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“Take almonds of the finest grind/ as many as you like/Add well beaten eggs therein/the yellow is the best/make it not too thick/in a quarter measure of almonds four or five yolks is enough/rosewater so it tastes well/so a weight of sourdough/so a weight of sugar/work into the dough with fine flour//leave it alone to bubble/mound it/as before/ in the form/of the waffle iron/so it is hot/salve with a feather/ take sweet almond oil/lay it on with force/to press the iron closed/let it bake/ over a prepared small fire/ or place it near toward the fire/ when you then think/ that is has had enough had on the side/ turn the other side of the iron towards the fire/and then take it up/lay another on it/let it not get too brown/ you can keep them up to half a year.” (trans by by the fabulous jillwheezul, whose class on wafers and wafer irons I got to take at the WCCS 2013, see http://jillwheezul.livejournal.com/tag/waffle)

7 oz almond marzipan (1 tube of Odessa brand marzipan)
½ cup water
Apx 2 cups sourdough starter
1/2 c wheat flour
1/2 c almond flour
4 egg yolks
3 Tbl rosewater
1-2 Tbl sugar
Pinch salt
1/2 tesp almond extract (optional)
4 Tbl water (more or less as necessary)
Chop marzipan small and dissolve in water. Add eggs, sugar, salt, and almond flour. Beat. Add wheat flour/sourdough starter. Add rosewater and almond extract as needed/wanted. Bake in waffle iron (oil with sweet oil). 2.5 min in (my) hot waffle iron.

I had hoped these would be like the almond waffles one buys on street corners in Belgium, but alas, the sourdough (while wonderful) is not the same. For the next version of this I'm going to try a more modern, baking powder-based waffle recipe with marzipan.

Since July of 2011, I’ve been arguing that the letter-shaped sweets in Dutch still-lifes of Elizabethan and Jacobean era banqueting stuff had no English equivalent. Sir Hugh Platt however, feels differently

18 To make a Marchpane. Take two pounds of Almondes beeing blaunched and dryed in a ſieue ouer the fire, beate them in a ſtone mortar, and when they be ſmall mixe with thē two pounde of ſugar being finely beaten, adding two or three ſpoonefuls of Roſewater, and that will keep your almonds from oiling: when your paſte is beaten fine, driue it thin with a rowling pin, and ſo lay it on a botome of wafers, then raiſe vp a little edge on the ſide, & ſo bake it, then yce it with Roſewater and ſugar, then put it into the ouen againe, and when you ſee your yce is riſen vp and drie, then take it out of the Ouen and garniſh it with pretie conceipts, as birds & beaſts being caſt out of ſtanding moldes. Sticke long cōfits vpright in it, caſt bisket and carowaies in it, and ſo ſerue it; gild it before you ſerue it: you may alſo print off this Marchpane paſte in your molds for banqueting diſhes. And of this paſte our comfit makers at this day make their letters, knots, Armes, eſcocheons, beaſts, birds, & other fancies.

Taken from the 1609 version of Delights for Ladies as printed by G.E. and K.R. Fussell. Any errors in transcription are my own.

I’d still like to find an English painting depicting banqueting stuff with letters. While I'm wishing, I'd like a set of letter-moulds in a passably Tudor font. (O, to have a set based on this 16th century pattern book: http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2009/january/a-designers-portfolio-16th-century-style)

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There's a renaissance still-life of a table with a bunch of banqueting stuff, and what looks like an open marmalade box in the bottom right corner.
Go here, http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/f/flegel/index.html and scroll all the way down to Still-life with Parrot (George Flegel b1566-d1638), and there's a round-ish box that looks like it's filled with jelly.
Hmm, those red boxes behind the parrot might be trencher boxes.

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The Arts of Living gallery in the Norwich Castle Museum in Norwich, England!

The Norwich gallery has nearly their entire collection of trenchers on display, AND they have placed the trenchers in context of the highly competitive Tudor banquet. The display includes spoons and a sampling of the cute little sweets one might have eaten at a (Dutch*) banquet.

They also have a really excellent website, that includes the one trencher they own that is not on display.

The excellence of the banqueting display continues into the other galleries and displays at the Norwich Castle Museum. They are the only museum (of the apx 39 museums/castles visited in the past three weeks) that actually bothered to put a piece of wood in their spindle-whorls to make the use of them obvious! They put pieces of bridles on a silhouette of a horse so even I could understand what the parts were!

Norwich Castle Museum, along with the Museum of London, are the two best museums I visited for putting their displays medieval and Tudor "stuff" in the context of how people used the stuff. Highly recommended.

*Yes, Dutch. While I've found many pictures of banquetting stuff by both English and Dutch painters, the letter-shaped sweets are only present in the Dutch paintings. The "Butter Letters" are still a Dutch holiday tradition and I can't find anything similar in the English recipe books around 1600ce. [Edited to add, I was wrong about this: Sir Hugh Plat mentions letter-shaped marchpanes in his 1609 Delights for Ladies.]

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Anna Wecker’s Sourdough Almond Waffels (1598)

I'm wrong again.

Is that a marmalade box?

And the winner for most fabulous dessert trencher display is....

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