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 recipe November/December 2008
Tasty Hedgehogs
A medieval subtlety
Extra: a sweet little hedgehog from the eighteenth century
Dutch version of this recipe

There really are recipes for preparing hedgehog, but fear not: the recipes on this page are without hedgehog meat, they only look like hedgehogs.
The first dish is a medieval one, for a savoury 'hedgehog' with pork.
The extra recipe is from the eighteenth century, with marzipan. Both recipes are from English cookbooks. And both have spines from almonds.

The medieval recipe for fake hedgehog
The first recipe is from the fifteenth century English manuscript Harleian 279 (edition p.38), which I have used several times for this site (Strawberye, Apple fritters). The yrchoun was made as follows: a cleaned pig stomach is filled with chopped meat and spices, pricked with almond sticks to make spines, then roasted and glazed with a paste made of flour with a colouring agent.
On the menu list of several festive banquets that is written down in the same manuscript, it can be read that the Yrchouns were served during the second course of the funereal meal of Nicholas Bubwith, bishop of Bath and Wells, on 4 December 1424, together with roasted fowl and game (pheasant, woodcock, partridge, plevier, lark, curlew, rabbit, large animals) and other dishes. There was another menu especially for the clergy, with fish instead of meat. They too got fake hedgehogs. I haven't found any medieval recipes for fake hedgehog with fish, but several with almond paste (see below). So the bishops and priests probably ate almond hedge hogs.

The fake hedgehog in other medieval cookbooks
The Forme of Cury, an English cookbook from the fourteenth century (edition p.139/140), also uses a stuffed pig stomach as the body of the hedgehog, but here the spines are made from dough.
The fake hedgehog is not exclusively English. In one of the manuscripts of the French Viandier, from the fifteenth century, there is also a recipe for it (herisson, in Bibliotheca Vaticana, Regina 776 olim 233 and 2159, edition p.264/265). This uses a sheep stomach. There is also a 'sweet hedgehog', in the printed Viandier from 1486 (edition p.30/31): this recipe is meatless, the hedgehog is made from almond paste, with almond spines. The Ménagier de Paris (late fourteenth century) also mentions the dish (edition p. 802), but declairs it is not worth the trouble. Chiquart on the other hand uses the fake hedgehog as part of his spectaculair subtlety the 'Love Castle', in Du fait de cuysine (around 1420, edition p.147), but neither he nor the Ménagier provides us with recipes.
In the German cookbook of Maister Hannsen from 1460 there are no less than three recipes for fake hedgehogs, a white hedgehog of almondpaste with almond spines, a black one with ginger, spices and sugar, with pines of cloves, and a hedgehog of pureed figues, also with pines of cloves. The links are to the site of the American Gwen Grasse, who adapted and photographed these recipes. Quite lovely, and a nice addition to the 'meaty hedgehog' on this page.
Of course I also looked in Dutch cookbooks, but there are no medieval or later Dutch recipes for fake or real hedgehogs. But we do have the Fake Fish, and Fake Calf's ears.

The real hedgehog
Both Pliny the Elder and Isidore of Seville describe the hedgehog as a beast with tricks: according to Pliny, the hedgehog rolls over fallen apples to bring them to his nest as winter hoard, Isidore lets it roll over grapes to take them to feed its young. The two stories are nonsense, of course. If only because hedgehogs are insectivores (and they love catfood too!).
In De honeste voluptate et valetudine from 1468, the Italian humanist Platina compares hedgehog meat with that of a porcupine. It is not common to eat either, he writes, but the meat of both animals is good for the stomach, works laxative, relieves several skin diseases and eczema, and lessens bed-wetting. If the meat is salted, it also helps against dropsy.
The picture above is an illustration of a hedgehog that has rolled over grapes (or apples, I can't determine which).
In case you want know: the best way to prepare a hedgehog is to pack it in clay and bake it. When you break away the clay after baking, the spines come with it. According to Alan Davidson the meat is succulent and tasty, resembling chicken or pork. I wouldn't know, I've never tasted one.
The Ménagier de Paris has a recipe for real hedgehog too: it is prepared as a poussin, roasted, with sauce cameline or a sauce forn young ducks (edition p.790). He also explains how you get a hedgehog to unroll itself: put it in warm water.
When we still lived in Hilversum, we had a wooded bank in the back of the garden, where hedgehogs hibernated. Sometimes we could see them strolling in the garden. They are not sweet or nice animals, but cute to look at.

