Happy Christmas Eve to all who celebrate, and a Good Yule and Merry Solstice. So continuing on my current kick of making all the hot ale drinks I can find, for this week’s task, I opted to make a posset. Why a posset this week? Well, this time of year signals the return of one […]

Wassailing. There are a lot of good articles online about its history, but in case you aren’t familiar, here is a brief overview.  According to the UK National Trust, the wassailing tradition has been around for centuries.[1] It is particularly associated with the Twelfth Night which is January 5th and marks the eve of the […]

I made butter beer! No, not the wizard version, but the real late 16th and early 17th-century stuff made with sugar, warming spices, eggs, and you guessed it, butter. It has been absolutely freezing this week and so the thoughts of a hot beverage to ward off the chill sounded like an excellent idea. Also, […]

I love ketchup. Love the stuff, put it on so very many things. Eggs, grilled cheese, burgers, nearly everything can be improved with a little bit of the red sauce. However much I love tomato ketchup, I had never tried, nor even heard of, walnut ketchup, which apparently is quite a thing. Also mushroom ketchup. […]

On the back of last week’s cock-ale, I wanted to make something I was a wee bit more sure about. This dish, Soppes Dorre, appears throughout medieval and early modern books about cooking. There are at least 10 recipes I could find easily in my search and I am going to prepare two of them […]

Elynour Rummyng, an Early Modern fictional alewife, mixed hen’s droppings with ale to create a potion designed to make the drinker appear two or more years younger. In this week’s historical beer cooking, we recreate her recipe. Well kinda. I’m not particularly interested in acquiring food poisoning. But, I did think it would be fun to […]

Welcome to my newest project where every week I’ll cook a new historical recipe with beer as an ingredient. Each recipe will be at least 100 years old, with most written between 300-700 years ago. I’ve scoured the archives and have at least a year’s worth of these to try, so join me as I […]

It’s time for some more information on those 155 tablets I went through. This time- legal documents. Same caveats as the last post: I am not an expert in cuneiform and will be using translations. We are going to investigate the legal codes found amongst the cuneiform tablets in my sample today; specifically as it […]

So this past while, I fell down a rabbit hole of epic proportions procrastinating researching cuneiform tablets and their inscriptions on beer. I used the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, which is an internet archive for cuneiform tablets from all over the world. This is an excellent resource and one well worth having a look and […]