House Capuchin 3

This is in date order as we started got the idea within a week of the 2017 feast, tested the foods, some repeatedly, and finally got into the big push to get done in time.

If you wade through the whole thing, you can see that this was a year-long process as we came up with the idea, started the research, made various foods, re-made to test the recipes, decided which ones to use, came up with a tentative menu in the fall, refined, refined and refined the lists and then made the foods over several months, adding in some at the last weeks when Anja found better instructions for some that she had hoped to make.

…and then as feasts do, things went awry and not everything got made, but there was plenty!

Week of 2/19/17 – Gogor and Anja came up with the idea of next year’s feast being Slavic Foods and that’s being kicked around. We also talked over what worked and didn’t with this past feast and tried to work out how to do it better next time.

Week of 3/5/17

Links for Potluck foods! 

• Period Food is Yummy: What to Bring to an SCA Potluck
• https://lelandra.com/joan/potlucktoc.htm
• http://www.damehelen.com/food/potlucks.shtml
• http://chatelaine.sca-caid.org/newcomers/mundanefood.php

Asparagus! – https://ritaroberts.wordpress.com/2014/12/27/cuisine-in-the-roman-world-an-update/

Growing Leeks from Seed – http://www.almanac.com/video/growing-leeks-seed

Week of 3/12/17

Project Day

We started the day with sorting out clean feast gear. Anja spent a little time on spoons.

When what Anja had planned for a feast dish, turned out to not be doable since the ingredients weren’t there, so she looked up some recipes and made the cabbage pottage below and a creamed chicken dish at the last 2nd.

When Amy and Stella got there we started on the fruit, pickles, bread and butter and nuts. Eventually we got around to the pottage and chicken, then finished up with the cookies! There was a lot of “ooh” and lip-smacking over Loren’s wine. 🙂

We ended up talking butchering, mostly of chicken, but also frogs, and then about bats, hypnotizing chickens and foods.

Potluck Menu

• Cabbage, onion and leek pottage – Anja and Loren
• Creamed chicken (1 can cream of chicken soup, two cooked, chopped chicken breasts, handful of chopped garlic that had been cooked in a dab of butter)  – Anja and Loren
• Grapes – Estrella
• Almonds – Estrella
• fresh fruit box (pineapple, grapes, strawberries) Amy
• Loren’s blackberry wine
• Bread – Loren
• Garlic butter – Anja
• Bacon/Blue butter – Anja
• pickled garbanzo beans – Anja
• Pickled Eggs – Anja and Loren
• asparagus pickle – Anja
• black olives – Loren
• cookies – Estrella

Cabbage, Leek and Onion pottage – This was a last-minute brainstorm on Anja’s part, since what she had planned wasn’t going to work. If time allows, chopping the coleslaw and making your own broth is the hot tip.

• 3 large leeks
• 2 small or 1 1/2 medium onions
• 2 bags of deli cole slaw mix
• 1 tsp coriander
• salt
• 1 box of chicken broth

1. Chop leeks, onions, cabbage to “deli slaw” size (1/4 inch slices, tops)
2. Heat broth with coriander (and any necessary salt) to boiling.
3. Add ingredients and cook until done.
4. Taste test and add salt if necessary.
5. Serve hot.

…and good “adds” to this to make it a main dish are either cooked crumbled bacon or chopped ham.

Updated Pages

• Potluck Foods – http://wp.me/p8ngGY-8u
• Perioid Food from the Grocery – http://wp.me/p8ngGY-eB
• List of Period/Non-Period Foods – http://wp.me/p8ngGY-d5
• A List of Medieval Cheeses – http://wp.me/p8ngGY-5W

Week of 3/19/17

Cheese and Wine Workshop – Loren and Anja were initially the only ones there for this, and then Amy got there as the cheese was being strained. Not sure whether folks forgot or missed the announcement, but we went ahead and started at 5:10. Anja had been grinding and measuring spices before that and getting pictures, but that’s when the milk went onto the burner. At about 5:50 it started to foam and Anja tossed in the vinegar and pulled it off the heat. At 6:15 it was in the cheesecloth and hanging up to drain. At about 7:15 Anja took it down and boxed it, pressing it down as though it were being molded and then stuck it into the fridge. The whey went back into the milk containers and was frozen. (Anja uses it for chowder base!)

Ingredients

Cooking

Straining

…and the next day.

The cheese turned out tasty, and wasn’t overly salty on Friday, although it *had* been on Thursday before the salt melted in. This kind of cheese doesn’t keep all that long and the salt will help keep it from going bad. the whey was awfully milky and Anja thinks it might not have been hot enough when the vinegar went in.

Anja and Loren are talking about how to make some molds, rather than buying them, since our quantities are going to be small. Molds that make cheeses like this one…. >>>>

 

Week of 4/9/17

Having a lot of fun this week with various projects! The cheese was a success. The mustard was a success (even if it’s the darkest mustard we’ve ever seen!) Other foods got made. We had guests from the Valley at the potluck.

Early Week – Anja set up a Cheese and Wine night for a group of people who aren’t part of the household, but were interested in the cheese-making.

Cheese and Wine Workshop – Thursday

We started a little later than Anja had hoped, waiting for someone, but gradually setting up. Once the last person arrived we moved out to the front to snack a bit (the ladies brought cheese, bread, crackers and garlic jam!) and do the first part of things which needed to be what we were doing with the cheese.

Eventually we moved into the back, got the spices ready, poured in the milk and started and it took over 1 1/2 hours to get the stuff up to temperature! Or close enough that stuff would curdle, at least. The whey was still a bit milky, but not quite so much as last time. We think that it was the hotplate cutting in and out that made it take so long, but eventually it was frothing and we put in the vinegar.

