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14th Century Cooks' Play-date at Coronet
One of the ways in which I tend to diverge from a lot of my friends in the SCA is that for me the big, number one, most important and most fun thing I do in the SCA is try to understand historic cultures by trying to reproduce little bits of them. I'm not saying that other people don't think this is fun and important too, but it seems to come further down the list for most people. I don't come to the SCA for a "dream of chivalry"; I don't come to find "family" (well, except for my brothers, of course); I don't come for the partying; I come to do and make medieval things. Yesterday was the sort of thing I love to do in the SCA. Trying to learn more about the constraints and advantages of medieval cooking methods and equipment; comparing different possible interpretations of a single recipe; sharing and discussing knowledge and techniques in a situation that involves practical application without the looming pressure of a room full of paying diners. And the second most fun thing about the cooking (after the cooking itself) was the near-constant stream of people wandering through to taste the results.
Here are the recipes I did -- all from Sent Soví, no repeats of my previous experiments (although I brought the results of the arugula sauce for people to try). See previous postings for the bibliographic information.
Mushroom Sauce
If you want to make sauce of mushrooms that are boiled, pressed, and fried with oil, make the sauce like this: take onion, parsley, vinegar, and spices, and mix it with vinegar and a little water. Make pieces of the mushrooms, to fry, or serve with a fried mixture, and then put them in their sauce, or serve them grilled with salt and oil.
This seems to be a combination of a mushroom-based sauce, and fried or grilled mushrooms served with it. I went for just the sauce part.
Wash ca. 4 cups mushrooms and mince finely. Simmer in water in a pipkin until tender, then drain and press out as much liquid as possible. Mince an onion and put it in a skillet with the mushrooms and a couple tablespoonfuls of olive oil. Saute until the onion is cooked and any remaining water is evaporated. Grind about a tablespoonful of fresh parsley in a mortar with a little red wine vinegar and add to the pan, using more vinegar to wash it all out of the mortar, for a total of about 1/4 cup. Stir the mixture in the hot pan (but off the heat) until well mingled.
Results: Everyone seemed to like it. I liked that it wasn't too vinegary -- it helped that I was aiming for something of a "relish" texture, which precluded too much liquid, so the amount of vinegar was determined by that goal. It's hard to know what texture was intended by the recipe -- other dishes explicitly say to grind ingredients in a mortar, but this one only mentions "make pieces" in the part that seems to be talking about larger pieces of mushrooms to serve the sauce on. On the other hand, most of the "sauce" recipes do seem to intend more of a mush/puree result, which was the basis for doing the mince.
Carrots
If you want to make carrot purée, take white carrots and set them to cook. When they are cooked, take them out and put them in cold water and peel them. When they are peeled, press them between two plates, as one does for cheese. If you find the heart, take it out. Then, once they are pressed, take a good mortar and grind them up. Put them to cook in mutton and salt pork broth, or whatever kind of broth you want, and cook them like squash. When they should be cooked, take almond milk, made with the best broth that you have, and put that in also. Put in cheese, in whole slices or grated. If you want to, you can put in goats' milk.
We had two versions of this dish at the event, taking significantly different choices at the various options, so it was fun to compare. (White and orange carrots have a noticeably different taste -- I didn't know that before.) Having decided to focus on vegetable dishes, I noticed that with the exception of "almond milk made with broth", all of the dishes I planned could be done vegetarian simply by navigating among the offered options. And although I'm far from a vegetarian, I decided to try that route just to see how they came out. So I used a commercial vegetable broth to make my almond milk (1 cup ground blanched almonds in 1 quart hot broth made from onion, celery, and carrot, blended then strained). I ended up collapsing the second and third cooking stages, since my carrots were mushable after the first stage.
