Parte The Last…

Parte The Last…

…in which our brave hero, having deciphered the cryptic manuscript, quested for and received in turn the most necessary Ingredient, and followed all the steps of the Dance Culinaire, does finally put the pieces together and assemble the Dish at Last.

Well. Yeah. We did this. Octo-lutefisk has been made and consumed. No one died in the making of this except some cephalopods, who were already deceased before I conceived this mad notion. Let’s recap, shall we?

(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.

So, we acquired said dried octopus. We rinsed it off in three pots full of water before letting it soak in the fridge for two days, changing the water about every 8 hours. We then made lye, determining a pH of 10 or so would be a good starting point, and found happily what we made from wood-ash was about the pH we wanted, testing it with a cool hack involving red cabbage juice.

Last night, I put the rehydrated octopi in the lye, and left it in the fridge overnight. Today, I put my firebox together, assembled olive oil, black pepper, tools, and such and got to work.

Yes. A fire extinguisher is by definition medieval. Don’t argue, I live in California and it’s still fire season.

Here’s the thing. It worked -just- like the instructions said. No black skin formed until after the octopi were boiled. It rubbed off very easily. The head easily was skewered, the tentacles, not so much. Brushed on some tree oil (olive oil), ground some black pepper over it, and held it over the coals. When it looked like it was nicely heated through, off the skewer and into the mouth!

Here’s the boil…

See the little bit of “black skin”? Bit of a membrane, is all.

Watch you don’t burn the tentacles!

The whole Head of an octopus rehydrated, lye treated, boiled and roasted. Not very big, is it?

Open wide!

So, now you’re wondering, what was it like? I confess, I had imagined it would become some gelatinously mushy, meaty gel thing. It didn’t come out like that at all. The tentacles were a little chewy, not bad, mind you, but that’s where the muscles are. Nothing was jello-y at all. The head was actually rehydrated quite well for something that had the thickness of construction paper to start.

Taste? It was…rather like cod or sole…some fairly bland white fish. Royce, pictured above, and I agreed it could use a touch of salt! If I’d cooked it over the fire longer, it might have gotten a touch crispy around the edges…so a combination of fish and chips? Probably not. Longer over the fire is generally a bad idea with a lot of sea-life unless you’re going to cook it a LOOOONG time.

What did I do that wasn’t period? Primarily, I kept it in the fridge when rehydrating for safety. And the octopus had some sulphates in it that you wouldn’t find in period. I also used it as fast as I reasonably could, rather than leaving it on ice, as it says we can. If you want to go nuts, I also didn’t time days and nights at that latitude in the times octopus would have been available. But it talks about doing it in summer, and summer is just about done-ish now…good enough.

My cooking methods were as medieval as I could manage, and there is nothing a period cook would have found out of place in the preparation of lye (except trying to explain the concept of pH would be a challenge). You can see I got out my pipkins, and natural hardwood charcoal is the period cooking fuel of choice.

Was it exceptional? No. Would I refuse to eat it if it showed up on my plate? Not at all! I will say, that after trying this, the recipe before, with less detail, interests me more. It tells you to cook it in “oily sauce”. As it happens, there are three basic oily sauces given…one that basically cabbage broth with olive oil, one that shows up with a lot of dried fish which is vinegar, wine, honey, and olive oil. And one that’s the same, but with grapes, chopped apples, and dill! Those are some decently strong favors for something that is fairly bland. So, since I have some left over, and in fact a whole package that hasn’t been rehydrated yet…I might not be done with tentacles yet!

So, questions? Comments? Ready to send me off with a jacket that has sleeves in the back?



4 thoughts on “Parte The Last…”

  • Harmony is fairly sure that this could be done with fresh octopi. Also, switching out avocado oil for the olive oil would allow her to have some. But all in all, sounds yummy!

    • You could, but you wouldn’t get the same results at all. The nearest sources for octopi to Transylvania are 500-600 miles away. Assuming decent roads and a wagon, you’re looking at about a month delivery time which makes fresh octopi kind of…a stinky problem. Also, dried, you can haul a lot more with less effort.

      Of course, the whole point of this rigamarole was to follow the recipe as given, using the same sorts of tools as the original author, to see what he was making for his boss. As it is, I may be the first English-speaking person ever to have made this…or possibly the first person at all to use this recipe in a couple hundred years. That’s worth some effort on my part.

      Hence…”obsessive period cook”. 😁

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *