Almond milk

Basic recipe - two versions

Almond milk was a very common ingredient in all kinds of recipes, including the savoury and the sweet. It was especially useful during Lent, because at that time all consumption of milk products, eggs, meat and derivatives was forbidden to the (mostly Christian) population.

Simple milk of almonds

This recipe is a metric variation of the one in Cariadoc's Miscellany at:
http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/cariadoc/recipes_introduction.html#am

To make some 650 ml of almond milk:

50 g. almonds
approx. 700 ml water (or broth, or wine, if the recipe says so)

Put the almonds in a food processor (the thing with blades) and grind them until they're like fine sand. Add a little bit of the liquid (water, broth,...) and grind both things together. Strain the resulting milky liquid, keeping the milk in some recipient and putting the almonds back into the blender. Add more liquid and continue "grinding". Strain. Repeat the process until the "milk" gets too watery or you have enough.

Notes:

You can't strain this through a normal colander. You will need a cloth one. Make one with clean cloth if you can't buy one ready-made. If the cloth is new, wash it well just in case there's nasty chemicals left in it.

Sweet milk of almonds

Juan Cruz Cruz suggests a recipe for Nola's time, with the following ingredients:

10 litres of water (17.6 British pints; 21.1 American fluid pints)

2.5 kg of ground almonds (5.5 pounds)

up to 1.5 kg (3.3 pounds) of sugar or honey (depending on what you want to do with it)

1 peel of a bitter orange

Stir until the milk is reduced to half of its original volume. Filter and let cool.

Sources:

“La cocina mediterránea en el inicio del Renacimiento” by Juan Cruz Cruz, published by La Val de Onsera, Spain 1997.
Cariadoc's Miscellany, http://www.best.com/~ddfr/Medieval/Medieval.html

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