From our intrepid chef, and her tasting team:
Well, the recipe testing went well yesterday.

The Sawse Madame was fantastic (I substituted mint and thyme for the hyssop and savoury) and I want to cook this again for a dinner party.

The original recipe for Mawmenee was cooked and even Muighein thought it was too sweet. I've kept that sauce in a jar in the fridge to let the unsuspecting masses try it. I then did another redaction of the recipe, this time using significantly less sugar and it worked really well. Not everyone's cup of tea and needs to be mopped up with bread, but will be good to present. 

- Francesca
 
Saturday was a busy day for these pentathletes - winemaking and lots of cooking.

As you would imagine, the basics were - wash and de-stalk the grapes. Then press them to squeeze out the juice. Well, in the 14th century they were stomping it (see the Holkham Bible illustration in the picture). So, with our disposable apprentice away, Muirghein volunteered to give it a go. Apparently it is quite pleasant, although rather cold. And there was a bit of messing about to get the technique right - fresh washed grapes are slippery suckers!

After all the fun was over, we added the sulphide (to sterilize) and the yeast (for fermentation). Given we were going for an open fermentation process, we only covered this with a cloth, to make sure no unanticipated ingredients made their way into the mash. Now to ferment for a week...

 
When looking for unusual things to do with grapes, we came across a recipe labelled grape relish. Even though it was not specifically datable to 14thC England, we decided it just sounded too interesting not to try - plus it allowed us to use black grapes, where all our other activities used white. 

First we washed and de-stalked the grapes, then pounded them, and added the breadcrumbs, verjuice and spices. Then we simmered the relish over the stove. This was when we realised this was much more of a sauce - and a sweet one at that.

After simmering it for half an hour, we took it off the stove, and pressed it through a mill. And the result was a fantastic rich purple sauce - very decadent. The only problem was that there wasn't very much as at reduced quite a lot - enough for us all to taste some, and bottle about a cup worth.
Relish it isn't, but it is a really lovely tasting sauce. And have you ever seen  such a fantastic purple in a dish before?
 
On our first big project day, we thought we would start with something easy - making fresh verjuice. This is unfermented grape juice, usually from underripe grapes to produce one that has tang rather than sweetness. We chose this project early on because we needed to get to the grapes in Muirghein's back yard before they ripened. This ended up being a much bigger effort than we thought, and gave us a new appreciation for this ingredient.

Based on an estimate of 5 kilos of grapes for about a litre of verjuice, we started with picking enough grapes, then getting them off the stem. From here we needed to juice them. While we tried the food mill, it just couldn't process the grapes - they were too big, and often too solid.
We fell back on crushing them with our fingers, and also tried pressing them through a seive. While both were effective, they weren't getting the juice out efficiently. At this point we fell back on putting the partially squashed grapes into some cooking muslin, and squeezing the juice out. This was more effective, but still left some grapes almost in tact. However given this was now about 3 hours into the process, we decided that was good enough!

At this point we wanted to clarify the verjuice, as there was a lot of sediment. We strained it through a linen cloth (a tea towel that was sacrificed for the job, and the verjuice came out reasonable clear (the tea towel will never be the same). Our hands were quite stained with the process also. But in the end our verjuice looked pretty good, and we stored some in a jar to settle, and froze some. Both will be tried later to see how they have fared. The final photo in the series above shows (left to right) strained verjuice,  unstrained verjuice, and commercial verjuice for comparison.

 
Our first activity was to try making vine tendril charcoal for our black pigment. Muirghein found the reference in Theophilus, and Portia cut the dry vine tendrils from a dead grape vine. As there was no specific recipe for how to create this charcoal, we then took them to Sui to get some help, and he walked us through the process of creating charcoal from the vine tendrils.

Essentially charcoal is created by burning something in a restricted space - in this case a milo tin that had been used before to create charcloth. We packed the tin as full as possible of vine tendrils, placed the lid on it with a small hole, and then put it on the barbecue. As the tendrils heated, they off-gassed, and this caught fire - you know your substance has become charcoal when this fire goes out.
At the end of the process, we tested the blackened tendrils in a small brazier  with a flint and steel to check that we had definitely created charcoal.  Success! Now to make the pigment by grinding it all up...