Eleanor's Closet Opened

This weekend was fun cooking at Jamestown during their Military Through the Ages event.  Carla and I decided to try pea-flour bread.  Last weekend at the Tudor Kitchen presentation they discussed bread and its importance in the Tudor diet.   In several of my medieval cookbooks there are references to breads made with flour that is not wheat.  Even today we have oat cakes and corn cakes.  In times of a bad wheat crop, rye, pea, lentil and other grains or legumes were used in place of wheat. 

Apparently dried peas heartily resist being ground into flour.  Richard Fitch (from the presentation) mentioned that trying to pound them in a mortar pestle resulted in peas being shot like bullets around the room.  So, I used my food processor at home before heading to Jamestown.  Peas heartily resist the food processor as well.  I got three cups of pea flour and mixed it with three cups of whole wheat flour.  

The traditional bread recipe is flour, salt, yeast and water.  Sticking to that we, mixed approximately 4 cups of flour with 1 cup of water, 1 tablespoon of yeast and about a teaspoon of salt.  I decided to feed the yeast a little bit sugar as well, since it wasn't going to get a whole lot of gluten in this flour mixture.  I kneaded the flour for about 10 minutes and let it rise for about an hour.  After that I divided the dough into about a dozen rolls and let it rise for about 2 hours.  or so.  Then in exaperation I handed them over to the ladies at the Devon oven and let them bake them.

The result?

I didn't take pictures.  Small, faintly green rolls that actually are edible.  They still tasted of peas. They were better warm than cold.  I think I'm going to try this again in more controlled circumstances at home and see what happens.  The bottom line - if your hungry, you'll eat these.  I think also that perhaps they would cook the peas to much with the barest amount of water possible and then use that as the start for making bread.  You wouldn't need to actually grind the dried peas to flour, which is very difficult.  Another aspect for experimentation. 

It was fun!