King Alfred and his burned cakes… recipe inside!

Stephen Liddell

Sep 29

Before we get further into King Alfred and Winchester, I thought it would be a change of pace to write a little on one of the little gems of old English folk history. You can read about King Alfred on this old post but basically where this story takes place is in the midst of his legendary battles with The Great Heathen Army and by brains, braun, a bit of luck and the skin of his teeth, led to the unification and modern day establishment of England.

One thing Alfred wasn't very good at is cooking. One day, he and his men were ambushed in Wiltshire. Desperately looking for food they were found my the wife of a lowly pig-herder who cooked for him and some men. Later she made some cakes and left Alfred in charge so they didn't burn in the fire. Famously he somehow let the cakes burn and when the wife returned she furiously told him off!

Frying pans at the ready, because here are the instructions on how to make the simple hearth cakes, like the ones King Alfred famously burnt. This is the type of bread eaten by the vast majority of the population in early medieval times.

The recipe wasn't written down as such but a number of experts have been able to agree on the likely best way to make it in the present day.

I make most of my food from scratch, the old fashioned way but I do like to keep recipes simple and fortunately for me, if not my ancestors, many of them would be very poor which helps keep that ingredient list short.

Ingredients: flour (see below) AND water.

1. First you need to decide on your level of poverty. Remember that by our standards most Anglo-Saxons were what we would deem 'poor.' You will need one of the following:

If you are very poor: pea- and/or bean flour, which you should mix with oat flour in random proportions

If you are moderately poor: oat flour, which you should mix with barley flour in random proportions (this mixture is now known as dredge)

If you are a reasonably prosperous yeoman farmer: wholemeal wheat flour, which you should mix with rye flour in random proportions (this mixture is now known as maslin)

Oats and barley often grew together, and wheat and rye often grew together, so these mixtures make sense. It was advantageous to grow two kinds of grain together, so if one failed through disease or bad weather, the other kind might still produce, and you had a better chance of not starving.

If you want to have an authentic stomach ache, you could add cockle, a troublesome weed that grew among the grain. Excavations in York showed that tenth-century bread had enough cockle to have given the eaters digestive discomfort. I can likely skip this as being gluten free, bread does this to me anyway!

2. Grind, then take a handful or two of flour, and put it in a bowl. Add enough water to make a dough that is not too sticky. Please note that you really should have collected this water from a source that is not downstream from any farm animals or indeed anyone with dysentery but hey, beggars can't be choosers and we do have a drought on.

Later medieval sources suggest that if you're using pea flour, you might pour in boiling water, which keeps the smell down. Yummy, sounds delicious! Obviously if you do this, let the water cool before handling the dough.

Do not add anything else. You do not need salt. Medieval butter and cheese were heavily salted to preserve them, so much so that in the later Middle Ages at least, people had to wash out their butter before use, because it was too salty to eat.

3. Put a girdle/griddle or frying pan on the fire. Do not use any fat in the pan and if unlike me you don't have a fireplace then you will just have to cheat and use what you have in the kitchen.

4. While the griddle is getting hot, knead the dough until it is well mixed.

5. Form some of the kneaded dough into a flat roundish disk by patting it between your hands.

6. Put your disk of flattened dough on the hot griddle, and squeeze on as many of these 'cakes' as you can make, side by side. Watch them so they don't burn, King Alfred had the excuse that he was fighting and dodging Vikings, you do not!!! The dredge (oat and barley) bread will not rise, but the maslin (wheat and rye) bread will puff up a tiny bit from internal steam, enough to have a discernable crust and crumb.

7. When the bottom has some brownish burny spots, turn the cake over and cook it on the other side. Depending on the thickness, each side will probably take as long as it takes to say nine or ten Lord's Prayers, which is how they measured cooking time in the medieval period. If you follow a different faith then I'd say the prayer takes about 30 seconds.

8. The 'cakes' will keep indefinitely (my 18th birthday cake was like this.. so hard it broke the electric saw required to cut the icing), though they need weighing down or they will go curly. They will dry out and go hard; to revive, put between layers of damp cloth for a while, or dip or soak in water or other liquid. But these dried cakes are probably for journeys; everyday bread would have been recently made, and is much better that way.

I think if you can beat the Vikings eating this stuff, particularly the pea variety then you deserve to be king. It's not often you can taste history so I will have a go myself.

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