RedHeadedGirl’s Historical Kitchen: A Dish for Harlots and Ruffians

Isn’t that the best name for a dish you’ve ever heard?

This is from a 15th century cookbook by Johannes Bockenheim (last name of various spellings) who was a cook to Pope Martin V. In it, he included notes on what type of person each recipe was best suited for- based on social class and/or nationality. Why this particular recipe is ideal for ruffians and harlots, I do not know.

The truly unfortunate thing is that I was not able to find an edition of the entire book that’s in English, and my Latin and French is not that good. In English, I found this recipe in what is often called (at least around these parts) “that one blue book,” The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy.  It’s a collection of various sources, with previously interpreted recipes, but is one of those really great books that starts people off in playing with medieval cooking.

The English translation (which is from the French the blue book was originally written in, which itself was translated from the original Latin) is:

“Take eggs and break them, with oranges, as many as you like; squeeze their juice and add to it the eggs with sugar; then take olive oil or fat, and heat it in the pan and add the eggs. This was for ruffians and brazen harlots.”

It’s pretty straightforward- eggs, orange juice, sugar, fry it up, eat.  The blue book does suggest cutting the orange juice with lemon juice, as oranges in period were more bitter than navel oranges are today.

Now, you could tie yourself into knots going, “but what KIND of oranges” but my grocery store only had navel oranges and I didn’t want to worry about it. So I did not. I did splurge a tiny bit on organic cane sugar, rather than generic sugar.

So I tried this two ways- one with straight orange juice and scrambled, and once with a little lemon juice and (attempted) sunny-side up.  (Spoiler for the tl;dr crowd: the scrambled was better).

Ingredients!

 

For each iteration, I went with two eggs each. No one else was home when I played around with these, so I had to eat them all myself. I mean, I’m not complaining, but six eggs in one sitting is a bit much.

 

Two eggs, plus orange juice, and the sugar. For the scrambled iteration, I beat them and poured them into a pan.

Cooking!

Sunnyside.  Kinda.

What we really learned here is that I don’t cook sunnyside eggs very often, and, well, my attempt to get them out of the pan was….hilarious?

 

Yeah.

Anyway, here’s Wonderwall the scrambled version.

I think the scrambled version is more likely. The orange and the sugar came through and it was a light, delicious snack. I don’t know if this is, like, breakfast, or dessert, and ultimately it doesn’t matter, because there’s orange juice involved, so it’s healthy right?

Right.

But seriously it’s really quite tasty, if you like scrambled eggs (I’m partial to Gordon Ramsay’s scrambled eggs myself) but you want less butter and more vitamin C, then this is the right choice.

In period, you’d probably be cooking it in something like this, which also leads credence to the scrambled theory.

That’s a pipkin, and given that the handle would be used for stirring and nudging the food, scrambled makes a lot of sense.

As for why this is good for ruffians and harlots, I don’t know. No one does! I had a friend who wondered if the need for vitamin C and protein was good for exertions of various kinds, which is as good a theory as any, but I’m super interested in what ideas y’all got.

Ruffians, harlots and breakfast? Oh, my!