​"A gilded leche, leech or leach was served at Henry VIII's Garter Feast at Windsor in 1520, appearing in both the first and second courses. This rosewater-flavoured jelly featured as a chessboard with the 'black' squares gilded. Leach continued to be a favourite dish at other Garter Feasts until the seventeenth century. Leech was closely related to 'ribband jelly', a jelly moulded in multi-coloured layers, (ribbons), also popular in Tudor times." The Tudor Cookbook: From Gilded Peacock to Calves' Feet Pie By Terry Breverton

I was inspired by this Garter Feast, as told to me by Master Drake and Mistress Acacia, to create my own checkerboard. My practice run was more successful than the one I produced for the feast (a bit of a disaster as the jelly lost cohesion although it still tasted good!) as everything should be done in a cool room and remain well refrigerated to be successful. 
 
I didn't use a recipe as jelly flavours are fairly easy to create if you remember the following:

• Check how much jelly your gelatine will make – mine was 12 sheets to 1 litre of jelly
• Alcohol needs more gelatine – usually half as much again as other fluids (can be more or less depending on the strength of the alcohol
• You lose a lot of flavour when setting jelly so what will taste a bit overpowering as when at room temp, will lose flavour when chilled 

 
Ingredients
Almond Milk Jelly

• 10 gelatine sheets
• 750 mils chilled Almond milk
• 80g white sugar

Port Wine Jelly

• 12 gelatine Sheets
• 300 mils room temp cherry juice
• 450 mils room temp tawny port or cherry liquor/port
• 40g white sugar

 Method

• Prepare a 23-25cm/9-10 inch square plastic container (or other square mould) by oiling the inside with olive oil or cold butter.

Almond Milk Jelly

• Soak the gelatine sheets in cold water for one to two minutes, separating each one before putting it in the dish (you can put them on top of each other and all must be submerged). This is called blooming the gelatine. The result should be floppy gelatine sheets.
• In a very small saucepan slowly heat (using medium to low heat) 50-100mils of the almond milk. It should not be boiled, just hot.
• Add the gelatine sheets one by one, dissolving each before adding the next.
• Dissolve the sugar by adding a little at a time and stirring until all is dissolved.
• Take saucepan off the heat, pour into a Pyrex jug and pour the remaining cold almond milk in and stir
• Carefully pour the mixture into the prepared plastic container and refrigerate for about 20-30 minutes until just set.

Pot wine jelly

• Bloom the gelatine.
• In a very small saucepan slowly heat (using medium to low heat) 50-100mils of the cherry juice It should not be boiled, just hot.
• Add the gelatine sheets one by one, dissolving each before adding the next.
• Dissolve the sugar by adding a little at a time and stirring until all is dissolved.
• Take saucepan off the heat, pour into a Pyrex jug and pour the remaining room temperature cherry juice in, then pour the port in and stir.
• Carefully remove the mould from the fridge and pour the port mixture in taking care to minimise the bubbles.
• If the finished pour has too many bubbles, carefully skim the top off.
• Put in the fridge for 5-10 minutes and skim the top again if the bubbles haven’t disappeared.
• Refrigerate for at least 3-4 hours.

Unmoulding

• Prepare hot (not boiling) water in a sink or tray and submerge bottom of mould for a few seconds. Jiggle and see if the jelly is coming away from the sides. Repeat until it does. Don’t be tempted to rest the jelly in the hot water as it will dissolve the jelly.
• Unmould by putting the final tray/plate on top of the container and flipping it upside down.
• Cut off any curved corners and cut jelly into 64 equal squares an inch wide (you will have off cuts this allows you to make the sides of the jelly clean and square. I used a sterilised quilting set square to do this.
• Flip alternate squares to make the checkerboard.
• Cover with plastic wrap or the upside down container and refrigerate.

Sources:
How to Milk an Almond, Stuff an Egg, And Armor a Turnip: A Thousand Years of Recipes by David Friedman and Elizabeth Cook 1988
How to make Almond Milk (p7)
“Almond milk is an ingredient common in Medieval European recipes, particularly in Lenten dishes (milk, eggs, and meat broth all being forbidden in Lent). The recipe below is a basic one. For some recipes we make a thicker almond milk with more almonds relative to the amount of water; other recipes say “draw up a good milk of almonds with broth (or wine),” in which case the broth or wine is substituted for the water in making the almond milk. To make almond milk: Take ¼ c (1 ¾ oz) almonds. Put them in a food processor, run it briefly. Add a little water, run it longer. Continue adding water and running the processor until you have a milky liquid. Strain through several layers of cheesecloth. Put the residue back in the food processor, add a little more water, and repeat. Continue until the residue produces almost no more milk. Throw out the residue. This should give you about 1 c of almond milk.”  
Notes:

