Ursula

I used to make this recipe from the 1997 Joy of Cooking all the time in grad school. I don't spend quite as much time trying to solve the problem of how to make a bag of carrots into a meal as I did back then, but they're still delicious.

carrot muffins

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Grease a muffin pan or line with paper or reusable cups.

Whisk or sift together:

1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
pinch of salt
1/2 tsp. ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp. ground cloves
1/4 tsp. ground allspice

Whisk together in a large bowl:

2 large eggs (flax eggs also work)
3/4 cup sugar

Stir in and let stand for 10 minutes:

1 ½ cups packed grated carrots

Stir in:

1/4 cup orange juice (sweet apple cider is a delicious substitution, or milk works in a pinch)
5 tbsp. warm melted unsalted butter or vegetable oil
1/2 cup coarsely chopped walnuts or pecans (optional)
1/2 cup raisins (regular or golden)

Add the flour mixture and fold just until the dry ingredients are moistened; there will be some lumps. Divide the batter among the muffin cups. Bake until a toothpick or wooden skewer inserted into one of the muffins comes out clean, 15 to 18 minutes (or perhaps a little longer).

This weekend, I did some test cooking from the sixth-century dietary manual De observatione ciborum (Anthimus). I skipped the pennyroyal because you don't use an herb traditionally employed to induce uterine contractions unless all the potential diners are on board for that experiment, I skipped the spikenard because our probably-American stock is so old it's tasteless and true Nepali spikenard is endangered, and we were out of a couple of other odd ingredients. But I did buy a costmary plant:



This herb smells lemony and tastes bitter; you can use it fresh or dried.

One of the longest recipes in Anthimus is for a beef dish:

Beef which has been steamed can be used both roasted in a dish and also braised in a sauce, provided that, as soon as it starts to smell, you put the meat in some water. Boil it in as much fresh water as suits the size of the portion of meat; you should not have to add any more water during the boiling. When the meat is cooked, put in a casserole about half a cup of sharp vinegar, some leeks and a little pennyroyal, some celery and fennel, and let those simmer for one hour. Then add half the quantity of honey to vinegar, or as much honey as you wish for sweetness. Cook over a low heat, shaking the pot frequently with one's hands so that the sauce cooks the meat sufficiently. Then grind the following: 50 pepper corns, 2 grams each of costmary and spikenard, and 1.5 grams of cloves. Carefully grind all these spices together in an earthenware mortar with the addition of a little wine. When well ground, add them to the casserole and stir well, so that before they are taken from the heat, they may warm up and release their flavor into the sauce.

( cut for interpretations and more recipes )

thistleingrey asked me to post about "Added sweeteners in cooking," with the note, "However you prefer. (Not recs unless that's what you'd prefer; I tend not to make food be very sweet.)"

Sweeteners show up in my savory cooking in two ways: in recipes where the sweetener is integral, or when I'm trying to adjust a dish's taste. For an example of the former, consider the Pok Pok tuna salad, which is a recipe I use a lot as a template. In practice, I would use two cans of tuna and whatever crunchy vegetable I can find (often slivers of daikon and carrot--in the late fall, sometimes glasseye sings, "This is the dawning of the Age of the Daikon"!) Sometimes I double the dressing and sometimes I don't, but I always make adjustments based on the contents of my pantry; this isn't a special-shopping-trip recipe. Thus, my version of the Pok Pok tuna salad dressing actually goes:

( Combine in a small pot... )

If you analyze how this recipe works, it contains salty liquid (fish sauce), sour liquid (lime juice), intense aromatics (ginger and garlic), and something hot (chiles or sambal oelek). The brief heat mellows those ingredients very slightly, but on their own they would still be extremely aggressive: the sugar soothes your tongue enough to taste the actual flavors.

