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.

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