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Poll Question for you folks…

Poll Question for you folks…

So, I have a pretty decent collection of medieval cookbooks these days, and of course there are SO many more available for free access online. To the folks who read this, my question is this: What three to five SCA period cookbooks, in order, do 

3.0 Inbound!

3.0 Inbound!

So, what with all the SCA wonderful weirdness hitting my life this second, I felt the need to actually wrap up the 3.0 edition of the Transylvanian Cookbook. This is, realistically, probably the last major update I’m going to do. If I start doing more 

A tale of two weekends…

A tale of two weekends…

So. Last weekend we had a local SCA event. I was going to keep it simple. I was going to reprise those fried cheese sticks because yum, and a bunch of friends wanted to try them, and I was also going to do the Bird Sauce from the Transylvanian Cookbook over a Ye Olde Costco Rotisserie Chicken.

Hen with bird sauce.

Remove the feathers and wash it like I told you to. Put it on a skewer like the capon. While being roasted, make the sauce; take some wine, if you barely have any wine, then use water from boiling beef or regular water; add some bread; cook it, pass it through a strainer, add apples and grapes; once the hen is roasted, take it down from the skewer, cut it in the sauce, add some saffron, black pepper and ginger. This should be a more sour than a sweet food. They call it bird sauce for its wildness. Chefs nowadays put almonds into it, but it is not a necessity.

Easy, right? Take a few pictures so you could see the Microkitchen in use…a fun and relaxing time. But that’s not what happened. The Queen of the West showed up, and in amongst the fun and silliness, she offered entrance to the Order of the Laurel to myself and my cooking partner Gwendwyn the Silent. If you’re SCA, I don’t have to say more. If you’re not, I don’t know if I can explain it, but it’s a very big deal which is why I was too shaken that day (that whole weekend) to dare to play with hot oil or sticky liquids with a tricky and slightly top-heavy cooking rig with an alcohol burner.

This weekend was different. A friend had offered up her home for a weekend of cooking with the theme being the Transylvanian Cookbook. We were all going to make various recipes that interested us, culminating in a big dinner last night. Originally, the plan was to haul out the firebox and pipkins and REALLY do it right, but the weather forecast made us rethink the outside part, and Rosamund has a nice kitchen, so we used that.

Tiffany, Dorrie, Perrin, Rosamund–please post your recipes in the comments, because my fingers will be tired just with the stuff I did!

So, first off, Beef with Harvest Sauce. I’ve made it before, it’s a favorite.

BEEF WITH HARVEST SAUCE.

If you want to cook with a harvest sauce, prepare the meat like I told you. Put parsley roots, (parsley) leaves and onions into it. After it’s cooked, add six or seven eggs, according to your needs. After you’re done, put the eggs into vinegar and start whipping it. Then pour the meat’s juices into it. Pour it onto the meat again, but don’t boil it; if you boil it, its size will suffer.

I fried up some strips of beef, heated up some broth wherein were boiled onions and sliced, peeled parsnips, and parsley (yes, I know it calls for parsley root, and I’ve tried it that way before, but parsley root is hard to get, small parsnips were easy…and there is almost no taste difference). Beat eggs and vinegar together, and tempered that into the broth. Add the meat and heat to a low simmer. Done!

(And I forgot to take a picture of it)

Next up, Fried chicken. I love fried chicken. So watch out Colonel Sanders, Baron Gwyn is coming after you!

Fried chicken.

Do what I told you before. Cook it in salt, and once cooked, take it out and let it cool. Make salty pancake from eggs and flour, and when serving it, fry the chicken in this, put it into the pancake and serve it when hot.

This was terrifically simple, and very tasty. Boiled some bone-in, skin on chicken thighs in salted water until cooked, pulled them out, and allowed them to cool and dry. Meanwhile I mixed a cup and a half of flour and a half-dozen large eggs with a tablespoon or two of salt. Mixed until smooth and no discernible lumps. The batter wasn’t particularly thick. Coated the thighs in the batter, and fried it in about a half inch of hot oil in a skillet, for maybe 3 minutes on each side until the batter was nicely browned. YUM! 5/5, will definitely do again! So, next time you’re tempted to bring a bucket to a medieval potluck, do it yourself! I reheated it for the dinner in a warm oven and it worked well. Chicken stayed nice and juicy.

It reminded me of the Persian fried chicken my friend Urtatim does.

As a bonus, I still had nearly two cups of this batter left over, and the skillet still had hot oil. So I…dumped it in. They call the batter “salty pancake” right? Fwoosh! It puffed up, cooked in just a minute or two on each side, in a fashion not unlike a Dutch Baby. It was surprisingly good hot, okay cooled, and was tasty with cheese. Some onions would not have gone amiss, either. Just to be clear, nowhere in the cookbook does it say to do this, but it’s not unreasonable, in my opinion.

To use up the unused chicken from last week, which had gone into the freezer, I did Hen with Dumplings. This wasn’t my most successful dish, but that’s okay.

Hen with dumplings.

