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Strawberry Raid IV Laurel Prize Display: Fermented Porridge

Strawberry Raid IV is just over, and it included a Laurel Prize Display. This is an arrangement whereby aspiring artisans of whatever kind bring out their stuff to display it, and the attending Laurels (and everyone else) gets to look at it, poke it, ask questions, and in my case, taste it.

My overall Big Arts & Sciences project at the moment is a reconstruction of pre-Norman Irish cuisine. The outcrop of this at Strawberry Raid was fermented porridges (which I've done before) and this time I tried a ten-day ferment.

The Prize Display is an excellent format. It gives room to talk about some of the super-geeky aspects of a project, and to see other people doing the same with theirs. I got all the Laurels present, pretty much, to try the porridges, and explained the context and the likely usage.

The four-day ferment was the by-now-familiar slightly cheesy, slightly sour taste. The ten-day one was, from my point of view, spectacularly sour, too much so for my own palate. However, several people, including some of the Laurels, preferred it to the 4-day one, and said they'd happily eat it on, variously, crackers, bread, or with jam.

Master Alexandre pointed out that it's essentially sauerkraut with oatmeal.

Someone (I now forget who) asked about why porridge would have been fermented. I reckon it's to fill some of the taste gap in the winter - sowens, the Scottish dish that's essentially the same thing, is associated with New Year and the months that follow, and in Irish food, with very little in the way of preservation available, there would have been only a few different tastes through the winter. So the variation of fermenting it would have alleviated that considerably.

(Image of Magnifica Magdalena Grace Vane and myself, with the two pots of porridge between us. Photo by Viscountess Agnes Boncour.)

The Porridge Project

[thejoyofseax]

Sausage Making with Daniel Serra

Daniel Serra is one of the authors of An Early Meal – a Viking Age Cookbook & Culinary Odyssey. He was running a sausage-making workshop at the Boyne Valley Viking Experience, so I found it absolutely necessary to go.

These Viking things are interesting, but they never quite grab me. Too much focus on fighting (which then looks unsafe from the SCA point of view), and less on day-to-day life, although I have to say there were some very nice cooking setups at this one. There were many stalls - about 60% jewellery - from which I bought a few odds and ends of things; some nice S-hooks for my camp kitchen, a ladle and some other bits. I thought about wearing garb, but didn't, and didn't really miss it.

Anyway. The sausage making included everything except preparing the intestine. We started with chopping the meat - 2 parts beef, 2 parts pork, and 1 part cold-smoked bacon. This was reduced to pea-sized bits, and since there were about ten people working on it, and only a couple of kilos of meat, it was quickly enough done.

The meat was then mixed together, and pounded. This is a process that has largely been lost from modern cookery, I think - we've replaced it with mincing (grinding, in American English), which doesn't do quite the same thing. Many of the Arabic recipes I've worked with have included instructions to pound the meat, and it really does make a difference both in texture and taste; pounded meat takes on the flavour of vegetables, herbs and spices better.

We then added flavourings - mustard, prepared the previous day, in one batch, and wild garlic, juniper and thyme in the other. Also a little water, which adds overall coherency, and helps steam the sausages from inside a little in cooking. These were mixed in by hand. Notably, we didn't add any salt.

The final step was to stuff the actual sausages. Daniel had gotten hold of far more intestine than was needed, so we cut bits off at about 60cm lengths. He had a bunch of little horn tools - essentially funnels - which were segments of cow horn, narrower at one end. These apparently turn up in Swedish flea markets all the time. You put the intestine over the narrow end, hold it in place, and stuff the meat in through the wider end. Some were wider at the narrow end than others, and I think the optimal width there is probably about 12-15mm; the intestine otherwise tends to slide off.

The most effective way to make sure the intestine is not tangled is to blow into the wide end of the horn once it's on; this puffs out the intestine like a balloon, and provides a very amusing short squeaky noise as air comes out the other end.

We then stuffed meat through the horn segments and into the sausages. This was remarkably easy, in the end; the intestine is strong stuff, and deals pretty well with being manipulated. There were more issues with it sliding off the horn device than anything else. The end result was a neat pile of sausages.

Daniel reckoned these were either boiled (with a reference to "kettle-worms" in one saga) or grilled, rather than fried. These examples were boiled, and came out very well.

Someone noted that sausages were a particularly useful way of providing meat to people who didn't have many teeth (yet, for children, or still, for older people). Daniel also said that these sausages could be smoked to preserve them.

There were a few other interesting bits of conversation about other cookery topics, of course, but I'll note and credit those when they arise in other posts. It was an excellent day.

[thejoyofseax]

Peas & Lye

Superb post here about medieval pea-processing. It's a really good illustration of how processes that were reasonably well-known at the time, and which are described in medieval texts, are still difficult to reconstruct because the whole method has been lost.

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Du Fait De Cuisine, Flintheath

I'm just back from Du Fait De Cuisine in Flintheath, a small event focused entirely on food. There were 32 people there, I'm told, and there were a number of excellent classes. I'm already watching the ripples go out from conversations there into the wider community, which I feel is a fantastic thing.

(Photo by Lady Amy of Osgoldcross)

From my own notes: Master Thomas Flamanc says that spit-roasted meat is notably better if it's rotated constantly, rather than turned a quarter turn every few minutes, as is many people's practice. This does necessitate an extra body in the kitchen to turn it, someone who knows what they're doing in order to slow down and speed up on differing sides for even cooking. He noted that spit-turners were some of the highest-paid people in medieval kitchens.

