March Hare, and other tasty treats

So, this weekend was March Crown, a West Kingdom (SCA) event wherein the next Queen and King are chosen via combat, and of course, inspiration. More to the point, we also have a cooking competition. By the way, you can skip this part if you know how this all works. Or you don’t care.

I don’t actually like to think of it as a competition, actually, unless you’re challenging yourself. All the entrants get some sort of recipe criteria, whether it’s make a dish from this medieval source, or some medieval dish involving ingredient X or technique Y. The award is just a simple token, in this case a Wooden Spoon, sized usually to wear around the neck. And this is a fairly common contest format for cooking. Actually, I run these currently for the Principality of Cynagua, a sub-group of the West Kingdom.

But yeah. I haven’t actually entered one for a while, mostly because my attendance at last year’s events was severely curtailed by stupid car trouble. And the criteria this time (make a dish from the Viandier of Taillevent, a mid-medieval French source wasn’t so wide open as to give me fits on what to write, but neither was it so limiting as to be a straightjacket. And I hadn’t seen, face to face, a bunch of my friends that would be going to this event, in some time.

But as the event go closer, the weather reports got worse for the weekend. And while I’m no shrinking violet, cold, wet, windy events, where you have to find the time and space afterwards to dry the canvas of your pavilion, are a real pain.

Ah, but this event was being held in a town, where there were hotels! So I went that route. That meant I could take the car, with better gas mileage. It also meant no room to pack along my whole medieval kitchen setup, which I’ll show you someday.

Very well, thought me. This is a great opportunity to try out my Microkitchen, an obsessive little project of mine wherein I try to cram as much functional kitchen gear needed to make nearly anything, and keep it in the space of…well, about the size of an American Football, right now. It’s based on a Swedish Trangia mess kit, WW II edition, and I’ll talk about it sometime too. ‘Cause obsessive.

Okay, those of you who care about the cooking can come back now.

So I picked three recipes from Taillevent to try.

Now, if I were serious about this, as in a serious competition thing, I’d have tried it several times in advance, written up copious notes, and worried greatly about using a medieval an ingredient set as possible. This one was to be participant judged, and I would be just as happy if someone else won.

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90. Hulled barley gruel.

If it is not hulled, prepare it. Pound it well (like wheat) in a mortar, cook it, drain it, and boil it with almond milk, salt and sugar. Some crush and sieve it. It should not be too thick.

18. Ragout of small birds or whatever meat you wish.

Fry very well in lard. Take grilled bread, steep in beef broth, sieve, and put with your meat. Grind ginger, cassia and a bit of verjuice, and boil together. It should be delicate and not too thick.

186. Stuffed tubes.

If you wish to make some stuffed tubes, have good harvest cheese in strips as fat as your finger. Coat them in the batter for Small Crisps, insert them into your hot lard, and keep them from burning. When they are dry and yellowish, set them out with the Crisps.

And, for those of you who want the batter for Small Crisps:

185. Large and small crisps.

Cook the large crisps in some hot lard in a syrup pot or brass casserole. Make them from egg whites and fine flour beaten together. It should not be too thick. Have a deep wooden bowl, put some batter in the bowl, and shake the hand inside the pan above the hot lard [pouring batter into the lard]. Keep them from browning too much.

Cook the small crisps in an iron pan. Beat egg yolks and whites with some fine flour. It should be a little stiffer than the batter for large crisps. Have a little fire (as long as it is hot). Take your wooden bowl pierced at the bottom, and put some batter in it. When everything is ready, pour [a thread of batter from the hole in the bowl] and form it into the shape of a small buckle (or larger), with a kind of tongue of the same batter through the buckle. Let them cook in the lard until they are plump.

So, here’s how I interpret medieval recipes. Your method may vary.

