Some days planning is over-rated. I was standing in the kitchen of a friend and watching them bottle the Stout that they had made and realized that I was looking at a ton of yeast that I could be making bread out of. I asked for the barm and was gifted two containers full of beer and barm. Originally it was thought that it would take up to 72 hours to settle, but it took until the next morning and I immediately started looking for recipes and found the following:

http://bewitchingkitchen.com/2009/09/09/barm-bread/

The first instruction is:
Heat the beer to 160F, remove from the heat and quickly add the flour. Transfer to a bowl and allow it to cool to 68F, then add your white levain.

This would kill off any of the live yeast and then re-populate it with the yeast from the levain. I decided that I would try this method, as well as simply feeding the barm with flour and water like I would any starter. I put 250g of barm in each container and followed the heating instructions for one (adding 1 T commercial yeast rather than a levain, because I didn’t have a levain) and just fed the other. They were labled “heated” and “unheated”.

I really need better names.

Notes:
2/2
The heated starter, because of the amount of yeast in it, was really bubbly and vigorous. It tripled in volume in about an hour, surprising me greatly. The unheated one was bubbly, but the overall appearance was smoother. The heated starter collapsed about an hour after it trebled.

2/3
Added 1/2 c bread flour and 1/2 c water at around 8:00 a.m.
About 50 minutes later, the heated starter was very bubbly and the unheated one was increasing at a rate of about half the amount of the heated starter.
At 10:00 a.m. the heated starter was very bubbly and the unheated starter was now increasing at the same rate.
At about 11:00 a.m., I started following the instructions to make bread. I used Jennifer Heise’s recipe for barm bread (http://www.gallowglass.org/jadwiga/SCA/cooking/recipes/bread1.html) with some modifications for the unheated yeast. I did not add honey and did not add baking powder.
At 1:50 p.m. the unheated yeast bread had increased by half.

At around 3:00 p.m. it was time to knead the heated yeast bread and realize that I really needed to name these things because the whole heated/unheated thing is really confusing to write. Based upon the recommendation of a good friend, I shall now refer to them as “Thor” (heated) and “Grim” (unheated).

I put the raising bread into the refrigerator overnight around 4:00 p.m. as my window for bread making was closing and I wanted to slow everything down. The most notable thing that happened was that the starters were both continuing to double and bubble well into the night. I checked them before bed and they were both just over doubled (not quite trebled). The activity had slowed by morning. I fed them again on 2/4 with 1/2 c bread flour and 1/4 c filtered water and they commenced to bubbling again in about 30 minutes.

2/4
The bread came out of the refrigerator around 8:30 a.m. and Thor was smooth and beautiful and looked ready for baking. I heated the oven to 450F and stuck a dutch oven into it for 40 minutes. Then I dusted the bottom of the pot with corn meal and plopped the raw dough into the hot pot, put the cover on, placed the whole shebang into the oven, and dropped the temperature to 425F. I set the timer for 30 minutes and walked away.

About fifteen minutes into the baking time I realized that I had made a fatal error in both loaves - I forgot to add salt. This will decrease the flavor in the final loaves, but as I will be doing this again soon, I can fix it the second time around.

When I took the lid of the pot off, I was greeted by a beautiful, rounded loaf that smelled absolutely amazing. I put the bread back in for another 15 minutes, uncovered, and gloated to a friend online that I would have fresh bread in 15 minutes.

Why did I cover and uncover my bread? Crust. There are a few methods for gaining an awesome, crispy crust and one of them is trapping the steam generated by the liquid cooking off of the bread with a pot lid. You can also spray the top of the loaf with water and/or put a cup of ice cubes in another container on the bottom rack of the oven when you put the bread into the oven. I’ve used all of these methods and they all work very well.

While Thor was being baked, I put Grim on top of the stove in a bread pan and allowed it to come up to room temperature with the intent to bake it when Thor was done.

I got impatient, and good thing, because Thor was ready to come out of the oven five minutes before I had set the timer. The bread needed salt, but we knew that. It had a nice crumb and was spongy and very tasty. You could faintly smell the beer, but the taste wasn’t there.

