Poetry as Inspiration for a Picnic

From Erotic Cuisine: A natural history of aphrodisiac cookery by Ravicz I found this delightful, a 14th Century passage (pg 67):
Under the green leaves, on the soft turf beside a chattering brook with a clear spring near at hand, I found a rustic hut set up. Gontier and Dame Helen were dining there, on fresh cheese, milk, butter, cheesecake, cream, curds, apples, nuts, plums, pears; they had garlic and onions and crushed shallots, on crusty black bread with a coarse salt to give them a thirst. They drank from a jug and birds made music to cheer the hearts of both lover and lass, who next exchanged loving kisses on mouth and nose, the smooth face and the bearded. (referenced as Marie Collins & Virginia Davis, pg 81 and attributed to Book of Hours (Summer) by Philippe de Vitry.)

The menu is:

1. fresh cheese
2. milk
3. butter
4. cheesecake
5. cream
6. curds
7. apples
8. nuts
9. plums
10. pears
11. salad of garlic, onions, shallots & salt
12. crusty black bread
13. salt
14. Wine, and
15. kisses

Its sort of a lop-sided menu. Its from a book of hours, mostly the passage is to illustrate ‘Summer’ and not really a menu. I did make the menu many years ago as a picnic for around 10 people and it was fun.

Allium Family Salad
* 4 cloves of garlic, peeled, minced
* 1 large onion, peeled, chopped small
* 2 shallots, peeled, chopped small
* 1 tsp salt
* Crusty black bread
* Wine

1. Mix garlic, onion, shallots and salt together.
2. Serve by the spoonful on black bread, with wine.

Not kidding about the wine. The dish is very thirsty making.

Gone Fishing

I love the idea of someone in medieval costume, sitting beside a bubbling brook. Beside them rest a book, and half a bottle of wine. A fishing rod made out of a stick and string held loosely in hands, while they napped under a large hat.

And accidentally catching a trout and ruining the quiet of the day.

Took cook your trout you need to scrape the scales on the outside of the fish with the side of a knife and wash them off the fish, the knife, your hands and everything you touched in the last 24 hours. You then cut the fish’s belly open from anus to neck and remove all the squishy guts from the pocket there, and wash the fish again. Pat dry.

You can grill a 1/2 lb trout on a high (500F) heat and it will cook in about 5 minutes. Pan frying is about that time, on each side.

Boiling takes a little longer, 10 minutes for every inch thick your fish is. The medieval cook would put 2 cups of wine or vinegar into the water with the fish.

In all cases cooked fish flake away from the bone easily.

The medieval cook will pair the fish with a sour sauce of your choosing:

Le Viandier de Taillevent (1380):
Salmon trout. Peeled, head and all, and then cooked in water or roasted; eaten with verjuice.

Le Menagier de Paris (1393)
Trout are cooked in water with a lot of red wine, and should be eaten with a cameline sauce and should be cooked in chunks about two fingers thick. 

Libre del Coch (1520)
And if they want to eat it roasted, it must be eaten with orange juice and water and salt and a little oil, and all the good herbs; and prepare the plate of the roast trout. And cast this juice on top of everything. And know that the best morsel of it is the snout.

Clay Pots, Earthenware and Pipkins

Its camping season! It means I can dig out my collection of clay pots and experiment with cooking on a campfire.

Aside from cooking, unglazed pots can be used for cool storage, the outside of the pot will moisten and evaporate creating a mild cooling effect.

“The nature of milk is such that if the milk is drawn (from the cow) and put in a very clean and fair vessel of clay or wood or tin (pewter), and not in brass (bronze) nor copper, and kept in these vessels without moving or changing from one vessel to another, nor transported hither and yon, it will keep well for a day and a half or two days, and will not turn at all when boiled, provided one stirs it when it begins to move as it is boiled; and you should not add salt to it until you take it off the fire, or at least when you add sops to it, and you can add to it sops of leavened bread or otherwise, for it will not turn so long as the milk is treated as I have said.” Le Menagier de Paris (1393)

Unglazed clay pots are my prefered cooking pot. As with any piece of pottery the clay pots can break. They are more likely to break if you introduce high temperature differences. They transfer heat from coals to food faster than my microwave. You need to watch them closely once you start cooking. Stir constantly when is use, and I also like to move the pot around a little if it is on the edge of the fire pit to distribute heat, but this might just be slightly paranoid.

