Why don’t I eat tomatoes? Well, in this regard, I am truly a throwback to my medieval forebears: I suffer from an intolerance to tomatoes, one that was probably more common centuries ago. Tomatoes belong to the nightshade family, and indeed some early Europeans labelled them as poisonous (see, for instance, John Gerarde’s Herbal, published in London in 1597). They make me get dizzy and blotchy and have to lie down. A biologist friend once suggested to me that tomato intolerance among Europeans is like lactose intolerance among Asians: something that a few generations of exposure often eliminates– except, apparently, in throwbacks like me who lack the enzymes to digest tomatoes, unless they are cooked.

But this is a digression, because of course there are no tomatoes in my farmshare in January. Instead, I have lots of lovely root vegetables: potatoes, rutabaga, beets and Jerusalem artichokes. Beets and turnips (the rutabaga is really just a giant turnip) are authentic medieval vegetables; along with beans, they kept people alive through the long, Northern European winters. And by the way, if you haven’t already read it, here is a link to Umberto Eco’s marvellous “How the Bean Saved Civilization“. Like cabbage, another winter staple, turnip greens helped fight off scurvy, and you could also feed turnips (assuming you had any left over) to your livestock. When I was a child, in fact, living in Burgundy, my neighbours still fed turnips to their cows in winter. Sometimes, if I was very lucky, I was allowed to watch the turnips being put into a turnip mill and come out as a sort of pulp which was made into cow-cakes. The machine looked a lot like this one, only French, of course.

Your Jerusalem Artichoke, however, is an oddity. To begin with, it’s not an artichoke, but rather the tuber of a kind of sunflower. I’m not sure what kind of confusion produced that part of the name– do they taste like artichokes? I certainly don’t think so. Nor are they from Jerusalem; they are a new world vegetable that reached Europe in the 17th century. A semi-convincing explanation for the Jerusalem moniker is that the word is a corruption of the Italian girasole, or “turn to the sun”, sunflower. The impulse to connect the exotic and the wonderful with Jerusalem, though, that’s really quite Medieval, when you think about it.

There is nothing authentically Medieval about the recipe that follows, except the turnips and brussel sprouts (unlike the Jerusalem Artichoke, they really do come from Belgium, originally). Lamb in the wintertime? You’d be lucky to get a bit of aged mutton or some bacon, but it’s Australia day and my husband is Australian. It’s tasty, though. And if I make the stew I’m meditating for tomorrow, that will be more authentic. I promise.

Rack of Lamb Roasted with Winter Vegetables
There are no measurements, because really, you’re going to cook as much as you think whoever you’re cooking for will eat.

• Jerusalem artichokes, scrubbed and halved..
• Rutabaga, cubed.
• Garlic cloves in their skins.
• Rack of lamb (you want 2 chops per person, or maybe 3 if they’re small)
• Brussel sprouts, halved
• Rosemary, salt, pepper.
• Beer (just a splash or so, you get to drink the rest)

Preheat oven to 400F.
All the vegetables should be about the same sized. Toss with a bit of olive oil and spread in a pan in a single layer. Roast for about 20 minutes, or until they’re just starting to soften.
Meanwhile, let your lamb sit out and come to room temperature. Salt it– this helps it crisp up later.
When the vegetables are starting to soften, add the brussel sprouts (because you should never overcook these fellows) and lay the rack of lamb on top of the veggies and sprinkle with rosemary and a grind of pepper.
Roast until the lamb is done to your liking (about 20 minutes for rare). The lamb drippings drip down into the veggies… when the lamb is done, remove it and let it rest under a tinfoil tent for 5 minutes. Give the veggies a stir around and add a splash of dark beer to loosen up the dripping. Let that simmer a bit while the lamb rests.
Carve the lamb, serve with the veggies, drizzled with the sauce.

Puffins

They are also ridiculously cute. They look a bit like small people dressed up in puffin suits.
Little Skellig is home to some 60,000 gannets, large gull-like birds with lemon-coloured heads. I don’t know much about their domestic arrangements, but here is a little video of where they live. Gannett

In the first Christian centuries, suffering for God took the form of martyrdom; devout Christians refused to sacrifice to the emperor and died (albeit not in numbers as great as once was claimed) in the Roman arenas, often in the wild beast shows. Once the Empire itself became Christian, other avenues to salvation had to be found. In the deserts of Egypt, holy men began living lives of extreme asceticism, dwelling in caves or huts far from other human beings, surviving on the bare minimum of food necessary to sustain life. These were the first hermits or anchorites; when some of them decided to live their lives of extraordinary privation in small communities, they became the first monks. The monks who removed themselves to the Skelligs were the spiritual descendants of those early desert fathers, albeit in a very different geographical context. In fact, they were more hermits than monks since they did not live according a particular Rule (like the Rule of St Benedict, which laid out the details of monastic life for its followers). They simply sought the most extreme environment imaginable in which to live and pray.

