Introducing kids to medieval flavors

I've been at two different schools this spring giving presentations about medieval food to local kids. The kids I've talked to find it a bit strange that children in medieval England were likely to drink ale at breakfast and that even in the wealthiest households there were not always enough cups and plates to go around and people shared them at table. They have shown much curiosity in whether some of their favorite foods also showed up on medieval tables, whether they were told correctly that wealthy feasters enjoyed such odd dishes as roast peacock dressed in its feathers and cockentrice, and whether the table knife I bring to medieval-style feasts (that piece of tableware was usually provided by the diners, not by their hosts) is a weapon. For the record, my table knife has only been used on food, the peacock and cockentrice stories are for real (I've seen the original recipes) and pizza and potatoes were unknown to the Europeans of the Middle Ages. 

At the first school demo, I had the opportunity to bring a dish for the students to taste. They impressed me by being more adventurous eaters than I expected. A few even asked for second helpings, which I was happy to provide. I was telling my favorite friendly city bus driver about the school demo and he asked for the recipe, since he hasn't eaten any medieval food either. I hope he likes it as well as the schoolchildren. 

This dish travels well if it is in a sturdy pie plate and it is tasty when cold or warm. Enjoy the mix of sweet and savory flavors, a typical medieval English combination.

Tart in Ember Day

A tart for religious holidays in medieval England when eating meat was forbidden

Pie crust:

Measure all the ingredients by weight with a scale.

8 ounces all-purpose flour

4 ounces whole-wheat flour

8 ounces cold butter

4 ounces ice-cold water

1/8 ounce salt

Mix the flour and salt. Cut the butter into 1/8-inch cubes. Rub into the flour until flour-butter pieces are the size of small peas. Mix in the water and push mixture together with your hands to make a ball of dough in your bowl. You may need to mix in a tablespoon or two more of the water to get a dough to form. Divide your dough ball into two pieces, wrap and refrigerate at least one hour before rolling out for your pie plate.

Tart filling:

4 Tbsp butter

pinch of saffron threads

Melt the butter, cool a little and stir in the saffron. Let this mixture sit while you prepare the rest of the tart filling.

2 medium-sized onions

dash of salt

Boil a couple cups of water in a small pan with the salt. Peel the onions, cut off ends and chop each onion finely. Parboil the onions until tender, drain in a strainer with very small holes. Make the rest of the filling while the onions are drip-drying:

1 ½ pounds cottage cheese

about 1 cup chopped parsley

½ cup zante currants or golden raisins

2 Tbsp sugar

10 eggs

1 tsp chopped fresh sage

½ tsp ginger powder

½ tsp ground cinnamon

3 cloves, ground

½ tsp ground nutmeg

small pinch of ground mace

½ tsp salt

1 cup breadcrumbs made from fresh bread

Mash the cottage cheese in a large bowl until it is no longer in lumpy curds but is smooth. In a separate bowl, lightly beat the eggs. Mix the eggs and all the rest of the filling ingredients in with the cottage cheese, including the saffron butter and onions.

Roll out two rounds of pie dough and line two 9-inch pie plates. Pour half the filling into each pie shell. Put the tarts side-by-side on a baking sheet. Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit about 20 minutes, turn each pie plate (move the outside edges to the center), and bake another 10 to 20 minutes or until center of each tart is just barely set.

Original recipe sources:

“Tart in Ymbre Day” in Ancient Cookery, a collection of 14^th Century English recipes edited by Samuel Pegge

original text: Take and perboile oynouns presse out the water & hewe hem smale. Take brede & bray it in a morter, and temper it up with Ayren. Do therto butter, safroun and salt, & raisouns courauns, & a litel sugur with powdour douce, and bake it in a trap, & serue it forth.

“Tart in ymbre day” in Forme of Cury, a 14^th Century English cookbook, edited by C. B. Hieatt and Sharon Butler in their book Curye on Inglish

original text: Take and perboile oynouns & erbis & presse out the water & hewe hem smale. Take grene chese & bray it in a morter, & temper it up with ayren. Do therto butter, safroun and salt, & raisouns corauns, & a litel sugar with powdour douce, & bake it in a trap, & serue it forth.