Thomas also talked about the different firewoods in use; we settled on beech and birch as being the best for most purposes, with oak burning hot and for a long time, and with good coals. Órlaith Ildánach, hearing of this conversation later via the Cullacht Sealgairí Hubertach Discord server, put up some research on Irish sources concerning firewood.

Magnifica Marcella di Cavallino's Feast Planning 101 class brought up the idea of calibrating ovens with a thermometer, both on actual temperature, and time to reach it. Anecdotal information seems to indicate that oven thermostats are dodgy pieces of equipment at best. There was also discussion of allowing time for plating in the kitchen schedule, which is something I know I've missed out on in the past.

Marcella also talked about themes, and the importance of varying food such that no one ingredient occurs in all the dishes, even if it is the theme.

My own Early Irish Foodways class went well, and there were a number of interesting bits of discussion around it, including one with Master Duncan Kerr about the hāngi, a Maori method of pit-roasting which I think lines up well enough with the Irish fulacht fiadh to give this - or something like it - some credence as a cooking method. And indeed, there's some solid reasoning out there which indicates that what we're traditionally told are boiling pits are in fact roasting pits.

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Egg-Enriched Porridge

Thinking further about the German Wholegrain Porridges, I was looking again at the bit about adding eggs. As noted there, that's the final step for frumenty, and also for modern egg fried rice.

This morning, I gave it a shot, and added two eggs to standard oatmeal porridge made with milk. The result was good, and extremely filling - I can normally absent-mindedly dispose of a 1.5 cup oatmeal/3 cup milk batch while reading without really noticing, and I couldn't finish the same amount of the egg-enriched version.

It definitely lends itself to savoury additions - I tried ham, butter and grated cheddar, and had most success with the cheese. I'd like to try it with cumbled blue cheese at some stage, and also with scallions, in the way that Chinese rice porridge is eaten. Wild garlic scapes might also be interesting, and indeed most vegetables could go over the top pretty well. I tried a little jam, and didn't find it to go well, but tastes might vary. I'm also wondering if there's anything in early medieval Ireland that would cover an umami taste, like soy sauce in East Asia, and murri in medieval Arabic food.

I'm considering plausible ways of serving these foods, too. I think that a central pot of porridge on a table or on the floor, surrounded by various additions and condiments, around which people sit to eat from small bowls, would be interesting. This reflects period dining for many other places.

[thejoyofseax]

German Whole-Grain Porridges, 14th-15th Century

Maestro Giano has put up a couple of recipes from the 14th-15th century German Dorotheenkloster MS. These take whole grains - rice and oats - parboil them, finish them in milk, and add eggs or egg yolks before serving.

There are a couple of things of interest here - the main one being the use of whole grains, of course, but also the addition of eggs, which reminds me of frumenty, an English and French dish served as an accompaniment to venison.

On the one hand, the whole grains cut down massively on the amount of processing that needs to be done on the oats before it's eaten. Pre-Norman Ireland had plenty of mills (there's evidence for a tide mill from the early 7th century, and plenty of water-mills thereafter), but they must have had a transactional element to their use, and it's likely that not everyone could afford that. So the ability to cook the otherwise unprocessed grains would have been attractive for the less wealthy.

At the same time, I can't imagine that parboiling and then cooking in milk is a quick process, and one of the most important things about porridge as a meal is that, given rolled or other cracked grains, they cook pretty quickly (although not as fast as modern porridge oats, which are usually steamed before we ever get to them). So there's a balance of expenditure of fire and fuel to take into account.

Giano's recipes also include eggs, and in early Ireland, those would be a more expensive proposition. He reckons these dishes are high status, and I'm inclined to agree.

But for a future experiment, I'll try whole oats in water and then milk over a wood and turf fire, and see where we get to. Having actual times to attach to this cookery, and knowing how much difference the eggs make, will be another detail in the likelihood of techniques and practices in early Irish foodways.

[thejoyofseax]

Tart de ffruyte

Casting about for something to cook at Dun in Mara's January Arts & Sciences Day (because one should never pass up a chance to experiment on an audience, I feel), I found a recipe from Harleian MS. 4016 (an English cookery book from about 1450). It goes: Tart de ffruyte. Take figges, and seth hem in wyne, and grinde hem smale, And take hem vppe into a vessell; And take pouder peper, Canell, Clowes, Maces, pouder ginger, pynes, grete reysouns of couraunce, saffroñ, and salte, and cast thereto; and þeñ make faire lowe coffyns, and couche þis stuff there-iñ, and plonte pynes aboue; and kut dates and fressh salmoñ in faire peces, or elles fressh eles, and parboyle hem a litull in wyne, and couche thereoñ; And couche the coffyns faire with þe same paaste, and endore the coffyñ withoute with saffron & almond mylke; and set hem in þe oveñ and lete bake.

So the overall gist here is a pie of figs and raisins, salmon (or eel) and dates, pre-cooked in wine, with a layer of pine nuts, and flavoured with a set of sweet spices. The combination of fish, fruit and pine nuts was unusual enough that I couldn't quite guess at what it would be like (I'm usually good at this).

I cooked down about 600g of dried figs in half a bottle of white wine, and mashed them into not-quite-a-paste, along with the spices (black pepper, cinnamon, cloves, mace, and ginger and salt). I left out the pine nuts from that mix, since I'd be putting in more on top, and those things are _expensive_, and saffron, since it'd almost certainly be drowned out by the other spices, and I don't care about the colour there.

That went into a (bought) pastry case, and then the layer of pine nuts on top (after some debated, untoasted), and salmon and dates (poached in the other half of the bottle of white wine) on top of that. The salmon flakes nicely so that it's almost spreadable, the dates not so much. That got capped off with a pastry crust, which I glazed with milk (not having almond milk to hand, and again not being bothered about the saffron colour). The whole thing got a little over half an hour in the oven at 200C. It came out of the oven coherent, and not overflowing anywhere, which is frankly unusual in my pies.