I slung Grim into the oven at 425F and set the timer for an hour. In retrospect, it should have been more like 45 minutes at 450F. The crumb was similar to Thor but was darker and a bit more dense, which is more because of the wheat flour than anything else. I have to wait for my husband to get home from work for a final determination on the bread’s tastyness to people who aren’t me.

To recap the recipes:

THOR
This is the heated and repopulated starter.
The recipe used was: http://bewitchingkitchen.com/2009/09/09/barm-bread/
The dough was refrigerated overnight to slow the raising process.
I then heated up a pan at 450F for 40 minutes, put some corn meal in the bottom of it and put the dough into the pot.
The oven door was closed and the heat was dropped to 425F and the bread cooked, with the lid on the pot, for 30 minutes. Then the lid was removed and the bread was cooked for another 10 minutes.

GRIM
This is the barm that was fed and nothing else done to/with it.
The recipe used was: http://www.gallowglass.org/jadwiga/SCA/cooking/recipes/bread1.html
The dough was refrigerated overnight to slow the raising process.
This dough was put in a standard bread pan and cooked at 425F for 45 minutes.

In both cases, I checked to make sure that the bread was 210F internally before slicing them open.

The chicken documentation is not complete, but is due for review by the competition committee on 7 February 2010, so I will be working on edits and generally making sense of something that has been very difficult for me to write.

I have a good friend that I have neglected to invite to dinner in too damn long, so I am fixing that this Saturday by making a medieval feast for him, his girlfriend, and another couple.  The recipes are all going to be out of the dutch cookbook and will be served as traditional courses, rather than in the medieval fashion as I don’t have the time to do that many dishes at this time.

The current menu is:
Onion Sop
Capon in the Spanish Manner
Stewed Spinach

The original recipes and the translation (Copyright, Jennifer Strobel):
19 Om een ajuynsoppe te maken.
Neemt ajuyn, snijt die in schijven ende roost hem in olye met de corsten van de brooden. Als dit nu wat gesoden heeft, so doet er wat azijns by, wat byers, wat suyckers ende wat gengeberpoeder. Laet dit tesamen sieden totdat het begint dick te werden ende alsdan in de schotel ghedaen ende gegeten.

19 How to make onion sop.
Take onion, cut it in slices and roast it in oil with crusts of bread. When this now has cooked a while, so put therewith some vinegar, some beer, some sugar and some ginger powder. Leave this together to boil until it begins to become thick and then place it in the dish to be then eaten.

85 Om eenen capoen te braden op het Spaensche.
Neemt een half pont rozijnen ende soveel versch speck alst u belieft ende soveel loocx als ghy wilt. Cappet ooc met het speck wel cleyn, mengelet dan met de rozijnen ende steket tsamen in den capoen. Steeckt den capoen dan aen den spitte ende droopt hem wel met boter ende dienet ter tafelen.

85 How to roast a capon in the Spanish [manner].
Take a half pound of raisins and as much fresh bacon as you please and as much garlic as you want. Chop it together with the bacon very small, then mix with the raisins and put it in the capon. Then put the capon on the spit and baste it well with butter and serve to the diners.

205 Om spinagie te stoven.
Neempt spinagie ende sietse morwe. Dout dan t’water schoon uut. Neemt dan geschelde appelen. Captse wel cleyn met de spinagie. Setse tesamen te stoven met wijn ende een weynich verjuys, suycker, gengheber ende boter. Laet dit tsamen stoven totdat ghenoech is. Rechtet dan in schotelkens ende stroyt er gengeber over. Dientse dan dese spijse. Ghy moecht oock ronde taertkens backen ofte ronde coecxkens in de boter gefruyt.

205 To stew spinach.
Take spinach and boil it soft. Then remove the clean water. Then take peeled apples. Chop very small with the spinach. Set together to stew with wine and a bit of verjuice, sugar, ginger and butter. Let this stew together until is enough. Dress it then in small dishes and strew thereover ginger. Then serve this food. You might also bake small round tarts, or small round cakes fried in butter.

The redactions will be posted as I create them. The one for the chicken is going to be a challenge as this is the dish that I make when I want to impress company as it’s really a small amount of work for a huge culinary payoff. I’m excited about making it for non-SCAdian friends and getting their take on the flavors and textures.