To cook food in the earthenware put in ingredients that are ‘room’ or ambient temperature, the same temperature as the pot itself, or put warm food into a pot that is already warm. Use prepared coals, not a fire to cook. You can use ambient heat from the fire by setting pot near fire, or suspended above but set it up so the clay pot is in the ‘low’ heat range.

Never use them on a modern stove top.

To clean my pots I add water, cooking fire ashes, and a bit of sand to the pot and scrub it clean with a cloth. Rise the pot well.

The pots will ‘season’ as you use them, changing the colour slightly, making them easier to clean. The outside will blacken from the smoke and ash, but if you clean the pot it won’t rub off onto your stuff. I’ve not found that the unglazed pots absorb flavours from cooking.

The pots are very attractive. I have a recipe below for Hippocras that you can make ahead of time and not heat, if you are worried about splitting your pot. This makes use of your pride and joy without risking it over the heat.

I also include a dished that inverts the clay pot to use as an oven or smoker.

Hippocras
To make Hippocras. Take a gallon of white wine, sugar two pound, of cinnamon, ginger, long pepper, mace, galingale, cloues not bruised, you must bruise every kind of spice a litle, & put them in an earthen pot all a day, & then cast them through your bags two times or more as you see cause, and so drinke it. The Good Housewife’s Jewell

Five parts cinnamon, three parts cloves, one part ginger; half of the wine must be white and half of it red, and for one azumbre, six ounces of sugar, mix everything together and cast it in a small glazed earthenware pot and give it a boil, when it comes to a boil, [cook it] no more, strain it through your sieve often enough that it comes out clear. Libre del Coch 

Ingredients
* 1 litre wine
*1 cup raw cane sugar
* 1 cup combined of the following dry whole spices: cinnamon, ginger, long pepper, mace, galingale, cloves

Directions
1) Combine ingredients in your earthenware pot.
2) Option 1: Let wine mixture set for 24 hours, strain through a cloth and serve.
Option 2: Set wine mixture on the coals, bring to a boil while stirring. Once boiled remove from heat and strain. Serve warm.

Smoked Pears

Again, pears cooked without coals or water: to instruct the person who will be cooking them, he should get a good new earthenware pot, then get the number of pears he will be wanting to cook and put them into that pot; when they are in it, stop it up with clean little sticks of wood in such a way that when the pot is upside down on the hot coals it does not touch them at all; then turn it upside down on the hot coals and keep it covered over with coals and leave it to cook for an hour or more. Then uncover them and check whether they have cooked enough, and leave them there until they are cooked enough. When they are cooked, put them out into fine silver dishes; then they are borne to the sick person. Chiquart’s “On Cookery” from godecookery.com

Ingredients
* 6 or more pears with stems, washed and any stickers removed
* Sticks from non-poisonous trees, like apple, soaked for a few hours.

Directions

1. Place pears into pot carefully, stems in the middle of the pot.
2. Criss-cross the soaked applewood sticks to form a lattice to keep the pears from falling out.
3. Flatten some coals, making a little bowl for the pot to nestle in. Place the pot in the middle of the depression, mouth down. Gather the coals around the pot. Leave it cooking for an hour or so.
4. Uncover the pot and very carefully try to lift the pot straight up, off the coals (or you will scoop up the ashes). Poke the nearest pear with a fork to check to see if pears are cooked. Return to coals if not soft.
5. Using tongs remove the sticks, and then remove the pears from the pot by grabbing the stem. Serve hot, on a silver platter.

Cooking with beer and wine

Hypothetically if you are cooking something like lamb sausages in beer on a BBQ and the grease catches fire do not add more beer. It kind of explodes. Maybe. Hypothetically.

I’ve been experimenting with cooking with (gluten-free) beer and wine after discovering two duck-sauce recipes that were pretty similar at first blush except that one uses wine and the other beer.

Beer adds a smokier and bitter flavour. The flavour would radically change from redaction to redaction depending upon what kind of beer you used. You’d want something on the lighter side, and less hops.

Wine is sweeter, even a dry wine, and adds an acidic and tart flavour. I find that cheaper cooking wines, when used in cooking, don’t taste that differently, some difference but not wildly different in the way beer is.