The original recipe
About the manuscript Harleian 279: see the recipe for Strawberye. Edition. The letter þ (thorn, reproduced on your pc by pressing ctrl-alt-t) represents the 'th' in the modern alphabet.
The phrase 'every hole half, & eche fro other' is mysterious. What does the author (or copyist) mean? My guess is: in each hole you stick the half length of an almond spine, and in each hole just one. If you know better, tell me.

The modern adaptation of the recipe:
Printout version
A pig stomach is hard to come by, at least in The Netherlands. And when I finally found a butcher who sold them, he only had cut up stomach. I saw it, it was useless for this recipe. According to Schell, the Rotterdam butcher who sells practically everything (really, I even found sheep's penis there) you simply can NOT buy whole pig stomach. That is the consequence of modern regulation.
An alternative is using pork caul instead of stomach. Not much better maybe for those who abhor the consumption of intestines, but at least it's easier to come by. This membrane is ideal to wrap around ground meat, and it's easy to form several small hedgehogs instead of a big one. Simply cut the caul in sizeable pieces.
The order in which things are done in the modern adaptation is different from the original recipe. The body of the hedgehog is roasted and glazed before adding the spines. Then it is returned for a few minutes to the oven. To me, this is more logical. Otherwise glazing would be rather difficult, with all those spines.
For six persons as a first or main course, for 24 persons as a side dish.

List of ingredients:
1 caul (crépinette)
500 gram (1 pound) ground pork (when using a pig stomach, you'll need more, probably around 2000 gram/4 pounds)
ginger, cinnamon, cloves, pepper (ratio 5:3:1:1, together 1 table spoon)
salt and sugar to taste
egg and bread crumbs if you like
For the spines:
blanched almonds cut in sticks
50 gram (1/4 cup) suet or lard (or butter)
2 Tbsp. sugar
For the glaze:
almond milk made of 50 gram (1/3 cup) ground almonds and 1/4 liter(1 cup) boiling water
green and black food colouring (or pureed parsley and pig's blood)
for every decilitre almond milk 60 gram (1/2 cup) flour

Preparation in advance:
Add spices, salt and sugar to the ground pork. If you like, you can also add an egg and some bread crumbs to make the ground meat more cohesive. Shape one or more hedgehog bodies, and wrap them in the caul.
If you can't buy almond sticks, cut some blanched almonds. Melt fat and sugar in a small saucepan, add the almond sticks and stir until the sticks start to brown. Spread the almond sticks out on a plate, to prevent them sticking together.
Make almond milk for the gaze: add boiling water to the ground almonds, steep for twenty minutes, and strain.

Preparation:
Roast the stuffed caul in the oven at 170dgC/350dgF for about one hour and fifteen minutes (if using a whole pig stomach, it will take longer). Use a turnspit if you like, but take care that the weight is divided evenlyaround the spit. You can also put the hedgehog on a roasting tin.
When done, remove the spit, and let the hedgehog rest for fifteen minutes. Divide the almond milk/flour paste over two bowls, add green colouring to one, and black colouring to the other. For black, you'll have to use colouring paste instead of liquid colouring. Glaze the hedgehog with these two colours as you like (half-half, quarters, whatever).
Now prick the almond spines into the glazed hedgehog, and put it back in the oven at 120dgC/250dgF for another ten minutes until the glaze has set. But if you simply let the hedgehog stand for a couple of hours, the glaze will have dried by itself.

To serve:
Warm or at room temperature. A nice subtlety for a medieval meal.
You can play with the recipe as you like. For example, use ground veal and herbs instead of pork and spices, or use dough instead of caul or pig stomach. Adding raisins to the stuffing is also a good idea.
You can serve this dish as a first course (small individual hedgehogs), as a main dish with a medieval sauce (two recipes on this site: onion sauce and 'sauce madame', both from English manuscripts), or even as a side dish in a medieval buffet.
The glazing is rather tasteless. So don't worry about the colouring, you'll only scrape it off the hedgehog to discard it.

Extra: a recipe from Hannah Glasse, "To make a Hedge-Hog"
This recipe is taken from a very succesful English cookbook from 1747, written by Hannah Glasse: The Art of Cookery, made Plain and Easy. There is a beautiful facsimile edition, titled First catch your hare (edition). The article in Wikipedia about Hannah Glasse and her cookbook uses information from the introducion to the facsimile edition.
This eighteenth-century English recipe needs no translation.
This recipe is from chapter XV Of making CAKES, &c. (p.146). But this recipe already appeared in chapter IX For a Fast-Dinner, a Number of good Dishes which you may make use of for a Table at any other Time ('Fast' as in fasting, not quick), on page 85. The main difference is that the meat jelly is replaced by hartshorn jelly (apparently the antlers of a stag were not forbidden as ingredient on fast-days). It is served cold as a side dish at second course, as centre-piece for supper, or in a Grand Dessert. There is a second hedgehog recipe in this chapter, using bitter almonds, saffron, sorrel, nutmeg, mace, and lemon and orange peel, served hot during the first course.

