I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world.	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he's experimenting with federated platforms. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance, and can found on t he PlusPora diaspora pod. He hates cell-phones.

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Feast Planning During Plague Years Part the Second To recap: First Course: chicken (warm and dry), and other stuff Second Course: vegetarian or fish (cold and moist), and other stuff Third course: pork (warm and moist), and other stuff The exact recipes, naturally, would alter the humoral qualities, but I'm not going to go crazy here. I need some other dishes, and maybe some specific dishes. My garden produces a great deal of sage, so I was thinking I might do something with sage. Sage, we are told, is warm and dry. So, it clearly doesn't go with chicken (also warm and dry). It shows up in a number of recipes with pork, presumably to counter the potentially dangerous moistness of pork. So I could do one of those recipes - there's a lovely little one for meatballs wrapped in sage, dipped in egg, and fried. That's kind of a hassle for a feast, though. There's also sawgeat, which is sage and sausage, mixed with egg and sage, and fried. But, there's an ember day variation, which is just sage, butter, and eggs. (And probably powder douce.) The full recipe is: Sawgeat. Take sawge; grynde it and temper it vp with ayren. Take a sausege & kerf hym to gobetes, and cast in a possynet, and do þerwiþ grece & frye it. Whan it is fryed ynowȝ, cast þerto sawge with ayren; make it not to harde. Cast þerto powdour douce & messe it forth. If it be in ymbre day, take sauge, buttur, & ayren, and lat it stonde wel by þe sauge, & serue it forth. ('Curye on Inglysch,' IV:169, Hieatt and Butler) So, if I do something like an omelette texture with sage and butter, and have poudre douce on the table, that's a warm and dry recipe to go in the second course. I'll probably bake it rather than fry it, and make sure it's sliceable for portioning. The tacuina have entries for both a 'barley soup' and a 'wheat soup,' which are cold and dry, and warm and dry, respectively. If I consider those to be variations on frumenty, then a barley frumenty would be a good cold and dry dish. There is a Lenten version in Yale MS Beinecke 163 ('An Ordinance of Pottage'), which would be not only vegetarian but vegan. Frumente yn lentyn. Take clene pykyd whete. Bray hit yn a morter, and fanne it clene, & seth hit tyl hit be brokyn. Than grynd blanchid almondys yn a morter; draw therof a mylke. Do hit togedyr & boyle hit tyl hit be resonabull thykke: than loke thy whete be tendry. Colour hit up with safferyn. Leche thy purpas when hit is sodyn, then ley hit on disches by hitsylfe, and serve hit forth with frumente. ('An Ordinance of Pottage,' p.40,#16, Hieatt) Leeks, in addition to being delicious, are also warm and dry. Blaunche porre is leek and onion soup. If I make it with vegetable broth, it is vegetarian. To make blaunche porre. Take whyte lekys & perboyle hem & hewe hem smale with oynouns. Cast it in good broþ & seþe it vp with smale bryddys. Coloure it with safferoun; powder yt with pouder douce. ('Curye on Inglysch,' IV:1, Hieatt and Butler) We're getting there. I had a good trawl through the tacuina looking for ingredients I like to work with and organizing them by humoral category. Cold and Dry quince, sour cherries, millet, pears, dates - a lot of fruit Cold and Moist cherries (not sour, I suppose), fish, spinach, fresh cheese, lettuce Warm and Dry old cheese, rice, cabbage, Warm and Moist apples, beans, turnips, chickpeas Picking and choosing, and following my theme, that means I think I'm looking at: First Course: chicken (warm and dry), exact dish TBD Pears (cold and dry), there are several good pear dishes that come immediately to mind - in syrup, in confyt, and so on. Spinach (cold and moist), dish TBD Turnips (warm and moist), dish TBD Second Course: Sawgeat in ymbre day (warm and dry) chickpeas (warm and moist), Chiquart has a chickpea dish for invalids, but there's also a chickpea dish in Apicius that I love. dates (cold and dry), some good options here. Lechy frys in lentoun, Rissoles from Le Ménagier, or something called Brineex from An Ordinance of Pottage. Decisions, decisions fresh cheese (cold and moist), a cheese tart of some kind, almost certainly Third course: pork (warm and moist), recipe TBD barley frumenty (cold and dry), blaunche porre (warm and dry) Lettuce (cold and moist), probably salat So two courses have a sweetish fruit dish, so I might swap the order around so one of those comes last, and the fruit dish can serve as pudding. The chicken and pork might just be roasted off, which has the advantage of making them less likely to cause issues with dietary restrictions. In which case, I might add a sauce on the side. There are plenty of choices there. I'm playing fast and loose with the humoral qualities, of course, since the cooking method would affect them, as would the other ingredients. That's a price I'm willing to pay ... I'll just assume that the main ingredient, or one of them, is driving the humor, as well as driving the humour, if you see what I mean. For those playing at home, there are a few things to note: no bread, at the moment the first course has three vegetarian, and probably two vegan dishes, and all gluten free, I think. the second course is all vegetarian (well, three full veg and one ovo-lacto), one or two vegan, two gluten free, maybe three depending on what I do with the dates the third course is three vegetarian, probably all three vegan, and three gluten free To achieve that, I'll have to alter a few recipes and use vegetable stock where meat stock is called for, or use olive oil rather than grease or lard, but that's easy enough to do. It also means that I will not be offering special gluten free or vegetarian dishes. Of twelve dishes, ten are vegetarian, and nine or so gluten free - that's plenty of food. Furthermore, by publishing the menu in advance, if someone thinks it will not be sufficient food, they have plenty of time to make alternate arrangements. But it will be plenty of food, trust me. As an experiment, I'm linking to a Diaspora posting for comments and such. Comment thread on PlusPora

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