Scrape and coarsely chop about 3-4 cups white carrots. (Since my carrots were young and tender, there was no advantage to keeping them whole to make it easier to remove the heart, and besides which they fit into my pot better chopped. So it made more sense to scrape them first than to peel them after cooking.) Put them in a pipkin with water to cover and simmer covered until tender. Drain thoroughly. Grind into mush in a mortar. (Memo to self: need larger mortar if you're going to do this regularly. My mortar only holds about a cup, which means the working volume is more like a quarter of that. Grinding the carrots took a while.) I skipped the step of cooking in plain broth and put them back in the pipkin with almond milk (made with vegetable broth) to cover and simmered until it turned into a puree. Since my broth was low-salt and I hadn't used a "salt pork broth" I added a little salt to taste. I served it with a side of grated parmesan-type cheese.
Result: It was pronounced yummy by all who tried it.
Squash
When they are peeled well, put them to boil, and be sure that they are tender. Once boiled, press them between two plates. Put them to cook with a good broth of much salt pork and fresh pork, if you have some. If you want, you can put in, according to the quantity, five or six round onions, that are peeled and boiled, and mix [them with] the squash. When they have cooked a lot with the broth, all of them softened, make that at the end some help**; and stir them firmly so that they break apart quickly and are quite smooth. Then take almond milk made with well-cooked broth or goat milk, or if you want, both of them together, and put them inside. Then, when they should be cooked and thick, put in whole cheese, if you want to serve some at the table; if not, put in a little grated cheese, so that it gives flavor. Watch out that the meat that is cooked with the squash does not come apart, so that there are no pieces. Flavor it with salt and put it in bowls. You can put ground cinnamon over top and, if you want, take soft cheese cut into thin slices, and serve it in the bowls. You should prepare sour grape juice, which one puts on the table so that whoever wants some can be served. **The editor notes that this passage is "difficult to interpret".
Having left my shopping until the last minute, I stood there in the Berkeley Bowl produce section on Friday after work with my iPhone out searching the web for the most appropriate type of squash to use. I got as far as the knowledge that I was ideally looking for something in the genus Lagenaria, ideally a young "bottle gourd", and even got as far as determining that the gourd used in Japanese cooking known as "kanpyo" is at least a close relative ... but none of that helped. So I decided to go with a "snake squash" (Trichosanthes anguina) on the principle that 1) it was, at least, an Old World plant (although not a European one); 2) it appeared to have a similar physical structure to the bottle gourd (relatively thin walls); and 3) at the very least it would be "wrong" in a different direction than usual. So I have no idea whether the physical issues I encountered in cooking (to say nothing of the taste) in any way replicate the expected behavior in this recipe.
Take two large snake squashes, scrape off the (very thin) skin, remove the seeds and pith, and cut into manageable pieces for the pot. Cover with water and simmer in a pipkin until tender. They simmered. And simmered. And simmered. I could poke holes in them with a knife easily enough, but they weren't really "mushy" in any meaningful sense of the word. But the afternoon was wearing on, so I drained them and started working on them in the mortar, a few pieces at a time. I could grind them into a mushy state, but mostly they wanted to retain their structural integrity (although they were clearly cooked to tenderness), so eventually I gave up and simply diced them into the smallest cubes I could easily manage (ca. 2 mm cubed). I added half an onion, minced, and once again skipped the middle step of cooking in plain broth and went straight to simmering in broth-based almond milk (as for the carrots) with a little salt to taste. Somewhere in there I forgot to add cinnamon. Since the dish wasn't done until after most of the taste-testers had wandered through, I decided to serve it at dinner (for which I'd been invited to join the Company of St. Teresa), so rather than serving the cheese and sour grape juice on the side, ad lib., I mixed in a couple splashes of verjuice and about half a cup of grated parmesan.
Results: At least a couple people asked for seconds. The squash itself was extremely bland -- almost tasteless. I think next time I'll plan more in advance to try this with the appropriate vegetable and see how it behaves, rather than trying to tweak the recipe for the snake squash.
Broad Beans (Favas)
This is a variant on the recipe for chickpeas -- I'd planned to do the chickpea version, but it's the wrong time of year for fresh chickpeas and the recipe is specifically for fresh, not dried. But the store did have fresh favas.
If you want to prepare tender chickpeas, wash them well. Take almond milk, and cook them with the milk and oil and salt; and put in one or two onions scalded with boiling water. When they should be cooked, put in parley, basil, marjoram, an other good herbs, and a little ground ginger and a little sour grape juice. This is the way to cook them when they are tender, but not among the first.