Today, getting from the mainland to the Skelligs is not terribly difficult. You go to the little town of Portmagee in the morning. Assuming that the weather is not impossible, someone will approach you on the dock, asking if you want passage out to the islands; this all happens in a typically Irish haphazard fashion: there are no tickets, you don’t have to book ahead, the boats leave sometime after 10, but that might be 10:30 or 11:15. The boat we took carried 10 passengers, and the trip took 45 minutes, during which everyone was thoroughly soaked by the salt spray that broke over the boat as it forged through a bit of chop to get out of the long harbour and onto the sea. No one was seasick. The fog was so thick that the islands were entirely invisible from the mainland; you wondered how it ever occurred to anyone to row out there in the first place. And then, after half an hour or so, there they were, looming out of the grey, looking for all the world like something from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
The climb begins immediately, from the jetty. I can’t imagine how the first monks made it to the top, but their successors built a staircase, and it’s still in use, all 700 or so steps of it. You climb right up into the clouds, sometimes with a vertical drop down to the pounding waves right next to you. Any monk who fell, one imagines, went directly to heaven.
Finally, up on top of the rock, you come to the monastery, a cluster of beehive huts and stone crosses. There a guide awaits to explain the mysteries of the place to those who make it. There are those who don’t– some people give up after a hundred steps because their knees or hearts can’t take it, and we encountered one poor German fellow crawling back down from the first terrace, paralysed with fear. The monks, he tells us, spent their days in prayer and in finding ways to survive. They ate puffin meat and puffin eggs (for puffins, see my next post), and grew a few vegetables, cabbage and the like. There’s no scriptorium– not for these hard-core ascetics the aesthetic pleasure of illumination. The Vikings tried to raid the Skelligs a few times, but evidently gave up; there wasn’t much there, after all, and it must have been easy for the monks to drop rocks on their heads from above.
Century after century unrolled like this: prayer, fog, a diet of sea birds and air. And then, in the twelfth century, the Church intervened, calling the Skellig monks back to the mainland; evidently their radical spirituality, individualistic and essentially ungoverned, didn’t fit Rome’s program. The Skelligs were left to the birds, who are the only permanent inhabitants these days; even the guides and archaeologists are only temporary visitors. There are no modern buildings on the island except a disused lighthouse. There is no café, no gift shop, no toilets. It belongs to the sea.

So after a few hours we stagger back down the stair, legs shaking from the climb, pile back into our waiting boat, and return to the 21st century and a well deserved pint.

Isabella at the tölt. Look at her little hooves go!

Our guide, Begga, who owns Islenski Hesturinn (The Icelandic Horse), told us the following story, about an exhibition of different breeds of horse in Germany. Big German horses doing elaborate dressage routines, elegant Arabs beautifully groomed with flowing manes, showing their speed. And then in come the Icelandic horses, short and shaggy, with their manes in their eyes or sticking straight up, their riders’ feet nearly brushing the ground. A ripple of laughter, politely suppressed, goes around the audience. What are these funny looking ponies going to do? The head of the Icelandic delegation pops a champagne cork, pours each of his companions a glass, and off they go at full speed tölt, three times around the ring, before stopping in front of the judges to drink a toast without having spilled a drop. The crowd goes wild.
Begga also has a theory about a link between Icelandic horses and the Icelandic language. She points out that Iceland has very difficult terrain and no dialects, just the same Icelandic everywhere, pretty much unchanged from Old Norse, while Denmark, with less difficult terrain, has several different dialects. She thinks Icelandic horses kept the language moving freely around the island, so that no little pockets of people developed their own way of saying things. It’s a lovely notion, though I suspect that Danish dialectical variants are probably influenced more by linguistic contacts Iceland simply didn’t have, with the other Scandinavian languages, with Dutch, with German.

I rode Isabella. I don’t normally much care for mares, but she was brilliant (although I needed to keep her at the back because she kicks). She loved to run, picking up the tölt easily from a fast walk. No need to trot if you can do this! I’m a convert. I entirely understand why those great tall Norsemen loved their little shaggy horses and still do. I’m already planning a return to Iceland, with a longer ride, maybe several days.

