hrj

As those who follow my journal know, one of my goals for the playdate was to try out my new spit setup. In addition to the spit, I had a new dripping pan, courtesy of Mercy the Potter to try out. To add in to the mix, I wanted to reprise the Pisam farsilem that I'd done for A&S, and I'd offered to do drop-in "intro to open fire cooking" for which I figured I'd recycle my handout and recipes from the culinary symposium. So with all that put together, I figured I'd split my time between the 15th century on Thursday and the Roman empire on Saturday, meeting in the middle with seafood dishes and overflow on Friday.

Wednesday

Since I didn't have to accommodate anyone else's schedule for the trip, I was all packed Tuesday evening and got on the road at my usual weekday departure time of 6:30am on Wednesday. Between the hour and the holiday I encountered almost no traffic on the trip, although it may have been a near thing going through Willets as the locals were already setting up seating along the road for their 4th of July parade when I passed. I stopped for lunch at the Cafe Marina since they had the wisdom to have a billboard on 101 advertising fresh local seafood. (On a previous coastal drive I'd gotten burned stopping at a random seafood restaurant and discovering that it was all imported/frozen stuff.) A plate full of steamer clams later I was back on the road and attempting a pre-arranged phone date, during which I learned several useful features of my bluetooth headset, like how to redial after repeatedly losing the signal. (Repeated the experiment on the drive home Sunday but waited until I was south of Ukiah and had a solid signal the rest of the way.) This put me at the event site before dinner time. Yay for setting up in daylight!

Thursday I started off with a store run for the fragile perishables (fresh fruit, eggs, etc.) and then got cooking. In general, the cooking seemed to be a bit more laid back than two years ago, although the headcount at dinner certainly didn't suffer. I started off by setting up a pork loin roast on the spit to see how long it would take to cook completely. Or rather, to see how cooked it would get in a certain time period, since I forgot to include my meat thermometer. I set it up with coals on both sides of the spit and let it go for about 4 hours, at which time it felt solid to the touch and juices ran clear. (I wasn't too worried about undercooking because all the uses I planned for it involved further cooking.) As it happened, 4 hours had it done perfectly all the way through and wonderfully moist. If I'd been planning to serve it as a plain roast, it would have been perfect. After I moved the pork off the roasting position, we swapped in

gormflaith's rabbit to roast. I didn't track the cooking time on it specifically but I'm fairly certain that it was done in less than 2 hours. One of the reasons I'm doing some fairly specific calibrations is for future meal timing planning.

About 3/4 of the pork was processed into ffelettes in galentyne from Two 15th Century Cookbooks. (The rest went on ice to be used in later dishes.) To wit:

Take faire porke of the fore quarter, and take of the skyn and put the pork on a faire spitte, and roste it half ynogh; and take hit of, and smyte hit in peces, and cast hit in a faire potte; and then take oynons, and shred and pul hem, not to small, and fry hem in a pan with faire grece, And then caste hem to the porke into the potte; And then take good broth of beef or Motton and cast thereto, and set hit on the fire, and caste to pouder of Peper, Canel, Cloues & Maces, and lete boile wel togidur; and then take faire brede and vinegre, and stepe the brede with a litull of the same broth, and streyne hit thorgh a streynour, and blode with all; or elles take saundres and colour hit therewith, and late hem boile togidur, and cast thereto Saffron and salt, and serue hit forth.

I sliced the roasted pork loin in 1/4 inch slices then cut them into large cubes. I sautéed about half a cup of minced onions in oil in a large pot then added the pork and a cup of commercial broth and returned it to the fire. I don't normally measure spices when I'm cooking like this, so all I can document is that I cast thereto pepper, cinnamon, cloves, and mace and let it simmer. I soaked a slice of crustless bread in enough vinegar to moisten then added it about 20 minutes before the end along with a bit of saunders, and a pinch of saffron ground with salt. (My usual method of ensuring even distribution of the saffron.) This thickened up the sauce nicely.

I did have one couple come by for the intro to open fire cooking, although they were more interested in a demo than plunging in for hands-on instruction. So we made a few slices of payn perdu, again from 2-15th C. (One of the recipes I used for the symposium class.)

Another nonce dish I did at some point during the day was the Waffres recipe in 2-15th (rather than the recipe I've used before from Scully's Early French Cookery).