• c stands for cup
• I have not tried this recipe yet

Cookit History Cookbook: Almond Leech
"Take a quart of almond milk and three ounces of gelatine, half a pond of beaten sugar; stir them together. Let it  be thick. Then strain it with three spoonfuls of rosewater. Then put it into a platter and let it cool, and cut it in squares. Lay it fair in dishes, and lay gold upon it." Original source is Sir Hugh Plat’s Delights for Ladies, 1602

and The Tudor Kitchen: What the Tudors Ate & Drank By Terry Breverton
"Leach of Almonds
Ingredients: 1 cup almond milk, 1 ½ tbsp. of sugar, ¼ cup cream; tbsp. rosewater; ½ tbsp. gelatine."
"Milk Jelly
1 pint fully fat milk or almond milk; 2-3 leaves of gelatine; 2 oz sugar"
"Wine Jelly
¼ pint red wine or grape juice; 1 leaf of gelatine, 5-6 rose petals or a little rosewater."

These are a cross between a biscuit (cookie) and a cake. They are buttery, crumbly and delicious. Can be served at the end of a feast, as an afternoon pick me up or a wholesome snack on the run. The picture shown has a thin pelican patterned sugar plate disc and barberry on top.

I have put all the measurements in teaspoons and grams as these are universal - sorry to anyone using imperial (Australian and US tablespoons are different measures)
This recipe makes many, many cakes. It is great for the holiday season and you can play around with spices. Try adding ground ginger or the zest of a lemon for something different.

Ingredients

• 400g Plain Gluten Free Flour
• 300g Currants
• 150g Sugar
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 4 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 2 (generous) teaspoons fresh ground black pepper
• 1 egg yolk
• 16 teaspoons of lactose free cream
• 10 teaspoons of sherry
• 200g Butter (salted) (or lactose free alternative for lactose free cookies)

 
Method

• Combine dry ingredients.
• Cut butter into the dry ingredients.
• Whip the egg yolk and cream together
• fold in sherry to the egg mixture
• add wet mixture to dry mixture slowly
• Shape into two or three balls (to make it manageable) and roll out on a cold surface dusted with gluten free flour to stop it sticking.
• Cut using a round cookie cutter.
• Place on a baking paper lined biscuit/cookie tray.
• Bake for 20-25 minutes at 175 degrees Celsius/350 degrees Fahrenheit. The time is dependent upon each cook's individual oven and the size of the cakes. 
• The glaze is brushed on while still warm from the oven and a second layer once cooled.

Source
This recipe was adapted from "Excellent Small Cakes Revisited" by Tirloch of Tallaght.
http://www.florilegium.org/files/FOOD-SWEETS/Digby-Cakes-art.text
Stefan's Florilegium, 30 June 2001.

“Period subtleties served at feasts often included food items made to look like a completely different food item.” (ingen Dairmata, Accessed: 29 July 2019)

The use of colour in food, particularly sweets, has long been a source delight. When sugar started to become more available in the sixteenth century, at least to the nobility, decorative sugar creations, often using plates as moulds became a feature of feasts. 

I became interested in learning about sugar paste as a way to contribute to the culinary life of my household as I cannot assist in the kitchen in mid-June. Taking the advice of his Excellency Master Drake Morgan, I made my first attempt at sugar plate using a pre-made modern paste. ​

The feastocrat for the Canton of Stegby saw my first atempt at sugar plate and requested I attempt to create a  subtlety to fit the Alice in Wonderland theme chosen for the 10 year aniversary. Stegby is a local chapter of the medieval and renaissance history group of the Australasian Kingdon of Lochac of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA). The original idea was to create bugs, slugs and snails as part of the Alice in Wonderland theme, but that didn’t work because:

• Creating a cohesive theme was difficult using just those elements
•  Individual bugs and slugs wouldn’t have told a story or commemorated the event as a subtlety should
• The royals would be attending and their presence should be highlighted.

Having a nineteenth century theme of Alice in Wonderland, posed a problem for turning it into a sixteenth century design. I decided to make a flat cap as a nod to the mad hatter theme out of historically accurate sugar paste as a subtlety. First I had to work out how to make the sugar paste. 

