What with picnics and barbecues, it seemed suitable to blog about summer food. I have a book from 1853, passed down my family, which includes selections of food for August, so here we go.
For meat, they could expect to have beef, grass lamb, mutton, veal, and buck venison.
The list of fish always amazes me. barbel, brill, carp, cod conger-eels
Let's pause on eels. Eels were a food staple in the middle ages, gathered in basketfuls from places like the fens. The conger-eel is in a class of its own, however. Check out this web site. Trust the British to 
have a conger eel club!
Crabs, crayfish, dabs (I'm very familiar with that one as they were caught in Morecambe Bay, where I grew up. A dab is a small flat fish similar to plaice. But who gets plaice in North America? Shame, that. We used to buy dabs right off the fishing boats and they'd be cooked by battering and deep-frying them. Delicious.)
Dace is in italics, which means it was (is?) prime in August. Eels, flounders, gurnets (what? I'm going to Australia in 6 days and don't have time to look that up. Your adventure, should you choose to accept it, is to expand everyone's knowledge on these foods.*G*)
Still on fish, note -- haddock (lovely fish), herring, lobster, mackerel, mullet, oysters.
Perch and pike are also prime in August. Plaice, prawns, salmon, skate. sole, tench, thornback, turbot, whiting.
Turbot was quite a choice item, but these days it seems to be a junk fish.
On to poultry and game. Again, quite a selection. Chicken, duck,green-geese, grouse (from the 12th, of course), leveret, moor game, pigeon, plover,rabbit and turkey.
Vegetables: Artichoke, beans -- French, kidney, scarlet (picture of our scarlet runner beans on right), and Windsor. Now I know the first three, but
what are Windsor beans? The queen's favourite?
White beets, carrots, cauliflower, celery, cucumber, endive, finochia, leeks, lettuce, mushrooms, oniots, peas (I would have thought it a bit late for peas), potatoes, purslane, radish, salsify, scorzonera (over to you on that one!) shallots, spinach, turnip.
Fruit. Apples (a bit early, I'd think, but I'm sure they knew) -- codlin, summer pearmain,and summer pippin.
Now I ask you, if there are such early apples, wouldn't it make sense to grow them instead of shipping apples from New Zealand etc?
Back to the list -- cherries, currants, damsons (a small plum used for pies. Again, delicious.) figs, filberts,gooseberries, grapes, melons,mulberries, nectarines, peaches.
A number of pears are listed -- jargonelle (doesn't that sound lovely?) Summer Bon Chretien (could almost be a movie star, couldn't it?) and again, Windsor.
Gosh, look at this wonderful page of prints of fruits of the past. This image of Summer Bon Chretien is from there.
Plums are listed as greengages or orleans, then raspberries and wild strawberries.
With all this, we certainly need something to drink! Some are less than inspiring in my opinion.
Appleade, for example. Cut two large apples into slices and pour a quart of boiling water on them. Strain and sweeten to taste. Hmmm.
Then there's "Eau sucre" which is exactly what it sounds like. Sugar dissolved in water.
Then there's the odd sounding Lemonade au lait. It's basically a lemonade but then one adds milk and let it stand 12 hours. As it's then strained, I assume it makes something cheesy. Or is the cheesy bit discarded? If so, what's left? Anyone want to give it a go?
But let's leave this with orgeat, often mentioned in period pieces.
Blanch and pound three-quarters of a pound of sweet almonds and thirty bitter ones with a tablespoonful of water. Stir in by degrees two pints of water and three pints of milk and strain the whole through a cloth. Dissolve half a pound of loaf sugar in a pint of water, boil, skim well, and mix with the almond water, adding two tablespoonfuls of orange-flower water and a cupful of good brandy.
A cupful of good brandy will rescue anything, says I. Though it's a shame to use the good stuff.
Please do expand on any of these period foods, most of which had been around for a long time. Which of them appeal the most and which the least?
And how do you react to strange food in historical fiction? Have you ever been turned off by what a character was eating?
I'll leave you with a simple dessert I always think of as English, though it may be common everywhere. It's usually called cream and cream, and it's simply cream poured over ice cream. The liquid cream makes a shell when it comes into contact with the cold. I prefer to use a sorbet, however, because the sharper flavours contrast well with the creamy flavor. Get the sorbet as cold as you can. Use whipping cream and only pour over as much as will cover the ice.
Apart from being delicious, this isn't terrible wicked because it's best in small portions. Once the ice begins to melt it all becomes a mush. Tasty must, but that's not the point. A quarter cup of sorbet is fine, and as I said, just enough cream to coat.
Do you have a summer treat to share?
As I said above, I'm off to Australia next Monday -- via Hawaii.If anyone here is going to attend the Romance Writers of Australia conference in Melbourne, I look forward to seeing you there! Because of my jaunting off to the antipodes, however, we've juggled the schedule a bit. My next blog will be on September 5th, when I'll actually still be down under. So really, I'm hoping you'll all leap in to fill the gap. I'm leaving a blog to go up, and I'm hoping it'll stimulate lots of discussion. To help this along, I'll give books to the three commenters I think have made the best contributions.
Ta-ta for now!
Jo :)