Medieval Oat Soup

Welcome to our kitchen. Today we prepare medieval oat soup from the Liber de Coquina, written in the 14th century. We start with the ingredients. We need oat flour, chicken, spinach, and spices, black pepper, cloves, and nutmeg. We mince the spinach and half a chicken breast and grind the spices. The anonymous author doesn't specify which spices to use. Choose those you prefer, from ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, grains of paradise, and black, white, or long pepper, which are the most commonly used in this period. The meat mentioned in the text is hen breast, but if you use chicken or capon, the result won't change much. This recipe is for olus, a term that usually refers to leafy greens, such as spinach, chard, or borage. But in another passage, this source calls olera a series of aromatic herbs, such as parsley, fennel, dill, marjoram, and rosemary. This means that you can prepare this recipe as you like, using different greens and aromatic herbs, and adapting it to your taste. We melt some lard in a pan and cook the chicken breast and spinach with the spices and two pinches of salt for a few minutes. Then, we add the flour and hot water a little at a time. We cooked the flour for about 20 minutes, stirring almost all the time. If you prefer, you can use cured pork fatback or olive oil instead of lard. We used half a chicken breast, about 200 grams of spinach, and 100 grams of flour. In addition to this recipe, in the Liber de Coquina, there is another similar one that calls for vegetables, oat flour, and apples instead of chicken. The one we are preparing today comes from France, whereas that with apples is according to English usage. The reference to France and England is very important, because we don't usually find oats in Italian recipes, except in some preparations for the sick. The most common use of oats in Italy was as fodder for horses and other herbivores, since this cereal was rarely used for human consumption. Oddly enough, it seems to be a matter of taste. The physician Lodovico Bertaldi, in the 16th century, writes that bread made with this cereal is bitter, unpleasant to taste, and hard to digest, an opinion shared by Galen in the 1st century, who writes that oat bread is not good. Outside of Italy and Greece, however, oats seem to have been widely used. According to Pliny, apples made with oats was a staple of the diet of the Germanic populations, a use that continued uninterrupted throughout the centuries in the northern countries, according to Bertaldi and Pietro Andramattioli in the 16th century. In addition to bread and pulse, oats were also used to make soups and blancmange. Some examples of recipes can be found not only in medical handbooks, but also in cookbooks, such as the Liber de Coquina and the Tractatus de Modo Preparandi et Condiendi Omnia Cibari et Potus. To learn more about cereals in historical Italian cuisine, check out our new book, Early Italian Recipes, Cereals, Bread, Pasta, and Pies, with recipes from the Antiquity to the Renaissance, and an introduction to the historical uses of cereals, basic preparations, and ingredients. This book is the second in the series, Early Italian Recipes, the first being dedicated to vegetables, fruit, herbs, and flowers in historical cooking. For more information on medieval cooking, read our translations of Anonimo Toscanos, Libro della Cocina, and Ioannes Bochenheim's Registrum Coquine. In addition, the translations of the Liber de Coquina and the Tractatus are available on our Patreon page, along with several other ancient and medieval sources and articles on historical food. In the description below, you'll find a list of our books on historical food, along with links to buy us a beer and purchase our merchandise. This soup was very simple and hearty, with the sweet taste of the oats well balanced by the intensity of the spices and the delicate combination of chicken and spinach. It would be interesting to try this dish with different greens and some aromatic herbs, to experience how medieval cooks approached their culinary tradition through variations of flavors and ingredients. If you're interested in ancient foods and flavors, subscribe our channel and consider supporting us on Patreon.