It curdled beautifully and with much more cheese than last time, leaving only about an 1/2 gallon of whey. It “broke” from the cheesecloth very cleanly, unlike the last batch when we had to do a lot of scraping. After letting it cool a bit, we packed the molds and weighted them and left it to stand overnight. One lady took home the frozen whey from the last batch and we got the next into the freezer. Anja unmolded and fridged the cheese Friday morning.

Herb Bunch – Saturday

We had decided to make batch of hot wine mustard, because we needed it for the Mylates, but also because it’s tasty, 🙂 and we’ve been out for awhile. The mustard took forever to grind. It’s amazing, but a teaspoon takes a minute or so. An 1/2 cup took an hour with Loren and Anja taking turns with the pestle! We used a small hole sieve to get the already powdered stuff divided from the whole seeds 4 times and finally ended up with just that last tablespoon. Anja got all the ingredients measured into a cookpot while Loren went to get the balsamic vinegar that we had forgotten.

Hot Wine Mustard

• 1/2 C dry mustard
• 1/4 C honey
• 1/4 C balsamic vinegar
• ¼ cup red wine (yes, red wine, although you’ll see port in the pix, which is what we had. Wine turns it purple!)
• 1 T olive oil
• 1 t salt
• 1/2 t ginger
• ½ tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 t garlic powder
• 1/2 t horseradish (or more, Anja tends to used more like a tablespoon)

Place all ingredients in a small saucepan. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until mixture thickens (this only takes a few minutes). Store in an airtight container in the fridge for up to a few months. Great as a sauce on bread.

Project Day – Sunday

Anja and Loren started by setting up the pork pies and starting the bread. While the bread was rising they ran around picking up and cleaning up to get ready for the day. Eventually Loren took off with the pies and the bread to go bake it and Anja sat down with some sorting-of-supplies tasks. When Loren came in with the bread and pork pies (mylates),  Anja got up and helped Loren get the back sorted the rest of the way out and the rest of the foods heated, then we all sat down to eat, and *did* we eat! Oh, yum!

Potluck Menu – Sunday

• Mylates of Pork – Loren and Anja
• Sweet Ginger Carrots – Anja
• Hot mustard sauce – Anja – Recipe above
• Bread – Loren
• Rolls – Alys
• Cheese (Brie and Cheddar) – Alys
• Rice pudding with strawberry topping – Louisa – recipe here: http://www.medievalcuisine.com/site/medievalcuisine/Euriol/recipe-index/rys
• Shortbread cookies – Estrella
• Cheese – Cheese Ladies – (A couple of Sunday pix in the Cheese section above….)
• Butter – Loren

Anja’s Mylates of Pork Recipe (pork pie)

• 2 pounds ground pork
• 4 eggs
• 1 cup mozzarella, grated
• 1 big glop (about 2 TBSP) of hot wine mustard
• 1/4 cup hazelnuts (forgot!)
• 1 tsp Ginger (All spices approximate, I just shook)
• 1/8 tsp clove
• 1/8 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• pinch saffron
• 1/2 cup chopped onion
• pastry for a double-crust pie (leftovers, re-rolled)

1. Thaw two frozen deep dish pie shells and set out two top crusts to warm to room temp
2. In a large bowl mix eggs, spices, nuts and mustard.
3. Add ground pork and fluff with a fork. Mix with grated cheese and onion.
4. Pack into crust.
5. Put on top crust, crimp and cut.
6. Bake at 350 for about 1 ½ hours or until internal temp reads at least 160F.

From Forme of Cury – “MYLATES OF PORK. XX.VII. XV. Hewe Pork al to pecys and medle it with ayrenn & chese igrated. Do þerto powdour fort safroun & pyneres [1] with salt, make a crust in a trape, bake it wel þerinne, and serue it forth.”

Week of 4/16/17

All Fool’s – Event – Saturday – Anja

After my stuff got brought into the hall, I sorted out my potluck contributions (lots of little stuff: the mustard, some garlic butter, honey butter, the cheese wheel and a lentil pottage that had been frozen, but was put into a crockpot borrowed from Temperance and Tryggr for the day.) got it all into serving plates/bowls and with utensils and Seamus got it to the table.

Week of 5/7/17

Cheese and Wine Workshop – We found a recipe for Schiz (pronounced Skee, apparently) an Italian cheese that is fried before eating. We had been talking about it all week, but finally managed to get all the pieces together on Friday and started in. It called for heating the milk slowly, and it took 45 minutes to get up to temperature. We added caraway, dill and celery seed to the milk as it warmed.

At 8:30 the rennet went in and at 9 went back and checked. No break! …. so heated the milk back up the 5 degrees it had lost and added an 1/2 tab of a different rennet. Kinda crossed our fingers and prayed. 🙂 …`The next time the curd “broke” so went on with cutting the curd, then cooking some more. By 10:30 the curd had cooked and the whey was starting to look right, so we started draining the whey. We had to use two cloths because the cloth we started with was too thick! (The cheesecloth had gone walkabout….again!) …and re-appeared 10 minutes after we had grabbed something else.

By 11, it was all hanging and cooling. By 11:20 it was still dripping, only molded in the cloth like some of the italian cheeses, but it hadn’t been salted, which it didn’t say in the recipe when to do! We broke up the mostly-dripped-out curd, salted, squoze and re-hung and it went into the fridge, along with the re-bottled whey. It was tasty both with and without the salt, but it’s definitely a damp cheese. I see why this one gets sliced and fried. Ricotta from the whey tomorrow!

…and then fridged overnight to drip some more, which it did very little of. The pot below was dry.

Anja says, “Sunday evening, I pulled out the cheese, sliced it and then fried some. ….omgs…. I haven’t had fried cheese that good in a long, long time! You can only do that with cheeses that don’t melt. My Baba used to get a cheese with a similar texture from a local Czech butcher shop, but they closed before I was a teenager. I haven’t found any cheese that worked as well until now!” The thing is that the not-expensive American cheese *all* melt. We haven’t been able to afford an artisanal cheese and this qualifies.

The process was rather similar to this one, except we didn’t press it.