If you want to prepare the most tender ones, boil the almond milk with oil, salt, and new onions, and the herbs listed above, and ginger and sour grape juice. Put in the chickpeas, washed with hot water, and they'll be done right away.
In this way you can also prepare young broad beans; you can put in green coriander with some good spices, pepper, ginger, cinnamon and saffron.
I would have expected a step in the recipe to cook the beans enough first to skin them, and only then add the other ingredients, but I went ahead with the single-step cooking and it turned out ok.
Shell about 2 cups fresh fava beans. Add almond milk (made with vegetable broth) to cover, about a tablespoonful of olive oil, and a little salt. Start simmering -- they'll need to cook a long time. Mince half an onion and add it in time to cook well. When the beans are starting to look done (make sure they never get close to cooking dry), grind in a mortar about 2 tablespoonfuls each fresh parsley, basil, and marjoram, using about half a cup of verjuice as a medium and to wash it out of the mortar. Add this to the pot along with a pinch each of pepper, ginger, cinnamon, and saffron. Cook, stirring regularly, until the liquid is reduced to a thick sauce.
Results: This was very successful. I got several comments on the complexity of the flavors. It's nice to see a recipe that calls for a variety of fresh herbs.
Broom Pudding
(Contains no brooms. Named for the yellow color of broom flowers.)
If you want to make broom pudding for fast days, make almond milk and strain it and put it in a good pot. After that, take flour made of ground rice and pass it through a sieve of silk, and then mix it with the milk; it should be nice and clear, so it cooks well. Then, when you have to take it from the heat, put in saffron so that it turns the color of broom. Take cinnamon and cloves, and put them in to cook whole; there are some who do not want the pieces to appear: take a good cloth and wrap the spices inside. Boil it all the while. You can put in, if you wish, a bit of old oil. Then at the end, take cleaned raisins and put them in the pot. Flavor it with salt. It should be quite thick, like porridge, and it should have a lot of sugar, to overtake the flavor of the rice and almonds. And you can put in, per every four bowls, a pound of almonds and as much rice as fits in a mustard bowl. If one likes it, one can put in toasted pine nuts, and these one leaves to boil. After that, one distributes enough pudding for the bowls. Take care that before you put in the pine nuts, they should be a little cooled off.
I actually blended this recipe with the one for "Oat cream" (sweetened almond milk thickened with oat flour, but without added flavorings) and used oat flour for the thickener instead of rice flour.
Toast about 1/4 cup pine nuts in a skillet and crush coarsely in a mortar, then set aside to cool. Mix about 3 cups almond milk (made with water) with about 1/4 cup fine oat flour (not rolled oats, but actual oat flour). In a mortar, grind a generous pinch of saffron (I ground it up with sugar as a carrier to help with the grinding) and add this and ca. 1/4 teaspoonful of ground cinnamon and 1/8 teaspoonful of ground cloves to the liquid. (I was going to do the "whole cloves and cinnamon pieces tied up in a cloth" thing, but I was out of cinnamon sticks so I didn't bother.) Simmer slowly until well thickened and not "raw" tasting. Add sugar to taste (I think I used about 1/3 cup in total), 1/4 cup raisins or currants, and the toasted pine nuts. Continue simmering until the raisins are tender.
Results: Also a success. Several people commented that it was nice having a sweet dish with dinner. I made this one last, so again I contributed it to dinner since the tasters had wandered away. (I also have leftovers to take for lunches this week.) It was fairly runny -- a larger amount of thickener would make it stand up to a spoon better, although the reference to serving it in bowls suggests that runny isn't necessarily wrong.
Overall Summary
I'm quite fond of the number of vegetable dishes in this book. It's also interesting to see several "patterns" of preparation applied to multiple base ingredients. I'm itching to do a distribution analysis of seasonings to get a big-picture notion of the rules of the cuisine. I keep getting the notion that some of the dishes labelled "sauces" are more in the way of side dishes -- or at least more of a condiment than a sauce, per se. It's also interesting to read some of the side comments on preparation and serving (like the bit about serving the squash with sour grape juice on the side, presumably to be added individually as people are served). All in all, the recipes seem more "talky" than contemporary collections from more northerly areas. Less someone's personal memory aid and more intended as actual instructions to someone unfamiliar with the dishes.
