Use of Molds to Shape Foods

from Food in Medieval Times by Melitta Weiss Adamson

One way to enhance food in the Middle Ages was to give food a distinctive shape through the use of molds. They seem to have been especially popular in Germany, as, in fact, they still are today. A pan known as a “Turk’s head pan,” presumably named after the shape of a turban it gives to the cake baked in it, continues to be used for making Gugelhupf, a favorite coffee cake. But the Turk’s head pan was not a medieval invention.

As early as A.D. 200 the Romans used similar molds made of bronze. In the opinion of one scholar, the swirls symbolized to the Romans not a turban, but the rotating sun. Prior to the Romans, the Egyptians were known to prepare sacrificial food in a pan of this type.

In addition to bronze, clay was used in antiquity for the production of molds. Stone was another durable material for such cooking vessels, but most of them were probably made of wood. Due to the rapid decay of wood, examples of wooden molds from earlier centuries are rare, however. Molds are already mentioned in the oldest German cookbook, as the following recipe illustrates:

Diz ist ein guot spise von eime lahs [This Is a Good Salmon Dish] Take a salmon, scale it, split and cut the two halves in pieces. Chop parsley, sage, take ground ginger, pepper, anise, and salt to taste. Make a coarse dough according to the size of the pieces, sprinkle the pieces with the spices, and cover them completely with the dough. If you can fit them into a mould, then do so. In this way you can prepare pike, trout, bream, and bake each one in its own dough. If it is a meat-day, however, you can prepare chickens, partridges, pigeons, and pheasants, provided that you have the moulds, and fry them in lard or cook them in their moulds. Take chicken breast or other good meat. This will improve your art of cooking even more, and don’t oversalt.
Adamson, The Book of Good Food, 96 (“This is a good salmon dish”)

When these molds were used for baking in an oven, they were covered on the inside with butter and on the outside with clay. Molds also played an important role in the preparation of gingerbread and confections. To create fully formed shapes, two corresponding molds were used, held in place by aligned holes through which sticks were pushed.

At the end of the Middle Ages, molds made of wax are mentioned in the preparation of sugar figurines. Jellies and confections were poured into molds in the shape of boxes. Molds consisting of dough were filled with jelly, according to the fifteenth-century German cook Meister Hannsen.

Pie shells, too, were cooked in special containers or molds that were first sprinkled with flour, and then boiled in a water bath before being filled with the farce. Some molds had the shape of stamps whose relief was pressed into the marzipan or dough preparation; alternatively, the mixture could also be pressed onto the stamp and then baked. This was a favorite technique of gingerbread makers.

The popularity of waffles and wafers in the Middle Ages, especially at the conclusion of a multicourse meal, meant that waffle irons were part of the standard kitchenware in upper- and middle-class households. They usually consisted of two flat planes with interlocking handles. Decorations found on the planes could include images or inscriptions. Waffle irons made of cast iron were used less often. A variation of the waffle iron for oven use was the stove-top waffle iron, which was equipped with a mechanism to turn the iron 180 degrees. Waffles were either eaten flat, or rolled up into little sticks