My guests are providing dessert and I am excited to try it. I love when people share food with me that they have made, no matter how complicated or simple, I love sharing that experience.

The other projects that I am working on right now will get updates of their own, especially the updates to the Frisian food research that I will be presenting at the Royal University of the Midrealm on 20 February 2010. I will also be presenting what I learned while doing chicken research and participating in the suburban farming roundtable.

As usual, I have little updates and links of interest posted on the Medieval Cooking Facebook Page, so if you haven’t added the page, please consider doing so.

I am hoping to have another update in about a week with more details about the chicken research paper, with the paper then being available after I have turned it in for review on 7 February 2010. Look here for that and there will be some non-food updates while I get ready to participate in The Pent at Ice Dragon.

It’s the first day of 2010 and I am engaging in the same New Years activities as many of you: recovering from being up very late last night and reviewing my list of tasks for the upcoming quarter:

January 2010
-Submit research paper for the competition in March to editorial team.
-Make final revisions to paper after editorial team reviews it.
-Use more recent information to update the Frisian Cuisine research for presentation in February.
-Build a class around the research paper.
-Continue working on Pentathlon entries (The Ice Dragon Pentathlon is the premier A&S competition in my Kingdom).

February 2010
-Complete updates to Frisian Cuisine paper and the Chicken Research paper for the classes that I’m teaching at RUM.
-Write up documentation for the entries to Ice Dragon Pentathlon.
-Teach at RUM on 20 February.

March 2010
-Clean up documentation and complete all Pent activities.
-Compete in the Pentathlon on 29 March.

April 2010
-Breathe.
-Plan for 2nd Quarter of 2010

Most importantly, I need to make updates a bigger priority. For the duration of 2010, I promise one update every two weeks. There may be more, but there won’t be fewer, and it will either be something that I’m currently working on, some philosophy about the creative process, or a recipe or redaction. There will be more updates on the facebook group as I have finally found a reasonable way to do that without hitting more than three pages to get things updated across the board.

I am continuing steady progress on the research and I am happy to share what I am learning along the way. While I am focused on that, you will be also be seeing some older work or some updated information on older works, including an article about my past research and how some of it is horribly flawed and how I deal with that - because not everything I do is perfect and learning from bad conclusions is important.

I hope that your year is a productive and happy one and I appreciate your readership and look forward to more interaction in the upcoming months.

The history of the domesticated chicken is going well, at least the parts that I have completed. I was editing the section that touched upon the ancestor of the domestic chicken - commonly held to be the red jungle fowl. This piece of information had been given to me as an uncontested fact from the first time I had asked the question. When I was writing it, I wanted to cite an authoritative source so did a simple search in the hopes of just finding a reasonable citation and then moving on. What I found was far more interesting and made me very sad that I hadn’t spent more time paying attention in biology class.

In a couple of periodicals, there was a reference to a Swedish study (”Identification of the Yellow Skin Gene Reveals a Hybrid Origin of the Domestic Chicken”) that was published in the Public Library of Science’s Genetics Journal. The article is available here. This research is the first

This research says that the yellow skin gene, which is a common gene in domestic chickens, is not found in red jungle fowl but are found in grey jungle fowl. This is the first definitive proof that there is a hybrid origin to the domestic chicken. Previously, Dr. F. B. Hutt had posited that

This genetic debate aside, what is clear is that domesticated chickens were likely to have been brought to the West on the same routes as the spice trade. This would have been the most logical way for chickens to have moved into Western Europe. It would also be logical to assume that there were chickens in the Near East and China that may have been interbred with those chickens, providing the the variety of characteristics that they eventually displayed. Unfortunately, I have found no documentation of this, nor have I found documentation that mentions the specifics of the early introduction of chickens in Western Europe. The first documentation that I can find about chickens is in 77 ACE in Platina’s “The Historie of Nature”, which I will discuss in a later update.

The last few weeks have been working through my research paper. It has grown significantly from the documentation of a single breed of chicken and is now a survey of domesticated chickens since the earliest records of domestication through to the latter part of the 17th century (I am using Digby, which was published in 1669). This is, as you may imagine, a gigantic project that is taking up a great deal of time to write. There are times that I feel like I have my arms around it and then more information comes in and I find out that I was only seeing one part of the thing. It’s like deciding that you’ve caught an elephant by grabbing its toe.