Schiz – NICOLO SANTORIO·TUESDAY, MAY 2, 2017 – Schiz (pronounced “skee”) is a fresh cow’s milk cheese from the Dolomites in Northern Italy. It’s only good for a few days and is fried in a pan before eating, usually served with polenta.

Ingredients:

• 1 gallon of milk (not ultra-pasteurized)
• Liquid rennet (1/4 tsp) or 1/4 tablet.
• (optional) Calcium chloride for pasteurized cold stored milk

Tools

• Good thermometer.
• Large pot
• Ladle
• Knife or cake spatula to cut the curds
• A basket molds or any other good draining mold.

1. Pour the milk in to the clean pot and heat milk slowly to 96° F (35° C), then take it off the heat source.
2. Add 1/4 tsp (1.25ml) single strength rennet or ~ 1/4 tablet. Stir for one minute with an up and down motion with the spoon or ladle, then stop the milk moving with a slight back stir.
3. Put a lid on and leave milk to set for 30 minutes.
4. Cut the coagulated curd in a grid pattern with your knife, with about 1-2 cm between cuts, keeping the knife vertical. Allow this to set for 2-3 minutes while the whey begins to show in the cuts. Then cut again following the existing cuts, but this time hold the knife at a 45 degree angle. Be gentle so you don’t mash the curds up.
5. Return to the heat and set to very low, continuing to monitor the temperature so that it doesn’t go above 120°. The total cooking time will be 20-30 minutes. The longer it is cooked, the drier the final cheese will be. The final curds should be cooked well through and should be examined to make sure that enough moisture has been removed. A broken curd should be firm throughout and the curds should have a moderate resistance when pressed between the fingers.
6. Remove the whey with a ladle to about an inch above the surface of the curds. Leaving a bit of whey for the transfer will help the cheese consolidate.
7. Transfer the curds to the basket mold and allow the whey to drain. A small amount of weight (1-2 lbs) can help consolidate the curd and produce a slightly drier curd, but this is optional. I use just a bit of hand pressure to consolidate the cheese. Turn the curds as they drain and firm up. Doing this several times during the draining will keep the moisture even.
8. The draining cheese should be placed in the refrigerator as soon as the whey drainage slows, but with a bowl underneath to collect the small amount of whey that continues to drain. Schiz should be used within a few days at most.

To cook, slice up and fry in a pan with butter and a pinch of salt. Cream can be added. Serve with polenta or wide cut pasta like Pappardelle.

Week of 5/21/17

Cheese and Wine Workshop – Amor was here for a quick visit. He’s Loren and Anja’s son that’s in the Air Force. He’s moving to Eskalya in Oertha. He wanted to see cheese being made, so that happened Wednesday night and then the cheese got fried on Thursday!

He liked it and took 1/2 with him on the next leg of his trip!

What was even funnier was that his little dog, Pooka, (having had too much cheese earlier in the day) was having all kinds of fun licking everyone’s hands and faces after we had eaten our share!

 

Herb Bunch – …started with sorting some of the dried herbs and labeling things. AFter that we worked on the blossoms from the sweet woodruff plant and talked about coumarin. After the workshop time, Loren got one of the bottles of white wine and we set up a May Wine.

Project Day – (Anja) The whole morning was cooking. Loren made bread. I set up a meat pie, then prepped ham including making ham broth that mostly went into a bean soup for the week and then finished up the May Wine, set up the carrots and thawed the butters.

May Wine – a “traditional” spring wine

…and then we started realizing that no one was here, so put off baking the pie until later, because the two folks who had definitely said they wanted to be here couldn’t make it until well past 5pm. So we did finally have our feast, but in the early evening.  Jeanne got her share, even though she couldn’t join us. 🙂

 

Potluck Menu

• Meat Pie – Anja
• Bread – Loren
• Butters (from stash) Loren and Anja
• Butter – New folks
• Sweet Carrots – New folks
• Devilled Ham – Anja (from ham donated by Jeanne)
• May Wine – Loren and Anja
• Marzipan – Anja & Amor

 

Week of 5/28/17

Early Week – Anja went a little nuts early in the week, trying to get some stuff made for Tryggr’s vigil. Loren brought her some milk Tuesday evening, so that turned into Schizz, of course. …and shortbread on Wednesday.. and a couple of flavored butters and pickled eggs. That all went to the event, leaving early Friday morning along with the House Banner.

Largesse Offerings For the vigil

• 7 plates of shortbread
• 2 dozen pickled eggs
• 2 half-cup garlic butters
• 1 lump of Schizz

Week of 6/3/17

Early Week

A cheese got made on Wednesday and fried up with some sauerkraut on Thursday, which is a dish Anja remembers her grandmother making. We heard back on the Egil’s foods and they mostly got eaten and the quantities were pretty good. We supplied about 20% of the food for 65 or so people and all but a couple of eggs and a plate of shortbread got eaten, and the rest consumed at breakfast the next day.

Cheese and Wine Workshop – … was on Wednesday evening. We made another recipe of Schizz, since that one’s pretty easy and no one had a lot of ambition. We used lemon and regular thyme, basil and chives in this one. The interesting thing was that a red color cooked out of the basil (It’s a purple ruffles basil) that left a slight orange tint in the cheese.

Week of 6/18/17

Cheese and Wine Workshop – So the mozzarella experiment got tried. It took awhile to collect the tools, but once we got started it went pretty fast. It didn’t end up with the right texture, though. 😦 It took about 2 hours, start to finish, counting letting the whey cool enough to put it in the fridge. Best guess on the texture probably is that the cheese didn’t get/stay hot enough to stretch and something happened also with the curdling too soon. Bad measurement?

Week of 6/25/17

Herb Bunch – Most of this was during the week rather than workshop time, as garden stuff needs to be done when it’s time. Photos also need to be taken during the week of the garden stuffs as they grow towards harvest.

