How far is far enough? Scary far!

Okay. I know I can be maybe a trifle obsessive when it comes to cooking medieval recipes. It’s not enough to be actually cooking dishes based on sometimes-fragmentary and unhelpful recipes that are occasionally not even in anything resembling English, but then I have to cook with handmade period equipment, over fires.

And that’s fine. That’s just who I am. But sometimes, I have to take it further. Pick a crazy recipe to go with. Pick recipes where you have to make ingredients first to make the finished product. Find truly bizarre ingredients. Do stuff that has your friends cheering you on…but only at a minimum safe distance.

That’s where I am today.

The Transylvanian Cookbook, known as the Science of Cooking, has some unusual foibles. The writer was obviously a firm nationalist, but he(?) was obviously well travelled, as he wrote about seeing the Hungarian Emperor at dinner (hey, bro, more detail would have been nice!), talks about recipes from other countries, and he uses ingredients not found in that area at all. Which brings us to the two recipes for octopus.

Octopus isn’t native to the region at all. The nearby Black Sea is too salty for them. The nearest place you might find them would be the Mediterranean or Aegean Seas, which are an uncomfortable number of hundreds of miles from Transylvania, even given that they knew about using ice to keep foods fresh, longer. So these two recipes must be truly exotic dishes to please very high class people, since you’d have to catch them, dry them thoroughly, and then ship them up to Transylvania in sufficient quantity for your feast. And, as one often finds with high class foods, you have to do a lot to them to make them even more special for your lord or prince.

Here’s what I’m working with. And all credit to my friend Tiffany, who found the dried octopus to begin with. No, credit is NOT another word for blame!

Let’s talk about octopi

First.

(412) How to soak octopi.

Make some holes, clean it and let it soak in lye. Once done, wash it in cold water, boil it, cook it in vinegar. It’s good to fry it with oily sauce. Make thin slices, and make a sauce with black pepper, saffron, vinegar, tree oil and honey.

(413) Octopus in a different way.

Wash the octopus in three pots of water, then let it soak in clean water for two days, but change the water frequently, especially in the summer, elsewise it will go bad. Once you put it in a new pot of water, wash it. Once two days have passed, make some alkali out of ash, but don’t make it too strong, for that will devour the fish, and your lord will be angry with you. Let the alkali cool, and put it in the same pot with the octopus, let it stand for one night, then boil it in clean water, pass through a strainer the water, put it in cold water, and keep it with ice in the summer so that it will not go bad. Once you’re about to cook it, remove the black skin, put it on a skewer, roast it, paste it with tree oil. Once done, put it on a skewer and add some black pepper, then serve it while it’s hot.

Yes. This is lye-cured octopus. Octo-lutefisk, if you will. Fish-jello, with tentacles. Oh, heavens, what AM I about to do?

Okay, that first recipe? Too simple, and some details are missing, like how long you soak it. Maybe I’ll try that one if I get more octopus and recipe 413 doesn’t kill me. No, I’m going for the gusto.

So if I’m doing this, I will need to plan carefully. When you read the recipe through, one of the first things I notice is that we are talking about something that’s going to take three days, minimum, to prepare. As I have a real life outside the kitchen, this means starting it on a day when I’ll have time to follow all the steps, especially when I get to the night of the second day, and cook it on the third day. Because I can’t just do it on the stove, no. I’ll have to do this over a medieval cooking hearth, using a period heat source, and period cookware, and both of those mean time consuming.

Wait, let’s back up. Making alkali (lye) isn’t hard…it’s a matter of straining water through wood ash (preferably hardwood). So I’ll need a supply of ash. I can do that, but given the fire season, let’s do that carefully, hmmm? How strong do I make this? Since I’m no longer taking college chemistry classes, I no longer have access to a phenolphthalein titration rig (not that that would help as our cookbook author forgot to give us a nice pH for the solution).

I’m going to have to reach outside my source for this one. Some post-period references talk about making lye “strong enough to half float an egg”…in other words, the concentration of lye for a strong solution would float an egg halfway out of the water. There is a lovely analysis of the process here: Lye Making and here: More Lye Making . Okay. Traditional lutefisk has a pH of between 10.5 and 12 per Google (yikes, that’s high). Our recipe says to not make it strong so I think we should aim low–besides, with a lower pH, we can always soak it a bit longer if we have to. Too high, and the octopus will dissolve and our lord will be angry at us. Thankfully, that second link shows a means to make an easy pH testing solution and provides a color testing scale.

So, now our first step is going to be to get the lye ready in advance, testing it to make sure we have it not too strong, but not too weak, either. Then we can rehydrate the octopus for a couple of days, soak it overnight in our home made lye solution, and on the last day, peel it, put it on a skewer, season it up with some good olive oil and fresh black pepper, roast it over a fire…and taste it.

It’s too late tonight to start making ash, and I don’t have a red cabbage on hand to make the pH testing liquid. But we have a plan. Stay tuned friends, and let’s see how this works!