It was fine. The tastes didn't integrate worth speaking of; it was fish alongside fruit, and the pine nuts kind-of vanished (I might toast them next time). Thinking about it, it needs something else to bring it together, and I reckon a sauce to apply over the whole lot is the way to go. What my palate wants with it is a sharp fruit sauce - raspberry, say - but the only raspberry sauce I can find around the same period is German, and noted by foreigners there as being unusual (thank you, Maestro Giano).

It is slightly more coherent, taste-wise, when re-heated, but applying grated cheddar cheese or a modern chutney-ish relish (Ballymaloe) was definitely the thing to make it work properly.

A few people at the A&S Day had suggestions - lemon, a white-ish sauce, probably not garlic considering the fruit - and I poked around a bit in godecookery.com to see what I could find. There were a couple of possibilities - a walnut and garlic sauce, a ginger and mustard (from the same manuscript, even) suggested for roast heron, a Lumbard mustard from the Forme of Cury, and slightly more exotically, a blackberry sauce from Martino.

However, there's a recipe for "breney" in the the Noble Boke off Cookery, which has a sauce: "put wyne in a pot and clarified hony saunders canelle peper clowes maces pynes dates mynced raissins of corans put ther to vinegar and sett it on the fyer. and let it boile then sethe fegges in wyne grind them and draw them through a strener and cast ther to and let them boile to gedur" - and that has basically all the same ingredients, so would work perfectly as a sauce for this pie. So next time (possibly with eels, for variety, if I can get hold of them), I'll try that. (There are two different versions of the breney in Two Fifteenth Century Cookery-Books, too.)

[thejoyofseax]

Arabic Lunch, Corónú Nollaig na mBan

For Drachenwald's 12th Night Coronation, The Honourable Lords Arpad and Unegen hatched the idea of a journey on the Silk Road, starting in Italy, moving through the Middle East and Mongolia to China in different meals. My contribution to this was Saturday's lunch, as an Arabic meal.

Lunch at Coronation needs to be filling, survive being kept hot for an arbitrary length of time, and cope with a wide range of allergies, tolerances, likes and dislikes. Some of the royalty were not keen on lamb, which rather limits what can be done in medieval Arabic cuisine.

Eventually I settled on some recipes from A Treasure Trove of Benefits and Variety at the Table: A Fourteenth-Century Egyptian Cookbook (2018), translated by Nawal Nasrallah.

(49) Recipe for rummāniyya bi-dajāj (pomegranate stew with chicken)

Boil a fine plump chicken (dajāj fāʾiq) in salted water, along with galangal (khūlanjān) and cassia (dār Ṣīnī), a stick of each, until it is almost done.

When it is completely cooked, take fresh pomegranate seeds, both sweet and sour. Press them with a stone, put them in a sieve (ghirbāl) and press them down [to extract] the juice. Take half the juice and add it to the pot. Blend the second half with some [finely crushed] almonds, and add it to the pot [in the final stage] when it is simmering on the smoldering fire, to thicken the sauce. Season it with aromatic spices, rosewater, and camphor. Keep the pot on the smoldering fire to simmer, and then remove.

Modern Version: Boil chicken pieces (thigh or leg, ideally) in salted water with galangal root and a stick of cinnamon. Add pomegranate juice (which we can just buy, rather than needing to make) to the pot, and mix some more with ground almond, adding it to the pot toward the end of cooking as a thickener. Season with ground ginger, ground cloves, and ground cardamom.

Notes: I left out the camphor, since getting food-grade stuff reliably is very difficult, and it’s a more alien taste than I want to use in a main dish. Rosewater is on the do-not-serve list for some of the royalty too, so I left it out.

(101) Recipe for taqliyyat yaqṭīn (fried dish with gourd)

You need meat, gourd, garlic, black pepper, chickpeas, cilantro, and a small amount of polished rice (ruzz mubayyaḍ). Boil the meat, [drain off its broth], and fry it with garlic, black pepper, and cilantro. Return the broth to it, and let it boil on a strong fire. Throw in the gourd and rice, and if preferred, some meatballs (mudaqqaqa), and then remove.

Modern Version: Simmer stewing beef in water until it’s falling apart (needs to be started early!). When it’s cooked, drain the broth, and fry off the meat with garlic and black pepper. Put it back in the broth with chopped butternut squash pieces, chickpeas, and rice, and cook until rice is done. Remove from the pot with a slotted spoon so that broth mostly drains away, and pile on platters.

Notes: Cilantro/coriander tastes like soap to many people, so I left it out here, and served it as a garnish instead. Exactly what the medieval Arabic gourd was is a bit of a mystery; butternut squash is an easily available substitute in the right direction. Chickpeas are listed at the beginning, but not mentioned in the method, so my guess was that they go in with the other ingredients at the end. These dishes were served with plain rice and flatbreads, with chopped coriander as an optional garnish, and there was also a vegan version of the rummāniyya bi-dajāj, replacing the chicken with chickpeas and aubergine pieces.

Everything seemed to go down well, and a few people were very pleased with some of the dishes, even the somewhat invented vegan version.

[thejoyofseax]

SCA Social Media

Aside from being a cooking nerd, I'm also very interested in communications and information flow. It would be reasonable to say that inasmuch as a Pelican is awarded for any one thing, I got mine in comms and diplomacy. (Or at least, I assume so; I don't have visibility on the discussions the Pelican circle had about me pre-elevation.) I'm also Drachenwald's social media minister.