I arrived in Iceland by air and not by sea, at Keflavik which is somewhat south of Ingólfur’s landing site. Landing at Keflavik is a bit like landing on the moon. You come in over dark and brooding waves which merge almost imperceptibly with dark and brooding lava flow on which almost nothing seems to grow. It looks, in fact, as though it had been frozen in the moment of boiling, rocks belched up like great bubbles on the land.

Since the  collapse of its banking industry–a collapse so traumatic that Iceland is considering adopting the Canadian dollar as its national currency, although that’s a tale for another day–Iceland is doing everything it can to attract tourists. My Boston-Keflavik-Amsterdam flight was several hundred dollars less expensive than anything I could find this summer, and allowed me to break my journey for as many days as I liked between legs, so I decided to spend two days in Reykjavik. I’ve wanted to visit Iceland ever since reading Njal’s Saga, and I found a ridiculously inexpensive room, and besides I wanted to visit the Blue Lagoon and go horseback riding. There were no academic pretenses or excuses to my initial plan; I just felt I’d earned it (an academic excuse evolved later, but that’s for another post).

So at ten o’clock this morning I stepped out of a warm spa building into bracing 40F weather, wearing only a bathing suit. I only had to suffer the chilly wind for the ten steps it took me to lower myself into the weird robin’s egg blue waters of the lagoon, waters that seem even bluer because of the harsh black basalt that surrounds them. I’m not going to go into detail about the chemical composition of that water, or how it’s related to the lava beds below or the near by geothermal plant, because frankly I don’t really understand any of that, but I will say that early in the morning, with only a handful of other people in the water paddling silently about, it was a remarkable experience, eerie and yet strangely meditative. The steam above the water was so heavy, because of the difference between water and air temperature, that all you had to do was move about 20 feet away from another person and you were screened away by the mist, in your own private universe. Sometimes, to make things even stranger, a human figure would surge out of the swirling fog face entirely painted white with silica from the bottom of the pool. It’s supposed to do miracles for your skin (though it wreaks havoc on your hair!).

Ok, it’s not ancient. Maybe it’s not even “real”, whatever that means, since the pool was created as a by-product of the abovementioned geothermal plant. And it’s too expensive, and they pressure you pretty hard to buy Blue Lagoon skin care.  But after 4 hours of unsleep on the plane, and for that first half hour in particular, when I sat in the hot water at the edge of the pool and looked out over the black lava fields towards the snowcapped fells, feeling that no one in the world existed but me, it was entirely worth it.

So when James pointed out that I’d be in Halifax over St Patrick’s day and suggested that we do something to celebrate, I was initially dubious, until I realized that my son has, at least in this respect, inherited my own good sense and was determined to avoid the pubs. We decided instead to cook a large meal for the band of his friends who congregate at his house on weekends. The menu would consist of a vat of Irish stew, a mountain of colcannon (potatoes mashed with leeks) and a Guiness cake (I used Nigella Lawson’s recipe– the picture is of her cake, not mine, but mine looked just as nice). Tanya, who writes her own blog, wanted to know about St Patrick’s Day and food traditions, and this got me thinking a bit.

St Patrick himself is not especially associated with food, as far as I know. He was Welsh, actually, and was kidnapped by Irish raiders when he was a boy and taken to Ireland as a slave. Eventually escaping, he returned to Wales and was ordained as a priest and eventually a bishop, and finally went back to Ireland to evangelize the island. None of the miracles I know of concerning him (banishing all snakes from Ireland, speaking with Oisin the son of Fionn MacCumhall who had returned to Ireland after 300 years in Tír na nÓg) have anything to do with food. Still, hospitality, and especially the sharing of food and drink, is an integral part both of ancient Irish culture and of Irish culture today.
More important than food or drink, however, is craic, which means something like companionship or fun, but of a sort involving the telling of tales and the singing of songs rather more than running around hitting a ball with a stick or anything of that sort. And my Saint Patrick’s Day was full of good craic, beginning with my conversation with my landlady Joan, of the Marigold B and B. Joan has lived in the same house all her life, and it belonged to her parents and grandparents before her; she is a veritable compendium of all things Haligonian. At breakfast that morning, she was telling me, I can’t quite remember why, about her grandfather who was a stone-carver and whose workshop, in fact, carved the headstones for the 150 unclaimed victims of the Titanic who were buried in Halifax. This is craic not because it’s fun in any kind of obvious way, but because it’s deeply fascinating. Then at James’ house, after dinner and quite a lot of beer, there was another kind of craic, which began with listening to the Dropkick Murphys, but quickly evolved into singing along enthusiastically (James and his friend Mike’s rendition of the duet in “The Dirty Glass” will live long in my memory, and on Facebook). We sang “Follow me up to Carlow“, which memorializes the massacre of an English army at Glenmalure; it has wonderful bloody lyrics (“From Tassagart to Clonmore/There flows a stream of Saxon gore”) and encourages footstomping. We also roared out “Come out ye Black and Tans“:

Come out ye Black and Tans
Come out and fight me like a man
Show your wives how you won medals down in Flanders
And how the IRA made you run like hell away
From the green and lovely lanes of Killeshandra.

Sounds a bit Fenian, I know, but the best songs are the fighting songs. We finished the evening with “The Last of Barrett’s Privateers“, singing the line about Barrett being “smashed like a bowl of eggs” with particular gusto.

No parades. No green beer. No goddamn leprechauns. Good food, good drink, good craic, good friends. Possibly the best Saint Patrick’s Day ever.

The Travelling Medievalist will post again from Iceland…

Once I recovered from my disappointment in missing the trek to the mountain top, I actually had a lovely day, walking up to see the foals, one of them only a day old, with little Ruby, the daughter of our guide. And I’m sure the rest could go faster without me to hold them back. So it’s off to the International Arthurian Congress with my pride more or less intact (I still didn’t fall off!) and a swollen purple ankle.

We ride with a group called Cavogaro, which stands for Cavaliers de la Voie Gallo Romaine, a name inspired by the fact that an ancient road used to run along the crest of the hills from Alésia, where Caesar defeated Vercingetorix, to Sombernon. Bits of the old road have been identified, as has at least one Roman villa beside it, but for the most part the trails we actually ride criss-cross back and forth across it, weaving up and down the steep slopes. We progress in single file at walk or trot alongside cultivated fields, and when we get into the more restricted woodland paths, we canter enthusiastically, as many as eight of us thundering along, and occasionally shrieking with glee or distress (when a branch gets you in the face for instance).

Lucy rides the most spirited horses Delphine can set her up with; every now and then, when something goes wrong at the back of the line, Lucy is left in command of the front. She’s acknowledged as one of the really seasoned riders, and as someone who knows the trails well.  I, on the other hand, just ride Aramis, my fat, beloved, probably-partly-Welsh pony. He’s ancient (over twenty) and greedy as a pig, but I like him and he likes me and we do very well together. And he loves to go for a sprightly canter, and he’s short enough that I get fewer branches in the face than most people.

Château de Thenissey, showing both what remains of the 14th C keep and the 18thc wing behind

Seeing the countryside from horseback is an entirely different experience from seeing it from a car window (of course!) or even on foot. You sit a bit higher, you move rather faster, you take different short-cuts. And indeed, you realize how many of these ancient tracks were designed for exactly this, not for tractors or four-wheel drive vehicles or any of the other silly things that now occasionally venture onto them. There are steep ascents and descents that would be impossible on anything motorized, and difficult on foot, but that are just right for a surefooted pony. And you get to thinking (or at least I do) about just how many people have ridden these paths before: ladies on palfreys, the occasional knight headed down to the chateau at Thenissey on a destrier.  Given the power of the Abbey at Flavigny, to which most of the area owed duty, plenty of priests on mules or donkeys, going to visit outlying farms, and maybe the occasional naughty and self-indulgent monk like Chaucer’s, on a horse far too good for a man who has taken a vow of poverty. Heavy farm horses, like the one in the Friar’s Tale, who gets the cart he pulls stuck in a muddy patch… and there were plenty of muddy patches the other day, when we started out in a fine drizzle that turned into steady rain after the first twenty minutes and persisted for the rest of the two hours that we rode, so that we couldn’t even risk a canter because the ground was so slippery.  When we finally dismounted, I had a dry patch on the top of my head (rather like a monk’s tonsure) where my helmet had protected me, and on my butt, and the rest of me was soaking wet and chilled to the bone. I also had a whole new appreciation for men-at-arms riding out on their lord’s service, or farmers coming home from far away markets, or pilgrims heading to Compostela, none of whom had the option of giving up after a couple of hours and climbing into a dry car and turning the heater on full.