When I'm adding sugar (or honey, or mirin) that wasn't in a recipe, it's usually to address the following specific problem. When you cook something acidic, such as canned tomatoes or a sauce with vinegar, long enough, it stops tasting sour and starts tasting rich. For example, I used to make the winter and spring curries out of Fields of Greens very frequently. These include a step where you simmer tomatoes with ginger, water, and spices by themselves, to induce this specific effect: that's the kind of process you come up with if you own an outstanding restaurant and want to cook at scale and with control. But if you're cooking at home in your own kitchen and are optimizing on variables like "counter space" and "number of pots to wash later", you probably want to cook some vegetables or meat in your acidic sauce. And sometimes you just get the timing wrong, and hit a stage where the texture of whatever you're simmering is right, but the sauce still tastes sour. That's the moment you add a spoonful of sweetener and simmer it in for a couple of minutes--at a teaspoon or so of sugar, the sweetness should be nearly invisible, but the sauce will no longer be sharp.

glasseye, our friend L., and I had a quiet Thanksgiving, in which we ate baked goods (pumpkin rolls from L., ginger parsnip cake courtesy of a link from kaberett, and mushroom turnovers) and Brussels sprouts and a medieval Andalusian lamb dish, and then watched glasseye play the Untitled Goose Game.



A while ago, I wrote a story for vass that involved the apocryphal legend of Susannah. I got wrapped up in trying to write an evocative sentence about the mastic tree, because that's the sort of thing that happens when you're writing historical fiction. Since I had invested all that mental effort, I also bought some mastic. It's crystallized sap that smells like high-pitched, sour pine:



Today I finally cooked with some of it! I chose a recipe from Andalusia, translated by Charles Perry and indexed on Medieval Cookery:

Dish of Meat with Walnuts and Mastic. Cut up the meat, after boiling it, and put with it half a dirham of mastic, pepper, cinnamon, lavender, garlic, rue, a little vinegar, oil, salt, whole onions, head (and) greens (or: whole green onions) and a little water. When you have done this, pound walnuts smoothly and pulverize them until they are white and thickened and throw into the pot and stir until they give out their oil and serve on walnut leaves; cover the contents of the pot with an egg and pour it out, sprinkle with pepper and spices and serve it, God willing.

My variant uses lots of modern time-saving appliances. It omits the lavender and rue because I didn't have any, and omits the egg due to a personal dietary restriction. Here's the way I would do it, next time:

( recipe )

This time I used 1/4 cup of champagne vinegar and then back-sweetened with a tablespoon of honey because the vinegar seemed too intense, even after simmering for quite a while. The result was very tasty, and it's a plausible medieval technique, but I prefer sticking closer to medieval recipe ingredients when I can.

This is good hot, but actually even better when it cools off a bit and the flavor of the walnuts comes through. I used to love a Persian spread for crackers made from walnuts and feta, and this has a very similar flavor profile. The sweet and sour combination means that it's also good with cranberry sauce!

eirias asked for quick--ideally, under 30 minutes including prep--recipes using beans (lentils, chickpeas, etc.). I have some ideas about the theory of this sort of cooking!

First, if a bean dish doesn't taste as good as you expect it to, the fault is almost certainly that there is either too little acid or too little salt. You need more salt than you expect, especially if you are someone like me who prefers a fairly light hand with salt generally. If you have salt, acid, and perhaps some cracked black pepper, you really don't need any other spices, though of course they can be interesting.

Acid usually comes from lemon juice, vinegar, or tomatoes, though there are interesting variations (I used to really like a black bean soup recipe out of Fields of Greens that used orange juice, for example). The taste of vinegar and tomatoes will change and deepen after a little bit of cooking. For vinegar, just a minute or two will often be enough. If you're working with canned tomatoes--and with this tight a time restriction, you probably should be--you should allow more time. Canned tomatoes really need to simmer for a little while to taste good. You can try adding a spoonful of sugar and rushing the simmering if you're in a hurry, but it won't be as tasty.

To minimize simmering time, you should use either dry lentils, canned beans, or maybe pre-cooked beans, if you're the kind of person who likes prepping food on weekends. (I personally might allow myself an hour and make chickpeas in the pressure cooker, but I'm working with a different set of constraints, one of which is an irrational aversion to canned beans and another of which is a health concern that prioritizes chickpeas.)