This means less time to update here and update at Facebook, and I feel terribly neglectful of that and wish that there were just more hours in the day. Updates will be sporadic for a while longer while I beat the piece into shape and have it edited and ready to go to the judges for their review.

What I want to share with you today, and why the title is what it is, is that I am also working on a translation for the cooking portion of the competition. The recipe is one from Carolus Battus’ work “Eenen seer schonen ende excellenten cocbok”

Original Recipe:
1. Om eyeren te vollen
Neemt herde eyeren, peltsse, ende clooftse in den midden ende neemt de doyeren uut. Meemt dan groen cruyt, te weten: roosmarijn, margeleyn, ende diergelijcke. Neemt dan eenen pot waters, ende letet op de seude commen, doet er dan u cruyt in, ende latet een walleken ofte twee opsieden. Neemt dan het cruyt weder uut het water, ende doetet in eenen mortier, ende doet er de herde eyeren by, stampet tesamen wel cleyn ende doet er dan by: suycker, cannell, foeylie, gyneber, gepoedert, ende roeret wel ondereen. Alsdan so vollet hol van den witte der eyeren met desen cruyde, elck half ey besonder. Alsdan soo neempt een panne met boter, laetse bruyn werdern, endelegt de halve gevolde eyeren daerin, met het cruyt tegen de panne, ende laetse so roosten. Ghy moechtse oock wel om keeran, ende als u dunckt datse genoech zijn, so dientse ter tafelen, ende strooyt er suycher op.

Translation (in progress) by Jennifer Strobel
1. To make eggs
Take hard egg, peel and cut in the middle and take the yolk out. Take then green herbs to soak: rosemary, marjoram, and such. Take then a pot [or quart] of water and leave in the steam bowl. Put there then you herbs in and let a small boiler or two [opsieden] take then the herbs again out the water and put in a morter and put there the hard egg [by] stamp [tesamen] much smaller and put there then [by] sugar, cinnamon, mace, ginger [melted?] and stir much together also. Thus fill hollow of the white of the egg with the same herbs each half [ey] separately also as take a pan with butter let brown become and lay the half filled egg therein with the herbs toward the pan and leave as roast you might also much how turn and also you think that enough be. Thus serve for the table and strew there sugar on.

Discussion
This sounds like it’s hard boiled eggs that have had the yolks removed, mixed with herbs and then put in a mortar where it’s mashed with additional cinnamon, mace, and ginger. Then the egg is re-stuffed and fried in butter. The final product is then garnished with sugar.

There are a number of words that I need to find, which is a matter of doing some poking around to locate them. The one that is especially interesting to me is the word “tesamen” as it’s seemingly superfluous in the flow of the sentence. We shall see.

The big decision is going to be what herbs to use. I will be making this dish in the spring and that limits the available fresh herbs…well, because I’m not entirely okay with explaining away using out-of-season ingredients because I live in the modern world. I could grow rosemary and marjoram inside of the house and chervil should be available locally. Chervil is seasonal for spring and it is documentable to the Roman era (the Romans purportedly spread chervil throughout the empire), so I should be able to find evidence that it was in the Netherlands during the 16th century.

It’s very much a first step on a much longer road, but this translation is not nearly as difficult as some others I’ve done and the missing words aren’t impossible to find. Once I finish the research paper, I can share with you the details about the breed of chicken that I am raising and whose eggs will be used for the recipe that I will be using in the competition.

Let me start with my being thankful that my daughter only has one appendix - which was removed a month and a half ahead of schedule on Friday - because we may now stay out of hospital for longer than a week before going back.

I was considering what to do for an update for today and realized that the only thing that is happening in my world right now is chicken documentation. It being the traditional month for novel writing, I have dedicated myself to producing 400 words a night on the research - and ran into a brick wall on Monday night. My word count is where I want it to be, but it’s not good work, it’s confusing, jumbled work.