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Playing with 15th-Century pork pie again

Not only are pork pie recipes available in the Harleian manuscripts from 15th century England, there is also a pork pie recipe in the 14th-century collection called Forme of Cury. The last time I tried to recreate a pork-and-fruit pie and described it in this blog, I was going with a 15th-Century source, but the recipe I used most recently from the prior century isn't much different. It's still ground/minced pork inside a crust with fruit and spices, although this one also includes some fowl, as did the first Tarte de Chare recipe I found.

This latest experiment with pork-and-fruit pie was a big hit at the local Society for Creative Anachronism shire's holiday party potluck, where a few of us took the challenge I'd posed to bring pre-1600 food to the party.

Here's the recipe I worked from this time (with special characters replaced with "th" where they appear):
Tartee
Take pork ysode. hewe it and bray it. do thereto ayrenn. Raisouns sugur and powdour of gyngur. powdour douce and smale briddes theramong and white grece, take prunes, safroun & salt, and make a crust in a trape & do ther Fars therin. &bake it wel & serue it forth. 

That is, take cooked/boiled pork and grind it, mix in eggs, raisins, sugar and powdered ginger, powder douce (sweet powder, a spice mixture). Add small birds and white grease (fresh fat, not drippings). Take prunes, saffron and salt. Make a crust in a trap (a pie dish) and put the farce (meat mixture) in it. Bake it well and serve it forth.

I departed from the original recipe's instruction to grind previously cooked pork and used fresh ground pork, easily available these days from the butcher shop. I also decided to do a double-crust pie that would stand on its own instead of putting a single-crust pie in a pie plate, because I wanted people at the potluck to be able to easily eat pieces of pie with their hands. As it turns out, the fresh pork may have been an unwise choice because the pie's juices steadily bubbled over through my vent holes in the crust and created quite a mess on my baking sheet. Cooked pork may have been more well-behaved and stayed in its crust.

I can only hope that entire small birds would have baked up to a safe temperature when mixed in with the rest of the meat. I didn't have the time the day I was baking to go looking for quail or doves, so I used 1.5 to 2 pounds chicken thighs, which for the convenience of my potluckers I deboned before cooking. And to be sure I'd get fully cooked fowl, I fried the chicken pieces in oil until browned before adding them on top of the pork mixture in my pie.

My recipe for the rest of the pork-and-fruit mixture:
1 pound ground pork
2 eggs
3 oz prunes, chopped
2 oz currants
1/2 tsp powdered ginger
1/2 to 3/4 tsp salt
2 whole cloves, crushed to powder
dash cinnamon and nutmeg
pinch saffron, crushed
2 tsp sugar

Once again, I used the "good white crust" recipe from A Temperance of Cooks that was their version of Gervase Markham's crust described in The English Housewife, a manual from 1615. It is sturdy, but just fatty enough to be a little flaky. The flavor is appealing, especially when the pie is still warm, and it bakes to a nice golden color at 375 degrees Fahrenheit without threatening to burn before the pie filling is done and bubbly in the center.

I should mention that I was instantly won over by the Project Gutenberg e-book version of Forme of Cury by Samuel Pegge, which I acquired for my iPod through iBooks, for the simple reason that it has every recipe listed individually in the table of contents, so I can just look for the title I want and go directly to that recipe without having to page through the entire book. A big win over the HTML version on the Project Gutenberg website because the recipes in the book are not organized alphabetically or even necessarily by course in the meal.

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No exact amounts of anything!

Some delicious ideas from this month's cooking experiments, but no exact recipes.

1. Eggplant and potato stew with lemon basil

• one small Italian-style eggplant
• new red potatoes from Henry's Farm CSA box -- the potatoes are pink inside!
• chicken broth powder and water
• one sprig's worth of leaves from Henry's Farm lemon basil
• cook together over low-ish heat on camp stove for a very lemony-tasting stew that is almost too sophisticated for camping

2. "I don't feel like turning on the oven when it's 90-plus degrees outside" zucchini casserole

•  one pound of ground turkey
•  a whole bunch of zucchini, thinly sliced
• my favorite seasonings that go well with turkey: Penzey's Spices Mural of Flavor mix, sage, Lawry's seasoned salt, pepper
• one can condensed cream of mushroom soup
• the rest of the box of potatoes from Henry's Farm plus some more that were in the cupboard
• brown the turkey in a bit of oil, add spices, add potatoes, soup, zucchini and a splash of water and simmer covered until the zucchini and potatoes are fully cooked. Could all be covered and baked instead on a cooler day.

