anise-msg - 4/3/10

Period use of the spice anise.

NOTE: See also the files: spices-msg, herbs-msg, galangale-msg, G-of-Paradse-msg, merch-spices-msg, saffron-art, sumac-msg, spice-storage-msg, spice-mixes-msg, comfits-msg.

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NOTICE -

This file is a collection of various messages having a common theme that I  have collected from my reading of the various computer networks. Some messages date back to 1989, some may be as recent as yesterday.

This file is part of a collection of files called Stefan's Florilegium. These files are available on the Internet at: http://www.florilegium.org

I  have done  a limited amount  of  editing. Messages having to do  with separate topics  were sometimes split into different files and sometimes extraneous information was removed. For instance, the  message IDs  were removed to save space and remove clutter.

The comments made in these messages are not necessarily my viewpoints. I make  no claims  as  to the accuracy  of  the information  given  by the individual authors.

Please  respect the time  and  efforts of  those who have written  these messages. The  copyright status  of these messages  is  unclear  at this time. If  information  is  published  from  these  messages, please give credit to the originator(s).

Thank you,
    Mark S. Harris                  AKA:  THLord Stefan li Rous
                                          Stefan at florilegium.org
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Date: Mon, 8 May 2000 21:27:06 -0400
From: "Robin Carroll-Mann" <harper at idt.net>
Subject: Re: SC - hi, anise

Anise is mentioned in Apicius, Platina, the Form of Cury, and various 
Spanish cookbooks.

Lady Brighid ni Chiarain
Settmour Swamp, East (NJ)

Date: Tue, 9 May 2000 00:40:44 EDT
From: LrdRas at aol.com
Subject: Re: SC - hi, anise

harper at idt.net writes:
<< Anise is mentioned in Apicius, Platina, the Form of Cury, and various 
 Spanish cookbooks. >>

Anise originated in Egypt from which it spread to the middle east and then 
throughout the Mediterranean basin. It was used as a medicinal and as a 
flavoring agent.

Ras

Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2002 10:58:21 -0500
To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
From: Philip & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Looking for a recepit

Also sprach Barbara Benson:
>I am looking for receipts that prominently feature Anise Seeds (not in
>comfit).
>
>I was hoping that the combined knowledge of those on this lovely list might
>help me come up with something. Ideally I would like a savory or meat dish
>(boiled would be lovely! wink, wink;) but a non comfit sweet that, again,
>prominently features anise would be good.
>
>Even a receipt that says "and add spices" or some such vagueness, that could
>be construed to feature anise seeds would be acceptable.

The compost recipe in The Forme of Cury uses anise seeds. It's a
mixed pickle of fruits and vegetables in a honey-mustard wine/vinegar
sauce, with various spices, including anise.

Adamantius

From: Christina Nevin <cnevin at caci.co.uk>
To: "SCA-Cooks (E-mail)" <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>
Subject: RE [Sca-cooks] Looking for a recepit
Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2002 15:57:13 -0000 

> I am looking for receipts that prominently feature
> Anise Seeds (not in comfit). <snip>
> Glad Tidings, Serena da Riva

I'm not sure if you want whole seeds or not, but this is an excellent sauce
for meat, and tastes great as a pickled cucumber dish if you put slices in
an hour or so before serving. Alternately I guess cabbage would be OK,
though I've never tried it. I personally usually loathe aniseed (that and
celery - ick), but I like this recipe (though admittedly I go light on the
anise):

Buoch von gute spise #48. A little sauce. [Caraway & Anise Sauce]
Grind caraway and anise with pepper, vinegar, and honey, colour it yellow
with saffron, and add mustard. In this sauce you can prepare jellied meat
with parsley berries and some sauerkraut or turnips, anything you want.

ciao
Lucrezia
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Lady Lucrezia-Isabella di Freccia   |  mka Tina Nevin
Thamesreach Shire, The Isles, Drachenwald
mailto:thorngrove at yahoo.com <mailto:thorngrove at yahoo.com>  |

Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2002 11:46:20 -0800
To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
From: david friedman <ddfr at daviddfriedman.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Looking for a recepit

>I am looking for receipts that prominently feature Anise Seeds (not in
>comfit).

