While I've worked on the challenge of the two mead recipes no. 9 and no. 10 in Curye on Inglysh; Goud Kookery for a few years now, I thought I had covered all bases. And then, to my surprise, someone shared a bottle of Poynaunt Meade at the Historic Brewing Round Table at Pennsic 46, based on recipe no.10. And while he was not able to make the recipe work literally - which he chalked up to translation / interpretation issues - he was able to make quite a nice mead with what he thought a plausible interpretation.
Similar to the editors of Curye on Inglysh Hieatt & Butler, he interpreted the word pomys to mean apple. But instead of interpreting it to mean pressed apple remnants, as the modern word pomace would indicate, in combination with the word sodden he interpreted the word to mean fallen apples, soaking wet: or windfall apples so brown and soggy they leak fluid when picked up. Really!
I've always been under the impression that browning fruit flesh imparts bitter off flavors, in cooking and fermenting, similar when biting unknowingly into an apple with a hidden bruise. But his mead sure did not taste bitter and had quite a nice flavor profile. He mentioned he had teamed up with a local cider maker to market this mead, which sold real well - so well the cider maker cut him out of the process the next year, but then also used standard apple cider to make the must. According to the brewer, the initial version with the soggy blackened apples tasted much better, and the bootleg version did not sell half as well as his...
How plausible do I think this interpretation is?
While I love the idea of using soggy windfall apples (blackened due to freezing instead of bruising might limit the bruised bitter taste) and I will most definitely try my own version, I am not sure it works with this recipe. It does not make the parts of this recipe, the steps, work any better than using standard apple pomace. And to make it ferment correctly, he changed the ratio of fermentable sugars. As he changed the recipe until it worked for him, significantly changing the ingredient ratios, I do not think this interpretation is a viable version, no matter how good it tastes, or interesting it might sound!
The recipe in question:
10
To make fyn meade & poynaunt.
Take xx
galouns of the forseid pomys soden in iii galouns of fyn wort, & i galoun
of liif hony & sethe hem wel & scome hem wel til thei be cleer enowgh;
& put therto iii penyworth of poudir of peper & i penyworth of poudir
of clowis & lete it boile wel togydere. & whanne it is coold put it
into the vessel into the tunnynge up of the forseid mede; put it therto, &
close it wel as it is aboue said. (Hieatt & Butler, 150)
For the complete article on my interpretation of these recipes, please check:
http://bookeofsecretes.blogspot.com/2017/02/of-boyling-and-seething.html
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