Take the Wombe of a luce & sethe here wyl & do it on a morter & tender chese ther-to, grynde hem y-fere; than take flowre an whyte of Eyroun & bete to-gedere,then take Sugre an pouder of Gyngere & do al togederys & loke that thin Eyroun ben hote & ley ther-on of thin paste & than make thin waffrys & serue yn

Interpreting the "wombe of a luce" as indicating gelatin, I softened up a packet of Knox gelatin, beat it with a couple of egg whites (left over from the payn perdu), some grated mild soft cheese and a bit of sugar and ginger, then added enough flour to make a batter. Not runny, but not stiff either. These cooked up in the iron wafer iron (I know that sounds redundant, but my other one is aluminum) with more integrity than Scully's recipe. You could even see the imprint of the design from the iron fairly well.

I was a bit of an overachiever in terms of dishes for dinner. Just because I love the dish so much, I did up a batch of Smale Byrdys y-stwyde (which I've described on several previous occasions, so I'll skip the details).

I'm trying to remember now whether I did the Stwed Beeff on Thursday or Friday. Let's put it here:

Take faire Ribbes of ffresh beef, And if thou wilt roste hit til hit be nygh ynowe; then put hit in a faire possenet; caste ther-to parcely and oynons mynced, reysons of corauns, powder peper, canel, clowes, saundres, safferon, and salt; then caste there-to wyn and a litull vynegre; sette a lyd on the potte, and lete hit boile sokingly on a faire charcole til hit be ynogh; then lay the fflessh in disshes, and the sirippe there-vppon and serue it forthe.

This was another "playing with the spit" dish (which is why I think I did it Thursday -- I don't think I used the spit Friday). I wanted to do just a "taster" but I did it late enough in the day that it got served for dinner rather than being passed around. I spitted one large short rib of beef and roasted it until cooked through. Then I put it in a pot with minced onions, currants, fresh minced parsley, ground pepper, cinnamon, cloves, saunders, saffron, and salt, with red wine and a splash of vinegar to cover. This simmered until the meat was falling apart, then I sliced up the meat and served it with the bone.

And I think I must have done the Chyryoun on Thursday too. It's all a blur. (I made way too many dishes on Thursday.) No, wait, I have a visual memory of doing them in the location where I had the firebox on Friday & Saturday, so I must have done them on Friday. Oh well, I'll put them here anyway.

Take Chyryis & pike out the stonys, waysshe hem clene in wyne, than wryng hem thorw a clothe & do it on a potte & do ther-to whyte grece a quantyte a partye of Floure of Rys & make it chargeaunt; do ther-to hwyte Hony or Sugre, poynte it with Venegre; A-force it with stronge pouder of Canelle & of Galyngale & a-lye it with a grete porcyoun of 3olkys of Eyroun; coloure it with Safroun or Saunderys; & whan thou seruyste in, plante it with Chyrioun & serue forth.

Last time I did this dish, I tried puréeing the cherries through a strainer prior to cooking, as indicated, and spent over an hour trying to get them through. (Although it occurred to me after the fact that the description may be suggesting that you want cherry juice not puree.) So I figured I'd cook them first and then puree them, but since I've been trying to work on following the descriptions more precisely, I went ahead and cooked the pitted cherries in white grease (clarified butter) and what I got was very delicious sauteed cherries, but not cherry pulp. So I sort of gave up on this and just added some sugar, cinnamon, ginger, saffron, and saunders, but the dish was already quite thick in texture, so I skipped the rice flour and egg yolks. (Another reason to suspect that juice was meant. Next time.)

I think that takes care of Thursday.

Friday

I didn't want to start coals before I went to town on the fish run, so I used the gas stove to make Towres (from 2-15th) for breakfast, using some of the leftover pork. (This is one of a bunch of dishes I've been noticing lately that fall generally in the (modern) category of "omelette-like objects".