3.  Sausage and kale pasta

• heat salted water for a pound of pasta
• when water is just about ready to add pasta, put first ingredients into pan for sauce, then cook pasta while waiting for sausage to brown
• sauce: olive oil with 3 cloves smashed garlic and about one pound Italian sausage (I would have used local turkey sausage, but I only could find local pork sausage -- Twin Oak Meats sausage is very lean) is all cooked together until sausage is mildly browned. A few ladlefuls of pasta water and a couple handfuls of kale are added at the same time. Cook covered until saucy but no longer watery, then mix together with drained pasta.

4. Tourteletes
A modern-equipment take on tiny medieval fig pies. The original recipe in Forme of Cury calls for deep-frying the pies, but I decided to bake them instead.

• 1 part butter cut together with 2 parts flour, a sprinkling of water to bind into rollable crust
• filling: chopped dried mission figs, ground cloves, ground nutmeg, ground pepper, all moistened with a) water with saffron moistened and crushed in it and b) honey
• roll out crust thinly, cut into circles with large cookie cutter, place filling into circles and fold over to make little half-moon-shaped pies, seal pies and bake at 350 degrees until starting to turn golden-brown

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Pumpkin Impossible Pie: "impossible" because it's inedible

For a few years, I've had a found-on-the-Internet recipe called Pumpkin Impossible Pie in my recipe box, waiting for the right time to try it out. I was always a bit curious about Impossible Pie since reading the recipe on the back of the Bisquick box as a kid.
Bisquick Impossible Quiche
Bisquick Impossible Cheeseburger Pie
I may even have eaten one of these before, come to think of it, but I forgot what it was like. My husband met my announcement of the plan for dinner with enthusiasm, declaring he had always liked Impossible Pie when it was served during his childhood.

Being all excited about a crazy new idea for dinner, I didn't follow the recipe exactly and decided to dress it up a bit. When I found the recipe, I was attracted to the idea of a totally vegan, low-fat pie without the hassle of making pie crust on a weeknight. The basics remain the same, but instead of using sugar and pumpkin pie spices, I went for a rosemary-flavored savory pie with caramelized onions and just baked the pie in the skillet I cooked the onions in.

After 60 minutes of baking, the pie had a crust on the outside, was not done at all in the center, and appeared to be underdone on the bottom as well. I used a plate to flip it over so the bottom would be on top and, hopefully, bake more fully.

After 80 minutes of baking and an attempt to remove a piece for eating, here's what it looked like:

The end result? Pie that is about to burn on the outside, but is still undercooked on the inside. Disastrously undercooked. It tasted salty like baking powder and starchy like uncooked flour. The texture was gummy. Additionally, the rosemary was so strong it was astringent and medicinal, and the brown and savory onions had nothing positive to add. To sum up, below is a recipe NOT to follow.

Impossible-to-eat Pumpkin Pie, or How to Ruin the Happy Nostalgia Your Spouse Had for Impossible Pie

2 Tbsp vegan margarine
2 medium-sized onions
pinch salt
1 1/2 c soy milk
1 Tbsp Ener-G egg replacer
1/4 cup water
1 Tbsp cornstarch
2 c pumpkin puree (perhaps my thawed frozen pumpkin puree was part of the problem? it still had a little moisture, which the original recipe recommends against)
1/2 c rice flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp crushed dried rosemary

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Melt margarine in 10-inch oven-proof skillet. Slice onions thinly and cook slowly until lightly caramelized and tender. Whisk or blend soy milk with Ener-G, water, cornstarch, then whisk/blend in the rest of the ingredients. Pour pumpkin mix into the skillet with the onions and bake 50 to 80 minutes until top and edges are browned and the center begins to set. Allow to cool, then discard and eat something else for dinner.

