braciatrix

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 adore 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, as big of a fan as I am of tomato ketchup, I had never tried, nor even heard of, walnut ketchup, which apparently is […]

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, a 16th-century 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 do […]

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 […]

For many of you, hearing the phrase Viking funeral may conjure up images of a small boat drifting off shore containing a body of some sort of male chief. In this boat with him may be other bodies, humans sacrificed to accompany him on his journey to the afterlife, perhaps if he’s lucky, Valhalla. As […]

Welcome to the latest instalment of Christina publishes her PhD thesis, this time we have my favourite thing… Theory!  Yay! Insert groans. Actually much to many a friend’s dismay, I do love some theory. And talking about theory, and arguing about theory, and making new theory.  I am SO FUN at parties friends, so fun. […]