There is an unavoidable truth about these “Middle Ages.” It is uncomfortable. For some, myself among them, it is painful. The fact of the matter is that some things about the Mediaeval period were not good. Some things that are integral to everyday life now, and that make our lives longer, easier, healthier, more pleasant, less painful, and generally better.

Not dentistry. Or Modern Medicine. Or Sciences such as astronomy. Not a balanced nutritious diet. Sure, that’s all very good and all.

I refer of course to chocolate.

Now, some people, in this advanced day and age, cannot eat chocolate. That is very sad. Some cannot eat many of the wonderful chocolate-based confections available to post-modern man; for some, the answer may be very dark plain chocolate (in my own opinion, the only kind worth eating, and a separate food-group in its own right). For others, the problem is gluten and lactose intolerances; in some people’s cases, it is a dark side of The Modern World and its Progress.

I’m not going to claim that for every post-modern problem, there’s a pre-modern solution. In this case, though, there’s a medievalist one: think medievally, creatively. Apply derivative ingenuity. It’s in every Medieval recipe-book and for good practical reason: the need to make substitutions on high days and holy days, when abstaining from flesh; and when running low on seasonal ingredients. The swing side: 101 ways to get creative with glut surplus, or, how not to die of boredom via endless pickled cabbage.

It’s also a post-modern solution: mix techniques and ingredient-sources, apply precepts of global fusion, and remix.

Remixing is, of course, also and always essentially medieval(ist).

This post is all about “getting medieval.”

There is a solution to the gluten-free lactose-free chocolate mousse problem. It is from The Daily Torygraph, not one of my regular sources for anything usually, but the main free online source for this recipe. It’s also in printed form in:

• Cotter, Denis. For the Love of Food: Vegetarian Recipes from the Heart. London: Collins, 2011. (pp. 282-84)
• —. A Paradiso Year: Spring and Summer Cooking. Cork: Atrium, 2005. (an earlier version of the recipe, “Cherries in kirschwith chocolate-olive oil mousse”: 50-51)

Mr Cotter and Café Paradiso have appeared on here previously, back in a post from May 2009: Dantescheria. They are wonderful and marvellous, and I mean that in the strongest, highest, most medieval senses of merveillos and mirabile.

Olive oil chocolate mousse, salt and chilli sesame praline, and cherry salsa

The next step in this recipe would be, for vegan versions for example, to find a suitable substitute for the egg. Ground flax seems to replace it well in muffins and suchlike. Tofu scrambles welland makes good omelette-esque breakfast sandwich fillings. Chickpeas ground variously apparently also do breakfast egginess; not tried this myself. Avocado can be deployed to add squidgy richness, and for moussing. Agar agar, carrageenan, or other seaweedy stuff are an option for gellid-textured desserts. Raw soaked fine-ground cashews can sub for beaten egg yolks.

But a replacement for separated eggs, and especially for well-whipped egg whites in peaks?

I did find this, on Chef in you:

Egg White Substitute –> Use Agar Powder – For each egg white, dissolve 1 tbsp plain agar powder in 1 tbsp water. Whip, chill and whip again.

And from The Sweet Life:

This Chocolate Peppermint Mousse uses both coconut milk and cashews to resemble a classic French mousse. Classically mousse is made by separating eggs and whipping them up individually before reincorporating. This provides the airiness that is unique to mousse. The cashews in the recipe replace the whipped egg yolks as they are thick, fatty, and full of protein while the fat of the coconut milk is turned into coconut whipped cream and folded in at the end, similar to the egg white meringue in classic mousse.

Hmmm.

I wonder if some W. Heath Robinson machinery, liquid nitrogen, and other Magic might help? Is it time for an intervention from the greatest alchemical genius of the post-modern / post-medieval age, Heston Blumenthal?

Much as I like ending any writing by opening up into questions and gazing out into The Bigger Picture, I didn’t really want to end on a speculative note but would rather stay with the marvellously medieval. So here is some medievalish marvellousness which is also, as it happens, all about asking questions.

I was delighted to find something I’d thought lost. (That’s already a marvel and possibly miraculous in itself.) Josie Long is another genius of the current age, working in the medium of comedy; composing in a Blumenthalian / medieval palette of high and low, serious and frivolous and facetious, deeply silly in the most profound and humanly vital way, merrily geeky, interweaving multiple threads, polysemy and polyphony, mixing and remixing, punning fun, and plain joy and fun and, well, wonder.

While it’s been disappeared from the BBC Radio site, her sort-of-lecture series that is all about marvelling and questioning, “All of the Planet’s Wonders (Shown in Detail)” is at her website. As the BBC puts it: “Comedy series in which Josie Long attempts to better herself through learning from reference books, with help from Irish comedienne Maeve Higgins.”

In greater details, episode by episode, here it is for your greater enjoyment. May you have a marvellous day, week, and indeed year…

• Part 1 – Astronomy mp3/all_of_the_planets_wonders/all_of_the_planets_wonders-01-astronomy.mp3
• Part 2 – Collecting mp3/all_of_the_planets_wonders/all_of_the_planets_wonders-02-collecting.mp3
• Part 3 – Animals mp3/all_of_the_planets_wonders/all_of_the_planets_wonders-03-animals.mp3
• Part 4 – Connected mp3/all_of_the_planets_wonders/all_of_the_planets_wonders-04-connected.mp3
• show programme (PDF)
• and some more by her at The Guardian