There's a thing I see cropping up recently among Facebook users in the various social media: a strongly stated dislike of Discord. For context, there's a shift underway in Drachenwald for the bulk of day to day communications, from Facebook to Discord. Discord has a wide range of technical advantages over Facebook, and it's more used by the younger generations who are (gradually) taking over running things from the older folks. But there are many people who will happily state that they hate Discord.

I don't like Facebook, myself. It was a decent enough medium in about 2014; it has gotten worse in every measurable way since (except shareholder value, of course). It's particularly useless for trying to get information to people; every part of it is governed by an algorithm that selects what to show on any given screen, based mostly on what will annoy them most (annoyance leads to more time spent looking at the screen than any other emotion, ergo more time looking at ads, ergo more money for Meta).

Discord (at present; I make zero long-term predictions, and fully expect it to start getting worse at some point) has no such issues - the information flow on it is under the control of the server admin, pretty much, and it's searchable and categorisable as needed. Also, I just like the feel of Discord more; it's a lot more like a real conversation than Facebook's shouting-across-the-corporate-lobby atmosphere.

But this dislike of the new medium isn't new. Humans, for all we're supposed to like novelty, dislike change. I wrote as a comment in one of the discussions on Facebook:

"Facebook was massively polarising when it first started, because it was "taking over" from discussion lists. Discussion lists were massively polarising when they first started because they were taking over (assume scare quotes from here on) from newsgroups and phone trees. Phone trees and newsgroups were absolutely HATED when they started, taking over from paper newsletters (some of which were from before printing and photocopying was a thing, and were produced by mimeographic printing). If I dig around, I can find things written by Crusty Old Peers at each stage of this maintaining that the New Thing Will Destroy The SCA."

And you can extend that beyond the SCA right back to Plato complaining that the written word will prevent people from learning properly as they did in oral traditions.

My current position on this is that we should be using our websites - which are the one medium we actually "own", generally - as the source of actual information. We can then link to that from anywhere else on the internet, social or not. And the conversations can fall where they may, for each branch and household and other grouping, because honestly, that's how it's always been. If people don't like Discord, they don't have to use it, and it's only us unfortunate comms people who have to use all the different media.

(I recognise the irony of posting this on Another Social Medium. But Tumblr behaves more like a website for publication purposes, and comes with many of the advantages for getting information to people - RSS feeds, deep linking, etc.)

I'm also going to teach some classes on how to actually use Discord, I think. I've been steeped in talkers, IRC, and other channel-and-text media as long as I've been online, which is closing on 30 years now, so there are almost certainly aspects of functionality there that I take for granted and which are not evident to people unused to it. Or they're expecting it to work the same way as Facebook does, and don't have the technical experience to jump to a different medium. Either way, a start-with-the-basics actual-demonstration of how to use it is almost certainly useful.

[thejoyofseax]

This was my entry for the Arts & Sciences competition at Champions of Lough Devnaree this year, which had a theme of "Autumn". I haven't entered a poem before, although I write them pretty frequently. There's some commentary at the end of the documentation about that.

Autumn Sonnet

My harvest is more words and deeds than grains, My crops more thoughts than leaves and solid roots,  Others’ regard a measure of my gains, A harvest grown from springtime’s solemn moots. But harvest reaped brings earthen joy to winter, Provides the food that through the cold sustains; As days go dim, what’s brought becomes the centre And in the frost the fallow field remains. As summer’s light from bounty now pours forth, The summer’s labours, gentler, warm us more Than planting, gleaning, reaping did, to sort Into the dark well-armed, warmed to the core. But how the mind will not lie still, wanting To go past the snow, to next year’s planting.

Introduction

This poem is written as an English Sonnet in or around the 1590s. There are four major considerations for writing a poem in a period style.

Does the form exist?

Do the words exist?

Do the rhymes exist?

Do the concepts exist?

The following discussion looks at each of these.

Form

The sonnet is the most Shakespearean of poems; almost all the poetry William Shakespeare wrote was in this form, and there were plenty of other writers in the late 1500s using it (Spenser, Sidney, Howard, Constable, etc.). Indeed, what’s sometimes called the English Sonnet - to differentiate it from the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet - we frequently know as the Shakespearean Sonnet.

The English sonnet has the usual 14 lines in iambic pentameter (off-on stresses, repeated five times for a total of ten syllables), arranged in three quartets (four lines each) and a couplet at the end. The rhyme scheme is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. In the Italian sonnets, it’s usual for the volta (“turn”) to occur at the 8 line mark - this is where the poem changes direction, presenting a different point of view in the final 6 lines. In the English sonnet, the volta happens more often at the 12-line mark, making the final couplet the differing point of view. In Shakespeare’s poetry, this sometimes makes it almost like a punchline to a joke.

The Autumn Sonnet fits this form exactly, with the turn from consideration of the metaphorical harvest to next year’s planting after 12 lines.

Words

The easiest way to verify a word for this period is to search the works of Shakespeare for it. Every word in the Autumn Sonnet occurs in that text, except for “moot”, in the sense of a gathering or discussion. This term did exist in Shakespearean English - it’s originally Old English - although it wasn’t in common use. The later term “moot point”, for something that has already been decided, was not a 16th century usage, although it does come from the same root.

Rhymes

The ways in which we pronounce words have changed since the 1590s, even where the words remain more or less the same. “Prove” and “love” rhymed for Shakespeare; modern renderings of Sonnet 154, which uses these in the final couplet, either have to live with the words not quite rhyming, or shift the pronunciation of both words a little to meet in the middle.