Looking at the first, not much challenge to it. It calls for hulled barley, which is to say, the pearl barley we get in the stores. And then, uncharacteristically for medieval recipes, tells us exactly what to do with it, IN ORDER. Now, even though I’m cooking this in a stainless steel mess kit over an alcohol burner, I try to view how this works through what I know about period kitchens. Using coals, ceramic pots, and temperature control being a matter of how far you were from the heat. Yep, still works. Using a period setup would also keep the food from burning and sticking on the bottom. The sugar I used (and almost always use for medieval recipes) is those brown cones of mostly raw, unrefined sugar. It’s a close match in taste, consistency, and format for what they used in period. So I always have some in the house. Almond milk? NEVER EVER use the stuff from a box. Bleah. Soak your almonds over night in water, rub off the skins the next day, then grind them up one way or another. For the richest milk, use equal parts almonds to water, let them soak a while, then strain out the almond milk. Doing this will HUGELY impact the quality of your end result. And it’s not hard.

End result? Barley-based breakfast oatmeal. Really. I liked it, but there was about as much zing to it as regular oatmeal. Sadly, this is all I actually got entered into the competition. You saw that header picture? Yeah, that rolled in, just as I finished the barley gruel, and we had intense, SERIOUS rain for about 20 minutes. I got my stuff covered in time, mostly, but since I wasn’t CAMPING, I couldn’t precisely have a place to cook out of the weather.

But.

It didn’t STAY raining. The competition part was over (and the right person, who was not me) won with a rabbit bisque (see title of this article) which was awesome. But I still had a cooler full of stuff to play with, and darned if I wasn’t going to do my other two recipes. And I wanted lunch!

So, recipe two and three both were to be fried in lard. Again, if I’d been serious I absolutely would have rendered my own lard and used that. It DOES make a difference in final taste. Instead, I used a bottle of canola oil I had on hand. High smoke point, neutral flavor.

For reasons, I started with the stuffed tubes. Yes, you’re reading that recipe right. Fried cheese. Nothing wrong with that. It says harvest cheese, which is a common way to say “some nice, tasty cheese that isn’t specifically named, and isn’t probably a fresh farmer’s (green, unaged) cheese.” The trick is picking a historically correct cheese to use! Thankfully, I have some pretty good notes from a class a while back. Muenster dates to that time and place and it’s one I like, and could pick up without hunting for it. Cut it into tubes the size of my large fingers. Yes, I was tempted to make them smaller–that’s a lot of cheese, but as you’ll see, glad I didn’t.

The batter could have been tricky. The recipe doesn’t call for multiple dunks, so you need a thick, sticky batter, and since I didn’t want to go back and forth with eggs and flour to make tons, I beat up a couple eggs, and slowly blended in spoonfuls of flour, mixing well before adding the next, until I got a batter that was thick, sticky, and yet could drip, albeit slowly as is called for in the small crisps recipe. It was around 1/3 cup of flour to two large eggs.

At this point the oil was hot enough to brown a piece of bread in 15 seconds or so. The alcohol burner was working better than I thought it would! Cheese blocks into the batter, rolled to coat, then into the hot oil. FWOOP! The crust set and puffed instantly.

The recipe says to make these big (finger size), and tells us to make them yellow (golden) in color. The temptation was to take them to a full golden brown. Nope. Don’t do it. If it brown, you’re going to have molten cheese erupting into your hot oil. Keeping them big gives them time to not completely melt, retain shape, and if you don’t cook them too long, you get stuffed tubes.

Only change I’d make? Some salt in the batter, or a saltier cheese. But I will make this again. Yum.

Last dish…fried meat or small bird in some bread-thickened seasoned beef broth.

Since I’m not going to go catch a basket of larks, I grabbed a Cornish game hen. Cut it up the way you would a full sized chicken with thighs, legs, and breasts. Fried them in the oil from the stuffed tubes, and set them aside. Then I grilled some bread over the burner until it was well toasted, and cut off the crusts. Made about four cups of beef broth using Better Than Bullion (again, for seriousness, I’d make a completely from scratch broth), and brought it to a boil with the bread ripped up into it. Not having a sieve to push the bread and broth through to make a paste to thicken said broth, I stirred and mashed with a spoon until it was thick and pretty smooth. Added in some powdered ginger and cinnamon, added a splash of verjus (the juice of unripe grapes), and the game hen pieces.

Pretty tasty, though I caught the flavors of cinnamon and ginger at unexpected moments, and I think the broth reduced too much, because it was a tad salty. Worth doing again, but I bet lamb would taste great with the sauce.