The problem is that I have a lot of information spread time-wise from the Roman Empire to 1602 and covers Europe and parts of the Near East. I can tell you about how chicken coops were similar in Rome and in Palestine during the same period of time, and that the coops described in thirteenth century France were about the same. I can tell you that the way that the Romans understood how to feed chickens (differently for meat and for egg laying) was the same understanding that medieval people had throughout the entirety of our period of study and even somewhat agreed on what was best to feed chickens for each purpose.

I can tell you lots of things, but not in a way that moves gracefully from time period to time period. I have decided to scrap my original way of accumulating data and have moved to the 3×5 card method, which has already yielded a bit more order and has created a few segues from time period to time period that I am more pleased with, but it is still in the frustrating phase.

So, there will be a lot of fits and starts of my research paper here. I have a solid grasp of the information, it’s just not forming itself well enough to be meaningful to anyone, including me, so I will share with all of you while I go through the process of writing the paper.

So, some more frequent updates for a while and until life gets entirely back to normal - Thanksgiving and Christmas are coming up for us, which will make my schedule exciting again. There should be more food experimentation as I also have a dish that I am entering in the same competition as the research paper and need to write the documentation for that, which is a much easier prospect because it’s food documentation and that’s familiar and makes sense.

This is the feast booklet for the feast that I did at Agincourt. The skill that I need to figure out is recording everything while I’m doing it. Often when I’m in the midst of doing a feast, I just make the food happen, rather than recording everything. My ability to reproduce my own food has been excellent, so it doesn’t really encourage my writing things down. Which doesn’t help me communicate things better, and that’s what I have been working on. It may be a case of doing one means that I will only detract from the other and may never improve on my skills as a booklet-writer as I’d rather be a good cook than a good feast booklet writer.

The booklet is in pdf form here. Please visit the Adobe Reader site and download the free pdf reader if you don’t already have one.

It is in booklet form, so if you print it out, you will get several 8.5″x11″ pages that you can fold in half and have the booklet. The information is already available here in pieces, but the booklet provides a few of the recipes.

The recipes are:

Seeded Soup
Original (Le Menagier de Paris, transcribed by Jérome Pichon):
GRAVÉ OU SEYMÉ est potage d’iver. Pelez oignons et les cuisiez tous hachiés, puis les frisiez en un pot; or convient avoir vostre poullaille fendue sur le dos et hallée sur le gril au feu de charbon, ou se c’est veel, aussi; et qu’ils soient mis par morceaulx soit veel, ou par quartiers se c’est poulaille, et les mettez avec les oignons dedans le pot; puis avoir pain blanc harlé sur le gril et trempé au boullon d’autre char: et puis broyez gingembre, clou, graine et poivre long, deffaire de vertjus et de vin, sans couler, mettre d’une part: puis broyer le pain et couler par l’estamine et mettre au brouet, et tout couler ensemble et boulir; puis drécier.
Nota que l’en dit seurfrire pour ce que c’est en un pot, et se c’estoit en une paelle de fer, l’en diroit frire.

Translation (Janet Hinson):
SEEDED SOUP is a winter soup. Peel onions and cook them all chopped up, then fry them in a pot; it is appropriate to have your poultry split through the back and browned on the grill over a coal fire, or if it is veal, the same; and whether it is veal cut in pieces or chicken cut in quarters, put it with the onions in the pot; then have white bread browned on the grill and moistened with some other meat stock: and then grind ginger, clove, grain and long pepper, mix with verjuice and wine, without sieving, and set aside: then grind the bread and put through the sieve and add to the soup, and strain it all together and boil; then serve.

Note that we say ’sur-fry’ when it is in a pot, and ‘fry’ in an iron skillet.

