud.

           Oh, stop pretending – you know very well that you’ve chosen your pudding before your starter – a simple task for me, as it’s just a matter of deciding what has the most chocolate in it.

          In The Sterkarm Handshake, the pudding is a great disappointment to Windsor, as it’s simply a repetititon of the creamy, buttery ‘grewts’ the meal began with, but served with honey and berries instead of raw meat.

          The Sterkarms could probably have honestly claimed to ‘not have a sweet tooth’ since they would rarely, if ever, have eaten anything sweeter than honey and fruit – and their fruit would have been closer to the wild varieties, seasonal, and much less sweet than the kinds we have today.

Honeycombe

          Honey was seasonal, and although stored for use throughout the year, was relatively scarce and valuable and wouldn’t have been used with the carelessness that we use sugar.  Poorer Sterkarms, unless they had the time and skill to keep bees, would have counted themselves lucky to taste it on ‘high days and holidays.’

         Sugar was available, but in the early 16^thCentury was only just beginning to be produced in bulk, and it was still, like other spices, extremely expensive.  The soft sassenachs might have been going mad with it down in London until every tooth in their head was black, but I doubt if the fashion for it, or much of the stuff itself, was yet to be found on the Borders.

         So, for this Sterkarm dessert, you can either serve groats again, with honey, small wild strawberries, raspberries and bilberries – or may I suggest something a little different, that very ancient British pud, frumenty?

Doesn't that look tempting?

          I’ve no doubt the Sterkarms enjoyed frumenty on many another day.  Perhaps they thought it too good for Windsor.  (Isobel didn’t want to waste her spices on him.)

          You take 140g of cracked wheat, or bulgar wheat, or semolina.

          Half a litre of ale.

          Two eggs

          A couple of handfuls of raisins.

          Half a teaspoon, or a large pinch, of cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger.

          Three to four tablespoons of single cream.

          Honey or sugar, some water to top up and – if you’re feeling really extravagant – a pinch of saffron.

          Soak the wheat overnight in the ale.  Most of the liquid will be absorbed.

          Put the wheat in a pan over heat, and add a little more ale, or water.  Add the spices and boil until the wheat is soft.  The smell is pretty wonderful.

          Remove from the heat and allow to cool a little, then add the raisins and stir them in.

          Then add the cream and two beaten eggs.  Don’t add them while the mixture is too hot, or the eggs will cook like scrambled egg.

          Return to a low heat and cook.  Add sugar or honey to taste – and the saffron if  you’re using it.

Expensive foreign almonds! Not for the Sterkarms.

          You can add nuts, or berries when you serve it.

          This also used to be served with meat, such as venison or pork, as well as being a sweet dessert.

          For the Sterkarms, this would have been a real luxury, celebratory dish, something only for special occasions, such as Hogmanay, weddings, christenings and such.  Eggs, cream, fruit and honey were all seasonal - something we tend to forget - and therefore prized.  The spices and raisins would have been extremely expensive.  About the only thing that was common-place was the ale, which was drunk instead of water – and even though ale would have been brewed every week, and was served at every meal, it still represented hours of work.

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A Sterkarm Dinner-Party: The Main

A soay sheep posing as a Sterkarm sheep      Now for the main course of the Sterkarm dinner party.      It’s a delicious meat pudding.  In The Sterkarm Handshake, Per Sterkarm went out especially to catch a deer for it, and the deer was hung for several days - but if you can’t put your hands on a deer, fallow or red, you can use a sheep, goat, or even a cow, though  obviously, the size of your pudding will vary, and the amount of other ingredients will have to be adjusted.        The recipe below assumes you are using a sheep.        Take the stomach, liver, heart and lungs.        You’ll also need three onions, 250 grams of beef lard, 150 grams of the inevitable oatmeal, salt, and about 150 mls of stock.         Also some of that expensive spice, pepper – the little dried berries of a vine, picked and dried half a world away.  Their price reflects the distance they’ve travelled.           Start preparing this dish at least a day before you need it because first you must clean the stomach well, emptying it of what the animal was last keeping in it, and washing it out.  Soak it overnight (in a wooden bowl or tub, probably).           In the morning, turn the stomach inside out, and boil it for one and a half hours in good stock.  (There would always be a stock-pot full of bones and bits boiling in the Sterkarm kitchen.)  Make sure that the weasand – that it, the windpipe – hangs over the edge of the pot, to allow drainage – though drainage of what I’d rather not ask, if you don’t mind.           While the belly-bag is boiling, slap the heart and lungs on a table-top or large chopping board, and mince them with a big knife.           Get hold of the liver and chop up half of it.  (The other half isn’t needed for the pudding, so Per Sterkarm probably had it as a treat, and a reward for catching the deer.)           Keep chopping! –chop  up the onions and the beef lard.           In a large crock or tub, mix together the chopped heart, lungs, liver, lard, onions and oatmeal.  Season well with salt.           Then the peppercorns need to be ground.  If you are the lady of the tower, Isobel, then obviously you can use your own pepper as you like.  If you’re a mere cook, you will need to ask for the peppercorns, as they are so valuable they will kept locked away.  Grind them in a pestle and mortar, and add to the mix.           Add sage, thyme and parsley, if liked.  They will have been grown by Isobel, or gathered wild, and may be either fresh or dried.           Take some of the water the belly was boiled in, and add enough to the mixture to make it a little watery.           Now take the belly-bag and put it in another bowl, to support it, with the opening at the top.  Fill it with the mixture of oatmeal and offal until it’s half-full.           Squeeze out the air, and sew it up with thread.           Put it back into the boiling stock, top up with water, and boil for three hours, without a lid.  Don’t let it boil dry, and  if the stomach starts blowing up, prick it with a needle.           When it’s done, bring to table and cut into steaming slices.  Serve with its own gravy and boiled neeps – that is, turnips.  Some turnip greens, would also be good, if  in season, as would carrots – which, in the Sterkarm’s time, the early 16thCentury, would be purple, not orange.  (They would never have called their redheads ‘carrot-top.')           No potatoes. The plant hadn’t yet been introduced to Britain.           They would expect you to tuck in enthusiastically, and Isobel Sterkarm would be beside herself with disappointment and shame if you didn’t.  After all, she and her maids had worked long and hard in a stifling kitchen to offer you their very best.           The offal was far more nutritious, juicy and tasty than the tough, dry, lean muscle meat from their hardy little beasts – and they’d put expensive pepper in it, just for you!           Isobel would press second and third helpings on you, because it was a terrible slight to be called mean, or for anyone to say that they left your table hungry.  It would be a matter of pride, too, to show that they didn’t need to care about saving food. And, of course, the more you ate, the more Isobel could pride herself as a hostess.           However politely you refused, she would heap your plate anyway.  She wouldn’t be able to help herself.         Toorkild and Per Sterkarm would probably make sure the pudding was finished but if, somehow, there was any pudding left over, it would turn up at breakfast, fried.  And, because you were a guest, the envious Sterkarm men would be denied it, and it would land on your plate.  With a clonk.  Good appetite!