The rhymes in the Autumn Sonnet are grains/gains, roots/moots, winter/centre, sustains/remains, forth/sort, more/core and wanting/planting. Most of these rhyme in modern English as well; winter/centre is debatable, and wanting/planting, oddly, works in Received Pronunciation, but not in my own Hiberno-English dialect. I am happy that all of these would rhyme reasonably well in the late 17th century, although a great deal would depend on the dialect and accent of the speaker.

Concepts

Finally, there’s the difficult idea of whether concepts were known. There are two aspects here: the main metaphor(s) of the poem, and the metaphors inherent in references and usage of language. The main metaphor of the Autumn Sonnet is the idea that affecting change in society is similar to planting seeds and harvesting crops, and there’s an argument to be made that the main metaphor of a work doesn’t need to be supported by existing language and usage - it’s somewhat in the nature of that metaphor to be new, or underused.

I do not, however, propose that the idea of reaping a harvest as a metaphor for consequences of actions is a new one. This idea has been established at least as far back as Mesopotamian literature. So this is a workhorse of a concept, used here for the specifics of having things change in a group or society over time.

Within the text, there are a number of different concepts and metaphors (and probably some that I have used unconsciously without intending to; this happens).

“Crops more thoughts than leaves and solid roots” requires an abstraction of thoughts as objects or things with individual existence. This is evident throughout Shakespeare, so I’m happy to use it here, and draw attention to it as a concept in and of itself.

“The fallow field remains” is a solidly period concept here; a field left fallow is one that has not been planted, and is left to rest. Winter crops were not yet much used in 16th century agriculture, so fields would have been left empty from the time of harvest and gleaning in autumn through to the ploughing and planting in spring.

“The summer’s labours, gentler, warm us more /  Than planting, gleaning, reaping did”. The idea of some work warming one twice - chopping firewood which is later burned being the principle example - is one beloved of heads of households throughout history, and not much liked by youths and apprentices at any point.

“To sort / Into the dark well-armed” uses two martial terms - to “sort” is to venture forth on a battlefield, an action called a sorty in military terminology of the time. And “well-armed” uses the idea of being prepared for a struggle; that of getting through the winter in this case.

“Warmed to the core” refers to the centre of one’s being. Modernly, we use the term “core” to refer to a central group of muscles, but the idea of the core (apple-core) as a metaphor for the inner centre of something is well-attested throughout Elizabethan texts.

And finally “the mind will not lie still” relies on a concept of mind as something partially separate from the self, a driver of individuality. This is a very strong theme throughout Shakespeare, and indeed it has driven some scholars to theorise that individuality as a concept was somewhat new in the 16th century.

Commentary

I write modern sonnets as my main form, but I use run-on sentences and don’t pay as much attention to strict iambic pentameter. Trying to get my brain to use the stricter form, and end sentences (or at least clauses) at the end of lines was genuinely difficult.

Not shown above are the words I considered and then didn’t use because they were obviously modern, and some that I thought I could use, and then couldn’t find evidence for in 16th century English. “Fecund”, for instance, was definitely a real word in that era, coming from a 15th century Old English word, but it doesn’t seem to have been much used in literature or poetry, so I refrained from using it in the sonnet.

[thejoyofseax]

Ormthing 2024 Feast

The feast for Ormthing is done, and having that last major SCA obligation for the year out of the way seems to have broken the dam on getting some writing up of stuff done too. Well, that, and being on a ferry for four hours on the way back with little enough to do; I was on the verge of feeling bored for a few minutes there.

The idea for Ormthing (a 4-5 day camping event at Caldicot Castle in South Wales) was to produce a Norman feast. Norman is not one of the cuisines from which I often cook, so a little research was in order first. Magnifica Magdelena Grace Vane helped with that, and indeed would have been my co-cook for the event had circumstances of modern life not gotten in her way. It would appear that there's very little out there about Norman food, though. There's more known about WHAT was eaten than there is about early Irish food, for example, but there aren't recipes or many coherent accounts. What's there is not massively different from the 14th-15th century English and French food I think of as "generic medieval", though it's argued in some places to be simpler, and in some to have more in the way of spices and bold tastes - the latter coming from Norman contact with the Arabic world via Sicily. The best guess at a feast menu would therefore be roast meats in plenty, bread, some strong tasting sauces, and - in August - quite a lot of fruit. I also guessed that fritters of some kind would have been available. So with these parameters, I went about constructing a three course feast.

Of course, account had to be taken of the actual circumstance of the feast (evening, after a day in which there were already two tournaments, including the Principality Coronet Tourney, and would be a third to follow, in the castle courtyard by torchlight) and the diners. So I went for having the "main food" of the feast in the first course, with stronger tastes and sweeter things to follow. I reckoned that five roast meats per course with fish to vary would be too much - and indeed, in the unavilability of things like swan, heron, and porpoise - it might be difficult enough to make it to fifteen different meats.

So the initial plan was:

Course the First: Roast Beast (Venison or Beef) Frumenty Chicken Pottage Vegetables

Course the Second: Fish in Aspic Chicken on Sops White Fish in a Fruit Sauce Vegetables

Course the Third: Roast Duck Baked Orchard Fruit Dates in Compost Cream & Honey Fritters

… with bread for all courses.

This did not entirely survive contact with reality. I have done fish in aspic before - indeed, I once did a beautifully clear aspic with a whole trout suspended in it - and nobody, including myself, would actually touch the thing. Aspic is one of those things which sound weird, and turn out to look alien. So I decided not to do that, and replaced that with little dishes of anchovies, which I reckoned would convey the strong taste, and not offend as many people. I was able to get pickled mussels as well, so they were added in.

