Open-fire cooking: Pisum farsilem (Apicius)

I wanted a dish to do for the A&S Tourney cooks' playdate that would give me a chance to experiment with the new firebox spit set-up as well as providing a contribution to the Classical/Mediterranean theme potluck for Villa Luna's Saturday evening dinner. So I hit on Apicius's Pisam Farsilem, a sort of layered "pea casserole" thing. The full recipe as translated by Grocock & Grainger is:

Pease mould: cook peas and add oil to them. Put some belly pork in a pan with liquamen, (water), leek and green coriander. Put it to cook. Make cubes of finely-groud forcemeat, and at the same time cook thrushes or other little birds or chicken meat and also par-cooked brains in stock. Roast some lucanicae; boil some pork shoulder and cook leeks in water; dry-roast a pint of pine nuts. Pound pepper, lovage, oregano, ginger, pour on some of the cooking liquor from the belly pork; make it smooth. Take an angular mould which can be turned out and line it with caul fat. Pour on oil, then sprinkle with pine nuts and put some peas on top of that so that you cover the bottom of the mould and then lay on top some of the pork, leek and chopped lucanicae. Put in another layer of peas; keep putting in alternate layers of the ingredients until the mould is full. Last of all put in a layer of peas to seal everything in. Cook in an overn or put it on a slow fire so that it sets from the top down. Hard-boil some eggs and put aside the yolks. Put (the whites) in a mortar with white pepper, pine nuts, honey, white wine, and a little liquamen. Pound it and put it in a pan to heat; when it is simmering, turn the pease mould out on to a serving dish and pour the sauce over it. This sauce is called 'white sauce'.

I simplified the recipe somewhat, found an alternate method for moulding it, and omitted the final sauce (mostly because it had just gotten too hot to keep cooking). Here's roughly what I did:

In a pot, put about 1.5 c split green peas and about 3 cups of water. Set it by the fire, covered, to simmer then let it cook very slowly while you work on the other ingredients. When the peas are cooked enough to mash (and the water is mostly absorbed), remove it from the fire and just let it sit in the covered pot until the other ingredients are prepared. (Note: I failed to add oil to this step, but since I later used the water from cooking the belly pork to bring the peas to the right consistency, I think this covered the topic.)

Put a piece of fat pork (I used ca. 1/3 lb "country-style ribs") in a pot with the whites of 3 large leeks, sliced, and a small handful of chopped green coriander. (Since my coriander had recently bolted, this was a mixture of leaves and immature seed-heads.) Cover with water and simmer while you work on the other ingredients.

As mentioned above, I wanted to experiment with my spit, so when the above two items were started, I put two quail on a spit and started it cooking over a relatively low indirect heat. Since I haven't come up with an automated spit-turning mechanism, I simply rotated the spit a quarter turn every 10 minutes or so. (The birds were almost perfectly balanced so the facets on the spit were enough to keep it in place when I turned it.) I think I roasted them for about 1.5 hours, basting once with some olive oil that I had out for greasing the wafer iron (different project). When they looked done, I took them off the spit and let them sit for about another half hour before picking the meat off the bones. The wing-tips were a bit crispy but otherwise they were perfectly done.

Next I spitted two large "sweet Italian" sausages and roasted them similarly. Alas, this time the load was unbalanced and when I turned the spit I had to pin it in place with a skewer (if I had pictures this would make more sense). I think they roasted for about an hour, again with a rather low heat. When they'd cooled a little, I cut them in quarters the long way then chopped them into cubes. (They sort of stood in for both the "forcemeat cubes" and the lucanicae.)

When the pork (with the leeks) was simmered to near dissolving, I fished it out of the pot and removed all the leeks with a slotted spoon. (At which point, since I still had the rest of the quail from the 6-pack, I put them in the pot and let it continue simmering in the broth.) I minced the pork and mixed it well so the fat and lean parts were thoroughly mixed.

I purchased pre-toasted pine nuts.

So now I assembled my ingredients: the cooked peas, the quail, the sausage, the pork, the leeks, the pine nuts, and the broth from the pork/leeks. I thought about assembling the layers in a pot, perhaps lined with thin slices of bacon, and putting it in a very slow fire to bake. And as it turned out, I could have snagged some caul from madbaker's meatball class. But the optimal container from unmoulding was the new ceramic colander I'd bought from Mercy at Beltane, and I was feeling a bit hesitant about adding more fat to the dish, so I lined the colander with cheesecloth and started with a layer of crushed pine nuts (ca. 1/4 cup). The peas were a little dry at this point, so I took about 1/5 of the batch at a time and added just enough broth from the pork/leek (and now quail) pot so I could beat them into a sticky paste. So a layer of peas went onto the pine nuts. Then the minced quail, then peas. Then the leeks, then peas. Then the minced sausage, then peas. Then the minced pork, then the last of the peas. I folded the rest of the cheesecloth over the top and covered the colander with a plate then let it sit in the shade until dinner time (several hours).

When we set up for dinner, I opened up the cheesecloth, placed a plate over the top, and turned it over, then carefully removed the cheesecloth. Here's the result, although the layers aren't entirely visible. (We ate about a quarter of it, and when I got the leftovers home I re-heated them with water to cover to turn it into soup.) I think I may try this again at West-An Tir War.