Recipe
I translated the Sir Hugh Plat recipe (Plat, 1602) , and then looked at other translations suggested to me by Baron Morgan. 
Ingredients Makes 350g (12oz)

• 1 egg white
• 300g (11oz) icing (confectioners’) sugar, sifted
• 10ml (2 tsp) gum tragacanth

Method: Put the egg white into a large mixing bowl. Gradually add enough icing sugar until the mixture combines together into a ball. Mix in the gum tragacanth, and then turn the paste out on to a work board or work surface and knead the pastillage well. Incorporate the remaining icing sugar into the remainder of pastillage to give a stiff paste. 
(Smith, 2017)

Drake’s recipe was similar and included rosewater
Ingredients

• 1 egg white from a 60g egg to 
• 300g (11oz) icing (confectioners’) sugar, sifted
• 1 or 2g gum tragacanth powder 
• 10ml Rosewater

Method: Combine egg, tragacanth powder and rosewater. Slowly add the sugar until no more will absorb. 
(Morgan, 2019)

I developed my own in order to get the quantity I needed:

• 900g-1000g icing sugar, sifted
• 3 egg whites from 60g eggs
• 30 mils of rosewater
• 1.5 teaspoons of gum traganth powder

Method: whip egg until frothed, slowly introduce gum powder, mix in rose water and slowly introduce the icing sugar until no more will absorb. 

I made three kilograms of paste to create the hat and base. I used a mould and tooling to create the base, a covered stiffened cardboard circle for the brim and a piece of cut styrofoam for the crown.

I noticed that the paste cured quickly on the surface, meaning that all pieces had to be created quickly. This gave me the idea to make the velvet texture for the hat. I rolled out the paste and left it for half an hour so that when I moved it, the surface cracked - giving it the velvet looking texture I was seeking.

I used modern moulds because I didn’t have time to create wooden moulds. The inside of the mould was coated with cornflower and the outside of each piece of gum paste was also dusted with cornflower before being finger pressed into the moulds. The pieces took between 2-8 days to fully cure. 

Colour
The symbology of colour is important, particularly for an event hosting the crown. I focused on red for the hat (to contrast with the base), blue (for the ribbon and small items) and white (on the hat and small items).  The symbology of the other colours were for the Alice in Wonderland theme – green and brown for the rabbit hole. Red, blue and white are kingdom colours.

I used rose spirit and ground food colouring powder to create the colours. Some colours I used as is and others were as mixed to need. The ‘paint’ was made up to the consistency of poster paints or thickened cream. 

I applied the colours for the base and hat using a sea sponge. This gave the hat the velvet texture I was trying to achieve. I used a small brush for the fine work. 

The colours are admittedly not correct to the period. Unfortunately, I did not have the time to create the quantities of colouring using beet, pomegranate or carrots roasted in embers for red, mulberries for blue, blood raisins for black or amydon for white – brown and green can be achieved by mixing some of the above (ingen Dairmata, Accessed: 29 July 2019) (Fleming, 1996). I am hoping I can put together some colours for future creations and experiment with a fully authentic colour palette. 

All these colours are possible using period materials, as was demonstrated by EA Fleming in her 1990s samples she shared with me on 29 July 2019, below (she notes the silver has tarnished):

Assembly
I used a small amount of sugar paste and sugar glue to attach all the pieces together.
 
Serving Confectionery and Wafery: produced “the spiced and sweetened compounds or confections served as digestives at the close of dinners, suppers, and also at more intimate and luxurious entertainments.” P344 (Brears, 2008)
​
This subtlety was served at the conclusion of the feast and was very well received. Once shown to the room it was taken back to the kitchen to be broken into pieces for serving.

What I learnt

• Taste: The interesting thing is that the historical recipe tastes like a childhood favourite, fags/fad lollies, whereas the modern sugar paste doesn’t taste like much at all.
• Assembly: It is very easy to break the sugar plate by applying too much force or dropping it.
• When to use the paste: It is easier to work the sugar paste once it has been stored in an airtight bag and container for at least a week.
• Curing: Drying is best done on a flat sponge and in a room with low humidity. If left on the plate, it will take at least 2 weeks.
• It was a balance to try to achieve Tudor period creation and honouring the Alice in Wonderland theme. The acknowledged anachronisms are the top hat. The playing cards of the time had similar suits, pocket watches existed in the sixteenth century, and of course bottles and mushrooms are in period.

