A tale of two weekends…
So. Last weekend we had a local SCA event. I was going to keep it simple. I was going to reprise those fried cheese sticks because yum, and a bunch of friends wanted to try them, and I was also going to do the Bird Sauce from the Transylvanian Cookbook over a Ye Olde Costco Rotisserie Chicken.
Hen with bird sauce.
Remove the feathers and wash it like I told you to. Put it on a skewer like the capon. While being roasted, make the sauce; take some wine, if you barely have any wine, then use water from boiling beef or regular water; add some bread; cook it, pass it through a strainer, add apples and grapes; once the hen is roasted, take it down from the skewer, cut it in the sauce, add some saffron, black pepper and ginger. This should be a more sour than a sweet food. They call it bird sauce for its wildness. Chefs nowadays put almonds into it, but it is not a necessity.
Easy, right? Take a few pictures so you could see the Microkitchen in use…a fun and relaxing time. But that’s not what happened. The Queen of the West showed up, and in amongst the fun and silliness, she offered entrance to the Order of the Laurel to myself and my cooking partner Gwendwyn the Silent. If you’re SCA, I don’t have to say more. If you’re not, I don’t know if I can explain it, but it’s a very big deal which is why I was too shaken that day (that whole weekend) to dare to play with hot oil or sticky liquids with a tricky and slightly top-heavy cooking rig with an alcohol burner.
This weekend was different. A friend had offered up her home for a weekend of cooking with the theme being the Transylvanian Cookbook. We were all going to make various recipes that interested us, culminating in a big dinner last night. Originally, the plan was to haul out the firebox and pipkins and REALLY do it right, but the weather forecast made us rethink the outside part, and Rosamund has a nice kitchen, so we used that.
Tiffany, Dorrie, Perrin, Rosamund–please post your recipes in the comments, because my fingers will be tired just with the stuff I did!
So, first off, Beef with Harvest Sauce. I’ve made it before, it’s a favorite.
BEEF WITH HARVEST SAUCE.
If you want to cook with a harvest sauce, prepare the meat like I told you. Put parsley roots, (parsley) leaves and onions into it. After it’s cooked, add six or seven eggs, according to your needs. After you’re done, put the eggs into vinegar and start whipping it. Then pour the meat’s juices into it. Pour it onto the meat again, but don’t boil it; if you boil it, its size will suffer.
I fried up some strips of beef, heated up some broth wherein were boiled onions and sliced, peeled parsnips, and parsley (yes, I know it calls for parsley root, and I’ve tried it that way before, but parsley root is hard to get, small parsnips were easy…and there is almost no taste difference). Beat eggs and vinegar together, and tempered that into the broth. Add the meat and heat to a low simmer. Done!
(And I forgot to take a picture of it)
Next up, Fried chicken. I love fried chicken. So watch out Colonel Sanders, Baron Gwyn is coming after you!
Fried chicken.
Do what I told you before. Cook it in salt, and once cooked, take it out and let it cool. Make salty pancake from eggs and flour, and when serving it, fry the chicken in this, put it into the pancake and serve it when hot.
This was terrifically simple, and very tasty. Boiled some bone-in, skin on chicken thighs in salted water until cooked, pulled them out, and allowed them to cool and dry. Meanwhile I mixed a cup and a half of flour and a half-dozen large eggs with a tablespoon or two of salt. Mixed until smooth and no discernible lumps. The batter wasn’t particularly thick. Coated the thighs in the batter, and fried it in about a half inch of hot oil in a skillet, for maybe 3 minutes on each side until the batter was nicely browned. YUM! 5/5, will definitely do again! So, next time you’re tempted to bring a bucket to a medieval potluck, do it yourself! I reheated it for the dinner in a warm oven and it worked well. Chicken stayed nice and juicy.
It reminded me of the Persian fried chicken my friend Urtatim does.