ETA:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sarahbellem was taking pictures of the cooking, so they may show up online at some point.
Here are the recipes I did -- all from Sent Soví, no repeats of my previous experiments (although I brought the results of the arugula sauce for people to try). See previous postings for the bibliographic information.
Mushroom Sauce
If you want to make sauce of mushrooms that are boiled, pressed, and fried with oil, make the sauce like this: take onion, parsley, vinegar, and spices, and mix it with vinegar and a little water. Make pieces of the mushrooms, to fry, or serve with a fried mixture, and then put them in their sauce, or serve them grilled with salt and oil.
This seems to be a combination of a mushroom-based sauce, and fried or grilled mushrooms served with it. I went for just the sauce part.
Wash ca. 4 cups mushrooms and mince finely. Simmer in water in a pipkin until tender, then drain and press out as much liquid as possible. Mince an onion and put it in a skillet with the mushrooms and a couple tablespoonfuls of olive oil. Saute until the onion is cooked and any remaining water is evaporated. Grind about a tablespoonful of fresh parsley in a mortar with a little red wine vinegar and add to the pan, using more vinegar to wash it all out of the mortar, for a total of about 1/4 cup. Stir the mixture in the hot pan (but off the heat) until well mingled.
Results: Everyone seemed to like it. I liked that it wasn't too vinegary -- it helped that I was aiming for something of a "relish" texture, which precluded too much liquid, so the amount of vinegar was determined by that goal. It's hard to know what texture was intended by the recipe -- other dishes explicitly say to grind ingredients in a mortar, but this one only mentions "make pieces" in the part that seems to be talking about larger pieces of mushrooms to serve the sauce on. On the other hand, most of the "sauce" recipes do seem to intend more of a mush/puree result, which was the basis for doing the mince.
Carrots
If you want to make carrot purée, take white carrots and set them to cook. When they are cooked, take them out and put them in cold water and peel them. When they are peeled, press them between two plates, as one does for cheese. If you find the heart, take it out. Then, once they are pressed, take a good mortar and grind them up. Put them to cook in mutton and salt pork broth, or whatever kind of broth you want, and cook them like squash. When they should be cooked, take almond milk, made with the best broth that you have, and put that in also. Put in cheese, in whole slices or grated. If you want to, you can put in goats' milk.
We had two versions of this dish at the event, taking significantly different choices at the various options, so it was fun to compare. (White and orange carrots have a noticeably different taste -- I didn't know that before.) Having decided to focus on vegetable dishes, I noticed that with the exception of "almond milk made with broth", all of the dishes I planned could be done vegetarian simply by navigating among the offered options. And although I'm far from a vegetarian, I decided to try that route just to see how they came out. So I used a commercial vegetable broth to make my almond milk (1 cup ground blanched almonds in 1 quart hot broth made from onion, celery, and carrot, blended then strained). I ended up collapsing the second and third cooking stages, since my carrots were mushable after the first stage.
Scrape and coarsely chop about 3-4 cups white carrots. (Since my carrots were young and tender, there was no advantage to keeping them whole to make it easier to remove the heart, and besides which they fit into my pot better chopped. So it made more sense to scrape them first than to peel them after cooking.) Put them in a pipkin with water to cover and simmer covered until tender. Drain thoroughly. Grind into mush in a mortar. (Memo to self: need larger mortar if you're going to do this regularly. My mortar only holds about a cup, which means the working volume is more like a quarter of that. Grinding the carrots took a while.) I skipped the step of cooking in plain broth and put them back in the pipkin with almond milk (made with vegetable broth) to cover and simmered until it turned into a puree. Since my broth was low-salt and I hadn't used a "salt pork broth" I added a little salt to taste. I served it with a side of grated parmesan-type cheese.
Result: It was pronounced yummy by all who tried it.
