A Good Day Out

A Good Day Out

So, we had a single-day SCA event today, a local one. Just a few miles from the house, so of course that meant we had to fill the car with stuff. Sunshade, chairs, tables, small ice chest, my Microkitchen…you know, the bare essentials.

There was also a “groaning board”…medieval-esque for a pot luck, and yes, I have a “thing” about cooking food on site. So, I planned for food I could prepare there.

First up…the Transylvanian cucumber salad. I’ve made this before, it goes down well with people who might be leery about trying “medieval food”. It’s also really easy to make with a minimal kitchen. You can see the recipe elsewhere in the blog, but it’s basically sliced cukes with salt, pepper, olive oil, wine vinegar, and finely minced garlic. Toss in a bowl, and let it sit. It’s vegan-friendly, gluten-free, fast, and cheap.

Next…well, pot lucks are often light on proteins…but I didn’t want to bring a big, heavy kitchen setup. To me this says pre-cooked meat of some sort, and a period sauce. Flipping through the Transylvanian again we get…

Fifth. (594) Sour cherry sauce.

Clean the sour cherry in a clean iron pot. Add some wine; a bit of white bread and honey, then cook it, pass it through a strainer into a plate and add some black pepper; but don’t add clove, add cinnamon instead; cook it together, but don’t make it too thick.

This followed a few recipes for bird sauce, sauces that go on spit-roasted chickens, and it certainly sounded like it would be good on a chicken, so…one quick trip to Costco for a rotisserie bird ($5 for a good-size, generically seasoned rotisserie chicken that’s already cooked? And tastes good on its own? No-brainer!). Those prior two recipes call for slicing the chicken off the bone and into the sauce, so I did slice up the chicken meat. Meanwhile, one jar of pitted morello cherries (which are decently sour), maybe a half cup of dried sour cherries (I like cherries), a cup and a half of white wine, the insides of a sandwich roll, hollowed out and hand-shredded into crumbs), a quarter cup of honey (by eye), and about a teaspoon each of ground cinnamon and black pepper. Bring to a simmer, mashing things up a bit since I wasn’t going to push it through a strainer. It did get a bit thick, so I added a half-cup of water, and did it again later as the liquid cooked down. Poured the sauce over the shredded chicken, and voila, service! Taste–delightful, will make again. I especially like the idea that this uses specifically an iron pot, as opposed to the likely more common bronze…the acidic cherries would have not done well in bronze…and thankfully, my small iron pot fits neatly on the Microkitchen stove.

Next…well, I was surrounded by demanding people and thus had to (was forced under pain of extensive whining) make Digby’s Toasted Cheese….aka Digby’s Evil Cheesy Goo. It’s a recipe from just barely after the SCA’s stated time period from The Closet of Sir Kennelm Digby, Open’d and it’s really very good, albeit high enough in calories I do not make it alone. Think terribly rich fondue made from equal parts butter, Brie, and cream cheese (so, a stick of butter, a standard wedge of Brie, and a brick of cream cheese, melted together over low heat and stirred until it all comes together.) You can add other cheeses, or things like garlic and black pepper. I kept it basic so it would appeal to as many as possible. It’s good on sliced bread, sliced tart apples, broccoli, a spoon, your fingers, an old shoe…

Last…I had several possibilities, most of them not medieval and mostly for my own gustatory pleasures. But….you remember that one little package of octopus from last week? When soaked and lye-worked it made for quite a few little tentacled buddies. There were SIX more I didn’t cook, so after their little boiling step, I ziplocked them and tossed them into the freezer for later use. And they came with me to the event. After all, there were people coming to the event that were interested in my results. So I quickly thawed them in cool water. Half of them I bundled up and impaled on skewers (the Microkitchen being well stocked)…and this time I had learned to wrap the tentacles up in the body, so it stayed as a nice, mostly neat package. Olive oil drizzle, some black pepper, and this time, a bit of salt, and a few minutes roasting over the alcohol stove burner. I had to cajole some folks into it, but no one who tried it thought it was horrible, or spat it out. So that was a win.

With the last three I wanted to try the other octopus recipe:

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.

Thing is, this reads to me like several different recipes. After all the rehydration stuff discussed in the second recipe, you have options. You can cook it in vinegar. You can cook it in “oily sauce”. Or you can cook it with what sort of appears to be a vinaigrette with black pepper, saffron, and honey. Oh, but there’s more. I looked up oily sauce. It’s mentioned quite often in amongst the fish. I hit the Mother Lode under dried sturgeon:

(293) Dry sturgeon with oily sauce.

There are three types of oily sauce. One of them is made from cabbage sauce, the second is made from water, oil, vinegar and onion. The third is made from wine, tree oil, honey, some grapes, apple, onion and dill. You shall find out how to cook the dry sturgeon among the beluga.

Dried sturgeon…dried (and rehydrated) octopus…So it appeared I had a choice of onion-rich cabbage broth with olive oil, the same with no cabbage, but with vinegar…and then number three…wine, olive oil, honey, grapes, apple, onion, and dill. Hey, that sounded interesting. Lots of flavors, there. So I made it. All by eye, maybe a cup of wine, half a cup of small green grapes, quarter cup of honey, a few tablespoons of olive oil, about 1/3 of a nice tart apple chopped small, and a good teaspoon and a half of dill, with a little minced onion. The Microkitchen doesn’t really encourage exact measurements. Because they were out on the table, I also added a few threads of saffron and a pinch of black pepper as flavors mentioned from the original octopus recipe. Brought that up to a simmer, chopped up the last of the octopi, and added it in.

Well. That was pretty surprisingly darned tasty. The octopi practically vanished into it taste-wise, being more texture than anything else. Added a subtle fishiness, like a hit of fish sauce or garum, but nothing huge. My main taste tester here (pictured below) REALLY liked this.

Hey, um, Siobhan, you have a little something on your lip…

By the bye, Siobhan has been testing other Transylvanian recipes and will be guest-posting them here.

But now it’s really bedtime after a long day. See you next time!



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