Wash it like before. When boiling the hen, cut out its breasts and add some salt. Make the dumplings like so; depending on how many chicken breasts you’ll make, take equal amounts of cow fat, parsley leaves, white bread without the crust, and eggs, whip it, and if you have no fat, fatty bacon will do.

So I cut the breasts out of the Costco rotisserie chicken and simmered it in broth to reheat (the broth from the chicken thighs, which, as you’ll recall, had salt). Set that aside. I then minced up some flat leaf parsley, pulled some white breadcrumbs out of a loaf, and rendered down some Hungarian bacon. And that is where things failed, I think. This particular bacon, bought at Pacific International Foods in Sacramento, was MUCH leaner than your run of the mill bacon. I added the few fat scraps from the beef in the Harvest Sauce Beef, above, but there was still very little fat to help bind it together. That, plus the meat from the bacon meant the dumplings just didn’t bind all that well, even when I added my last two eggs (plus one of Tiffany’s duck eggs!) to help bind it. The dish also doesn’t hold well. Oh, yes, and the dumplings were also simmered in that same broth. Still tasted okay, though.

(The finished dish is the one in the center left).

Okay, Perrin? Now you have to talk about the Hen and Egg Doughnuts. Tiffany? Your sauces, beef with carrots, garlic cucumbers, and pottage of millet in milk. Dorrie? Your stuffed pears, almond cake, and THAT SAUCE. Rosamund, your Bianca…go!

More pictures, from Tiffany:

The first would be a better picture of the chicken with dumplings, the second shows her sauces (garlic aioli, and two others slipping my mind), her beef with carrots, cucumber salad, and millet porridge.

Yum!

The Centipede’s Dilemma

The Centipede’s Dilemma

You know the story…the centipede was walking along, and someone asked it, how can you keep track of your feet? And the centipede stopped, and actually thought about what he was doing, and was never able to walk in a coordinated fashion again. Well, hopefully 

March Hare, and other tasty treats

March Hare, and other tasty treats

So, this weekend was March Crown, a West Kingdom (SCA) event wherein the next Queen and King are chosen via combat, and of course, inspiration. More to the point, we also have a cooking competition. By the way, you can skip this part if you 

Another rabbit hole

Another rabbit hole

So, yeah.  Last year, I fell into a rabbit hole involving a medieval method of chemically cooking using calcium carbonate.  Here’s an article I wrote about it…I need to revisit it one day, and expand on the article.

 

Medieval Fireless Cooking

A smaller feast

A smaller feast

Spring Coronet Feast 2015 Documentation   Oh, yeah, this feast.  A couple friends of mine, Bjorn and Hilarie, were at the time Prince and Princess of Cynagua in the West Kingdom (if you don’t know where that is, don’t worry, it’s not crucial).  In any 

Hungry?

Hungry?

Like many SCA Cooks, at some point you have to tackle a feast.  This is one I did in 2014…with a handout about the food that was there for the guests to read.  Now, I grant you, all my successes with feasts are because I 

Cheeeeeeese!

Cheeeeeeese!

Kitchen Chemistry Class 1

 

This might be the very first class handouts I wrote…a basic look at making cheese.  May have to update it someday…

I’ll be baaack…

I’ll be baaack…

No, not leaving.  It’s just that, many years ago, I took a class in pewter casting at the Estrella War.  And, as one does, I came home, wrote my own class handout, and taught the local group how to do it.  It’s basically, how to 

Another of my old class handouts—Intro to Mead

Another of my old class handouts—Intro to Mead

So, this is one of the oldest classes I taught where I wrote a handout.  Basic definitions on meadmaking terms, and the basics on how to make it yourself. Mead

A recipe for this weekend—Vetrece

A recipe for this weekend—Vetrece

So, after the boost to my cooking mojo from last week’s Culinary Symposium, I thought I needed to capitalize on that and play with the Transylvanian cookbook this weekend.  The two recipes for “vetrece” caught my eye just now.

Tenth. BEEF VETRECE WITH BREAD

Salt the beef and smoke it. Don’t leave it for too long on the smoke, cook it only when about to serve it. When serving it, pour some beef broth on top the bread and slice some onions.

Thirteenth. Toasted vetrece.

Put it into very hot water, leave it for some time, and after its blood is drained take it out, wait for the water to drain then add some salt. Let it stand for three days, and smoke it on the third day. You can toast it outside if you have no smoke. Do the same with the roast garlic beef. If you want to cook this for lunch, prepare the meat at the evening [before], add some salt, smoke it and leave it for a day. When you want to cook it, slice it into pieces. If you’re cooking for a lord, put it into clean and hot water and pour the water into a different pot. Pass the broth through a strainer. When it’s about half done, slice some onions into it and add some parsley roots. Add some vinegar when the onion is about to be cooked. When serving it, this should be the first course. If you want to cook beef vetrece, don’t slice onions onto the bread, for not everyone likes it. When cooking the vetrece, peel two to three garlic cloves and break them.