Ask and you shall receive. I do like having things available in
machine searchable form. But I'm afraid the anise isn't really
prominent in any of them. And it isn't always clear if its the seeds.

The Soup Called Menjoire
Taillevent p. 112

First you need the necessary meat-Peachicks, pheasants or partridges
and if you can't get those, plovers, cranes or larks or other small
birds; and roast the poultry on a spit and when it is almost cooked,
especially for large birds like peachicks, pheasants or partridges,
cut them into pieces and fry them in lard in an iron pan and then put
them in the soup pot. And to make the soup you need beef stock from a
leg of beef, and white bread toasted on a grill, and put the bread to
soak and skim the broth and strain through a sieve and then you need
cinnamon, ginger, a little cloves, long pepper and grains of paradise
and hippocras according to the amount of soup you want to make, and
mix the spices and the hippocras together and put in the pot with the
poultry and the broth and boil everything together and add a very
little vinegar, taking care that it just simmers and add sugar to
taste and serve over the toasted crackers with white anise or red or
pomegranate powder.

---

How You Want to Make a Food of Hens
Daz Buoch von Guoter Spise p. B-7 (#28)

This is called King's Hens. Take young roasted hens. Cut them in
small pieces. Take fresh eggs and beat them. Mix thereto pounded
ginger and a little anise. Pour that in a strong pot, which will be
hot. With the same herbs, which you add to the eggs, sprinkle
therewith the hens and put the hens in the pot. And do thereto
saffron and salt to mass. And put them to the fire and let them bake
(at the) same heat with a little fat. Give them out whole. That is
called King's Hens.

---

Flampoyntes Bake
Two Fifteenth Century p. 53
[funny symbol should be a thorn]

Take fayre Buttes of Porke, and se=FEe hem in fayre Watere, and clene
pyke a-way =FEe bonys and =FEe Synewes, and hew hem and grynd hem in a
mortere, and temper with =FEe Whyte of Eyroun, and Sugre, and pouder of
Pepir, and Gyngere, and Salt; =FEan take neyssche Cruddis [soft curds],
grynd hem, and draw =FEorw a straynoure; and caste =FEer-to Aneys, Salt,
pouder Gyngere, Sugre; and =FEan take =FEe Stuffe of =FEe Porke, and putte
it on euelong cofyn of fayre past; and take a fe=FEer, and endore =FEe
Stuffe in =FEe cofyn with =FEe cruddys; and whan it is bake, take Pynes,
and clowys, and plante =FEe cofyn a-boue, a rew of on, and rew of
a-nother; and =FEan serue forth.

---

Recipe for Oven Cheese Pie, Which We Call Toledan
Andalusian p. A-64

Make dough as for musammana and make a small leafy round loaf of it.
Then roll it out and put sufficient pounded cheese in the middle.
Fold over the ends of the loaf and join them over the cheese on all
sides; leave a small hole the size of a dinar on top, so the cheese
can be seen, and sprinkle it with some anise. Then place it in the
oven on a slab, and leave it until it is done, take it out and use
it, as you wish.
---

A Dish of Pullets Suitable for the Aged and Those with Moistnesses

Clean a fat pullet and put in a pot and put with it the white part of
onions, soaked garbanzos, pepper, cumin, caraway, anise, oil and
salt. And when it boils, throw in rue and cinnamon. When it is done,
cover with many eggyolks and pounded almonds and clove and lavender,
and ladle out and serve.
---

All but the last of these are in the Miscellany, webbed on my site.
There are a few more in the 13th c. Andalusian cookbook (where the
last one came from).
--
David/Cariadoc
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/

Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2002 12:35:25 -0800
To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
From: lilinah at earthlink.net
Subject: [Sca-cooks] Anise Seed Recipes

Many German recipes use anise. I know it was in a number of the
dishes i made for Boar Hunt 2001. Recipes on my website, starting at:
http://witch.drak.net/lilinah/2001Menu.html