Take & make a gode thikke bature of yolkys of Eyroun, & marow y-now ther-on, pouder pepir, Maces, clowes, Safroun, Sugre & Salt & 3if thou wolt, a litel sothe Porke or vele y-chopid; ther-to take then the whyte of Eyroun & strayne hem in-to a bolle; than putte a lytil Saffroun Salt to the whyte & sette a panne with grece ouer the fyre & be-war that thin grece be nowt to hote; than putte a litel of the Whyte comade in the panne & late flete al a-brode as thou makyst a pancake; then whan it is sumwhat styf, ley thin comade of thin Eyroun, that is to saying, of the 3olkys, in the myddel & caste by the cake round a-bowte & close hym fore-square & fry hem vp & serue hem forth for Soperys in Somere.

I separated 2 eggs. The yolks got mixed with pepper, mace, cloves, saffron, sugar, and salt and some of the fatter parts of of the remaining pork roast got minced to stand in for both the pork and the marrow. The whites were beaten and mixed with a little saffron ground with salt. (Thus making both parts of the dish bright yellow, with seemed a bit counterproductive.) I greased my frying pan and poured in half the white mixture and let it cook until getting solid, then spread half the yolk mixture (which was quite thick) in the middle and folded the whites over it around the edges to make a square. And when it had cooked on that side for a little I turned it over and cooked the other side. Then I repeated with the other half of each mixture. The second one came out more intact than the first, perhaps because the pan was hotter by then. It was a fairly "heavy" dish -- a bit more than my stomach was actually interested in for breakfast which put me in an off mood when I was fish shopping, resulting in me deciding not to buy any scale-fish to play with after all. Instead I got a half-dozen oysters (see below) and a pound of fresh shrimp to do the delightfully simple Shrympys boyled from An Ordinance of Pottage.

Take quyke shrympys; pike hem clene. Make thy sauce of watyr & salt; cast hem yn. Let hem boyle but a lytyll; poure awey the watyr. Ley hem dry. When thu shalt serve hem forth, ley hem yn dishes round all aboughte the sydez of the disches & ley the backesyde outward & every course till ye come to the mydward of the dishes within. Serve hem forth; sauce hem with venygger.

The shrimp weren't "quick", of course, so all I had to do was boil them in lightly salted water and let them drain. Although the recipe doesn't call for it, I shelled them before plating them. I also dressed them with verjus rather than vinegar, just for fun. The description of how to arrange the shrimps in the dish is fairly unusual for this era and I followed it as closely as I could, making about 3 courses of shrimps in a medium sized plate.

I'm not a fan of raw oysters, I confess, but I wanted to try at least one shellfish dish since they generally aren't practical to do at event cooking. Since mussels weren't available, I used half a dozen large (very large) oysters in Wortys in lentyn tyme other in flesche tyme from An Ordinance of Pottage. I'm going to condense the original text a bit since it includes a lot of variations on a theme:

Take caules and stryp hem fro the stalkes, and betes, borage, avans, vyolet, malues, percely, betayn, primrose, paciens, the whyghthe of lekes, croppes of netels. Perboyle hem & ley ham on a borde: presse out the watyr. Hewe hem small, ... with [fish] broth ... Also thou mayste, yf thou wil, wasch musculis; sett hem over the fyre and do to hem as moche watyr as they may flete yn. Boyle hem tyll they opyn, then poure oute the broth thorow a streynour. Pyke the musculys; grynd hem, tempere hem up with the silfe broth and draw hem thorough a streynour. Take the same maner of herbes as thu dedist byfore and the broth of the musculys; sette on the fyre, boyle hem up. When the herbes be boyled ynought, caste in the musculys drowe and salte.

Which is to say, "take a variety of greens, as available". I'd brought a bag of mixed young braising greens (which isn't actually a good approach as they recipes tend to assume somewhat older leaves) and someone randomly stopped by the cooks' encampment with the contents of their CSA box (which they weren't going to be able to use, being at the war) which included a young cabbage, a couple bunches of kale, and some other greens. So I used a bit of each, along with some leeks (I think). I actually had a kitchen assistant working on this part so I don't remember the details as well. We parboiled all the greens in water and some broth I had left over from another dish (see below), but in retrospect I should have saved the broth to add later since it ended up bitter from the parboiling. The greens were then chopped and returned to a pot. The oysters were boiled and minced, but the boiling water wasn't anything worth using as broth. So to the chopped greens and minced oysters I added some commercial chicken broth (which is what I keep packed in my camp kitchen for these purposes). Since the broth came pre-salted, that was pretty much it. (It turns out there were at least three variations of this dish done by different people for Friday's dinner!)