So thyme, lovage, leeks and parsley were harvested for the pies. Oregano was set aside to dry. Ditto rose petals. Mint liqueur was strained for another time. A bucket was obtained for the new batch of leeks.

Project Day – …began with setting up the lentil pottage that got forgotten Saturday night and then going on to setting up the pies. By noon the gravy was bubbling away and they were almost ready. We were hunting a small pie dish to make a individual one for the lady whose oven we were going to use, but didn’t manage to find one, so ended up with two pies (recipe below) which Loren took off to go do. We all sat and talked while the pies were finishing, then started eating once Loren was back.

We ate until we were all groaningly full and still kept going back for “one more bite”! It was all tasty. Not really all period, but a yummy feast! (pix below the menu) …and then we sortof sat there looking at each other wishing for a bit more room, so took some leftovers home. 🙂

Potluck Menu

1st course

• Cheese balls (from the failed mozz) – Anja
• Pickled eggs – Stella
• Black Olives – Loren
• Vermouth Olives – Jeanne
• Peanut butter pretzel bites – Amy

2nd course

• Chicken, leek and mushroom pie – Anja and Loren
• Beef Stroganoff – Stella
• Salad – Amy
• Bread – Loren
• Butter – Loren
• Lentil Pottage – Anja
• Mustard – Loren and Anja (omgs…on the pretzel bites!)

3rd course

• Lemon pound cake, mini muffins – Kristie
• Almond poppyseed cake – Anja
• Comfits – Leslie

Chicken, Leek and Mushroom Pie recipe – Chicken pie is an old standby especially in English cookery. This is not from a period recipe but made from descriptions.

• 2 deep dish frozen pie shells
• 2 “lid” of pre-made pie crust
• FOR THE FILLING
• 2 lbs cooked chicken meat (measured before cooking)
• 8 oz sliced fresh mushrooms
• 1 lg, 2 small leeks, finely sliced, leaves, scapes and all
• stick butter
• 3 heaping tbsp spelt flour
• 3 cups chicken broth – made from the chicken meat as it cooked with celery & vegetables, and then cooled and degreased.
• Handful chopped lovage
• 1/2 tsp fresh thyme leaves
• 1/2 tsp fresh lemon thyme leaves
• 1 tsp fresh oregano
• 2 garlic scapes
• Salt
• 1 beaten egg for glazing

Makes 2 large 6″/15cm individual pies or combine into one pie using a 1 pint pie dish.

• Dice the cold chicken meat and add to pie shells.
• Add the mushrooms to the pie shells.
• Snip some chives and add to the heap.
• Chop the leeks discarding only dry or brown leaf parts
• strip thyme and oregano from stems, chop lovage.
• Melt butter in a frypan over a medium heat, add the flour and stir well to incorporate all the flour into the butter. You should have a really thick paste. Using a hand whisk, slowly add the chicken stock, whisking all the time until a smooth gravy is created.
• Add the leeks, lovage, oregano and thyme to the sauce.
• Stir well.
• Turn heat down to medium, cover and let simmer 5-10 minutes
• Pour over filling.
• Crimp lid over the top, then poke ventilation holes.
• Smear with beaten egg
• PreHeat the oven to 350°F. Place a heavy cookie sheet or baking stone on the middle shelf.
• Set the pie dish/es onto the heated baking sheet in the oven and bake in the preheated oven for 1 hour, rotating pies 180 degrees at 25 minutes or until the pastry is golden brown and the filling bubbling. If edges begin to burn, cover with foil or edge covers.
• Serve hot or fridge to cool completely if serving cold. Fridge all leftovers.

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Week of 7/2/17

Cheese and Wine Workshop – Just a few pix this time from the day and some from Sunday. We tried molding the Schiz recipe.

Project Day – …started with checking on the cheese. It took a good solid whack with Anja’s come-along to get it out of the mold, but we got it, sliced it and later fried and ate it. Anja was carving. Loren made a cord container for Amy and was sanding. Amy headed out early and Anja was online talking Feast with Gogor for quite some time. We’ve got a menu and are starting to find recipes for some of the dishes that we don’t know how to make, yet. We ended the day tasting the strawberry cordial, which didn’t turn out as well as the last. 😦 Well, we’ll get there!

 

Possible Winter Feast Menu 

Day

• Noon – Breads/butters
• 1pm – Lunch – Fried cheese, fried saukraut with black bread
• 2pm – Caviar with caraway rye and hard-boiled eggs
• 3pm – Hot crab
• 4pm – Pickled Herring and add pickles to the breads

5pm – 1^st course

• Borscht for the horde
• Small amount chicken soup
• Breads

6pm – Main course

• Caraway pork roast with brined apples
• Beef stew with root veg and cabbage
• Baked salmon with salted lemons
• Baked fowl (Duck? Goose?)with brandied cherries
• Saffron rice
• Some other veg or kasha

Sweets, afters

• Kolacki
• Plum vareniki or knedliky
• Fruit in Kvass?
• Cookie Rings

Drinkables

• Kvass
• Beer
• Mead
• Mint water
• Tea

Week of 7/9/17

Pea flour in the bread may have been the most exciting part of our week! Green bread…. We did have things going on all week and Isabeau stopped by for a visit.

Pea flour bread – We’d been reading about adding pea or bean flour in period to bread to stretch it, and how it was made, so we decided to try it with a relatively modern recipe to see what the effect was. First we had to make the flour. We had green split peas and ran them in a food processor. Next we had to sift to get the flour. Then we added some to the regular bread recipe. Anja had seen that replacing 1 cup of the bread flour with pea flour was about right. Loren decided to get it wet to start, rather than leaving it dry on the off chance that some of the bigger pieces (divots in the sifted stuff) might stay crunchy if he didn’t.

So Sunday morning, he got the yeast and liquid proofing, then the pea flour went in, then the regular flour and the bacon grease that he uses instead of oil. It sat for a little and then he started the bread maker. He said it seemed “soupy” so he added 3 TBSP of flour.