Redaction (Jennifer Strobel):
6 cups chicken stock
2 cups onions, quartered and thinly sliced
4-5 lbs chicken, any parts will do, bone in
3 T olive oil
1 T salt
1 T powdered ginger
1 t powdered cloves
1 t ground long pepper (I used my mortar and pestle to grind it)

Take your chicken, rinse and dry it.
Cook your chicken on a grill or cook the pieces in a cast iron pan. The idea is to get some char and get the chicken cooked the whole way through. Using a grill is closer to the original recipe, however, if you don’t want to deal with the grill, just use the cast iron pan. You can get some nice flavor that way as well.
I used no seasoning on the chicken.
When the chicken is cooked through, cut the chicken into an approximate 1/4″ dice.
Put the olive oil into a pot on the stove.
When the oil is hot, add the onions.
Cook the onions until they are getting soft, then add the salt.
Continue cooking the onions until they are translucent and there is some liquid sweated out.
Add the chicken and mix thoroughly.
Add the ginger, cloves, and long pepper.
Mix again.
Add the chicken stock and bring to a boil.
Reduce the heat and then simmer for about 30 minutes to blend the flavors.
According to the original recipe, this soup would have been thickened with bread crumbs. This texture is typically found to be unpleasant to the modern palate. For this reason alone I did not include it in the redaction.

Pancakes
Dry Ingredients:
1 cup wheat flour
½ cup spelt flour
2 heaping teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon sugar
a pinch of salt

Wet Ingredients:
1 1/3 cup whole milk
2 eggs
2 tablespoons melted butter

Put the wet and then the dry ingredients into a blender and blend for a few seconds.
Turn off the blender and scrape down the sides with a spatula.
Blend for another couple of seconds, until everything is mixed together.
Scoop just short of ¼ cup of batter onto a hot griddle and cook until the edges of the pancake are dry and the top is covered in bubbles.
Flip the pancake for about 25 seconds and then take off of the griddle.

Pears in Wine
This is a recipe that I got from Katla Ulfeðinn, who served it at the Queen’s Rapier Tournament earlier this month.

Ingredients:
8 oz. Poached pears in light syrup (canned pears)
1 cup Bordeaux Wine
2 T Fresh ginger, grated

Drain the pears, reserving the syrup.
Mix the wine and syrup and warm in a saucepan.
Add the ginger.
When the wine mixture is warm, pour it over the pears.

Candied Almonds
This recipe is not one that I found through any period source. The process itself is simple and the ingredients are all traceable to the middle ages. The amount of sugar used, however, would be more likely to have happened in the sixteenth rather than the fourteenth century. Sugar was available to the French during the fourteenth century, however, the culinary use of sugar was not widespread until the fifteenth century . To be more correct for fourteenth century France, honey would have been used instead of sugar.

Ingredients:
3 c whole, unblanched, almonds
1 c white sugar
1 T ground nutmeg
1 ½ T ground cinnamon
1 t ground cloves
3 egg whites, lightly beaten

Preheat the oven to 300° Fahrenheit.
Mix together the sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves in a one gallon baggie.
The almonds should first be put into the bowl with the egg whites and thoroughly coated.
Pour the coated almonds into the gallon baggie with the sugar and spices, seal the bag, and shake thoroughly to ensure that all of the almonds are coated.
Spread out the coated almonds onto a cookie sheet and put in the oven for 30 minutes.
Check the almonds, they should be mostly dry.
Be very careful while checking them at this point as the sugar has gotten very hot and will be sticky and lava-like.
They may need an additional 15 minutes to become completely dry.
Scrape into whatever container you’re going to keep them in.
I used a large, flat container and covered it loosely with aluminum foil for seven days.
For longer storage, I would recommend cooling the almonds either on parchment paper or on a rack and when they are completely cooled, transfer them to an airtight container.

The last two weeks have been stressful. The weekend before last, my daughter was hospitalized with an asthma “event” and we spent several days in hospital. I then spent two days catching up on everything. Then last Saturday, my daughter got the stomach flu and it has hung on for the majority of this week. For the child that I typically described as “freakishly healthy”, this has been upsetting and difficult for everyone.

The little oasis of sanity for me has been cooking. I’ve been making soup for the Agincourt event and cooking for an event this Saturday while my daughter recovers. Unfortunately, this means few updates on facebook and late updates here.

For this week, I offer a redaction for Seeded Soup:

This is a dish from Le Menagier de Paris. I used the translation done by Janet Hinson.

