Farsumagru image courtesy of anwarnieninqe on Flickr.
If you read my post about the 12th century Crusader king food challenge I am putting together for an SCA event in November, you’ll know that I am on the hunt for recipes. A post to the Known Worlde Cooks List, an e-mail list for SCA cooks all over the world, brought a slew of ideas and book and article links from Johnnae Ilyn Lewis. I also did more poking around in the resource treasure that is Stefan’s Florilegium. And I think I have come up with a dish that could work for Richard I’s table.
There is a traditional Sicilian beef recipe called “farsumagru,” The name translates as “false lean,” and could be a pun on the appearance of the dish – it looks like a simple beef roll, but when you slice into it, you’ll find a rich filling that includes hardboiled eggs, cheeses, and meats. This Website gives another interpretation of the name, and says the dish was “invented” in the 19th century by the French-trained “monsu” chefs in wealthy Palermitan households, or it was introduced by the Spanish in the 15th century. Traditionally, mortadella (Italian bologna) or pancetta (salted, but not smoked, bacon) are used, though one version by Mario Batali includes sausage. Many versions of the recipe include pine nuts and raisins, such as this one by food writer Clifford Wright, an expert on Mediterranean cuisine.
The egg yolks struck a particular chord of memory with me, so I went looking in the Florilegium to see if there were any discussions of beef roll recipes. And there they were, several citations of a 15th century English recipe called “Alows de beef.” A large, thin piece of beef is filled with chopped-up hard boiled egg yolks, marrow, onions, and a mixture of spices (ginger, saffron, salt, pepper, and cinnamon) and is rolled up and broiled, and served with a sauce of vinegar and hardboiled egg yolks.
Here is one version of the recipe, from the “Two 15th Century Cookery Books” manuscript.
The many versions of the farsumagru recipes share some elements in common with the Alows de beef: the breadcrumbs, parsley, onions, and hardboiled eggs as part of the filling. But instead of using marrow as the rich, fatty ingredient in the filling,it’s mortadella or pancetta. And Alows de beef do not include the grated cheeses, while no farsumagru recipe is complete without them.
Interestingly enough (at least to me), if you check out the spices used in the two versions of mortadella available in Italy, mortadella di Bologna and mortadella di Amatrice, the flavor palette is somewhat reminiscent of the spices found in Alows de beef and many recipes of the medieval period (the mortadella di Amatrice does contain cinnamon).
Now, would a beef roll have been on Richard I’s Christmas table? It’s definitely a possibility. Beef rolls are certainly a way to eke out meat. It was wintertime, and Richard’s and Philip’s soldiers would have been eating everything in sight around Messina, so I bet older animals would have had to been used. Taking a piece of tough meat and pounding it out flat and tender would have been economical; and stuffing it with rich spices and marrow and eggs (the latter are scarce in the winter as the hens do not lay then) would have made it fit for a king.
Now, how did this beef roll get into Sicilian cuisine? Was it the 19th century French monsu? Something from the 15th century Aragonese kings? I don’t think it really matters. Medieval noble cuisine was “pan European;” the same recipes were copied from England to Spain to France to Southern Italy. There were regional twists; recipe collections differed. But Sicily, with its waves of “invaders” and settlers – Greek, Arab, Norman French, Lombard, Swabian German, Catalan, Genovese, Aragonese, etc. – was a perfect place for some of these recipes to find a new home. And the island’s isolation and poverty (especially from the 17th century onward) helped preserve the medieval traditions in peasant kitchens that died out elsewhere.
I’m looking forward to making my medieval farsumagru!
siquillya 