Pennsic cooking

[ursula]

I spent the afternoon doing a bit of pre-cooking for Pennsic. There's always a tradeoff, when cooking medieval food, between precisely reproducing a recipe and cooking the way medieval people actually cooked, making substitutions based on season and availability. This time, I leaned fairly hard toward the latter approach. I made a beef "hodgepodge" or stew, a greens dish, and medieval hummus; I'll freeze them all for later use.


The farm share gave me fresh oregano. This is used occasionally in medieval recipes, but the internet tells me oregano is also known as "wild marjoram", so I went looking for recipes with marjoram to broaden my scope. I found a French one from 1604, for a hodgepodge of veal.

Here's my redaction (with beef instead of veal).

Dump a pound of stew beef in a pot, with water to cover and a bit of salt. Simmer, covered, for a couple of hours. Remove the lid and turn the heat up to maintain the simmering. Add a big handful of chopped mint, the chopped leaves from a couple of sprigs of oregano, a sliced quarter of a salted lemon, a quarter-cup of verjuice (I buy the Persian sort, which is cheaper than the fancy French kind), a quarter-teaspoon of ground nutmeg, and a tablespoon of butter. Simmer for at least another forty-five minutes.

(This would likely benefit from even more simmering, or a shortcut with a pressure cooker, but it's tasty, albeit very heavy on the preserved lemon.)



For the chard, I used a sixteenth-century recipe from Libre del Coch that offers lots of choices, and adjusted it more based on what I had around:

Put a big pot of water on to boil. Rinse a bunch of chard and strip the leaves from the stems; discard the stems (or keep them for a medieval chard-stem recipe; there's one for chard stems with yogurt which ends up looking very odd if you use red chard). When the water boils, dump the chard leaves in, stir, and drain. Chop the spinach finely. Cut bacon into thin pieces (I used beef bacon, because I had it). Fry the bacon, then remove it from the pan (and pour out most of the fat, if you're using regular bacon). Add the chard and a couple of ladles of broth (I used beef broth, because I was simultaneously making hodgepodge), with salt to taste. Simmer for a little while, then stir in a handful of parsley, a handful of mint, and the cooked bacon. Simmer for a little while longer to soften the herbs.



I'm surprised I haven't posted the last recipe before; I used my notes from a class I taught.

Puree of Chickpeas with Cinnamon and Ginger
(A thirteenth-century Egyptian recipe, from Lilia Zaouali, trans. M.B. DeBevoise, Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.)

Cook the chickpeas in water, then mash them in a mortar to make a puree. Push the puree through a sieve for wheat, unless it is already fine enough, in which case this step is not necessary. Mix it then with wine vinegar, the pulp of pickled lemons, and cinnamon, pepper, ginger, parsley of the best quality, mint, and rue that have all been chopped and placed on the surface of the serving dish [zubdiyya]. Finally, pour over [this mixture] a generous amount of oil of good quality.

My class-handout redaction:

1 cup dried chickpeas, soaked overnight and boiled until soft
1/2 cup olive or un-toasted sesame oil
1/4 salted lemon, pureed
1/3 cup vinegar
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. ginger
1/4 cup chopped herbs
Pepper & salt

Drain the chickpeas (you may want to reserve some of the cooking water to thin the puree). Puree in a food processor. Stir in the other ingredients.

This makes a lot; you could cut down the quantities. I used a big handful each of parsley and mint, this time.


I'm out of salted lemons, now, which makes me sad. I already got someone to bring me lemons from California once this year; this time, I think I'll have to make a batch with storebought lemons.