July 11, 2018

Day Two—Thursday

Wait, you might cry, what happened to day one? Day one was Wednesday, aka set-up day. And when you have a large pavilion, a huge pile of gear to move from truck to ground, and from ground to where it goes, plus the bed, stuff for the outdoor kitchen space and my own personal in-pavilion kitchen space to set up, it takes a while. Plus helping out ones neighbors as one should do. Plus the four hour drive from Grant’s Pass, and getting back into town for dinner and getting a few extras at the local market. So yeah, cooking-wise, Wednesday was a bust, as it always is.

But day two, we get rolling. Sure, we have to unpack our supply of pipkins and rummage through the ice chests and dish out our recipes, but that’s why we are here!

So, here’s what I cooked on Thursday.

I first tried something not strictly period…I mean, I’m sure it is, but it’s not documented, since I was otherwise working more or less exclusively with the Transylvanian cookbook, The Science of Cooking, this time around. I had this big honking pork shoulder, bought for cheap. So I deboned it, and butterflied a section of it out, and then mixed up some sausage that was intended for dinner the night before (but we went out instead) with eggs, some spices, and some breadcrumbs. The idea was to roll the pork around the filling, tie it up, and roast it over the fire. Alas, it just never came together because the piece of meat was too small and since I was still working slowly I eventually disposed of it because it had been out too long. It probably would have been okay, but dealing in probably will get you sick at so3 point. No big loss. No picture either, which is fine because it was ugly.

Second, ah, a recipe! The Garlic Harvest Sauce is probably my favorite sauce in the whole manuscript, which is good, because it’s used so often. So, this time I did it with the remaining pork, and for the first time I did it using truly period cookware…I.e. in a Pipkin over a fire.

Twelfth. (151) Pork with harvest sauce.

Prepare the pig like I told you to. After the meat is tender, slice some onion and parsley leaves. When serving it, make harvest sauce. Don’t forget to add spices.

Not overly informative, no, but recipes (2) and (3) from the manuscript give very solid details on how to make harvest sauce. And see my earlier post on making it with beef on A Tale of Two Weekends. Since I was making a large pot of this, I made rather a lot of the sauce,and honestly, I should have grabbed two more eggs from the care basket that Tallina sent up to the War (period nut candies, unripe grapes for verjus, a dozen and a half free range chicken and duck eggs, rice flour, GOOD local olive oil…). Her eggs were great golden and tasty, but I needed a few more than I used to properly thicken the sauce. So, what I ended up using was:

3 pounds pork shoulder, sliced into smaller pieces, simmered in 6 cups water to make a pork broth with the pork cooked tender.

5 duck eggs beaten with 1/4 white wine vinegar

3 parsnips (in place of the parsley root)

Half a yellow onion

Leaves of half a bunch of parsley, chopped

Ginger, saffron, and black pepper to taste

Salt to taste

This ended up being one of my contributions to dinner that night and was enjoyed, especially by our post-dinner visitors.

Picture: I didn’t get one, darn it all.

The other thing I cooked was:

Fifth. (86) Lamb with onion sauce.

Cook the meat like I told you; once about to serve it, slice it to the pot, and do this with the sauce: peel the onion, slice it on a clean table then put it into the pot, put clean beef (broth) on top of it, cook it, and while it’s being cooked, add some vinegar, black pepper and pour it into a pot with the lamb, then serve it once both are ready.

And our author told us in the previous recipe how to cook the lamb–salt it, roast it over the fire until it was done, then hit it to knock the salt off. Now, I don’t know if the salt fell off particularly, but we did get some juices, which I dutifully put into the Pipkin with the four very large, amazingly tasty lamb loin chops (the site owner offered us his lamb for only the cost of having it butchered–an amazing deal, and talk about terroir!).

So, about two pounds of lamb, an onion and a half (diced with the lamb), about three cups of beef broth (made with Better Than Bullion…awfully convenient stuff, that!), and a quarter cup of red wine vinegar. Pepper to taste, maybe a teaspoon or so. Simmered a couple of hours and also served at dinner.

I would happily eat this again. And not share it.