As a bonus, I still had nearly two cups of this batter left over, and the skillet still had hot oil. So I…dumped it in. They call the batter “salty pancake” right? Fwoosh! It puffed up, cooked in just a minute or two on each side, in a fashion not unlike a Dutch Baby. It was surprisingly good hot, okay cooled, and was tasty with cheese. Some onions would not have gone amiss, either. Just to be clear, nowhere in the cookbook does it say to do this, but it’s not unreasonable, in my opinion.
To use up the unused chicken from last week, which had gone into the freezer, I did Hen with Dumplings. This wasn’t my most successful dish, but that’s okay.
Hen with dumplings.
Wash it like before. When boiling the hen, cut out its breasts and add some salt. Make the dumplings like so; depending on how many chicken breasts you’ll make, take equal amounts of cow fat, parsley leaves, white bread without the crust, and eggs, whip it, and if you have no fat, fatty bacon will do.
So I cut the breasts out of the Costco rotisserie chicken and simmered it in broth to reheat (the broth from the chicken thighs, which, as you’ll recall, had salt). Set that aside. I then minced up some flat leaf parsley, pulled some white breadcrumbs out of a loaf, and rendered down some Hungarian bacon. And that is where things failed, I think. This particular bacon, bought at Pacific International Foods in Sacramento, was MUCH leaner than your run of the mill bacon. I added the few fat scraps from the beef in the Harvest Sauce Beef, above, but there was still very little fat to help bind it together. That, plus the meat from the bacon meant the dumplings just didn’t bind all that well, even when I added my last two eggs (plus one of Tiffany’s duck eggs!) to help bind it. The dish also doesn’t hold well. Oh, yes, and the dumplings were also simmered in that same broth. Still tasted okay, though.
(The finished dish is the one in the center left).
Okay, Perrin? Now you have to talk about the Hen and Egg Doughnuts. Tiffany? Your sauces, beef with carrots, garlic cucumbers, and pottage of millet in milk. Dorrie? Your stuffed pears, almond cake, and THAT SAUCE. Rosamund, your Bianca…go!
More pictures, from Tiffany:
The first would be a better picture of the chicken with dumplings, the second shows her sauces (garlic aioli, and two others slipping my mind), her beef with carrots, cucumber salad, and millet porridge.
Yum!
Here’s Lady Dorrie’s Commentary on the pears and the almond cake:
Greetings to all, This is Lady Dory O’Malley Here: I was asked by , Glenn Gorsuch, to post the recipe I used at the Culinary weekend we just enjoyed, using the Hungarian Princes Cookbook, the recipe I found was a cooked, spiced pear recipe with the most AHMAZING sauce I’ve ever had the pleasure to try, so here goes: Footnote, I tried a tester cake, and was glad I did, because the recipe called for a bit of this to be added to the core of the pears, then the sauce over the top of that and then baked, otherwise it just pours out on the bottom of the pan when baking, and what’s the point?
Almond cake: You will need half a pound of blanched almonds, peel the almonds, ( I didn’t, but it was still wonderful!, I toasted them instead), crush it in a copper mortar, while crushing, pour some rose water. VERY SMALL AMOUNT, this stuff is powerful!, add egg yolks, and sugar as well, add dry bread crumbs, sour cream, rose water, & sugar make a pot for it. (Once the pot is solid, put almond dough into it, and bake with great heat, I cooked it at 325* and it was perfect. I used this mixture to stuff into the core of the pears, then added some of the fruit sauce to spoon on top. (You can make donuts from this too,) for the sauce Add a bit of rose water, egg whites , add lots of sugar, Paste it with this mixture, Heat it and it will glow and shine like marzipan. Make a lid, for this, you will need egg yolks, sugar and rosewater flatten it to make it thin, , put this Lid on it, heat it again, once the lid is baked, it should be white. Another method, you will need sweet cheese, cream the dough from cottage cheese, some almonds to mix it with, bake it like I told you, you can add use bread crumbs instead of cheese, you can cook this dough in the mortar, or on a flat plate, (my method, first try I Tried it in the mortar and it never fully set in the middle) Serve Hot, or cold, add cinnamon and sugar if you desire but quickly, or the bread will be burnt.