Basic Lentil Soup With A Green Thing

Rinse a cup or a cup and a half of dry lentils. Cover with an inch or two of water, add a bay leaf, and bring to a simmer.

Chop a couple of cloves of garlic. Fry them in some olive oil. Once they are aromatic, add a can of chopped tomatoes and a pinch of salt. Bring to a simmer. (I would actually add the liquid from half a big can of plum tomatoes, chop half a can of plum tomatoes finely, and add them. I do this because I think pre-chopped canned tomatoes and pre-made tomato sauce both have weird textures. You probably don't care.)

Your green thing might be parsley, cilantro, fresh spinach, or frozen spinach. If it's not frozen, rinse and chop it now. You can use a lot of parsley or cilantro (maybe half a bunch).

Start tasting the lentils after twenty minutes. When they are cooked to your liking, pour off a bit of water if you like your soups on the stew side. Add a big pinch of salt. Mix the salt in, then dump the lentils and the remaining water in with the simmering tomatoes. Stir. Add frozen spinach now, if that's your green thing. Also add some pepper.

Let everything simmer together for five minutes. Taste it. If it's not salty enough, add salt; if the tomatoes taste sour (unlikely unless you rushed the tomato cooking time), add a teaspoonful of sugar; if it tastes unexpectedly bland, add a tablespoonful of lemon juice or vinegar and simmer for another minute. Scatter your green thing on top, if it's not already included.

Variations

• Just dump a can of chickpeas or other beans in with the tomatoes, rather than messing with lentils.
  
• Add grated ginger and/or chopped green onion with the garlic.
  
• More spices: a teaspoon of cinnamon, cumin, and/or coriander, half a teaspoon of powdered ginger, powdered cayenne to taste (start with 1/4 teaspoon if you're cautious, 1/2-1 teaspoon if you're not).
  
• Or if you want more heat, just add a spoonful of sambal oelek with the garlic.
  
• I omitted onion because of the time constraint, but you can absolutely chop an onion and fry it in some oil, either prior to adding the garlic, or in a separate pan if prep time is more important to you than dishes.
  
• Use frozen kale or chard as your green thing (this will require a longer simmering time after the vegetables are added).
  
• Romaine lettuce is mostly green. Just saying.
  
• Does your garden have runaway mint? Strip the leaves and add big handfuls of mint!
  
• Use frozen corn kernels or cubes of cooked squash or pumpkin instead of a green thing.
  
• Add Moroccan-style salt-preserved lemon when you combine the beans and tomatoes.
  
• Make your own croutons! Preheat your oven to 400° F or so, chop some stale fancy bread into cubes, put it in a pan, drizzle it with oil, mix it around, and throw it in the oven until it gets crispy. This is especially good with chickpea soup. You can freeze the heels of loaves for just this purpose.
  

yhlee asked me to post about adapting medieval recipes to modern recipes.

The SCA slang for this process is "redacting" recipes. There are a couple of things you can do to prepare. The first is to cook medieval food from recipes other people have redacted. I like the recipes page at Medieval Cookery, which is consistent about including the medieval recipe along with the redaction. I've also cooked a lot from The Madrone Culinary Guild's pamphlets and The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy. (A friend of mine actually learned to cook from this book, because it was the only cookbook she owned as an undergrad.)

( More advice, and a walkthrough redaction! )

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.

( hodgepodge )

( greens )

( medieval hummus )

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.

The baronial holiday party was this weekend. This particular SCA group doesn't have much of a tradition of medieval recipes at potlucks, but I believe in making the effort; I made a dessert for the dessert auction, and an asparagus salad.

The 1609 household guide Delights for Ladies includes a recipe for puff pastry that ends with the following sentence: "You may convey any preetty forced dish, as Florentin, Cherry-tart, Rise, or Pippins, &c, between two sheets of that paste." In this context, I'm pretty sure "forced" means "spiced"; that's one of the possible meanings in the OED for farced, which is a possible alternate spelling. Modern puff pastry is pretty similar to the stuff that recipe would yield, and we had frozen cherries in the freezer left over from Thanksgiving, so cross-referencing with a sixteenth-century cherry tart recipe, I ended up with a lazy person's route to a c. 1600 dessert:

1 package puff pastry
1 package frozen sweet cherries
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. ginger
2 tbsp. sugar

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Cook the cherries, spices, and sugar until thickened slightly. Pulse in the food processor (optional). Roll out a piece of puff pastry, spread the cherries on it, roll out a second sheet of puff pastry, cover, and squish the edges together. Cut into squares. Bake until brown and crispy (I think this took about forty-five minutes?)

