Medieval in the kitchen (or, where are my s'mores?)

I like cooking medieval food. I mean, taking recipes from medieval and Renaissance "cookbooks," such as they were, and trying to make them in my kitchen. Much like hearing Beethoven played on a 300-year-old harpsichord or touching the walls of the Sainte-Chapelle, it's one of the only ways to actually experience the past. With food, or music, or buildings, you can somehow defy the laws of matter and cohabit with ancestors.

However, cooking from these recipes can be quite a process -- not only translating the recipes, which frequently give directions like, "Take enough flour to make a coffin and mold it into a pot" -- but because many of the ingredients called for in the recipes are not easily available today: rosewater, for example, or sandalwood or marrow. So you have to make the rosewater before you can make the food that the rosewater goes into. Too many steps.

I've discovered similar problems with gluten-free recipes. The best example is pies that require graham-cracker crusts. The whole point of graham-cracker crusts is that they take very little work: you pulverize graham crackers, add butter and sugar, and mush into the bottom and sides of a pie plate. Simple, right? No cutting in the butter, no chilling for hours. But if you have to first make the graham crackers, and then crush them, etc., all of the simplicity has fled the scene. I can't get over the injustice inherent in making a food just for the purpose of destroying it.

The result of this moral conundrum is that JFG has not had any pies with graham cracker crusts. Yes, I could make him crust-less cheese cake, but what's the point? That would be a very sad, saggy little cheese cake, naked -- almost like a head when you take off the toupee.

Eureka! The absence of graham cracker crusts shall cease! Kinnkinnick Foods, which also makes some awesome gluten-free pizza crusts, just introduced S'moreables Gluten Free Graham Style Crackers ™. They look slightly different from glutenized graham crackers, smaller and a little thicker, but they taste darned close to the real thing. I haven't run them by the JFG board of professional food-tasters, but I'm hopeful that they can both be used in crusts (as the picture on the back of the box suggests) and be squished up in a bowl of milk.

Naturally, they're more expensive than Faberge eggs. Even so, S'moreables Gluten Free Graham Style Crackers ™ get three rice flours for returning yet another food to our diet.