After the dough ball was “riz'”, Loren laughed as he started the cycle to knead it a little longer. “It hissed! I heard it hiss!” After that it was set in a pan and greased before going into the oven to rise again.

Green bread…. 🙂

Project Day – Amy showed up and we talked about cheese and bread and then got to try some of the pea flour bread. Green????

…and then late in the day….Amy had already headed home…. we made schiz…. this time the experiment was with using powdered spices (thyme (1 tsp) and garlic powder (2 Tbsp). …and it ended up with just Anja working on it since Loren crashed out on the couch for most of the time! We didn’t get the equipment set up right for the mold and it was top-heavy enough to bail out a couple of times, but we finally got it. Anja was going to try making ricotta with the whey, but she was too tired, finally, so it landed in the freezer. The cheese went into the fridge and will be pulled in the morning.

Week of 7/16/17

Mushroom pickle happened and a potluck (oh, the food!) and more pincushions and such. Pickle will be tried next week after it’s had time to steep.

Early Week – The un-molding of the latest incarnation of schiz happened. The leek buckets went home and got watered.

Some other flours got purchased or made, early in the week. Rye and barley are not spendy in the bulk section and oat…well, we had a huge bag of oatmeal that was the 2nd bag of which we’ve eaten 1/3 of the first… 🙂 So flour happened from that on Tuesday night and bread for the Sunday potluck

Cheese and Wine Workshop – The cheese got unmolded on Monday and then put by for the potluck, since we wanted fried cheese again. 🙂 (Moar pix below in the potluck stuff)

Project Day – Kinda started Saturday night as Loren and Anja started cooking. A pea/barley pottage, beef in wine and a root veg stew cooked overnight. The pickled mushrooms got started Sunday morning (although they’re not ready for eating, yet).

One of our Herb Bunch was here when she got back and then got going on the mushrooms after a few minutes. Eventually those were in the fridge and the press of the food prep happened.

Potluck Menu 

1st course

• Oat and wheat bread – Loren
• Butter – Loren
• Garlic butter – (from storage in the freezer from a previous feast)
• Fried Cheese – Anja and Loren – Schiz (made last week), sliced and fried in butter
• Olive plate – Loren – Olives in vermouth, black and green olives
• Stuffed Mushrooms – Jay and Loren – Mushroom caps, cheese
• White wine – (leftovers from cooking)
• Red wine – Courtney
• Burgundy – (leftovers from cooking)

2nd course

• Pease/Barley pottage – Anja – dried peas, pearl barley, caraway, onion, carrots, salt
• Beef in wine – Anja – Angus beef, burgundy, mushrooms, salt, caraway – gravy of butter, rice flour and broth from the beef
• Vegetable Stew – Anja – Turnip, spinach, carrot, rutabaga, celery, onion, lovage, plus misc greens, salt, caraway
• Salad – Amy
• Sekanjabin – Loren and Amy – Mint (harvested and prepped by Anja), Honey (local), vinegar, sugar, ice

3rd course

• Molasses Cookies – Amy
• Comfits

Pickled Mushrooms – We had less than 2 pounds of mushrooms to start, then 8 caps went for stuffing and a lot of stems into the veg and beef, so the recipe was halved. Also dried ginger and whole mace were not obtainable at the time we started this experiment, so we used dried. Horseradish was subbed for the pepper because of Anja’s allergy.

We washed the mushrooms Saturday night and left them to dry a bit, then started them with salt on Sunday morning. They needed to lose liquid. Since we could only run one burner at a time we did the ‘shrooms first, mostly over medium heat, then started the pickle broth which was wine, rather than vinegar. Drawing the liquid took time., at least an hour, maybe 1 1/2 hours. After that they were drained and set onto a towel while the pickle broth was going. Loren sterilized a jar and the mushrooms went in and then the pickle broth. It went in hot because of timing. A turnip got added after the feast, so’s to try that in the wine pickle.

Original Recipe (edited for length)

Pickled Mushrooms – Mar11by Mistress Leoba of Lecelade

TO PICKLE MUSHROOMS
Take your Buttons, clean ym with a spunge & put ym in cold water as you clean ym, then put ym dry in a stewpan & shake a handfull of salt over ym, yn stew ym in their own liquor till they are a little tender; then strain ym from ye liquor & put ym upon a cloath to dry till they are quite cold. Make your pickle before you do your Mushrooms, yt it may be quite cold before you put ym in. The pickle must be made with White-Wine, White-Pepper, quarter’d Nutmeg, a Blade of Mace, & a Race of ginger.

Ingredients

1.5kg mushrooms	1 tsp white pepper corns
500mL white wine	1/4 of a whole nutmeg
approx. 1/2 cup of salt	1/2 tsp mace
1 piece dried ginger

Method

In a mortar and pestle, roughly crush the pepper corns and mace. Using a grater, grate the ginger and the nutmeg (grate a whole nutmeg until you have used a quarter of it).

Put the spices and the wine in a pot and bring to the boil. Reduce to a simmer and cook for about 10 minutes, then leave to cool completely.

Wash the mushrooms and remove the stalks.

Put the mushrooms in a heavy bottomed pan, then throw the salt over them. Heat the mushrooms well and cook, stirring frequently, until the mushrooms have coloured and shrunk considerably. A lot of liquid will leach out of them.

Strain the mushrooms, and put on a towel so they can dry and cool.

When both the mushrooms and pickling wine are completely cool, put the mushrooms into a sterilised jar and pour over the pickling liquid. If there is any spice residue, pack this on top. Ensure the mushrooms are completely covered by the liquid.

Keep the jar of mushrooms in a cool, dark place and leave to steep – the longer they steep the better.

Notes

Lady Fettiplace would not have had access to fresh ginger, and if you can find whole dried ginger it’s a revelation. I found some in an Indian grocers and it smells incredible.