When the vetrece is cooked, pour beef broth on top the garlic. When they’re together, shake it. Pour them together and serve it to your lord however he likes it.

 

It helps to know a vetrece is meat cut into thin strips, like noodles made of meat.  I’ve come across a reference that implies a vetrece is an ancestor of the classic beef paprikash.

So, let’s look at these, hmmm? The first one reads to me like you take salted beef, and smoke it for a bit.  Since cooking it is mentioned as another step, I would guess you’re not cooking by smoking.  It mentions beef broth, I might think you simmer the salted, smoked beef, put the beef on the bread with sliced onions, and pour the broth over.  The Transylvanians loved their broth!

Okay, this is doable.  I can get beef, I have salt, onions and bread, and I have a smoker rig.  Since the recipe seems to call for smoking and then cooking, I’ll go for cold smoking.  The only problem is deciding is…is this beef that has been salted, you know, for flavor, or is it SALT BEEF, as in beef preserved with salt?  A number of times in the cookbook, we find “salted X” is meant to be preserved, such as salted gooseberries.  Other times we have instructions to knock salt off foods, which seems to me to indicate LOTS of salt, again, as you might used for preserved ingredients.  This lack of specialized language can be tricky.

The toasted vetrece looks more complex.  It specifies beef that is purged of blood and is salted, then smoked for a whole day.  You then simmer it, straining out the meat when it’s half-cooked.  Cook sliced onions and the ever-popular parsley roots in the broth, adding vinegar when the onions are done.  It also warns us not to put the onions directly on the bread that of course wasn’t mentioned previously, and that the beef broth should be poured over chopped garlic, and shaken to mix.

So, this one is also doable, but with a longer timeframe.  The meat you get in the grocery store is already pretty well purged of blood.  Parsley roots are not generally easy to find.  I’ve tried them (Thank you, Berkeley Bowl!), and they taste like carrots or mild parsnips, with a strong flavor of…parsley.  To replicate this, I’d use small parsnips peeled and simmered with a big bundle of parsley stems tied together to make removing them easier.  Vinegar would most likely be white wine vinegar (Transylvania had lots of white wine on hand).  Onions…well, I’m not sure what variety of onion they had, so I’ll just go with the common yellows I have in the pantry.  And if I find out later what kinds of onions are common to the region, I’ll let us all know.

Nice of our author to tell us to serve it how our lord likes it.  For me, I’d take it with the sliced meat on the bread, veggies (with onions!) on top, and some broth to moisten the bread and to sip.  But that’s me.  Okay, grocery run tomorrow!  Let’s see how this works!  I’ll probsbly do the first one with less preserved meat, though with veggies from the second—I don’t have all day to smoke the meat.

 

Class from WCCS 9

Class from WCCS 9

I did say I’d post other classes I’ve taught.  This is from last year’s Symposium, and was about the evolution of kitchens in the SCA’s period.   The Origin Story

And to use your túró

And to use your túró

So, supposing you have gone to the trouble of making a batch of túró (not that it’s hard or all that troublesome).  What to do with it? Túró cake Crush the túró, whip some eggs, then add some dill, sour cream and butter.  and Dish 

Next recipes—Fellorium From Eggs, and Túró cheese

Next recipes—Fellorium From Eggs, and Túró cheese

The only cheese actually specified in The Science of Cooking is “túró”.  After hunting around for a description, I finally was able to get one from one of my translation checkers, who describes it as a very mild, unaged cheese  with no real curd formation, but its not ricotta, cream cheese, or cottage cheese, either.

And then I found online a recipe for making it yourself, which is lucky, because it’s not like I was about to find it in stores locally, or even my favorite Bay Area cheeseshops.  And it’s easy.

https://zsuzsaisinthekitchen.blogspot.com/2009/01/hungarian-curd-cheese-tur.html

As always, the better the milk you buy, the better the cheese you make.  That said, it works fine with regular pasteurized milk from your supermarket.

My version is basically the same, though leaving it on the counter two full days, then heating it in the oven at 175F for 8 hours (or overnight) gives a really rich cheese and pulls nearly all the cheese-proteins out of the whey.

Also, do not toss the whey.  In addition to all the usual stuff you can use it for (making bread and scones, feeding to livestock, drinking on a hot day, etc), there’s another Transylvanian recipe you can use it with.

Poach your eggs in it.  Oh baby, yeah.  It gives a mild cheese coating to your eggs.  You may want to cut your cooking time by 15-30 seconds, because it does cook the eggs a little more efficiently than plain water with vinegar and salt.  The source says:

105

Fellorium from eggs.

When you cook a dish with túró, take some of its liquid into a small pan or pot, when you want to serve the curd cheese dish, bring the bit of liquid to a boil, crack the egg onto it, but take care that the yolk doesn’t cook, but only the white, and even that only gently. Deal with this quite quickly, because if it hardens, it will not be good for anything. Put this afterwards one by one on the túró dish nicely, serve the túró dish thus nice and warm. When you put the fellorium on it, salt it lightly.