The modern adaptation of the recipe:
Printout version
The hedgehog is made from a kind of marzipan, and surrounded by sweet custard or savoury meat jelly. The marzipan is sweetened, but not as much as modern marzipan. Which is probably why meat jelly is an alternative in serving. So, if you want to serve the hedgehog with custard, use more sugar, and if you serve it with meat jelly, use less sugar.
The hedgehogs on the picture are reddish. That is because I added some food colouring to the almond paste.
The marzipan and custard are very filling. If you want to serve this as dessert, I think the amount would be enough for 24 people. The two hedgehogs on the picture are one third of the marzipan from the recipe, the custard is from 1/4 litre cream. If you serve all marzipan as hedgehogs, at least double the amount of custard.

List of ingredients:
For the hedgehog:
400 gram (3 1/3 cup) ground almonds
150 to 250 gram (3/4 to 1 1/4 cup)sugar
3 Tbsp. (45 cc) orange flower water
2 whole eggs and 3 yolks
1,5 decilitre (2/3 cup) cream
80 gram (1/3 cup) butter
almond slivers for the spines
2 raisins
For the custard:
2,5 decilitre (1 cup) cream
2 or 3 egg yolks
50 to 60 gram (1/4 to 1/3 cup) sugar
For the meat jelly:
See this recipe

Preparation:
Prepare the almondpaste: temper almond flour with sugar, orange flower water, eggs and yolks. Melt the butter without browning, add this together with the cream to the almondpaste. Knead or stir until it is a smooth paste. Put it in a pan with a thick bottom, and heat slowly while you stir with a wooden spoon (or use an electric mixer with dough hooks) until the paste has thickened. This will take fifteen to twenty minutes. Let it cool, and form one big or six to eight small hedgehogs.Put them on a dish with slightly raised sides.
If you can't find ready made almond sticks, cut the spines yourselve from blanched almonds (ten to fifteen almonds for one small hedgehog). Roast them in a dry skillet until slightly browned. Stick them in the hedgehogs, like spines.
Use the rasins for the eyes.
Prepare the custard: beat the yolks with the sugar. Stir in the cream. Put in a small saucepan on a slow fire, and keep stirring until the custard has thickened (here you can also use an electric mixer, with whip hooks). This will take ten to fifteen minutes. Pour the still warm custard around the hedgehogs in the dish, and let cool. In a modern recipe vanilla would have been added.
Or prepare the jelly: see this recipe for meat jelly as was meant by Hannah Glasse.
You can use gelatine leaves or powdered gelatine instead, with water and syrup. The hedgehogs will rest on a coloured nest. You could cut fruit  to form floating flowers in the clear jelly.

To serve:
In the original recipe it is mentioned that this dish could be used as table decoration. It would stand on the table during the whole meal. You can do that too, of course, but the hedgehogs can also be served as dessert (although in that case I certainly wouldn't use meat jelly).
One of the other hedgehog recipes in Glasse's book also suggests serving the hedgehogs with cold cream, sweetened, with white wine and the juice of a Seville orange.

You may not know this, but almond paste, or marzipan, is traditional food in The Netherlands (and parts of Belgium)around the feast of Saint Nicholas (the evening of 5 December). Another tradition for this feast is giving small presents to each other, which are disguised as something else. We call them surprises. Often the packaging is more important than the present, some are real works of art. You could hide a small present in a marzipan hedgehog as surprise on Saint Nicholas' Eve. The presents are often accompanied by poems, sinterklaasgedichten, in which the receiver's good and bad actions/character traits during the past year are reviewed in an ironic way.

