After extensive reading of numerous books and websites, I've come up with my menu for the meal. Obviously this will be flexible depending on what I manage to find and kill, but it is a good structure to create a plan of what I am going to do.
I initially thought that basing a dinner around a Medieval Christmas feast would be easier due to the fact that all the ingredients would have been available in Britain. All our current Christmas traditions stem from these ancient meals, with roast beasts, fruit and lots of fattier foods in abundance, so there would be a link to the current feasts we all know.
The traditional Medieval Christmas dinner was rich and heavy as it had come after a period of fasting. The Advent fast prohibited meat, chicken, milk, cheese and butter, so once the period of abstinence was over, everyone wanted to cram as much of these foods in as possible. Sure, they had managed to eat some meat during the advent, as they reckoned that beavers, as they lived in water like fish, munching on their tails was a good source of protein. Once they had had their fill of a month of fish flavoured to taste like meat and beaver tail, medieval folks fancied a bit of venison, pig, chicken or goose, with lots of fatty and sweet treats. They also threw in lots of spices to their food, with gingerbread, spiced wines, mince pies and plum puddings, all things that are still commonplace today. Although the medieval meal hasn't changed a lot, some of the ingredients have so I will be looking back in time to old recipes to try and find alternatives for a lot of our imported ingredients.
My amuse-bouche is inspired by the medieval love of land animals and fatty dishes and I will be making Wild Beast Terrine with chutney & toast. I've deliberately kept things a bit vague here on the beast content, but it could include duck, pigeon rabbit, pheasant - anything really that I manage to get in the run up to Christmas.
The medieval feast was one of decadence and even though crabs and lobsters were once peasant food, they are now considered posh nosh so I will be making a Crab and/or Lobster consomme for a starter - hopefully that should embrace the decadence!
The main course is the highlight of the Christmas meal and again, being on the coast of Scotland with lots of migrating geese means that I'm aiming to have a couple of roast wild geese for dinner, and it is going very medieval as they too would have used this bird at Christmas. You can't have a Christmas bird without stuffing, and taking inspiration from a River Cottage recipe for Bunny Burgers, I'm going to make Bunny Stuffing - packed with herbs and juniper (I've found a bush!). I hope to be able to trade some shellfish for some venison that I will transform into Chipolata sausages (subtle hints have already been made for a Sausage maker for my birthday in June!) and instead of Cranberry Jelly, I'm going to have another go at making rosehip jelly to serve with the bird. Root vegetables are going to come from homemade growbags, and my initial plan was to find some disused land and plant some potatoes in it. Then I did some research.
Guerrilla Gardening is a growing past-time of the middle classes and, although illegal, has been going on for centuries. Since the 17th century, when a group of people fought for the right to cultivate land for food, people have been planting in land that doesn't belong to them. People are planting flowers on roundabouts and verges to stop the urban decay and brighten up our towns and cities with colour, others are putting down veggies in disused flower beds and all of this is often done in the middle of the night. However, because I run a wine shop, I have to pass police checks to keep my license to sell alcohol. Even though the chances of me being caught planting a few spuds up a farm track are slim to nil, I would have to write about it, and that would be me confessing to committing a crime, so I am going to have to borrow a bit of land somewhere for that.
Foraged Christmas Pudding is going to be made out of any fruit I can find and dry, as will the Christmas cake. I should be able to get a supply of plums, so rather than make a raisin filled Christmas Pudding, I'll be making a Dickensian Plum pudding after harvesting and drying plums at home. If I can find any other berries , I'll dry those out too for these desserts.
That isn't where the cooking stops I'm afraid, with as the Christmas feast continues with Mince Pies but that i've already got sussed. My sister-in-law gave us a jar of homemade mincemeat for Christmas last year so I'm just going to continue feeding it with booze throughout 2012 and use that for some mince pies. Another thing I'm cheating on is the damson gin that I made at the end of last year. Infusing damsons with a bit of sugar in a bottle of gin is one of the easiest home made drinks you can make. Of course it is unadvisable to make your own gin from scratch, but buying an inexpensive supermarket bottle of gin is a quick, cheap and easy way to make this winter treat.
Pickles and chutneys should be easy enough to make. The vinegar is going to have to be bought out of the budget, but the vegetables that I need can be grown in containers and grow bags, but cheese is going to be hard to come by. Any dairy I need is going to have to be bought, but when you start buying cheese, my £30 budget is going to be eliminated pretty quickly.
So those are my plans. I've not been able to do anything towards this yet, but I've had a bit more luck and progress with the gifts side of things. That will come in the next instalment.
