For the Thanksgiving feast this year, I used my friends as guinea pigs took the opportunity to get some immediate feedback on a stew recipe I was dying to try, but needed some help in eating the large quantity of food produced. I experimented with a recipe from the compilation by John L. Anderson called A Fifteenth Century Cookry Boke, a collection of recipes from several manuscripts written in England in the 1400s, and carted the results along in a big pot to reheat at the home of the hosts.
This chicken dish (in addition to two other meats) was substituting for turkey, since our hosts, who grew up in Sri Lanka, have never acquired a taste for that bird. My dinner offering was definitely standing on the far side of tradition among the foods at our Thanksgiving table. It was more like a tagine or a curry rather than the typical glorious platter of roasted poultry.
As per normal with these 15th-Century recipes, very little guidance is given in quantities or cooking times. The method is laid out with regard to what order things should be done and what mode of cooking should be used, but nothing more detailed than "take these and put them together," "cut it in pieces," "temper with this/allay with this" or "sethe (simmer/boil) it." Sometimes the recipes are written a little out of sequence when the writer goes back to add something that should have been earlier in the list. In this case, I had my choice of two different ways to make the same dish called "Vele, Kede or Henne en Bokenade" or "Autre (another) Vele en Bokenade." They are wildly different from each other, one being made with fresh herbs like parsley and sage and thickened with egg yolk, the other being flavored with warm spices and onions and including some dried currants and other thickeners. But, they are both "en bokenade," meaning a sort of one-pot main dish or potage.
The original recipe is for "Autre Vele en Bokenade," using veal. Since the recipe beforehand offered "henne" or chicken as an option, I decided chicken would be an acceptable option for the second recipe as well.
The original text:
Autre Vele en Bokenade
Take Vele, and Make it clene, and hakke it to gobettys, an sethe it; and take fat brothe, an temper up thine Almaundys that thou hast y-grounde, and lye it with Flowre of Rys, and do there-to gode powder of Gyngere, & Galingale, Canel, Maces, Quybybis, and Oynonys y-mynsyd, &Roysonys of coraunce, & coloure yt wyth Safroun, and put there-to thin Vele, & serve forth.
My quick-and-dirty version for modern cooks:
Take veal and clean it and cut it into small pieces and simmer it. Take that broth and thicken it with ground almonds and rice flour. Add powdered ginger, galingale, cinnamon, mace, cubebs. Add minced onions and dried currants. Color it with saffron, put the veal in the sauce and serve.
The recipe I devised:
Henne en Bokenade
Cut up a whole chicken so you have wings, breasts, thighs, drumsticks and a back piece. Place the chicken pieces in a large pot with the wings and legs and back on the bottom and the breasts sitting on top. If you have a young chicken, use stock for simmering. If you have a stewing hen, simmer in water. Simmer the deboned chicken in 3 cups chicken stock (or 4 cups water and a much longer cooking time for stewing hen) with 1 tsp salt, 8 white peppercorns and a dash of powdered ginger. Remove the meat when it is cooked through and make a sauce with the broth. Skim fat from the broth if desired.
Mix 2 heaping Tbsp of rice flour with at least 1/4 cup water until it becomes a thick slurry that looks like cream. Use more water if needed. Whisk the rice flour slurry into the hot broth. Add 1 minced onion, 1 tsp ginger powder, 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon, 3/4 tsp ground mace. Grind 10 cubebs and add them to the sauce. Bring the sauce to a simmer and cook until thickened, whisking occasionally. While the sauce is simmering, remove the meat from the bones and discard the skin. Pull the meat into smaller pieces that would fit on a spoon. When the sauce is close to the desired thickness, add 1 cup dried currants and a generous pinch of saffron. Add the cooked meat to the sauce and add a little salt if desired. The finished dish looks like chicken pieces and currants swimming in a fragrant yellowish-brown gravy.
Notes:
1. I did not have ground almonds or the time and desire to grind almonds on my own in a mortar and pestle on Thursday, so my sauce is thickened only with the rice flour this time.
2. I skipped the galingale because I had just run out, but I used more ginger than I otherwise might have.
3. This sauce thickens considerably as the dish cools. Serve immediately (just like the original recipe says) for the best presentation.
4. For those who are asking, "What's a cubeb?" A cubeb is a a dried berry from a plant related to black pepper. It is somewhat similar to pepper in flavor but also has a tangy, clove-like flavor. I got mine as a gift from a friend, but I know of a source in my area: Spicewell's Essentials. http://spicewells.us/Home.html
5. When I try this one again, I'd go for the ground almond and change up the spice mix to blend more successfully with the saffron; possibly, I would use less saffron than the approximately 1/4 tsp I had when I just dumped the rest of my saffron in the stew. Mine had a bit of an overpowering saffron flavor that blended well with the ginger, but left the other spices far less present.
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