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On the 14th Day of Christmas, my true love sent to me / An updated blog entry

Sorry for the unexpected one-month hiatus, all. This past December was a time of action, not written words. Much baking and cooking took place, but none of it was documented here at the time it was happening.

Some highlights of the Christmas season in my kitchen:
1. Testing out a household favorite, tofu-carrot scramble, on a potluck group. Positive comments from people who liked the gingery taste. The basics of how Andrew and I make this recipe come from the recipe in the Vegetarian Times Complete Cookbook. We just don't measure things anymore and I think I dropped an ingredient or two from the recipe long ago before I taught it to Andrew. I'm still debating on whether I should make this dish at work. Its appearance is not as good as its taste, I'm afraid. It's a bit like chunky yellow-orange vomit on rice. Maybe a nice garnish of chopped cilantro and using julienned carrot instead of grated would make it look more appealing.
2. The 15th-century pie recipe that looked doomed to fail until the moment I put some in my mouth. Another potluck experiment, going from a historical recipe that gave zero amounts or proportions, just a list of what ingredients to add when (and I think even these were out of order, so I adjusted based on the order of instructions in similar recipes from other sources from the same country). This pie was like a savory custard with dried fruit for sweetness. I messed up baking the crust blind (forgot the parchment paper under the pie weights), the crust shrank considerably, the custard took much longer than expected to even start pretending to set, I used far too much beef marrow so the filling looked a bit greasy while baking, I added the spices during the wrong step of the process (no matter, it seems). I couldn't believe how good it tasted after all those mistakes and how ugly it looked. And the crust was the flakiest I've ever made. Gives a whole new understanding of a "foolproof" recipe. However, my version needs some serious revising before putting it out here for others to try.
3. Are krumkaker still good after being frozen? This year's batch of Norwegian Christmas cookies was donated to science. I have also learned that the plural of krumkake is krumkaker. I packed the cookies in a box and gave them to one of the owners of the cafe/kitchen store where I work so she could experiment with how long they are still delicious when wrapped tightly in plastic (she reports the batch from two days before Christmas was still good on New Year's Day) and whether they could maintain crispness after being frozen and thawed. Still waiting on the lab results from the frozen portion of the batch.

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Quiet Thanksgiving dinner for two

Thanksgiving Day was not a large celebration this year, just me and my husband. Since we both had the day off work, I slept in and spent the rest of the morning cooking up a special small feast with lots of local items.

Here's our feast table just before we dig in:

The menu

Main dish:
a locally-raised organic chicken, roasted with rosemary sprigs (from my own backyard) stuffed in the cavity

Side dishes:
golden beets from the special Thanksgiving farmer's market, roasted in the pan with the chicken
spaghetti squash from a friend's backyard, roasted and seasoned with salt and pepper, butter and brown sugar
rose heart radishes from the CSA, boiled and then sauced with a roux-based white sauce with chicken bouillon base and lactose-free milk

Dessert:
pumpkin custard in pie form, with prosciutto bits rolled into the crust

To drink:
a California Chardonnay

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What's cooking this week? Berries!

Our friends who have turned their entire back yard over to food production occasionally find some of the crops getting away from them. My husband and I benefit when they invite us over to help with the picking in exchange for some of the harvest.

This week, we helped pick blackberries and gooseberries. Many thorn scratches and pokes later, we had enough blackberries to eat them for breakfast a few days and make jam plus enough gooseberries for a pie.

I have not eaten a gooseberry pie since I was a kid in Minnesota, where my parents found some growing wild one year and brought them home. This year's pie is just out of the oven, so I can't say yet whether it tastes the way the first one did. The berries are different, since the ones we picked this week were light red and sweeter than the tart green ones I remember from the childhood pie.

Here is the recipe I devised after looking up a few recipes online and picking out what I liked from about three of them.

Gooseberry Pie
makes one double-crust 9-inch pie

3 1/2 cups gooseberries
250 to 300 grams (about 1 1/2 cups) sugar (use more or less depending on tartness desired)
3 Tbsp instant tapioca (e.g. Minit)
1/2 tsp salt
two 9-inch pie crusts (my favorite recipe is from Cooks Illustrated, part of their "Best Blueberry Pie" article from 2008)
Optional: 2 Tbsp of milk and 1 Tbsp sugar

Prepare pie plate with bottom crust. Place in refrigerator while cooking filling. Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Crush 1/2 berries in a saucepan, add sugar, tapioca and salt and 1 tsp water to wet the sugar.  Cook gently until mixture comes to a boil, stir frequently and cook another 3 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in the rest of the berries.

