“All the while the courses came and went. A thick soup of barley and venison. Salads of sweetgrass, spinach, and plums, sprinkled with crushed nuts.” -A Game of Thrones
Medieval-ish Salad
Our Thoughts:
This was a tasty, tasty salad. All the elements of it work beautifully with one another both texturally and aesthetically. Pack this for a lunch, or have as a light afternoon meal, and you won’t be disappointed.
Salat. Take persel, sawge, grene garlec, chibolles, letys, leek, spinoches, borage, myntes, prymos, violettes, porrettes, fenel, and toun cressis, rosemarye, purslarye; laue and waishe hem clene. Pike hem. Pluk hem small wiþ þyn honde, and myng hem wel with rawe oile; lay on vyneger and salt, and serue it forth. -Forme of Curye, 14th Century.
Cook’s Notes: For our version of this salad, we used baby spinach, lemon grass, some mint leaves, diced plums, and candied walnuts. We sprinkled the whole thing with raspberry vinaigrette (a personal favorite). We then garnished with violets (high in vitamin C!), as suggested in the original recipe.
Feel free to make your version as the directions specify, or use any variation of these ingredients to come up with your own personal “salat.” Toss with vinegar, oil, and a pinch of salt, and you’re ready to serve! The primroses and violets can be mixed in with the salad, or used as a garnish on top.
Original Ingredients:
- parsley
- sage
- green garlic
- scallions
- lettuce
- leek
- spinach
- borage
- mints
- primroses
- violets
- “porrettes” (green onions, scallions, & young leeks)
- fenneland garden cress
- rosemary
- purslane
very very pretty!
Thanks! So is your jewelry! Just lovely!
What a beautiful pic!
Looks beautiful and tasty! I like to use violets in my food too (actually anything I can forage)!
Your blog it´s awesome, I´ll marry next year and your recipes gives me a great ideas for that day, because i´m going to do a medieval weding.
What a beautiful salad! Congrats on the Foodbuzz top 9 today :)
I had most of it down, just missed a couple of words!
Thanks for the translate, it sounds good
You bet! And it is very tasty. I’m not usually much of a salad person, but I’ve made this a couple times a week since writing the original post!
I just visited Pickety Place in Mason NH and had a salad with violets and sweet woodruff leaves sprinkled over top … so pretty and romantic! Kudos to you!
That’s the most food-pornographic salad I have ever seen.
So pretty!!!
this looks super nice! :D I have a question: how can I make the raspberry vinaigrette? or where to find the recipe for it?
I just use store-bought versions! :) I’ll see if I can come up with a recipe at some point, maybe…
Sam here from the Rosehip thread. You’ve been truly a wonderful person Miss Monroe, is there any chance I could pose another question before I visit twenty or so places looking for this ingredient? The Violets in this recipe: You do a lot of home cultivation, but if you had to purchase them at a retail location, where do you think would yield the best (Based on large, colorful violets as the criteria) flowers? Floral shops (Grocery store or independent), Garden centers, or somewhere else? Obviously the flowers are fresh, so any kind of store like the aforementioned will do, but before I went around to a bunch of places, I wanted your input. Thanks!
My favorite thing is to get one of those hanging baskets that has a lot of small flowers. If it’s a dish you make a lot, it’s good to have a larger, fast producing plant. I usually pick one up each spring at a garden center.
Thank you so much Miss Monroe! I will be sure to post pictures when I whip up these dishes! Keep up the good work with your fantastic historical/humorous forays into ASOIAF inspired cooking!
Given that Spring Is Coming–at long bloody last!–you might be able to forage wild violets in a month or two; they’re commonplace in shady areas of lawns and vacant lots, and peak in April through May where I live in southwestern Ohio.
I love this salad! My mother gave me the cookbook for my birthday, so I’ve been busy cooking! I made the Sansa salad and honeyed chicken for dinner tonight. They were both wonderful! I misread the directions, though, and bought arugula instead of spinach. But I really liked the way the tangy, mild bitterness of the arugula blended w/ the mild sweet of the other ingredients.