Squash
When they are peeled well, put them to boil, and be sure that they are tender. Once boiled, press them between two plates. Put them to cook with a good broth of much salt pork and fresh pork, if you have some. If you want, you can put in, according to the quantity, five or six round onions, that are peeled and boiled, and mix [them with] the squash. When they have cooked a lot with the broth, all of them softened, make that at the end some help**; and stir them firmly so that they break apart quickly and are quite smooth. Then take almond milk made with well-cooked broth or goat milk, or if you want, both of them together, and put them inside. Then, when they should be cooked and thick, put in whole cheese, if you want to serve some at the table; if not, put in a little grated cheese, so that it gives flavor. Watch out that the meat that is cooked with the squash does not come apart, so that there are no pieces. Flavor it with salt and put it in bowls. You can put ground cinnamon over top and, if you want, take soft cheese cut into thin slices, and serve it in the bowls. You should prepare sour grape juice, which one puts on the table so that whoever wants some can be served. **The editor notes that this passage is "difficult to interpret".
Having left my shopping until the last minute, I stood there in the Berkeley Bowl produce section on Friday after work with my iPhone out searching the web for the most appropriate type of squash to use. I got as far as the knowledge that I was ideally looking for something in the genus Lagenaria, ideally a young "bottle gourd", and even got as far as determining that the gourd used in Japanese cooking known as "kanpyo" is at least a close relative ... but none of that helped. So I decided to go with a "snake squash" (Trichosanthes anguina) on the principle that 1) it was, at least, an Old World plant (although not a European one); 2) it appeared to have a similar physical structure to the bottle gourd (relatively thin walls); and 3) at the very least it would be "wrong" in a different direction than usual. So I have no idea whether the physical issues I encountered in cooking (to say nothing of the taste) in any way replicate the expected behavior in this recipe.
Take two large snake squashes, scrape off the (very thin) skin, remove the seeds and pith, and cut into manageable pieces for the pot. Cover with water and simmer in a pipkin until tender. They simmered. And simmered. And simmered. I could poke holes in them with a knife easily enough, but they weren't really "mushy" in any meaningful sense of the word. But the afternoon was wearing on, so I drained them and started working on them in the mortar, a few pieces at a time. I could grind them into a mushy state, but mostly they wanted to retain their structural integrity (although they were clearly cooked to tenderness), so eventually I gave up and simply diced them into the smallest cubes I could easily manage (ca. 2 mm cubed). I added half an onion, minced, and once again skipped the middle step of cooking in plain broth and went straight to simmering in broth-based almond milk (as for the carrots) with a little salt to taste. Somewhere in there I forgot to add cinnamon. Since the dish wasn't done until after most of the taste-testers had wandered through, I decided to serve it at dinner (for which I'd been invited to join the Company of St. Teresa), so rather than serving the cheese and sour grape juice on the side, ad lib., I mixed in a couple splashes of verjuice and about half a cup of grated parmesan.
Results: At least a couple people asked for seconds. The squash itself was extremely bland -- almost tasteless. I think next time I'll plan more in advance to try this with the appropriate vegetable and see how it behaves, rather than trying to tweak the recipe for the snake squash.
Broad Beans (Favas)
This is a variant on the recipe for chickpeas -- I'd planned to do the chickpea version, but it's the wrong time of year for fresh chickpeas and the recipe is specifically for fresh, not dried. But the store did have fresh favas.
If you want to prepare tender chickpeas, wash them well. Take almond milk, and cook them with the milk and oil and salt; and put in one or two onions scalded with boiling water. When they should be cooked, put in parley, basil, marjoram, an other good herbs, and a little ground ginger and a little sour grape juice. This is the way to cook them when they are tender, but not among the first.
If you want to prepare the most tender ones, boil the almond milk with oil, salt, and new onions, and the herbs listed above, and ginger and sour grape juice. Put in the chickpeas, washed with hot water, and they'll be done right away.
In this way you can also prepare young broad beans; you can put in green coriander with some good spices, pepper, ginger, cinnamon and saffron.
I would have expected a step in the recipe to cook the beans enough first to skin them, and only then add the other ingredients, but I went ahead with the single-step cooking and it turned out ok.