Mace and nutmeg come from the same plant, Myrstica fragrans. Nutmeg is the seed in the middle of the fruit, and mace is a lacy membrane that surrounds this seed. Even though they come from the same plant, they have quite different tastes, and you can’t really substitute extra nutmeg for mace.

You will lose a lot of volume from the mushrooms as you are stewing them in the salt. We lost over 600g of weight – at the end of the process, we had 830g of mushrooms after starting out with 1.5kg.

Further Reading

Click on the links below to buy direct from The Book Depository.
Spurling, Hilary (2011). Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book.

Links – After our period, but likely the same recipes.

Week of 7/23/17

Early Week – .…was all about cleaning up, adding wine to the mushroom pickle so that the added turnip was submerged and eating yummy leftovers.

Project Day

We started with Loren making a oat/wheat bread and then trying out the mushroom pickles. They’re pretty good, but stronger than what we expected and the turnip pieces were “meh”.

Edibles

Week of 7/30/17

Early Week – Gudrun and Casey showed up on Tuesday for a visit and we talked feast and food and projects and such, at length. …and Anja sewed, which is surprising, of course. 🙂 They got to try the mushrooms. Casey actually thought they were decent and he hates mushrooms! Texture, apparently.

Gogor and Anja have been consulting about the feast menu for next February (and the date looks like 2/18/18!) They’ve got a pretty good one put together, based on early 1400’s foods from the various Slavic lands.

Herb Bunch – Sorted herbs for drying, mostly thyme and oregano….

The Shallots, garlics and the parsleys are doing well, the leeks are awfully spindly. No clue why. Other veg are coming along. There’s reclaimed celery, carrot, leek and turnip, and radish and carrot from seed. Other herbs got prepped and put away .

Project Day

We spent awhile talking about our winter feast. After we had talked that all through, Anja went in back to set up another round of beef in wine…another trial run for one of the feast dishes.

Week of 8/13/17

Herb Bunch – Early in the week some harvesting got done and then on Saturday we got serious about it. Anja was planning on making some herb and cheese biscuits, so she got a lot of snips and bits for that, plus pulled 2 shallots, one of which got separated into 3 and then replanted. She also harvested the garlics, replanted the small bulbs, thinned the radishes and collected some greens from that. She discovered more bulblets once at the shop, so those went back into the ground Saturday evening.

Garlics

Once we were at the shop, Loren spent some time washing the harvested herbs while Anja and the Herb Bunch sorted, prepped and chopped, ending up with two cups of herbs. We ended up putting one cup into a bread loaf instead of biscuits and the other cupful in with barley for a pottage.

That’s the crumb of the bread with 1 cup of chopped herbs and 1/2 a cup of cheese added. It was delicious!

Pottage and bread herbs

Week of 8/20/17

Cheese and Wine Workshop – Monday 8/14 – We made another batch of schiz, but Anja got distracted at a crucial moment and it didn’t turn out quite like the rest because it got too hot, going up to 110F before adding the rennet. The curd was very tiny, almost like ricotta, but we packed it into molds, re-cooked the whey, *got* some ricotta, and then the rest of the whey became a chowder. Few pix. We’ve taken lots before!

Week of 8/27/17

Herb Bunch – We got our tomatillos planted (No pix, yet….) and harvested more herbs and greens. The harvested stuff all got used on Sunday for the fritters, if we hadn’t set them aside for drying. I’ve put the pix from those here.

Project Day – Of course, it being a potluck day, most of this is cooking!

We started the day with draining the chicken that had been cooking all night. We saved some of the broth aside for papyns and added vegetables to the rest. We cooked parsnip, turnip, cabbage, beans and the radish greens in this for a vegetable pottage.

Loren got a bread going after they left and then we started making the “cake” batters. Now, these aren’t sweet, they’re more like fritters than than what we would think of as a cake. The pix of them getting the bisquik added and getting stirred didn’t turn out. We used bisquik because we had it and it needed to get used up. Normally it would have been just flour. The saffron was put into an 1/2 cup of warm broth while this was going on, to get the color to release, then set aside.

 

The next cake batter was for the cheese cakes.

The Papyn gravy was next on the list, so butter was melted, flour and salt were added (and Anja bemoaned the fact later that she used regular and not rice flour) and the flour cooked, then 1/4 cup of cream shaken with 1/4 cup of water to thin it, and then as it cooked the colored broth went back in and it was whisked until it got to a good consistency, then poured into the gravy warmer.

The eggs were cooked next, poached in the rest of the reserved broth with about 1/4 cup of sour cream added and a little salt and then that went into a crockpot to stay warm.

Loren had to take off on an errand at that point, but Amy showed up, so she and Anja sat and talked in between Anja running into the back for the next step of cookery. Amy worked on her njalbinden. The fritters were next and we had a dozen green herb and about 20 of the cheese.

Loren still wasn’t back, so Amy and Anja started on the food, which didn’t include the bread until later. The herb cakes were interesting, but had a slightly bitter aftertaste that Anja didn’t really like, but the cheese ones were enjoyed by all. You can

see the papyn gravy on the papyns in the little eating bowl. The pink stuff is the pickled ginger, which was really good with the fried cakes. The cookies were Amy’s contribution and we didn’t get to the bread until way later.

Loren got back about 1/2 an hour later and everything was still warm, so he did get his share after he got the bread into the oven. We ate that warm, almost as dessert! …and leftovers the next day!

