Henne en Bokenade

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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Taking it slow in the new year

During the first few days of the new year, my husband is still on winter break from his job at the university and I have extra days off from the cafe for New Year's Day and other days when business is really slow. It's cold outside and we're craving something warming and uncomplicated to eat after all the party food and cookies in December. And since at least one of us will be around in the late morning, it's a great time to drag out the slow cooker to make those dishes that finish themselves while you're having an afternoon at home relaxing or catching up on chores.

Before I go into the recipes, I just wanted to have a bit of a rant about slow cookers: you can't really just "set it and forget it," despite the conventional wisdom about them. They are slow enough to give you an afternoon off from cooking dinner, but not slow enough for the working woman or man who is away from home for 9 or 10 hours. Also, many recipes involve adding an ingredient an hour before the end of cooking time or changing the temperature partway through cooking. Unless you're talking very large slow cooker with very large amount of food in it (impractical for a two-person household like mine, where the five-quart cooker feeds us for two or three days) or you've got a fancier slow cooker than mine that can be set to only cook for a preset amount of time and then change itself to warmer mode, you just can't fill the slow cooker at breakfast and not look at it till dinner and expect the food to be anything but overcooked. My basic, no-frills Crock-Pot is a tool that can only be used for days off or staggered schedules where one of us has the morning off and the other comes home at the right time in the evening to turn off the cooking.

This planning problem is, of course, no trouble at all when one person is at home all day during winter break. On just one such day this week, Andrew further modified a Taste of Home recipe I'd already changed to accommodate our tastes. Here's our result:

Slow-Cooked White Chicken Chili
serves 4 to 5

2 chicken legs (bone-in, skin-on)
1 medium onion, chopped
1-2 Tbsp canola oil
1 garlic clove, minced
1 1/2 cup water
1 tsp Minor's chicken base concentrate
1 15-oz can Great Northern beans
1 1/4 cup frozen corn kernels
1 can chopped green chiles
2 tsp ground cumin

Brown chicken legs in oil. Remove and place in 5-quart slow cooker. Saute onions in oil until tender, add garlic and cook one more minute. Transfer to slow cooker, on top of chicken. Add all other ingredients. Cover and cook on low for 6 hours until chicken is no longer pink and leg bones pull apart easily.

Here's another recipe full of warmth, good smells, and beany heartiness that I made yesterday, once again making heavy modifications to a Taste of Home recipe. I was inspired to make cornbread (a Cook's Illustrated recipe) to accompany this one. Cut a piece of cornbread in half in a bowl and pour the stew right on top to let the juices soak into the bread.

Four-Bean Stew
serves 4 to 6

8 oz leftover roasted ham (OK to leave on the fatty bits)
2 medium onions, chopped
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 Tbsp canola oil
1 clove garlic, minced
2/3 cup packed brown sugar
1/3 cup apple cider vinegar
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp ground dry mustard
1 28-oz can Boston-style baked beans (no tomato, flavored with molasses)
1 16-oz can kidney beans, rinsed and drained
1 16-oz can butter beans, rinsed and drained
1 15-oz can whole green beans, drained

Chop ham and set aside. Saute onions in oil, add garlic and cook another minute or two. Stir in sugar, cider vinegar, mustard and salt. Simmer about 10 minutes. Stir all ingredients together in 5-quart slow cooker and cook on low 6 hours. Stir occasionally to avoid sticking. Serve over split pieces of cornbread.

Special note to my mother: Hey, Mom, I finally got over my long-standing hatred of cornbread! I found a couple of recipes that I actually like. They both include actual corn kernels, along with lots of fat or cream, and not very much sugar. For small portions only.

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Pork, cabbage, apples, grains: several stews

In August, I taught a class I called "Early Period Cooking Demo: Recipes for 10th Century England" at an SCA event. I've been trying to push myself this year to create recipes that could be appropriate for my 10th Century Saxon/Norse persona and to practice starting and controlling open fires for cooking.

My desire for the class was to offer 1) a demonstration of the ways in which a fire for cooking is maintained differently from a fire for warming a room, 2) a demonstration of different cooking methods known to people in 10th Century England, 3) recipes that could be appropriate to the time and place I'm portraying, a task complicated by the lack of recipe books for this period, 4) recipes I could reproduce on camping outings to reduce my reliance on modern recipes and foods.

The following recipe is influenced by two things: reading about food combinations in Ann Hagen's Bible of early English cooking, Anglo-Saxon Food and Drink: Production, Processing, Distribution and Consumption; and thinking about combinations of foods that would be in season together for a culture that was restricted in dietary choices by seasonal availability of foodstuffs. Bacon is a pork product that can be kept a few months in a cool place after the slaughter of a hog, so it's not tied to only one season. Apples, cabbages and fresh herbs are fall foods known to Anglo-Saxons as well as modern Americans. It's possible that my choice of kale for the later two versions of the stew is more authentic than heading cabbages, but I'm not certain the heading cabbages were unknown to 10th Century England.