Both of the following recipes needed the roasted duck to complete the flavours.

Beer Sauce for Roasted Mallards
Take onions and hew them well, put some in the mallard, so have you bliss, and hack more onions, as I teach you; with the grease of the mallard you fry them, then take ale, mustard and honey then, boil all together before you do more; for mallard roasted this sauce is prepared, and served in hall by good right. Liber cure Cocorum

The ratios for the sauce are more important than amounts. If you don’t have 1 cup of drippings treat the recipe as 4 part drippings, 4 parts ale, 1 part mustard, and 1 part honey.

Ingredients
* 1 onion, minced
* 1 cup of fat and drippings from your roasted duck
* 1 cup ale
* 1/4 cup of yellow mustard
*1/4 cup of honey

Directions
1)  Saute onions in the duck fat and drippings on medium heat until the onions are transparent.

2) Mix ale, mustard and honey together, then slowly pour into onion mixture. Bring the mixture to a low boil for 5 minutes. Remove from heat and serve with your roasted duck.

Wine Sauce for Duck
Take onions, and hewe them small, and fry hem in fresh greece, and cast them into a pot, And fresh broth of beef, wine, & powder of pepper, canel, and dropping of the mallard. And let them boil together a while; And take hit for the fire, and cast thereto mustard a little, and powder of ginger, and let it boil no more, and salt it, And serve it forth with the Mallard. Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books.  godecookery.com

Ingredients
* 1 onion, minced
* fat for frying
* 1/2 cup of beef broth
* 1/2 cup dry wine
* 1/2 tsp pepper, ground
* 1 tsp cinnamon, ground
* 1 cup fat and drippings from your roasted duck
* 1/4 cup of yellow mustard
* 1 tsp ginger, ground
* salt to taste

Directions
1)  Saute onions in fat  on medium heat in a sauce pan until the onions are transparent.

2) Add broth, wine, pepper, cinnamon, and drippings into sauce pan with onions, simmer together on medium  for 10 minutes.

3) Take sauce pan off heat add mustard, ginger, and salt and stir well. Serve with roasted duck.

Pynade or Chicken Candy

Ever since I first cracked open the intimidating Take a Thousand Eggs or More by Cindy Renfrow I wanted to make some of the stranger dishes.

Pynade, is like peanut brittle but uses chicken and pine nuts instead of peanuts found in this book.

Most people make the version for lent, or without chicken. Chicken adds moisture so it is harder to get the sugars to the hard crack stage without burning–especially when using honey instead of sugar.

If you remove the dish from heat before the honey reaches 300F it is still a kind of sweet and (not very) sour chicken dish people seem to like so it is worth experimenting with.

Pynade. Take Hony & gode pouder Gyngere, & Galyngale, & Canelle, Pouder pepir, & graynys of parys, & boyle y-fere; than take kyrnelys of Pynotys & caste ther-to; & take chyconys y-sothe, & hew hem in grece, & caste ther-to, & lat sethe y-fere; & then lat droppe ther-of on a knyf; & if it cleuyth & wexyth hard, it ys y-now; & then putte it on a chargere tyl it be cold, & mace lechys, & serue with other metys; & if thou wolt make it in spycery, then putte non chykonys ther-to. Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books

 

Ingredients
* 2 Chicken breasts
* Oil for cooking
* 1 cup pine nuts
* 1 tsp galingale, ground
* 1 tsp ginger, ground
* 1 tsp cinnamon, ground
* Pinch black pepper, ground
* Pinch of grains of paradise, ground
* 1 cup honey

1) Fry chicken breasts in oil until cooked through, then chop chicken very small, and lie meat on cutting board to cool and drain. Too much moisture left in meat at this stage will change the dish.

2) In a dry skillet toast the pine nuts with the spices on a low heat.

3) Add chicken pieces and stir, coating the chicken liberally.

4) Pour honey into skillet and simmer, stirring constantly, until honey reaches just over 300 degrees or hard crack stage. The honey will change colour from golden to brown, and smell like candy.

5) Quickly pour honey mixture onto non-stick baking mat, or parchment paper, and let cool.

6) Finished product should look like “chicken brittle”, break into pieces to serve.