Menu for Potluck

• Bread & Butter- Loren
• Cooked vegetable stew – Loren and Anja
• Fried herb cakes – Herb Bunch/Anja
• Fried cheese “cakes” – Anja
• Papyns – Loren and Anja
• Pickled ginger – Purchased
• Cookies – Amy
• Vegetable Pottage – Anja, Loren and the Herb Bunch

Anja’s version of Papyns

• 1/2 cup flour
• 1/2 stick of butter
• Several pinches of saffron
• 6 eggs
• Box chicken broth
• 3 tbsp sour cream

To cook:

1. Pour at least 2 inches of the broth (it was our whole box) to very soft boil in a saucepan with a cover.
2. Stir in sour cream and bring up to simmer again.
3. One at a time, break each egg carefully into the broth, being sure not to break the yolk.
4. Allow the eggs to poach just until the yolks have cooked; remove from the water with a slotted spoon and put into a heat-proof bowl.
5. In the saucepan, melt the butter and add the saffron.
6. Add flour, shaking or sifting into hot butter so that it cooks & thickens, but does not brown, stirring constantly (it helps to have an extra hand, Mrs. Weasley’s wand or a prehensile tail for this step!) then begin adding the broth back until you have a smooth, gravy-like sauce.
7. Heat slowly until the color changes as the saffron finishes cooking into the sauce. The color of the sauce needs to be a golden yellow, so adjust the saffron or food coloring as needed. Stir frequently to prevent sticking or scorching.
8. Pour over eggs
9. Season with salt & pepper if desired.

Week of 9-3-17 – Making some progress both on setting up the feast venue and the cookbook.

Week of 9-17-17

We had a not-too-productive week with a bunch of mundane obligations getting in the way, but wound up with a marvelous Coronet tourney day and then a really good potluck. Some of our food experiments are turning out really well and one really didn’t. 🙂

Project Day

….started with Anja and Loren sorting feast gear. Wow, does it get confused! Loren had to go back home after the camera and then they got the broth divided out from the beef and vegetables. (Pix below)

…and the cheese was intact and still good and the pickled cabbage elicited, “Oh, gods…. that’s *good*!” It was nice and crunchy, sour and salty, and spicy too, without being overwhelming! Yummy!

So we ate until stuffed and then divided things up to take home and sat and talked music and history and Coronet and a lot of other things.

Potluck Menu

• Beef soup stew with 2 kinds of dumplings – Loren and Anja
• Chia seed, peanut butter cookies – Stella
• Pickled cabbage – Anja and Loren
• Butter – Loren
• Olives (black and green) – purchased
• Pickled ginger – purchased

Pickled Cabbage – Jar or canned sauerkraut is too “loud” for a lot of people. Anja decided to try pickling some cabbage instead, hoping to get a product that’s more palatable when fried with the cheese. So far, the recipes that we found were all OoP, like this Townsend and Sons one.

So for a recipe that works out to…..

1. Shred your cabbage and tamp it down in layers into a crock, maybe with an onion (apple?) between the layers.
2. Take cider or malt vinegar, a couple of cups, and boil it with ginger, pepper and allspice, then pour it over the cabbage and let sit.

So, no salt? …and I can’t have pepper, and it’s not Czech enough without caraway, so what we did was….

• medium head of cabbage
• 2 onion
• 4 Ball jars
• 8 cups vinegar
• 4 cups water
• 1 cup salt
• 1 ½ cup sugar
• Caraway, Black Mustard Seed, Celery seed, Allspice, Clove (jars), Ginger (jars)

The process for filling the jars with cabbage and onion is in the process pix. The vinegar and the rest got brought to a boil and poured over the cabbage, which was left to sit for half an hour. The jars were banged against the table to get the bubbles out and then filled right to the brim with the broth, so that when the lids were screwed down they ran over a touch.

Dumplings – Nothing is more typically Slavic than dumplings. Everything from pirozki to vareniki to raw potato dumplings are all over the “traditional” food pages. Obviously the potatoes are right out for period foods, but lots of other possibilities are out there. We’re going to try doing some with parsnips at some point, because those are suggested as a possibility for “what did they use before potatoes, ‘coz there had to be something!”

…but we had to start with broth because all the commercial beef broths that we were finding had pepper, so Anja decided to do a potroast/soup. After all the hacky-choppy was done it was left to cook overnight.

Divided and cooled and the broth got separated out Sunday morning, so that the dumplings could be done in the broth. Anja then mixed two doughs, one a standard cheese biscuit dough (from a mix) and the other a plain flour/egg/salt dumpling dough. The egg one worked beautifully. The cheese one…. didn’t …. kinda turned to slime…. maybe gravy or something, but not dumplings…. so the rest of that dough became biscuits.

Egg Dumpling

Take 2 eggs, 1 cup of flour and a little salt. Mix to a stiff dough. Some flour might stay in the bowl, this is ok. Drop by teaspoonfuls into boiling broth (at least 4 inches of broth in the pot) or roll teaspoonfuls into balls between floured hands and then toss them in. Boil 3-5 minutes until done. If any don’t “rise” within a few minutes, use a spoon to get them unstuck from the bottom of the pot. Serve warm, maybe with a little broth in the bottom of the bowl. These were yum…and gnocchi-ish texture.

Cheese Dumpling

The cheese dumplings that didn’t work were made from a biscuit dough mix that called for adding 1/2 cup cheese and 3/4 cup of cold water to a packet that was supposed to make 8 biscuits. Now I’ve made dumplings of biscuit dough before and the dough looked right, but it didn’t work this time for dough, just sortof went to slime, or porridge or….gravy (?) in the pots and it took the broth with it. It had a good flavor, but not what we were trying for.

Week of 9-24-17 – Of course, this week started with cleaning up and putting away the feast dishes!

Project Day – We were still sorting out some projects during the early part of the day and tried some more of the pickled cabbage, which still isn’t too strong, and is nice and crunchy.

Week of 10-1-17

Early Week – We’re still trying to sort out the necessary insurance to rent the hall for our Winter Feast and Amy was working on that on Monday.

Cookery – Tuesday tends to be cooking day for Loren and Anja, since it’s the first day of their weekend. Other than picking and freezing berries for later in the season, they decided to make some more broth, chicken this time, since there are more dumpling recipes to try. After the chicken carcasses were in the crockpot and the berries were put by, Anja started on pickling some onions. She used her own pickle broth, but started the onions by the method he recommends that begins at 1:30 on the video.