Pork, Apple and Cabbage Stew
serves 4-6

1/2 pound wood-smoked bacon or other fresh or preserved pork, chopped
lard or bacon drippings or butter, if needed
1 large or 2 small onions, chopped
1 small green cabbage, cored and chopped
1 pound apples, peeled, cored and chopped
2 to 3 sprigs fresh thyme
1 small sprig fresh rosemary, chopped fine or 1/2 tsp dried rosemary leaves
1/2 cup barley, oat groats or wheat berries
chicken broth or water
salt and pepper to taste

Cook bacon in pot until it starts to crisp, or cook other pork in fat until browned. Skim some fat with a spoon if desired. Add onions and cook in fat until translucent. Add cabbage, apples, grain and herbs, then cover with water or broth and bring to a low boil over open flame. Move pot over to cooler area of fire and simmer with pot covered until the grains are tender. Stir occasionally. Add more water/broth if stew starts to become too thick and sticks to bottom of pot. Season with salt and pepper.

On the first cooking attempt, this stew was tasty. The apples were an interesting sweet contrast to the savory bacon and herbs. It was a little watered down because I added probably twice the amount of broth that would be necessary to keep the grains moist. It may have been more flavorful had I left in the bacon drippings, but I spooned them off to use in making a flatbread for the class.

Later at home, I tried out a similar stew to combine leftover bacon from the class, some rice that had been left from a previous meal, and kale from a friend's garden. Kale is a member of the same family of vegetables as green cabbage, so I figured I couldn't go wrong. The herbs are replaced by cumin, one of my favorite spices.

With this photo, I learn that really good food photographers wait until the stew is done steaming to take the photo so the food shows up clearly. Unlike those really good food photographers, if I let the food cool off first, I have to eat a cold supper.


Pork, Apple and Cabbage Stew play-at-home version
serves 4

1/2 pound hardwood-smoked bacon, chopped
2 small onions, chopped
1 bunch kale (large handful of stems), destemmed and chopped
2 large apples, peeled, cored and chopped
3 cups chicken stock
1 tsp cumin 
1 heaping cup leftover brown rice
salt and pepper to taste

For home stove, never mind the bits in the directions about moving the pot around on the fire.

While camping out this past weekend, I made the stew from memory over our little campfire and added in some fresh radishes from our weekly box from Henry's Farm. Once again, kale from our friends' garden substitutes for green cabbage. Thank you, "vegetable fairies" Viv and Nicole! I didn't chop the bacon in order to keep my cutting board from having both uncooked meat and raw veggies on it. Because I cooked it very crisp, it fell apart into bite-sized chunks as I stirred it around the pot with other ingredients. I forgot to bring onions, so this stew was yet another variant of the original. I left in the bacon grease because there was no other recipe to use it in later. The finished stew needed very little salt.

Pork, Apple and Cabbage Stew another way
serves 3 very hungry people
 
1/2 pound hardwood-smoked bacon
8 small radishes, chopped
2 large apples, cored and chopped, but with peels on
1 pound kale, destemmed and chopped
1/2 cup barley
3 cups chicken stock
2 tsp fresh thyme leaves stripped from stems
freshly ground white peppercorns and salt to taste

Follow directions as in first stew, but leave all the bacon drippings in the pot and omit the step of cooking onions in bacon fat.

Everything tastes better when eaten outside, and this stew is no exception to that rule. On a chilly fall night when dinner wasn't ready until after dark, it warmed me and my two camping companions physically and emotionally from the inside out.
 

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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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Easter leftovers idea: orange stew

This stew gets its name not because it has oranges in it, but because it is a bright-orange-colored, warm and nutritious resting place for the last bits of ham left over from Easter dinner. Since our balmy spring weather of March this year turned chilly and wetter as April went on, a new soupy dish was exactly what I needed to stay invigorated.

Orange Stew
2 Tbsp butter
2 large sweet potatoes, peeled and chunked (about 2 to 2.5 pounds)
4 medium-sized carrots, peeled and chunked
2 cups chicken stock
1/2 tsp ground sage
seasoning salt (such as Lowry's) to taste
black pepper to taste
1/2 pound leftover Easter ham, diced

Melt the butter in a large pot. add the vegetables, stock and seasonings (go easy on the salt, the ham will add more later) and bring to a boil. Turn down the heat, cover and simmer until the vegetables are tender enough to mash. Add additional stock if stew is too thick for your liking. Mash vegetables, add ham and cook over medium-low heat until ham is heated through. Reseason if needed.

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