shelidonDecember 12, 2023Leave a Comment

This recipe comes from Hannele Klemettilä‘s The Medieval Kitchen: A Social History with Recipes. She’s a Finnish historian and medievalist living in New York. Her recipe in turn is taken from Ulla Lehtonen’s Ullan luonnonyrtit : luonnon hyötykasvien keruu- ja käyttöopas (literally: Ulla’s natural herbs: a guide to collecting and using useful natural plants).
Are you out of bread and the guests are coming? We’ve got you covered, provided you’re up for a stroll in the woods.

Ingredients:

• 600 ml of lukewarm water;
• 180 grams of shredded fresh nettle leaves (wear gloves!);
• 1 pinch of salt;
• 1 teaspoon of caraway seeds;
• 50 grams of yeast;
• 170 grams of coarse-ground rye flour;
• 500 grams of dark wheat flour.

Recipe:

Warm up the water and the mix yeast, caraway seeds and shredded nettle leaves with a pinch of salt. Once the leaves have been immersed in warm water, they usually lose their stinging ability, but I suggest you keep wearing gloves anyway should you have to handle them.
Mix the two kinds of flour separately and then add the mixture to the water, little by little, until it becomes a dough you have to knead with your hands.

Leave the dough to rise until it has doubled in size, then give it the shape you prefer and leave it to rise for another hour.

Before baking, Klemettilä recommends we pierce a hole in the side of the dough: it’s a Finnish and Swedish tradition meant for the hole to serve when you have to hang the cooked loaf to dry. Apparently, there’s such a thing called a breadpole.

Bake for 40-50 minutes in a 180°C oven.

Nettles

I wrote about the significance of caraway when we talked about the Tudor Lovers’ Knots, so here’s an excursus on the other crucial ingredient of this bread: nettles.

In the Middle Ages, nettles were a medicinal herb as they’re rich in proteins (for being a plant, that is), sulphur, calcium, iron and potassium. They have hemostatic properties, a poultice from their leaves was applied to wounds, and their roots, boiled with milk, were commonly used to cure kidney stones.

Walahfrid Strabo, an Alemannic Benedictine monk and theological writer from 800 AD, didn’t like them at all.

But this little patch which lies facing east
In the small open courtyard before my door
Was full of nettles! All over
My small piece of land they grew, their barbs
Tipped with a spear of tingling poison.
What should I do? So thick were the ranks
That grew from the tangle of roots below,
They were like the green hurdles a stableman skillfully
Weaves of pliant osiers when the horses hooves
Rot in the standing puddles and go soft as fungus.
So I put it off no longer. I set to with my mattock
And dug up the sluggish ground. From their embraces
I tore those nettles though they grew and grew again.

Catullus himself was very well aware of their properties against a cough and a cold, as he writes in his 44th poetic composition:

At this point, a chilling illness and persistent cough
shook me continually, until I fled to your embrace,
and I restored myself both by leisure and nettle.

Plinius has weirder ideas: he writes that a poultice of nettles can relax the uterus (so far so good), and that rubbing fresh leaves against an animal’s genitals might encourage them to mate. I highly discourage you from trying that.

It might be because of that (but I really hope it isn’t) that the seeds were considered an aphrodisiac throughout Germany and Italy. Castore Durante, in his Renaissance New Erbarium, tells us that:

Nettle branches, boiled in wine and drank… excite Venus.

A more romantic connection between nettles and love might be through a particular kind of butterfly, the aglais urticae or, in Italian, Vanessa dell’Ortica: they only live on these plants, and they’re absolutely beautiful. In English you call them Tortoiseshells, thus losing the connection entirely.

According to Alfredo Cattabiani, they’re a plant connected to the Sun: both in Pedimont and in Novgorod, Russia, kids either carried nettles or jumped on them during the Eve of Saint John, Summer Solstice. As many plants connected to the sun, it’s also considered a plant to fend off thunders: in Tirolo, it’s thrown into the fireplace as it’s believed that fields of nettles are never struck by lightning. And, of course, where there are thunders, there are witches: they were considered the cause of thunderstorms, and people in Pedimont used to create bundles of these plants to keep them away from the house.

In the fairy tale “The Wild Swans” by Hans Christian Andersen, the heroine’s brothers have been turned into swans by their evil stepmother and, in order to save them, she must gather nettles in a graveyard by night, spin them into a green yarn with her bare fingers, and then knit the yarn into seven coats, one for each swan. She must do so without uttering a word, or else the spell will become unbreakable. Yes, Andersen had a thing for women who are magically compelled to silence.
The Myth & Moor website dedicates a wonderful article to this tale and to the significance of nettles in folklore. It also features a family recipe for Bumblehill Nettle Soup.