Bibliography

• Brears, P. (2008). Cooking and Dining in Medieval England. Wiltshire, Great Britain: Prospect Books.
• Fleming, E. (1990s). Sugar Paste Sample Colours. SCA Subtleties/Sotelties/Entremets/Sweet! Facebook page.
• Fleming, E. (1996, March 8). Food Colouring Agents. Retrieved from http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/articles/food_coloring_agents.html
• ingen Dairmata, A. (Accessed: 29 July 2019). Food Colouring Agents. Retrieved from http://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~lwittie/sca/food/colour.html
• Morgan, D. (2019, June 13). Sir Hugh Plat: The Making of Sugar Paste (Email). Brisbane.
• Plat, S. H. (1602). Delights for ladies . London.
• Smith, L. (2017, February 18). How and when should you use pastillage and what is the recipe? Retrieved from https://lindyscakes.co.uk/2017/02/18/pastillage-recipe/

About
Marchpane is much less sweet than marzipan and tastes like fragrant almonds. The rosewater enhances the almond flavour and you can shape it into fanciful shapes or simple discs. A lovely addition to a desert board after a feast or a simple treat with tea.

Ingredients

• 2 cups of almond flour
• 1cup pure icing sugar (confectioners' sugar)
• 2 tablespoons of Rosewater
• ¼ to ½ tsp almond flavouring extract if mixture needs added flavour otherwise leave this out

Notes on ingredients

• All measurements are Australian.
• Almond Meal can be used (I use the Lucky Australian Almond Meal). As long as it has been milled without the dark brown almond skin then it is usually good for use. If you are cooking for Coeliacs (gluten free), always check that the almond meal or flour is gluten free as a number of them are not.
• Icing sugar is different from icing mixture. Icing mixture is not a substitute and should not be used.
• There are many, many flavours of rose water. I use the Lebanese Kitchen Cortas brand rosewater (available at international supermarkets) for  marchpane as it doesn’t overpower the flavour of the almonds.
• I use the Queen brand of almond extract. Do not be tempted to use more than ½ teaspoon, I usually only use ¼ . It will become overpowering.

Method

1. Sieve the almond flour and icing sugar into a large bowl. Use a spoon to push it through faster.
2. Mix in the rosewater slowly with a spoon until it crumbs. 

3.    Shape into a ball.

4.    Kneed for one minute into a smooth ball.

5. Press into moulds
6. Dry out in oven for 20 to 40 minutes at 90 degrees centigrade until uniformly white.
7. Decorate with royal icing and/or comfits if desired.
This recipe is a redaction of a renaissance recipe.
'A book of cookrye. Very necessary for all such as delight therin', gathered by "AW" (AW 1591)

How to make a good Marchpaine.
First take a pound of long smal almonds and blanch them in cold water, and dry them as drye as you can, then grinde them small, and put no licour to them but as you must needs to keepe them from oyling, and that licour that you put in must be rosewater, in manner as you shall think good, but wet your Pestel therin, when ye have beaten them fine, take halfe a pound of Sugar and more, and see that it be beaten small in pouder, it must be fine sugar, then put it to your Almonds and beate them altogither, when they be beaten, take your wafers and cut them compasse round, and of the bignes you will have your Marchpaine, and then as soone as you can after the tempering of your stuffe, let it be put in your paste, and strike it abroad with a flat stick as even as you can, and pinch the very stuffe as it were an edge set upon, and then put a paper under it, and set it upon a faire boord, and lay lattin Basin over it the bottome upwarde, and then lay burning coles upon the bottom of the basin. To see how it baketh, if it happen to bren too fast in some place, folde papers as broad as the place is & lay it upon that place, and thus with attending ye shal bake it a little more then a quarter of an houre, and when it is wel baked, put on your gold and biskets, and stick in Comfits, and so you shall make a good Marchpaine. Or ever that you bake it you must cast on it fine Sugar and Rosewater that will make it look like Ice.
http://www.foodsofengland.co.uk/marchpane.htm

Another good source of information is: About Marzipan by Dame Alys Katherine http://damealys.medievalcookery.com/AboutMarzipan.html?fbclid=IwAR1Oo95EXfCZl1zbGQ6JShWMOpH4MWwLEoJZoDzMybRc7G2K2fhdYFYx9OA

Ingredients

• 100g Ground Almonds (lucky brand)
• 100g Pure Icing Sugar
• 1 Egg White (60g egg) beaten to a soft peak
• 3 teaspoons of Rosewater (cortas brand)

​Method

• Sift the Almond meal and Icing Sugar. Mix dry ingredients together
• Fold in egg
• Fold in rosewater.
• Moisten palms with Rosewater, and roll the mixture in the palms of your hands into a ball (use a heaped teaspoon to get consistent sized balls)
• Bake in fan forced oven for 14-16 minutes at 160 until light brown.   

Notes

• Makes about 20-25 Macaroons
• Gluten Free
• Dairy Free
• All measurements are Australian
  

Source: Recipe developed from http://www.jollyduke.com/almond-macaroons.html