Anahita

Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2008 10:09:15 +0100 (CET)
From: Volker Bach <carlton_bach at yahoo.de>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Anise and Bread - Pliny Re: The benefits of Anise
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

I found another reference for a bread recipe with
anise in the bread...I only have an english translation:

Translation: by Andrew Dalby
White Bread. Bread made from wheat is the best and most nutritious of all foods. Particularly if white, with a moderate use of yeast and salt, the dough kneaded midway between dryness and rawness, and with a little anise, fennel seed and mastic, it is very fine indeed. One with a hot constitution should include sesame in the dough. If wishing to add more moistness to the bread, knead in some almond oil.
-Dalby, Andrew, Flavours of Byzantium, Great Britain: Prospect Books, 2003

I have yet to find a transliteration of the original recipe. I tried this the first time with caraway, because I didn't have anise or fennel in my cabinet and I just wanted to give a try. I found the caraway too strong a flavor against the use of the white flour. I had not had come across a recipe before for mastic either, and after my first time trying this recipe looked for a source. 

Now I have some mastic, is it supposed to be ground to
a powder or possibly dissolved in something? I've never used this
ingredient before. But, I do look forward to playing with this recipe more.
______________________________________________________

I've worked with this and found that I liked it best
with a very gentle hand on the caraway and the
fennelseed dominant. You can put in whole fennelseeds
or grind them - I like the rustic appeal of whole
seends, but I suspect the Byzantines preferred them
ground.

Mastic can be had in lumps much like gum arabic or
powdered. Art supply shops alsao sometimes sell it in
little granules. I prefer to get mine in lumps because
I can thus be reasonably sure it hasn't been
adulterated, but pre-ground is more practical for
cooking (I use mine as chewing gum sometimes, too).

Be prepared to pay through your nose. Mastic has
gotten quite pricy - I think it's the Mediterranean
cooking craze and a fad for traditional materials in
art (I've only once used mastic in my art and wasn't
impressed).

Giano

Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2008 07:33:09 -0500
From: Johnna Holloway <johnna at sitka.engin.umich.edu>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Anise and Bread - Pliny Re:  The benefits of
	Anise
To: euriol at ptd.net,	Cooks within the SCA
	<sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>

I pulled Andrew Dalby's  Flavours of Byzantium off the shelf here
last night and looked up this recipe. His translated version appears on
page 180.

The source of the original recipe is given as "De Cibis 2."

De Cibis is described by Dalby on page 48 as being "a manuscript
compilation...
addressed to a seventh century emperor, presumably by a court  
physician."

Looking in the bibliography, De Cibis is given as being edited by
Ideler. 1841-1842.

Going back to page 127, it turns out that a scholar named Ideler edited
a collection of various texts in the early 1840's. These were published
in Greek in Berlin.
This collection includes De Cibis.

Dalby notes that this collection is now available as part of the TLG
CD-ROM set that is published by the University of California at Irvine.

So what is this TLG set? TLC stands for Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. It's
described at
http://www.tlg.uci.edu/
I can tell you that various academic libraries offer access to the texts
now through the TLG database, so if you read Greek you should be able to locate the text in the database. I looked and it appears to be there.
*To view the texts in Greek, a Greek font has to be installed on your
computer.*

Johnnae llyn Lewis

euriol wrote:
> I found another reference for a bread recipe with anise in the  
> bread... I only have an english translation:
>
> Translation: by Andrew Dalby
> White Bread Bread made from wheat is the best and most nutritious of all
> foods. Particularly if white, with a moderate use of yeast and salt, the
> dough kneaded midway between dryness and rawness, and with a little anise,
> fennel seed and mastic, it is very fine indeed. One with a hot constitution
> should include sesame in the dough. If wishing to add more moistness to the
> bread, knead in some almond oil.
> -Dalby, Andrew, Flavours of Byzantium, Great Britain: Prospect  
> Books, 2003
>
> I have yet to find a transliteration of the original recipe.  
> snipped   Euriol

<the end>