The vegetables for the first course were buttered turnips and creamed leeks, and for the second, stewed cabbage and a bean pottage.

Master Richard of Salesberie was able to source excellent meat for me, about two-thirds venison and one-third beef. It did, however, arrive from the farm shop already diced, so the idea of roasting it went by the wayside. Instead, I decided to brown it in a pan, and then bake it "in gobbets".

Due to various happenings of availability and illness, I wasn't able to have any of my usual kitchen crew along, but there were volunteers from the big island: Lady Julian ferch Luned, Lady Milada von Schnecken, The Honourable Lady Amphelise de Wodeham, and Halvar Darylson, all good cooks in the their own right. We had a relaxed kitchen with no particular rush, and indeed we were able to take breaks to go see bits of the tourneys, check in on family, and so forth. Early in the day, I saw my lady, Master Agnes Boncuer, have her champion Master Alexander of Derlington take the Coronet for her, which made the high table rather more familiar in terms of tastes and needs.

The kitchen in Caldicot is a modern one, situated just off the banquet hall. It's not big, and with five people in there, it was full. It also came without pots and pans, and there were no trays that would fit the steam oven. We knew about the pots in advance, so Amphelise - who accompanied me shopping, doing the driving and money-handling - and I picked up some the day before. We discovered the lack of suitable trays about three hours before serving, but the baked fruit went into a (slow) gas oven, and disposable roasting trays were procured at speed from the village - by whom I don't know, but I'm very grateful to them! The gas hob and the steam oven were excellent, though, and there was a dishwasher in a separate room.

The menu looks somewhat deceptively simple; there was a LOT of peeling and chopping of fruit and vegetables. We were able to do quite a lot of that during the day and get things going, so we weren't rushed, but I'm taking note of that for future reference, and might consider either some degree of prepping stuff the day before, or buying pre-chopped ingredients where possible.

We had people eating in three places - in the banqueting hall, in a smaller hall down a corridor and some stairs, and then more outside (and down a steep stairs), under a sunshade in the courtyard. This meant that service pretty much had to be to the tables, rather than my usual preference for a buffet. And we hadn't suitable serving dishes for most of what was there, so it was largely a matter of sending out the pots. Master Robert of Canterbury, Lord Trygg of Eplaheimr, Dominic of Flintheath, Lord Etienne the Younger, Kit of Flintheath, Taliesin Denet, and Sidney of Flintheath did excellent work, coping admirably with heavy loads and much stair-climbing.

Everything seemed to be well received, in general. I heard good things about the venison, the turnips, the chicken pottage, the pickled mussels, the chicken on sops, the sweet-and-sour fruit sauce for the fish (but not necessarily the fish itself, I noted), the duck, the orchard fruits, and the fritters. By the time of the duck and the fritters, the torchlight pas d'armes was under way, so I was able to wander round with the dishes and hand them out to the crowd, which is one of my very favourite things to do. We had more than was necessary of pretty much everything after the first course, so if I'm doing something like this again, I'd cut back on the quantities in the second and third courses.

Almost all the feedback I've had was good (with a couple of comments on the blandness of some dishes, but that's countered by others saying they were grateful for the edibility of those). Overall, I'm happy with how things went, considering the limitations of the kitchen and the service - there are things I'd do differently if I'm cooking there again, but that's always the case for the first use of a kitchen. I'll write up a document for the next person using it, and I can at least say that nobody went hungry!

[thejoyofseax]

Bustāniyya & Mis̲h̲mis̲h̲iyya

There was a practice day run by Master Agnes Boncuer in the Scout Hall in Clara the weekend just gone, courtesy of the good offices of THL Órlaith Caomhánach, and I took the opportunity to try out a couple of recipes on people. Both of these I've actually cooked before, but it was mostly before I was taking good notes. The two are from the same page of Annals of the Caliphs' Kitchens, the translation of al-Warraq by Nawal Nasrallah. They are bustāniyya, a dish with orchard produce, and mis̲h̲mis̲h̲iyya, an apricot stew. Both call for chicken rather than "meat", which makes them somewhat unusual.

It's worth noting that in both cases, where the recipe calls for the juice of the fruit, I used fruit and all. This is the "peasant" version of the dishes, at least in my head; while I can see the elite of the elite using just the juices and presenting meat "alone" as the dish, I can't see most cooks of the time leaving out the fruit. So in it went. I will at some point try the posh as-written version.

Here are the two recipes:

Bustāniyya (cooked with orchard produce) from the copy of Abū Samīn Wash small and sour plums and put them in a wet kerchief [to hydrate them] if using the dried variety. If fresh ones are used, [just] add to them some water, press and mash them then strain the liquid. Cut chicken breasts into finger-like strips and add to them whatever you wish of other meats. [Put them in a pot], add the [strained juice of] cherries, and let them boil together. Season the pot with black pepper, mā kāmak̲h̲ (liquid of fermented sauce), olive oil (zayt), some spices, a small amount of sugar, wine vinegar, and 5 walnuts that have been shelled and crushed. [When meat is cooked], break some eggs on it and let them set [with the steam of the pot], God willing. A recipe for mis̲h̲mis̲h̲iyya (apricot stew) Clean and wash a plump chicken. Disjoint it and put it aside. Choose ripe apricots, which are yellow and sour. Put them in a pot with some water and bring them to a boil. Press and mash them with the water they were boiled in, and strain them into a bowl.Now go back to the chicken, put it in a clean pot and add the white part of fresh onion (bayāḍ baṣal), cilantro, and rue [all chopped]. Add as well a piece of galangal, a stick of cassia, and whole pieces of ginger. Light the fire underneath the pot and let it cook. Then sprinkle the pot with onion juice and add enough of the strained apricot liquid to submerge the chicken. Season the pot with coriander seeds, black pepper, and cassia, all ground.Let the pot simmer until [chicken is] cooked and serve it.