SEEDED SOUP is a winter soup. Peel onions and cook them all chopped up, then fry them in a pot; it is appropriate to have your poultry split through the back and browned on the grill over a coal fire, or if it is veal, the same; and whether it is veal cut in pieces or chicken cut in quarters, put it with the onions in the pot; then have white bread browned on the grill and moistened with some other meat stock: and then grind ginger, clove, grain and long pepper, mix with verjuice and wine, without sieving, and set aside: then grind the bread and put through the sieve and add to the soup, and strain it all together and boil; then serve.

Note that we say ’sur-fry’ when it is in a pot, and ‘fry’ in an iron skillet.

Redaction

6 cups chicken stock
2 cups onions, quartered and thinly sliced
4-5 lbs chicken, any parts will do, bone in
3 T olive oil
1 T salt
1 T powdered ginger
1 t powdered cloves
1 t ground long pepper (I used my mortar and pestle to grind it)

• Take your chicken, rinse and dry it.
• Cook your chicken on a grill or cook the pieces in a cast iron pan. The idea is to get some char and get the chicken cooked the whole way through. Using a grill is closer to the original recipe, however, if you don’t want to deal with the grill, just use the cast iron pan. You can get some nice flavor that way as well.
• I used no seasoning on the chicken.
• When the chicken is cooked through, cut the chicken into an approximate 1/4″ dice.
• Put the olive oil into a pot on the stove.
• When the oil is hot, add the onions.
• Cook the onions until they are getting soft, then add the salt.
• Continue cooking the onions until they are translucent and there is some liquid sweated out.
• Add the chicken and mix thoroughly.
• Add the ginger, cloves, and long pepper.
• Mix again.
• Add the chicken stock and bring to a boil.
• Reduce the heat and then simmer for about 30 minutes to blend the flavors.

According to the original recipe, this soup would have been thickened with bread crumbs. This texture is typically found to be unpleasant to the modern palate. For this reason alone I did not include it in the redaction. The batch that I made yesterday was without verjuice as the sourness isn’t necessarily going to be popular with the people that I’d be cooking for at the event, but on Friday when I have the first “First Friday Cooking at Odriana’s” meeting, I will be adding the verjuice. Well, not really verjuice, but the juice of two Granny Smith apples. Verjuice was the juice of either unripe grapes or crabapples (according to the fine folks of the SCA_Cooks list) and running two Granny Smiths through my juicer is a good enough analog to get the desired flavor.

I have an acquaintance that has a habit of making updates in the form of a list so that he can cover a multitude of topics in a compact space. Taking my cue from his form, this part of the update will be in the form of a list.

1. The feast menu and notes are up: Here’s the link. The notes are found at the bottom of the page if you follow the link for “Feast Notes”.
2. There was a rumor that there was to be a whole pig served for coronation feast, now that seems to have been nixed, this means that my plan of pork loin for the “stuffed pig” may be back-burnered in favor of tasty, tasty roast piggies.
3. I have decided to make the sausages for the Agincourt feast and that is a daunting, but exciting prospect. I will be learning a lot about how to do that and sharing what I learn here.
4. The column is a nicely-sized challenge and I’ve finally targeted how to tackle it in a reasonable way. I’m going to determine a focus topic for each month.

Creativity
The thing that I have been struggling with the most lately is a sense of disconnectedness from other people and a dip in creativity. I’ve been struggling with what to do with myself now that I don’t have a child at home all day and we live in the middle of nowhere, so there aren’t people to talk to during the day. This has taken a toll on my creativity as I busy myself throughout the day with home projects to try and stay away from the computer as I don’t wish to sit all day. Last night, I had a breakthrough - I decided to learn how to gild.

Gilding is using a sheet of gold leaf or foil to create a metallic effect on a painting or scroll. You can even use gilding on wood for an Icon or to fancy up a wooden box. The process is to use gesso, which is slaked plaster, either colored or plain, as the glue to affix the gold leaf. I had some colored (brick red) gesso and a book of gold leaves and figured that I’d do something on pergamena (my preferred medium) to learn how to do it. Previously, I’d used Schminke’s Gold Gouache, which I love and will continue to use when necessary. During the Middle Ages, the substitute for gold leaf would have been “shell gold” which is ground gold leaf in a medium. My understanding is that it’s called shell gold because it was typical to use a shell for a palette for this color.

