My Menu

Here is the great menu that the Golden Swan presented to us for our wedding. We wanted a buffet with a lot to chose from. The Danish people loves potatoes, but as the potato was unknown in Europe in the middle ages it can't be a part of the menu. I am a little excited to see the reaction of guests when I show them what's for dinner. :-)

A Medieval buffet with courses from the knight's table

Warm smoked salmon with herbs
Fresh cold smoked salmon with herbs
Cold smoked and cured herring in marinade
Cold smoked air dried ham.
Cold smoked air dried veal saussage

Cinnamon fried chicken
Fried gnaw bones with salsament
Duck in lady sauce
Lam in men's sauce
Roast smoked veil sausages with pickled red turnip
Coarse salad from the cabbadge garden
Cinnamon baked apple pie with rose cream
Cheese with grapes
Freshly baked coarse bread with strong mustard and butter

I am not certain if I translated it all properly but you will have to leave a comment and ask if you wonder about something.

The menu

First forgive me for long time it took me to write a new entry. My second end-of-the-semester examination is upon me and I have quite a lot of work until my vacation starts June the 7th.

Anyway: The food is a big part of the wedding day and thanks to both historians and experimental archaeology we have a pretty good knowledge of how the medieval family dined. I will find some recipes or cooking books you can buy if you want to read more or learn how to do it yourself.

The daily meal for the common man or peasant wasn't all that interesting. Soup, porridge and bread. Usually the farmsteads had a small garden where they grew cabbage, turnips and the like. If you were close to the sea fish was also a part of the diet and wild plants like berries and nuts would be gathered. The poor did eat meat too, but it was more precious than grain.

At a wedding or a party lots and lots of courses were served and when the guests couldn't eat any more they would barf to make room for more and eat on. That may seem like bad manners, but it wasn't considered so at the time.

A simple choice for the main course is roast piglet. It's a meal that looks very medieval and it tastes soo good :-) It will take a while to prepare but for the man who likes a good BBQ it's a dream.

The medieval kitchen wasn't as boring as one might think. You can make a lot of tasty dishes.
I will recommend you to check out Daniel Myers blog: http://medievalcookery.blogspot.com/ . He also has a website: http://www.medievalcookery.com/.

Have fun in the kitchen :)

Guestbook

It's always nice to be able to open the guest book years after the wedding and to read the warm well wishes of those who participated in your special day. There's plenty of possibilities to make the guest book fit the theme and give the guests an experience along the way.

An obvious idea is to make people write with a feather quill and ink. You can get a lot of different color feather pens if you have a color scheme to stick to.

As for the book, the leather bound journals look just right. You can get these books designed after you own wishes in several shops. The motifs on these books should of course be medieval, or you can get your names engraved in the leather.

 

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In the end I want to show you my guest book, which I bought at a museum store in Denmark. I haven't unwrapped it yet, but it is beautifully red and with a crouching lion on the cover.

You can also buy different shades of ink so you really can make the guest book fun and medieval-ish. :)

My invitation

I want to share the invitation I made for my wedding with you. I made the drawing from scratch and colored it too. Later I will print them on paper similar to what they used for the medieval manuscripts, which are also the inspiration for my design. As I have been drawing for many years it felt natural to do the invitations by hand, but there's a lot of fine alternatives on the internet if you don't feel like making it yourself. :)
Some of the white spaces are to be painted with gold, so they will look mere like the manuscripts made by the munks. But the gold can't be copied and printet very well so that will have to be applied each of the invitations.