Ingredients
All descriptions of ingredients

Almonds, ground - Ground almonds can be bought in specialized food stores and maybe patisseries. You can also ground blanched almonds in a blender or mortar. Ground almonds are comparable to shredded coconut: you can make 'milk' with it. Almond milk is used in medieval recipes to thicken sauces (just like coconut milk is used in the Indonesian and Indian kitchen). During Lent almond milk was the most important substitute of dairy products (milk, cheese, butter, eggs). There are recipes for almond butter (think: peanut butter) and almond cheese, which resembles marzipan. The substitution of almonds for dairy products was a good one: 100 gram almonds contain twice as much calcium, five times the amount of phosphorus, and no less than hundred times as much iron as 100 gram milk (without industrial additions). Also, almonds contain more vitamin B1, B2, B6, and more $-carotene, 10% fibres and no cholesterol. Just one negative point: they also contain ten times the calories fat milk has.
Canary sugar - Simply sugar from the plantations on Canary Islands.
Hartshorn - From the antlers of a stag. It used to be a source of ammonia, and was used in the production of smelling salts. In England hartshorn was used in the 17th and 18th century to make jelly. It was also used as a rising agent under the name of baker's ammonia (or ammonium carbonate).
Orange flower water - This is made with the flowers of the bigarade or Seville oranges. It originates in the Middle East where it was used to flavour syrups and dishes. In Europe it was first used to perfume bed linen, but by the seventeenth century it was also popular as food flavouring.

Pig stomach - Like humans, pigs have but one stomach (cows have several). In the meat industry pig stomach is used in sausages, but also as encasing of sausages (at least, in 1965). As I have mentioned above, it is difficult to buy a whole pig stomach. If you kill your own pig, or know people who do, here's what to do with the stomach according to my Butcher's Book from 1965: first of all, the stomach must be cleaned: cut away grease; make an incision in the large curvature: through this hole push out the contents of the stomach, then turn the stomch inside out. The wrinkled mucous membrane will pop out. Rinse the stomach well and steep in cold water. The next day you can peel of the mucous membrane. [...] The rest, stull mucous, will be conserved in salt. (from Moderne beenhouwerij en charcuterie [+ Modern butcher and meat products], p.211). On the left you can see a picture of a stuffed pig stomach, with thanks to Nick Stanley (source).
Stuffed pig stomach (saumaagen, seimaage or hogmal) is said to have been a traditional dish on Thanksgiving (November 14) with Dutch families in Pennsylvania, en in Germany this dish still is popular in the Palatinate (source).

Pork caul - The French call this crépine. The caul is the part of the peritoneum attached to the stomach and to the colon and covering the intestines. You can buy it deep-frozen. To thaw a caul, put it in cold water with salt that you change once in a while. When the caul is completely thawed, you can spread it out, and see a thin membrane with veins of fat. It reminds me a bit of lace, rather attractive, actually.
Why would one use a caul in the kitchen? Because it is so thin and the fat melts away in the preparation, it is ideal to wrap food in that would otherwise fall apart. And the melting fat serves as a kind of "instant dripping". Use what you need of the caul, but not more. Do not wrap the caul six times around your meat because otherwise  you have to throw it away, the dish won't taste any better, on the contrary. A caul is cheap, you won't go broke if you do not use all of it.

Bibliography
The editions below are in my possession. Links refer to available editions. 
All books mentioned on this site  

The Viandier text from the first half of the fifteenth century is from this codex: Rome, Vatican City, Biblioteca Vaticana, Regina 776 (olim 233 and 2159), ff.48r-85r. Edition: Terence Scully, The Viandier of Taillevent. An edition of all extant manuscripts Ottawa, 1988.
T. Austin, Two fifteenth Century Cookery-Books. [,,,] Reprint Oxford University Press, 2000 (or. 1888), digital edition. Here you can find ms Harleian 279.
Terence Scully, 'Du fait de cuisine par Maistre Chiquart, 1420'. In:Vallesia 40 (1985) pp.101-231.
Hannah Glasse, "First catch your hare". The art of cookery made plain and easy. A facsimile edition, supplemented by the recipes which the author added up to the fifth edition and furnished with a Preface, Introductory Essays by Jennifer Stead and Priscilla Bain, a Glossary by Alan Davidson, Notes, and an Index. Prospect Books, 1995. The edition from 1747. Online edition of the edition from 1774.
Constance B. Hieatt en Sharon Butler, Curye on Inglysch. English culinary manuscripts of the fourteenth century (Including the 'Forme of Cury'). Oxford, 1985.
Meister Hans, des von wirtenberg koch. Transcription, translation and commentary by Trude Ehlert. Tupperware, 1996.
Le Mesnagier de Paris. Text edition Georgina E. Brereton and Janet M. Ferrier, translation (in modern French) Karin Ueltschi. Paris, 1994.
Taillevent, Le Viandier. D'apres l'édition de 1486. Introduction by Mary and Philip Hyman. Éditiins Manucius, 2001.