For the bustāniyya, I had fresh plums (probably much sweeter than the ones available in period), frozen sweet cherries (definitely sweeter), and I left out the sugar to compensate. Last time I made this was over a slow fire, outdoors, and two different people asked if there was chocolate in it - at least in part due to the colour it arrives at. The plums this time were very juicy, and there was rather too much liquid overall, so that the eggs at the end were submerged and poached, rather than sitting on top to steam. I think the walnuts might be intended as a thickener, rather than anything else - I had them down to a grit, but not to a powder, so they didn't really work that way. "Some spices" is unusually unhelpful for al-Warraq, but I used some cinnamon and ginger. The spices tasted stronger in this than in the other dish.

The mis̲h̲mis̲h̲iyya I've done a few times now, and it's starting to enter my rotation as just another dish I can do at short notice. Chicken and apricots are a good combination in any cuisine, and I'm pretty sure I've seen tagine recipes very much like this. As usual, I left out the rue, because nobody ever knows if they're allergic to it or not, and I don't fancy someone finding out from my cooking.

Both were served with plain rice and stack of pita and naan bread.

They went down well in general, the mis̲h̲mis̲h̲iyya more so (a few people took some home, too). The bustāniyya had 12 eggs in it, and I've only accounted for about four of them being eaten, so either eight people ate them and didn't notice, or were so horrified by the discovery they couldn't talk about it. Daniel was amused; he'd expected his to be a large chunk of chicken, and was very puzzled by finding white and yolk when he cut into it. I suspect that the bustāniyya might actually be better with just the juices, as written, so that'll be the next thing to try.

[thejoyofseax]

Irish Food History: A Companion

I haven't had much time to look at what's been done in academia around Irish Food History for a couple of years. I made some time for it this weekend, and discovered that Irish Food History: A Companion was part-published in 2023, and the first four chapters are free to download. The whole thing should be published this summer.

[thejoyofseax]

Iṭriya (meat dish with dried noodles)

Iṭriya is recipe 86 in the Kanz; page 130 in Nawal Nasrallah's translation, which is the version I'm using. I've cooked this a few times now; a couple of times for Dun in Mara Arts & Science Days, and once for the Travellers' Fare (Friday evening meal, as people are arriving) at Crown just gone.

I say I've cooked this: I actually change it so much it's almost certainly a different dish. But I feel the spirit survives.

Here's Nasrallah's text:

You need meat and dried noodles (iṭriya), black pepper and a bit of coriander for the meatballs (mudaqqaqa). Make meatballs with a small amount of the meat. Pound the meat with a bit of black pepper, coriander, and baked onion. [As for the rest of the meat,] boil it, strain it, and brown it [in fat]. Pound black pepper and cilantro and add them to the [fried] meat. Pour the [strained] broth on them, and when the pot comes to a boil, throw in the meatballs. [Continue cooking] until done.Add dried noodles to the pot, along with snippets of dill (ḥalqat shabath), and a small amount of soaked chickpeas. [Let the pot cook] and then simmer, and serve.

Meat, as ever for the Arabic recipes, should be mutton, and owing to the unavailability of mutton here, I use lamb. Iṭriya itself is noted in a glossary as "thin dried strings of noodles, purchased from the market and measured by cooks in handfuls". I did a bit of poking around as to what might best represent that, and while I do intend to try some Middle Eastern shops and see what they have, wholewheat spaghetti doesn't seem horribly wrong.

I've tried making the meatballs in two ways - with minced lamb, and with chopped lamb (Lady Erin's cleaver skills were employed for this at Crown). Chopped is way better, and this is not the first time I've noticed this - chopped meat and minced meat ("ground meat" for the Americans) are two very different things. A lot of Irish people seem to have the genetic trait whereby coriander tastes like soap, so I substitute parsley. And while I've tried both baked and fried onion, I didn't observe a lot of difference, so I keep using the easier fried version. I kept the black pepper, though!

A good few dishes in both al-Warraq and the Kanz use both meat and meatballs. I really like the effect, I have to say; it gives textural variation without mixing different things and thereby muddying the taste.

"Soaked chickpeas" becomes canned chickpeas, and I think they're not too different. They go very well with the lamb and the parsley. And the dill I add as written.

The overall dish is a dense, hearty thing, with the noodles/spaghetti leading, and plenty of meat in among them. It's a good dish for people arriving at an event, and it's been popular every time I've cooked it. Lady Aoife, who usually eschews carbohydrates, has been known to curse my name and reach for the tongs when it appears.

[thejoyofseax]

An Early Irish Feast for Drachenwald's Spring Crown, AS LVIII

Spring Crown this year was hosted by Dun in Mara in the territory of Glen Rathlin. As with almost all SCA projects, this feast didn't quite hit all the things I intended. In particular, I'd been thinking of having documentation available alongside it, and of a few more dishes that didn't make it in the end. A fermented porridge was high on that list. Next time!

Before I start talking about food, though, let me thank my kitchen crew: THL Órlaith Caomhánach, Lady Gabrielle of Dun in Mara, Noble Mallymkun Rauði, Lady Erin Volya and Cassian of Allyshia. There were a few other folk in and out of the kitchen too (THL Yda Van Boulogne did excellent work on the various flavoured butters), but these five did the bulk of the work. Lady Erin also provided lunch; cooking at Crown for 80 people as her first event cookery is notable.

