Feast Booklet - Agincourt
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.
December 19th, 2009 at 2:41 am
[...] the full set online at flickr. The GAYS* @ Trash, The Agincourt Hotel, Sydney - 13 June, 2009 …Medieval Cooking » Blog Archive » Feast Booklet - AgincourtThis is the feast booklet for the feast that I did at Agincourt. The skill that I need to figure out [...]