Day Four—Saturday

Day Four—Saturday

This is also known as “Cook All The Things” Day, and it’s kind of bittersweet. No one holds back, but that’s because we have to pack down and go home the next day (actually, given the amount of sheer stuff we have, most of us start packing up after the dinner dishwashing ritual). And who wants to pack food home, especially given that some us have to face scrutiny by the California Vegetable Police?

This was also the last of our formal fancy dinners for the event, and who doesn’t want to show off just a bit? Not that any of us have anything to prove. Except to ourselves.

This time, I got a later start than normal. I realized that as yet, I hadn’t walked through Merchants’ Row. So I leashed up the Doggles, and started in, beginning with an excellent ceramic potter who has kept a number of us in pottery over the years. Went through the first half of the Row without finding anything I couldn’t live without, and unlike the day before, there was a lot of Sun, so I cut the hike short and headed back to camp and to cook.

The first thing to be prepared was this lovely Transylvanian Cucumber Salad. And if you want an easy recipe to start your career as a medieval cook, this is it.

(666) 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.

I don’t know that that has to be translated, not really, but peel and slice cukes, mince up garlic, add salt, and add the salt, vinegar, and garlic to the cukes and let them sit. I gave them about 5 hours before serving them at dinner and not one slice was uneaten. As I’ve said elsewhere, given the period wine culture, you’d probably use wine vinegar, and from a color perspective, better white than red. I like garlic, so for three goodly cukes, I used about 8 cloves, minced small. And yes, the vinegar and salt do help “cook” the garlic so it’s not so harsh. This is basically a very quick pickle, and it’s terribly light and refreshing on a hot day.

Keeping in mind the goal of using all the produce I could, I next pulled out some mushrooms I had and proceeded to do one of the many mushroom recipes in the Transylvanian Cookbook:

(619) White mushroom with black pepper.

Peel and wash it, if they’re small, don’t slice it, but if they’re big, cut them into four pieces, you might have to slice them too, for I’ve seen one the size of a grate. Wash it in water, put it into a pot or a pipkin, add some salt, put it on the fire. If the juices are not enough, add some broth from boiling beef, and if you have none of that, clean water will do, then add some butter, parsley leaves and cook it; once cooked, add some black pepper and ginger, if you’re cooking it from boiled beef broth, don’t add butter.

Okay, nothing earth shattering here. In fact this is almost exactly a recipe that our feast cooking team has used a half dozen times in a variety of feast times and cultures…it exists in English, French, and German recipe sources too! Okay, I used cremini instead of plain white mushrooms this time, because I had them and they have more flavor, but otherwise you sauté them with salt, added a little beef broth, black pepper, and ginger. I’d note the water plus butter part is meant to emulate a fattier beef broth so if your broth is lean, the butter might not be inappropriate there too. Bam, it’s what was for dinner. This pipkin got emptied fast, also. Maybe, if I’d had mushrooms the size of a grill they could have lasted…

Next up, I had to fulfill a moral obligation. You see, there’s a whole chapter in the Transylvanian cookbook dedicated to “doughnuts”. That said, doughnuts is a bit of a misnomer, since some are more fritters, others are baked, and overall, the butter consumption is like unto that of Paula Deen.

The process for the “Hen doughnut” seemed to be pretty well defined, and you could do it without recourse to an oven. While the clay oven was being usable at this point, EVERYONE wanted to use it, so I held off on that.

Second. (468) Hen doughnut.

Pour sweet milk onto a pan, add some butter and put it on coal, boil it and have someone hold the pan. Take a big, strong wooden spoon and a pot full of flour. Once the milk is boiling, put the flour into the pan and break it with the wooden spoon so that the dough will be stiff in the pan. If you have a copper mortar, put the dough inside and crush it; once it’s starting to cool, whip two or three eggs and put it in there, too. Keep doing this until it’s a bit like a liquid. Then fill it into the doughnut. Before stuffing the doughnut, use butter. The butter should be hot. When cooking it, keep adding warm butter and rotate it, then serve it with sugar.