Shell about 2 cups fresh fava beans. Add almond milk (made with vegetable broth) to cover, about a tablespoonful of olive oil, and a little salt. Start simmering -- they'll need to cook a long time. Mince half an onion and add it in time to cook well. When the beans are starting to look done (make sure they never get close to cooking dry), grind in a mortar about 2 tablespoonfuls each fresh parsley, basil, and marjoram, using about half a cup of verjuice as a medium and to wash it out of the mortar. Add this to the pot along with a pinch each of pepper, ginger, cinnamon, and saffron. Cook, stirring regularly, until the liquid is reduced to a thick sauce.
Results: This was very successful. I got several comments on the complexity of the flavors. It's nice to see a recipe that calls for a variety of fresh herbs.
Broom Pudding
(Contains no brooms. Named for the yellow color of broom flowers.)
If you want to make broom pudding for fast days, make almond milk and strain it and put it in a good pot. After that, take flour made of ground rice and pass it through a sieve of silk, and then mix it with the milk; it should be nice and clear, so it cooks well. Then, when you have to take it from the heat, put in saffron so that it turns the color of broom. Take cinnamon and cloves, and put them in to cook whole; there are some who do not want the pieces to appear: take a good cloth and wrap the spices inside. Boil it all the while. You can put in, if you wish, a bit of old oil. Then at the end, take cleaned raisins and put them in the pot. Flavor it with salt. It should be quite thick, like porridge, and it should have a lot of sugar, to overtake the flavor of the rice and almonds. And you can put in, per every four bowls, a pound of almonds and as much rice as fits in a mustard bowl. If one likes it, one can put in toasted pine nuts, and these one leaves to boil. After that, one distributes enough pudding for the bowls. Take care that before you put in the pine nuts, they should be a little cooled off.
I actually blended this recipe with the one for "Oat cream" (sweetened almond milk thickened with oat flour, but without added flavorings) and used oat flour for the thickener instead of rice flour.
Toast about 1/4 cup pine nuts in a skillet and crush coarsely in a mortar, then set aside to cool. Mix about 3 cups almond milk (made with water) with about 1/4 cup fine oat flour (not rolled oats, but actual oat flour). In a mortar, grind a generous pinch of saffron (I ground it up with sugar as a carrier to help with the grinding) and add this and ca. 1/4 teaspoonful of ground cinnamon and 1/8 teaspoonful of ground cloves to the liquid. (I was going to do the "whole cloves and cinnamon pieces tied up in a cloth" thing, but I was out of cinnamon sticks so I didn't bother.) Simmer slowly until well thickened and not "raw" tasting. Add sugar to taste (I think I used about 1/3 cup in total), 1/4 cup raisins or currants, and the toasted pine nuts. Continue simmering until the raisins are tender.
Results: Also a success. Several people commented that it was nice having a sweet dish with dinner. I made this one last, so again I contributed it to dinner since the tasters had wandered away. (I also have leftovers to take for lunches this week.) It was fairly runny -- a larger amount of thickener would make it stand up to a spoon better, although the reference to serving it in bowls suggests that runny isn't necessarily wrong.
Overall Summary
I'm quite fond of the number of vegetable dishes in this book. It's also interesting to see several "patterns" of preparation applied to multiple base ingredients. I'm itching to do a distribution analysis of seasonings to get a big-picture notion of the rules of the cuisine. I keep getting the notion that some of the dishes labelled "sauces" are more in the way of side dishes -- or at least more of a condiment than a sauce, per se. It's also interesting to read some of the side comments on preparation and serving (like the bit about serving the squash with sour grape juice on the side, presumably to be added individually as people are served). All in all, the recipes seem more "talky" than contemporary collections from more northerly areas. Less someone's personal memory aid and more intended as actual instructions to someone unfamiliar with the dishes.
ETA:
sarahbellem was taking pictures of the cooking, so they may show up online at some point.
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Also, hard sauce. Which is hard (at least until the butter melts).
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btw the parsley & cilantro are specifically minced in the Grewe version.
Sounds like a fab time. Next time you're visiting up my way if there's time we could arrage a similar play date for you with the Seattle area food geeks :>
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