Pickling onions – Townsend’s –

Tymberhavene A&S night – Loren pulled out some of the pickled cabbage to hand around to folks. Some of them loved it and some of them turned up their noses at cabbage of any type. 🙂

Project Day – Anja started in on a list of Polish medieval recipes, so’s to have them. She and Gogor talked about some of the recipes online, like Chicken baked with Prunes, (….which sounds odd, but Anja’s had it before, and it’s delicious), or the Polish Hydromel, or Saffron Wafers.

Eventually we started the broth boiling and Loryea and Amy both came in not long after. Amy stayed for some dumplings. They worked, but dumplings are a very plebeian dish and bland, in any case. Later we tried some of the pickled onions. They’re really tasty!

The recipe for two servings of the dumplings is:

• 1 egg
• 1/2-1 cup of semolina flour
• shake salt
• broth

1. Bring the broth to a fast boil.
2. While it’s heating, mix the egg up with the salt, then add the flour by the 1/4 cup until you have a stiff paste. When it sits it will look damp on the surface, but be “grainy” when you pull some out.
3. Using two teaspoons, one to scoop up a measured amount and one to push it off the spoon, drop the dumplings into the boiling broth. After every 4 dumplings, take a long-handled spoon and unstick any that haven’t already floated.
4. When all the dumplings are in, put the lid back on and bright back to a boil, then let sit for a minute or two.
5. Pull one dumpling out and cut in 1/2.
6. If it’s done all the way to the center, use a slotted spoon to lift the rest out of the broth and serve.

Week through 10-8-17 – Anja put together the Dembinska page and the insurance paperwork is in….

Medieval Polish Foods – https://wp.me/p8ngGY-Sm

From 10/9-10/22

We’re still working on the insurance which is proving to be a pain in the tukas…. Some lucet cords happened (site tokens for the feast).

Cookery

10/13 – Anja used her recipe for lentil pottage to make a dish for the evening meal at their shop event and also served some of the pickled cabbage! Apples for pie filling happened on 10/17.

Herbs – A lot of greens were harvested for the potluck frytours, but didn’t get used, because of a time crunch. Those will get used early in this week.

Potluck 10/22 – (no pix? how’d we do *that*!)

Anja set up a beef in wine crockpot on Friday that was fridged until cooked overnight on Saturday. It was blearily flipped at 5am. It cooled in the fridge preparatory to being separated, with the beef sliced and the broth being further prepped into gravy. Apple pies got made and set aside to cool.

We didn’t have as many of the utensils ready as we thought, so things kept running later and later. Sasha and Josh showed up around 2pm and helped. We prepped the herbs for the frytours and Sasha prepped the onions for the pies while Anja did the crusts. Jay showed up at 3pm and Loryea just after, and Amy finally near four. We started on Loryea’s souffle almost right as she walked in, since it wasn’t going to keep. (recipe below). Everyone went out front to chat while Anja finished up the onion pies and gravy and then we feasted! Folks kept going back for 2nds and thirds and more!

Potluck Menu

• Souffle – Loryea
• Peach/Ginger crumble with buckwheat
• Grapes – Jay
• Sliced white cheddar Cheese – Jay
• Breads – Amy (Hawaiian Rolls and Rosemary sourdough)
• Butter – Loren
• Beef in wine – Loren and Anja
• Pickled Cabbage – from before
• Pickled Onions – from before
• Pickled Beets – Jeanne
• Olives – Loren
• Onion pies and gravy from the beef/wine broth

Planned, but didn’t happen.

• Herb frytours – Herb Bunch and Anja
• Laganum – Anja
• Lentil Pottage – From before

Recipes

Souffle

• 7 ggs
• 1/4 tsp cream of tartar
• 1 lg. onion finely chopped
• 3 Tbsp sweet rice flour
• 1 cup grated carrots
• 1/4 tsp. sea salt

1. Saute onion in butter at low heat until well browned.
2. Add carrots and salt
3. Cook until soft.
4. Turn off burner.
5. Separate eggs.
6. Beat egg white with cream of tartar until firm peaks form.
7. Beat egg yolks until lemon colored, add carrot mixture and rice flour.
8. Fold together, carefully.
9. Bake at 350F for 20 minutes in greased quiche dish.

Week of 10-29-17

Early Week – Anja was collecting info on how the foods went over with folks.

It sounds like the onion pies are a winner, and the apple, too! We got most of our dishes back and Anja plans to remind everyone that if you want stuff to take home, bring containers with lids or ziplocs! The cookbook is getting worked on.

Amy is still working on getting the insurance for the hall worked out and we found out on Friday that they’re going to charge us over $200! So, something needs to get worked out.

Project Day – We were trying to find the paperwork for the Garden Club building, which was an unsuccessful hunt. In the evening Gogor and Anja started brain-storming on how to replace the drinkables for the feast, since we can’t do alcohol.

Week of 11/5/17

This week’s big deal was the trials runs on the cheese filling for babovka. We already know that the poppyseed will work (it was tried on kolache for a feast several years ago) but needed to know if the cultured milk cheese (tvarog) would work and then also to try the babovka dough recipe in the bread maker.

Early Week – Gogor found recipes over the weekend for possible subs for the alcohol for the feast.

Cookery

We had been gifted with a pint of cultured buttermilk over last weekend so Anja decided to make tvarog/quark and started culturing the milk Tuesday night. She also set up a bottle of pickled carrots. …by Thursday while the milk had obviously cultured, it wasn’t yet beginning to separate, so Tempus set up a lightbulb and a box to get it a little warmer. Anja added radishes to the carrot pickles and tried one of the carrots….not there, yet. So on Friday the cultured milk was ready and we got the quark made… or tried… it boiled, so it was more like ricotta than quark! More below…. …and we had some of the yummy carrots on Sunday as a snack!