I'd brought a couple of game hens to play with on the spit, but ended up going with an alternate dish from Apicius, Crane or duck with turnip. Yes, I know, game hens are neither cranes nor ducks. But hey: turnips! You don't get a lot of fun recipes for turnips!

Wash and dress the bird and boil in a large cooking pot in water, salt and dill until it is half cooked. Cook some turnips by bringing them to the boil and draining them immediately. Lift the bird from the pot and wash it again and put it in a pan with oil and liquamen and a bundle of leek and coriander. Rinse the turnip, chop it finely and put it in on top, then set it to cook. When it is cooked a little more, add defrutum to add colour. Prepare this kind of sauce: pepper, cumin, coriander, laser root; pour on vinegar and some of the cooking liquor, pour back over the duck and bring to heat. When it is simmering, thicken with starch and add turnip over the top. Sprinkle with pepper and serve.

I boiled the birds in water with a little sale and fresh dill. In the same pot, I added some peeled sliced turnips. When the birds were cooked, I removed them and the turnips. (This was the broth I then used for cooking the greens.) To make serving a bit easier, I pulled the meat off the birds, except for leaving the leg parts and wings whole. I put this in a pot with some oil and liquamen (substituting Thai fish sauce) and some minced leek and green coriander. Then I diced the turnips and put them on top and simmered it until the leek was cooked. I didn't really have the bandwidth to make a separate sauce, so along with adding some date molasses (as a defrutum), I just added the ground pepper, cumin, coriander leaf, asafoetida (in place of laser root) and a smidge of vinegar to the pot with the chicken and turnips and continued cooking until ready to serve.

Friday also saw a couple of fruit dishes that I'd originally planned for 15th century day but counted as "overflow". I offered up a mash-up of OoP's Perys in composte and Perys in syrip to an eager cook who hadn't brought recipes of her own. Since I was sort of blending two recipes, I'll skip giving the originals.

Pare, core, and slice pears. Cut into pieces. Cook them in red wine with sugar and cinnamon. Add small raisins and minced dates and ginger and continue to simmer. Serve cold.

(I had another volunteer who pared, cored, and sliced apples in preparation for fritters, but I ran out of time before the fritters got made, so the apples got turned over to

madbaker for use in a different dish.)

One of my other favorite summer fruit dishes is 2-15th's Strawberye and I wanted to give it a try with more attention to the details of the process rather than my usual shortcuts.

Take Strawberys & waysshe hem in tyme of 3ere in gode red wyne; than strayne thorwe a clothe & do hem in a potte with gode Almaunde mylke, a-lay it with Amyndoun other with the flower or Rys & make it chargeaunt and lat it boyle, and do ther-in Roysonys of coraunce, Safroun, peper, sugre grete plente, pouder Gyngere, Canel, Galyngale; poynte it with Vynegre & a lytil whyte grece put ther-to; colour it with Alkenade & droppe it a-bowte, plante it with the graynys of Pome-garnad & than serue it forth.

So this time I gritted my teeth and spent an hour forcing strawberries through a strainer to purée them. (I did skip washing them in wine. Not sure why wine is supposed to be better.) This had the effect of removing the seeds, which seemed a desirable goal, so rather than shaking the last of the pulp trapped in the strainer into the pot (like I usually do), I tapped it out into a separate bowl to enjoy myself and just used the seedless pulp. I used a cup of unstrained almond milk I'd made the previous day. (When I pre-make it at home, I use a blender and then strain the nutty grit out, but since I can't get the same level of mixing at events, I tend to leave the nut meal in.) To this I added a couple tablespoons of rice flour, along with appropriate amounts of currants, saffron, sugar, ginger, and cinnamon. Let it simmer until thickened, then as it cools, stir in a couple spoonfulls of butter (for "whyte grece") and vinegar to taste (not anywhere near a sweet-and-sour taste, but enough to sharpen it).

Saturday

By Roman Empire Day, I was feeling like slacking off a bit. I had the leftover strawberry pudding for breakfast and started the leg of lamb marinating. (I probably should have started it the night before, but I was pretty wiped out at the end of the day.)