The main idea here was to lean heavily on seafood, which isn't often done in SCA feasts in my experience, and represents the food of Ireland well. I also wanted to include pork as a main meat, emphasise oats and barley, and use plain vegetables presented well. There were to be condiments on the table, hence Yda's butters: plain, honey, mackerel and garlic-and-chive, as well as green sauce (largely Órlaith's work, with Cass finishing it out). Condiments and the number of them available were an important aspect of Irish medieval hospitality.

I also wanted to nod to the usual progress of early Irish feasts, which started with formal services and frequently ended up so raucous and drunken that the nobility woke up the following morning on the hall floor along with everyone else. So we served to the tables to begin, and then had a less and less orderly buffet.

The first "course" was a set of pottages. The main one was pork, cabbage, onion, carrots, turnips, and barley, which had been slowly cooked down over a number of hours. There was also a version with lamb, for those who couldn't eat pork, and this doubled as the gluten-free version, having no barley. And there was a vegetarian one, including barley, but substituting mushrooms for the meat. These were served with flatbreads, risen yeast dough having been a tough proposition in the Irish climate (and still is, really; that's why the most Irish of breads is soda bread).

As that was consumed, we stocked the buffet with: sides of salmon (steamed then baked), mussels (boiled), monkfish and mackerel (also steamed and baked), chicken pieces (baked), hard-boiled eggs, turnips with butter, carrots with honey, samphire (new to many, most enthused about it), caramelised onions, creamed leeks, buttered cabbage with and without bacon bits, and a broth-based porridge, accompanied by a variety of flatbreads and oat pancakes. And as that all cleared, we put out fruit, some cheese, some oaten biscuits, and a "cheesecake", of sorts.

Everything was plausibly pre-Norman Irish, with the exception of the oaten biscuits and the cheesecake base, which were egregiously modern - although I could argue for something very like them. Simple cooking techniques mean that those are broadly plausible as well - steaming may seem incongruous, but I'll have more to say on that again.

It all seemed to go down well. A number of people said they weren't sure about fish, and then followed with "… but that was great!", and the green sauce, the samphire and the cheesecake were particular hits. The technique of doing a wide variety of simple things usually does well, I find; even the pickiest of eaters can usually have a few things, and the adventurous can pile their plates with a wide variety.

And I had energy enough left to wander around the party hall later offering plates of fruit, cheese and biscuits, which is one of my favourite things to do.

[thejoyofseax]

Steel-Cut Oats

What I think of as "ordinary" porridge is made with rolled oats. However, there are also steel-cut oats (aka pinhead oats, or "Irish oats"). Steel-cut oats are the groat (the oat grain without the kernel) chopped into a few small bits. I bought a pack of them in order to try them out; they almost certainly represent a more period-accurate form of oat porridge.

They have a much longer cooking time than rolled oats (which are steamed, and thereby part-cooked); 8-10 times as long. As such, they're far more likely to burn at the bottom in a moment of inattention. Ask me how I realised this, go on.

So far, I've only made this form of porridge once, and used milk as the liquid. For completeness, I'll also try water and buttermilk. I have to say I'm not as keen on this form, so far, but I suspect that some of that is that my ASD brain has settled on rolled-oats-buttermilk-and-raspberries as the "correct" porridge, and everything else hereafter is going to be wrong unless it's distinct enough to come across as a different dish.

It does resemble the US grits a lot more than rolled oats ever do, though, and I'm given to wonder if there's a rolled corn equivalent.

Thinking about the process of preparing oats to make into porridge, I'm guessing that the actual early Irish preparation is running oat berries (maybe groats) through a quern once or twice. That would, I think, result in a variety of sizes of oat pieces; some quite large and very like this modern form, and others smaller, down to what would essentially be oat flour particles, if the quern caught it just the right way. So the cooked porridge would likely be a bit less homogenous than this, but quite possibly in a pleasing way. That'll be an experiment for a future point, when I have access to some sort of grinder. Or indeed, an actual quern.

Standard (Rolled Oats) Oatmeal Porridge

Back to The Irish Porridge Project

[thejoyofseax]

Crustarde of Flesh

Today's experiment was a pie from Peter Brears' Cooking and Dining in Medieval England which is titled "Crustarde of Flesh". It's from the Forme of Cury originally, and while I've read the original text, I really only paid attention to Brears' version on this occasion. Essentially, you cook some poultry in a lightly sweet spiced broth including some vinegar, put the poultry in your pie crust, scatter on some dried fruit, beat the reserved broth with some eggs, and pour them over the poultry. Then you close up the pie and bake it.

I haven't used this kind of pie filling before, so I wanted to see how it would go, and Dun in Mara's Arts & Sciences day gave me a captive audience.

The pie itself came out looking pretty good, and rather more solid to the touch than I was expecting. This is with shortcrust pastry bought from Lidl; my hands are much too warm for me to be a good pastrychef, and I usually resort to buying it, or having someone else make it.

The egg-and-broth mix solidified to a scrambled-egg-like stuff, and given the proportion of broth to eggs (about 600ml of broth to four eggs), I was genuinely surprised at how much it actually did go solid.

Taste reviews from the audience were good; a few people were not quite convinced by the texture. I felt myself that if I had used five eggs (or perhaps four larger eggs), I'd have gotten a smidge more solidity in, and maybe absorbed the very last of the liquid that was knocking around in the base of the pie.

I think I'll try this form of filling again with different meats. Possibly also more meat; I feel like the egg mixture should be in among the meat pieces rather than in a layer over the top. I think I could also have let the broth cool a little more before beating the eggs into it.

Overall, I was pretty pleased with it, though. Good start to the New Year's cookery!