My attempt was mostly successful. I got the gold leaf onto the pergamena without too much trouble and with only some spots left uncovered. I figured out that you can re-wet the gesso with a brush and then re-apply the leaf where there were larger holes. I then used a piece of smooth glass that a friend of mine had gifted me after a trip to Wales to burnish the gold. I did that entirely because I don’t have a proper burnisher and it did the trick nicely.

Once I stepped back and looked at my work, the floodgates opened for me. I felt accomplished and enjoyed the process of learning greatly. The things that had been blocked were no longer blocked and it was such a creative rush that I am having trouble finding words to describe it.

It couldn’t have come at a better time, really.

Agincourt Feast
As mentioned earlier, I have decided on a menu for this feast, and I’m pleased with the outcome. I’ve already started making chicken stock for the soup and the plan for pre-cooking is falling into place nicely. The feast itself is going to be a significant challenge as it’s being held in a private home, with a kitchen to match. There is, fortunately, a dumbwaiter from the garage to the kitchen so we can put together a kitchen in the garage and move the food upstairs easily. The plating will be easier as I’m doing it as a series of trays so we can move each course from the basement to the kitchen for plating and just stage everything upstairs. I’m excited about the feast and will be talking about it a lot in the upcoming weeks before the event itself.

That’s all I have for this week and hope to be a bit more prolific now that I am no longer creatively blocked.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided that making bacon was a skill that I should have. So, I talked to a friend that had made bacon and then did some quick online research. It seemed pretty straightforward, so I decided to dive in and just do it. I had a like-minded friend, so we did this together.

We purchased several pork bellies (also called pork side) of varying weights and I decided to attempt a one day cure (which is really just aggressive seasoning) on one piece and to go through the extended bacon-making process with the other. The one day cure did not work as desired, but we did end up with a tasty piece of grilled pork belly. With the other piece, I used about 1/4 c canning salt on each side of the pork and rubbed it in liberally, covering each surface. Within just a couple of hours, there was about 1/4 c of liquid in the bottom of the container. I put the whole thing in the refrigerator and for the next three days I added a liberal sprinkling of salt and rubbed it into each surface of the meat. For two of those three days, I also poured some maple syrup over the meat and rubbed it onto each surface after adding the salt (day one was the remainder of some B grade maple syrup and day two I had to switch to A grade).

On the fourth day, I took the bacon out, rinsed it, and patted it dry. The smoking technique that I was going to use is cold smoking, which involves removing the meat from the fire in some fashion. There are a number of designs, including a nice two-oil barrel design that has the fire in the bottom and the food to be smoked is in the top barrel. The smoke rises through two metal pipes that connect the barrels. I didn’t have that kind of budget or welding skill so I went with another design.

On Good Eats, Alton Brown covered bacon making (Scrap Iron Chef) and created a cold smoker using a series of three gym lockers. I wasn’t so fortunate as to have several lockers to use, so I decided to take the basic structure and instead of using two paper boxes (I’m weird about fire), I used a trash can, a hot plate, and a smoker box to create the smoke. The top of the trash can was covered with a flat box with a hole cut into it and a piece of flexible ducting attached to the hole. I chose not to compromise the structural integrity of the trash can lid so that I can use the can alone as a hot smoker. I used a cardboard box for the cold side. I merely placed the opening towards the front and cut a hole in the side for the other side of the ducting.

This is my original plan

The hot side of the smoker

The cold side of the smoker

The smoker in action

Clearly, I need to trim up the box over the hot side, but I wanted to get things moving and didn’t want to waste time messing about with it the first time. I smoked the bacon for six hours with a combination of apple wood and hickory smoke. There were a few issues:

• After the initial burn, I never got the buildup of smoke that I really needed/wanted.
• We used a CPU fan to draw smoke into the cold side, which just seemed to dissipate the smoke, not draw it, so we pulled it out and kept allowing physics to do its thing.

In general, the product was tasty. The maple was more prevalent as a smell and was in the aftertaste, which could be improved by using all B grade syrup. I sliced it pretty thin and served it alone and as a garnish with dinner. It was generally popular and I was pleased with the result. Next time, there will be improvements on the smoker, mostly in how the smoke is generated. I haven’t come up with anything as of yet, but will do so before I do this again.