Tarpeian kid or lamb Before the carcass is cooked it should be trussed and dressed. Soak the goat in a mixture of pepper, rue, savory, onion, a little thyme, and liquamen. Marinade it. When it has finished cooking in the oven in a dish with some oil, pour into the dish (and over the lamb) this mixture: pound savory, onion, rue, dates, liquamen, wine, caroenum [sweet syrup of reduced wine], oil. When the mixture has been well absorbed, place on a serving dish, sprinkle with pepper and serve.

Now clearly I was taking some liberties because this clearly calls for oven roasting, but since it was All About The Spit, I punted. I made a marinade in my dripping pan of ground pepper, minced leeks (every other Roman dish I looked at called for leeks so I'd brought a bunch, but for some reason this one doesn't?), ground fresh savory and thyme (I don't have rue and I'm not entirely comfortable with using it, especially when serving people with unknown sensitivities), and Thai fish sauce (to stand in for liquamen). To turn this into a useful marinade (since it ends up more as a rub) I borrowed oil and wine from the next stage of the process. I put the leg of lamb in this while getting the coals started, turning it several times. Around about noon I spitted the leg and put it on the fire with the marinade still in the dripping pan. If you notice, the mixture that is to be "absorbed" into the lamb at the end of roasting has a lot of overlap with the initial marinade. So I figured to simply add the additional ingredients and use it as a baste throughout the roasting. I also wanted a bit more liquid in the dripping pan to avoid burning. So I added a bit more wine, oil, and liquamen, topping it off with wine a few times when there had been evaporation. For about the last hour or two I added minced dates and as a substitute for the caroenum, some date molasses (because I had it and I didn't have any wine syrup). I didn't want to add the sugars too early to avoid caramelization in the dripping pan. The lamb roasted for about 5 hours and was done, as they say, to a turn. When I took the leg off the spit to rest a bit and then slice it on the bone (so I could present it whole, but make it easy to serve), I added a little more wine to the dripping pan to deglaze it and served the result alongside as a sauce.

I decided to reprise the Pisam farsilem I did at A&S, so refer to that entry for the basic recipe. The main variations were that I boiled the quail rather than spit roasting them (since the lamb took up the spit all day), used uncased sausage rather than mincing up cooked cased sausages, used salt pork rather than pork belly (which added some badly needed salt to the overall mix) plus the remainder of the roast pork from Thursday. (I will note that my cooler provided excellent service along with my practice of pre-freezing all my meats and then layering them in the ice chest according to intended access. I still had solid ice on Sunday morning, and that even with returning leftovers to it at various stages.) I again assembled the layers in my lovely ceramic colander, lined with cheesecloth. And this time I made the "white sauce" to pour over it:

Hard boil some eggs an dput 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'.

My lovely apprentice assembled the sauce for me: in a mortar, grind pepper, toasted pine nuts, and pre-cooked egg whites. (Now I'm trying to remember what I did with the yolks. Medieval recipes are always calling for cooked egg yolks and I know I used them for something, but I can't figure out what.) This went into a pot with a little honey, white wine, and some liquamen (Thai fish sauce, as before) and was heated until it thickened -- which seems to be largely a function of the pine nuts.

In addition to the two dishes I did for dinner (such a slacker! only two!) I did one of the two taster dishes I'd planned for mid day: gustum de cucurbitis farsilibus (stuffed gourds). I'm running out of steam here so I'll just give my method and not the original:

Wash and trim some small round summer squashes (not the right species, but the closest that it's easy to get) and carefully scoop out the pulp from the center, leaving as small an opening as possible. Make a stuffing from ground pepper, lovage (I substitute in fresh celery leaves until such time as I can establish lovage in my garden), fresh oregano, liquamen and a raw egg. Stuff it into the squashes and set them closely together into a pot (so they can't tip over) up to their necks in water and simmer until the squashes are cooked and the stuffing is set. Take them out and carefully slice (parallel to the opening so you get some stuffing in each slice). Make a sauce with ground pepper and lovage with wine, liquamen,and passum (a sweet wine) with a little oil. Heat it and thicken with a little starch. Heat some oil in a frying pan and fry the gourd slices then pour the sauce over to serve.

Sunday And then it was Sunday and we all packed up and went home again. Here's a picture of my leg of lamb on the spit to close.