You could do something similar with apples, or any of the other options. "Florentin" here seems to be "Florentine", which is a bit like mincemeat; here's a flesh-day version with veal kidneys and a fish-day version without.

The asparagus salad was from the recently translated Prince of Transylvania's Cookbook. All of the salads cross-reference each other, so the instructions you end up with seem to be "make the same vinaigrette you'd make for beluga caviar, but add some sugar". I'm interested in the "rose vinegar"; I'm guessing this is vinegar flavored with roses, not rose-colored vinegar. I might try making some, sometime! In the meantime, I just went for a basic vinaigrette with a little bit of sugar and a little bit of rosewater.

This post is part of the Cooking For People Who Don't: Food Security blog carnival.

Here are some of my standard strategies for cooking beets, cabbage, and squash. All three tend to be cheap and plentiful in the winter months. As carpenter notes, cabbages and squashes can also be huge, especially if you're only cooking for one or two people. Fortunately, they store well, so you can cut a squash or cabbage in half or quarters and use the rest later. (If you're the sort of person who likes to prepare lots of staples at once and then store them, you could also roast cubes of squash and freeze them for later.)

This post involves general notes on dealing with all three vegetables, and two specific recipes for beets (one with squash variation).

( biases and substitutions )

( shopping and preparation )
Two Beet Recipes

Beets are good with white, salty cheese. Both of the following recipes follow this principle, but you can obey it more simply by cleaning your beets and cutting them into chunks, putting them in a pan, drizzling olive oil on top, tossing it around with your hands or a spoon, adding salt, pepper, and perhaps some peeled cloves of garlic, and sticking the whole thing in the oven at 400 degrees or so, until the chunks are no longer crunchy. Eat with the white cheese of your choice (I recommend goat cheese, and maybe some walnuts).

( Greek-Style Beets )

( Roasted Beet Soup )

This afternoon I made Election Cake, based on the 1796 Amelia Simmons recipe:

Thirty quarts flour, 10 pound butter, 14 pound sugar, 12 pound raisins, 3 doz eggs, one pint wine, one quart brandy, 4 ounces cinnamon, 4 ounces fine colander [sic] seed, 3 ounces ground allspice; wet the flour with milk to the consistence of bread overnight, adding one quart yeast; the next morning work the butter and sugar together for half an hour, which will render the cake much lighter and whiter; when it has rise light work in every other ingredient except the plumbs, which work in when going into the oven.

My version (sized for a party, not an entire election) is as follows:

Dissolve 4 1/2 tsp. yeast in 6 tbsp. warm water. Add 2 cups milk, then slowly mix/knead in 6 cups of flour. Knead the resulting dough for about ten minutes. Set aside to rise for an hour (presumably 30 quarts of flour would need more time.) Cream 2 sticks of butter (half a pound) with 1 1/2 cup of sugar. Mix in an egg, 4 3/4 tsp. red wine, 3 tbsp. + 1/2 tsp. brandy, a teaspoon each of cinnamon and ground coriander, and about three-quarters of a teaspoon of allspice, along with a pinch of salt. Combine the butter mixture with the dough mixture, then stir in about 9 ounces of raisins. (Hard work! I used the dough hooks on my hand mixer.) Divide batter between 2 buttered loaf pans. Set aside to rest for forty-five minutes, then bake until a skewer inserted in the center comes out clean. (I used a 375-degree oven, and it took about an hour and a half, ending with a very dark crust-- a cooler oven might be better.)

The result is not unlike a superior bakery scone: sweet for a breakfast but plain for a dessert, and inclined to break into large crumbs.