Sterkarm Cuisine: a starter

A (suspiciously clean and tidy) medieval kitchen

          One part of the Sterkarm books that people often tell me they enjoyed and remember, is the meal  the 21^st century executive, Windsor, is forced to endure at the Sterkarm Tower.

          So I bring to you The Sterkarm Dinner Party.  In the privacy and safety of your own home, you too can threaten your friends with Sterkarm cuisine.

          In the book, Windsor is hoping for ‘fresh oysters, salmon so recently caught it was still swimming, roast haunch of venison, wild strawberries…’  What he gets is groats, pronounced something like ‘gr-r-rewts.’

          This is how you make it.

Aa ancient cow. Or reasonable facsimile of same.

          Take two and three quarter cups of sour cream, and simmer in a closed pan for about fifteen minutes.

          No messing about with ‘low-fat’ now.  It’s got to be the full-fat stuff.  As cattle farmers first and foremost, the Sterkarms drank a lot of milk and cream.  They had skimmed milk, as a side-product of cheese and butter making, and valued butter-milk as a refreshing drink, but they had none of our worries about fat and calories.  Their lives were too active and food too hard to come by for them to get fat, and their lives were comparatively short anyway.  Even if they’d known that their diet was furring their arteries, I doubt they’d have let it worry them.

          Simmering a pan of cream would have been much harder for a Sterkarm cook than for us.  The ‘closed pan’ would have been of iron, with three little legs, so it could sit in burning peats.  A large amount would have been hung, in a cauldron, above a fire, but that much would more likely have been made with milk or water.

          The small pan of cream would either have sat at the edge of a larger fire, or would have been cooked on a stove – a brazier of burning peats, either free-standing or built into a stone bench.

          The only way of regulating the heat would have been to move the pan closer to or further away from the fire’s hottest part.  I’ve never done this (I’m glad to say) but I imagine it would have required even closer attention by the scorched and sweating cook than it does today.

          While your cream is simmering on the peats, take one and a quarter cups  of oat-flour.  This can be pin-head oatmeal, or porridge oats ground very fine.  The grain the Sterkarm used would nearly always have been oatmeal.  They were semi-nomadic cattle-herders rather than farmers, and ate a very high-protein diet: meat, milk, cheese, eggs (when they could get them) and fish.  They made great use of wild food, such as nuts, berries, sorrel, cress and mushrooms, but farming came second to cattle, and they grew little in the way of arable crops. Oats grew better in rocky northern fields than wheat.  Wheaten bread was a luxury, rarely seen and eaten by few. (Fife only became 'the bread-basket of Britain' after the Agricultural Revolution and great changes in farming methods.)

          How the Sterkarm cook judged when the cream had simmered for fifteen minutes, I’ve no idea,  I doubt they had any way of telling the time.  This is why I never have them speak of minutes or seconds: they say, ‘in an eye-blink’.  Cathedrals had great public clocks, but most people still regulated their day by the sun, rising at first light, going to bed when it was dark. In between, they did what they had to do, regardless of the hour.  Perhaps the cooks had sand-glasses of different sizes – or perhaps they judged the heat of the cream from experience, as smiths judged the heat of iron by its colour.

          Anyway, when the cream has simmered, sieve into it about a third of the flour.  Continue to simmer until the butter-fat begins to separate.  Skim off the fat, and save it in a bowl.

          Sift the remaining flour into the pan, and bring to the boil.  Then simmer until it is the desired thickness.  Whisk to make smooth.  Add salt to taste.

          Serve with the fat you skimmed off poured over the groats. Accompany with raw dried meat, such as smoked ham or lamb, or tongue, or dried fish.

          I’ve eaten this and it’s tasty.  It looks quite forbidding, granted – ‘a smooth paste’ with ‘pools and rivulets of yellow liquid’ running through it - but tastes good.

          This is your Sterkarm starter, the first in a series of download and keep recipes, which you can put in an easy wipe-clean folder, and consult when you have guests you don’t like - but to the Sterkarms, this was a delicacy and a treat, expensive both in terms of what it took from their stores, and the time it took to make, and if they’d known that their guests were revolted by it, they would have been puzzled and hurt. And it's probably best not to hurt their feelings.