Now for the most AMAZING sauce I’ve ever tried 🙂 take 5 pears, peel and core them, slice the upper part and sides, leaving only the core and the stalk
!!!!!SAUCE,!!!! In a sauce pan, put in lots of honey (I used 1/2 Cup), black pepper, saffron,(just a pinch) clove, cinnamon, currants, and a bit of wine, I used a really nice fruity red and it was MARVELOUS! I baked it at 325* for about 20 min, but check often, depending on the type of pan used, more or less, mine was thin so this time was perfect. My absolute favorite sauce I’ve EVER made! YUM, serve it warm over the stuffed pears. and you will think you’ve died and gone to heaven. ENJOY :), Sincerely,
Lady Dory O’Malley
Alright, finally notes on my dishes…
Pipkin sauce:
We make this sauce for roast meat. You will need a strong vinegar, sugar, uncrushed cinnamon, clove, black pepper and some good wine. This sauce is made for princes or noble lords only.
Cook it in a tin pot. Once the sugar is melted in the vinegar, taste it, pass it through a strainer into a small pot, and it will be coagulated. You can use this for peafowls or great bustards.
In our country, we use some vinegar, honey, black pepper and clove, then like the name suggests, we cook it in a pipkin.
So this is didn’t really get used at dinner, but it was tasty. Basically I took this to be a spiced vingar/wine reduction. Would have been great with the juniper beef I had originally planned to make.
Almond Sauce:
Peel the almonds, crush it in a clean mortar, add some garlic and a bit of vinegar. (This is the second of the two almond sauces listed)
Also something that would have gone with the roast beef if I had made it. Honestly, this didn’t work out so well, I was using a rather whimpy morter and pestle I’ll try again with my new marble one.
Bonus sauce:
The yellow sauce in the picture is garlic aioli made with a duck egg yolk. This was just for funsies, no medieval source, but it was tasty. Garlic and salt mashed in a morter and pestle, then added EVOO duck egg yolk and a slash of white wine vinegar.
Beef with Carrots:
Do the same with the meat. Add some bacon and sliced carrots, you may peel them too. If cooking for a prince, don’t slice it into too small pieces.
This is one of those great “do like I told you” recipes. I wasn’t super clear which meat I was supposed to do the same as, but I went to the most recent detailed recipe a figured that was a good place to start. In Beef with Rice the meat is prepared as such “Slice the meat according to how many will eat. Wash the meat, add salt in a clean pot and put it in the oven. When the meat is tender, pass through a strainer the water into a clean pot and pour clean water on top the meat.” I thought this sounded a bit like making beef stew in a covered pot, so that’s what I did. I browned the stew meat with some chopped up bacon in a Dutch oven, added the carrots (and parsnips), salt, pepper, and some water. I put it in the oven at 375 for about an hour and 45 minutes adding water a few times. The meat was fork tender and the veggies had disovled into a creamy sweet sauce. Since the dish is called Beef with Carrots, I thought I’d like there to be actual carrots in it so I boiled some sliced carrots in salted water and mixed them in. This dish turned out super tasty and I will definitely be adding bacon to all my beef stew in the future.
Cucumber with Garlic:
Peel the cucumbers and slice them across. Peel the garlic, crush it, add vinegar and salt, then put it together with the cucumbers.
Very simple. I made this earlier in the day so they where nicely quick pickled by dinner time.
Millet porridge with milk:
Wash the porridge like I told you before, put the millet in the milk and cook it. When putting the millet in the milk, put a spoon into it, and if the spoon stands, it’s thick enough. Once cooked, add some salt and butter, and again when serving it.
Eh, maybe this would have been nice at breakfast. I was very glad I read the cooking directions when I bought the millet… 45 minutes! I treated it like risotto since I didn’t know how much liquid was needed, it came out very rich.