I also decided on one of the recipes for a stuffing:

(556) Apple cake.

Peel and slice the apples. Wash some small currants, put it next to the apples, add some sugar and some cinnamon. You can use this as stuffing, too. This is an even better stuffing than the previous one, it will be better if you add some rose water.

So I chopped up an apple (not bothering to peel it, I was getting tired), added some currants, grated some sugar, added cinnamon, and splashed in some rose water. Because this was going to be in a doughnut, I also added some butter and sautéed it to soften up the fruit. Unfortunately, I got distracted and let some of it burn. Still, a tasty blend.

Then it was time to make the dough. Looking at it, it’s basically a dough to make pate a choux paste, which is modernly used to make things like cream puffs. Problem was, I just couldn’t get the butter-milk mixture to come to a boil (sweet milk, btw, is fresh milk). I got it hot, but couldn’t get it to boil…oh, well, onward. I stirred in enough flour to make a stiff dough, and then added a few eggs at a time, beating it until I had a liquid-ish paste-goop, golden with eggs and butter.

Okay, then! So I took the goop, and put spoonfuls of it into my skillet with hot butter to cook. To “stuff” it, after it started to cook, I added a spoonful of the filling to the top, and pushed it in slightly, the way you’d add fruit to a pancake. After it was cooked on the first side, I turned them over and allowed the other side to cook. Ideally, to serve, you’d want to grate some sugar over the top. This is NOT a low calorie treat!

They might have been lighter had I been able to boil the milk for the batter. Oh well…still pretty tasty!

At this point, it was time to get my last dish going for dinner. I had promised Lori that I would tackle a dish that’s listed in the menu section only: Hen with Honeyed Pasta.

Okay, that sounds a tad bit dramatic. The recipes do contain one for Hen with Pasta, and adding honey to that seemed simple enough.

Sixth. (12) Hen with pasta.

Boil it and remove the feathers like I told you. Once tender, slice its elbows; when time, add some saffron, black pepper and ginger. Prepare the pasta with eggs and use a rolling pin, add some flour. Fry it in butter, and when serving it, put it onto the hen’s sauce. Once boiling, serve it at once, for if you wait for too long, the pasta will be no good. Serve the meat first, then the pasta.

Okay, this was the last dish I was going to make, and I was pretty tired. It was also getting pretty close to dinner time. I didn’t have a whole chicken to simmer (much less “slice it’s elbows”/remove the wings). I had some chicken thighs. Boiling those over a fire in a ceramic pot would have taken all the time I had left, anyway. So…I punted. And the oven was open, and hot. I seasoned up those thighs with saffron, pepper, and ginger, and a bit of salt, tossed the, on a sheet pan, and they went into the oven. Fifteen minutes later they were roasted and PERFECT.

As the kids say today, OMG! So good! The skin was perfectly crispy, the chicken was juicy, and cooked perfectly to the bone. I had a really hard time not just eating them straight after taste testing it. But no.

So I made up a batch of “hen’s sauce” (chicken broth) with Better Than Bullion and brought it to a simmer. Dinner time was coming fast, so I didn’t even have time to make from-scratch pasta…reaching into the Pantry box I pulled out a package of Hungarian-made egg pasta (just flour, egg, oil, and water, a good match for what the recipe called for) and started that cooking in the broth. I chopped the chicken, added that, and let it simmer until the water was mostly absorbed and/or cooked off. I added more black pepper, saffron, and ginger to season it all, and just before service, stirred in about a quarter cup of honey.

Yesssssssssss. Sweet, delicately spiced, and very comforting. Consolation for the end of the PlayDate this time in a pot. Will definitely make again!

This came out perfect.

Meanwhile Aram’s Amazing Oven was churning out bread and pies for dinner and for the Kingdom party later that evening…

Okay, then! Now if my friends who also did stuff from the Transylvanian cookbook want to give me their write ups, I’ll post those too!

And in the meantime, less than a year until NEXT PlayDate….sigh.



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