Roll out top pie crust. Pour filling into prepared bottom pie crust, then cover with top crust. Cut off excess crust and crimp the edges to seal in the filling. If desired, brush top crust with the optional 2 Tbsp milk and sprinkle with the optional 1 Tbsp sugar. Cut slits and holes in top crust to allow steam to escape. Bake 35 minutes at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Cover edges with aluminum foil if the crust edge starts to brown.

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Tartes de Chare: Playing with 15th-Century pork pie

Another recipe for the previously-mentioned SCA event lunch. I combined parts of two 15th-Century English recipes that appear in the same text, starting with the simpler of two filling preparations and adding a little fruit for color and flavor.

The part that may be a bit of a stretch from the original recipe is using roasted ham as the meat filling. In the interests of making this a very economical lunch so we can charge each diner only $5 for a full meal including beverages and sweets, I'm using a meat that we all know will be on sale right around Easter time, which is near the date of the event. Meats were preserved by salting and curing before 1600, but I have not done sufficient research on the topic to be able to claim with confidence that 21st-Century America's familiar Easter ham was also known to medieval Europeans.

The original recipes were taken from A Fifteenth Century Cookry Boke, a collection of English recipes compiled and left largely unaltered by John L. Anderson. The first Tartes de Chare recipe calls for a filling of ground fresh pork, raw eggs, fried pine nuts and currants, pepper, ginger powder, cinnamon, sugar, saffron, salt, dates, prunes, and small birds browned in grease. These are put into a large "cofynne," a double-crust pie dough that stands by itself around the filling without a pie pan, and baked. The second recipe, "Tartes de Chare Another Manere," also available on the website Gode Cookery, is also baked in a "cofynne" and has a filling of broiled pork that is ground and mixed with egg yolk, pepper, ginger and honey. Neither recipe gives any indication of amounts of any ingredient or baking time or the ingredients for the pie crusts.

I had a little help with the "cofynne" recipe from A Temperance of Cooks, a website that gives modern measurements for early recipes. The one I chose is called "Good White Crust," which was adapted by ATOC from Gervase Markham's 1615 book The English Housewife. I divided the dough into two portions, one of about 2/3 to 3/4 of the dough for the bottom crust, the other 1/3 to 1/4 for the top crust.

Here is my recipe for the filling:

1 1/2 pounds roasted bone-in ham (not honey ham or precooked canned ham), minced (I don't have a meat grinder, so I minced and minced and minced)
3 eggs
3 oz prunes, chopped
2 oz raisins or currants
1/4 tsp ginger powder
2 Tbsp honey
freshly ground black pepper

Mix ham thoroughly with eggs. Sprinkle liberally with black pepper, add fruit and ginger and honey and mix. Roll out bottom crust and lay on baking sheet. Pile filling inside, press into shape and raise the crust up around the filling with straight sides. Lay on the top crust and crimp to seal. Cut an X in the top crust to let out steam. Bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit until center of pie bubbles and crust browns, about 1 hour 10 minutes (I also gave it an additional 10 minutes with the oven off, which may not have been necessary). Cool on rack, wrap in dishtowel and refrigerate.

The pie is best served cold a day or two later because the pie slices so neatly and the fruit flavor is not overpowered by the ham. I served it with a sauce made from dry mustard, red wine vinegar and honey, which tasted great, but really cleared out the sinuses like horseradish. On leftovers, I tried a milder mixture of dijon mustard and honey, which I liked better. Mustard sauce, my tasters told me, is really essential to making the crust less dry and more appetizing.

If I ever baked a ham for Easter, I'd definitely bring out this recipe to take care of the leftovers. Most of the other ingredients are usually hanging around our house. For a dish with this many eggs and this much meat, I was pleasantly surprised that eating a piece for lunch the day after the tasting dinner didn't give my guts fits.

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