progress, slow but moving

I have made it through two books now and have looked into leads for my Spanish portion of the meal.

I got a notebook with movable dividers and have been using it to keep notes and track things. Today I sat down and allocated myself 2 pages per recipe for my testing and redacting phase of the recipes I have found in The Good Housewife's Jewel. Now to make a shopping list and get cracking on the trying them out!

I have a seperate section for stuff to research, words, ingredients, substitutions etc... I will start with some of that later.

Sorry for so many posts and what seems to be so little content. I am trying to keep track of my thought processes as it is such a big project :)

Almost another book down

I am most of the way through extracting ideas from my Italian cookbook. As Scappi breaks his book into "Books" and not chapters I have one book left, I am intrigued and scared at the same time as it is his book on Pastry! I need to keep in mind the amount of time I will have to prep foods as well as the fact that I will not be able to personally oversee the kitchen. I am simply redacting the recipes for a professional kitchen's use. We will do prep work for them, but not the cooking. This makes me so scared! I just want things to be good, I am not even aiming for perfect!

I have a plan, a cunning plan :) I have enlisted a scribe to be my partner in crime, but more on that later :)

Off to do something useful, I think.

1 down

sigh, one down and many to go. Though it does mark progress. What am I doing? I am working on creating the feast for 20 year celebration in Drachenwald! Scared to death but moving ahead. It will be a 16th century Grand Feast, with 4 courses. I have decided to chose from the countries of England, Germany, Italy and hopefully Spain (if I can find enough material that I can read to work with.)

1 down? I have made it through my choice of English cookbook! A facsimile copy of The Good Housewifes Jewel. I have approximately 11 recipes to test in order to choose my final 3 or 4 for the course. One is chosen so that leaves me with actually only 2 or 3 to choose.

I have plunged back into Scappi for my Italian course and have asked around for some materials for Spain. I am hoping to be able to provide variety and substance to the people and I am hoping to meet or exceed the expectations that are placed on this coveted position. I am scared as hell at failing! but will carry on and try not to look at the big picture just the baby steps needed top get there right now.

Food failure is food success!

Greetings all!

I can now tell you why I have been so busy and lax lately. My husband was elevated to the order of the Laurel this last weekend and his squire brother made a Knight. I have been busy helping with organizational things as well as planning some "treat" to have. To this end I was brought back to a previous "food failure" that I had, Elizabethan Biscuit Bread is thy name.

The first time I conceived to cook it, it was a joint effort. My good friend and I were competing against another team in an open fire competition. The recipe struck us and so we began to cook! We glanced at the recipe i think twice in total which is likely our first mistake, we looked to the redaction maybe a time more. So it was not until we were finished that we saw we had made our mistake.

The original recipe is as follows:
     Take one pound of flower,& one pound of sugar, one ounce of annisseeds, half an ounce of coriander seed, mingle these together, take viii eggs and beat them verie well, then put in your stuff, then beat it alltogether very wello, then take dishes and annoint them with butter & put stuf into them, Let the oven be as hot as it is for manchet, when it is browne at top turne it, & set it againe, if you will have uit light put the yolks of viii eggs more to it & beat the sugar with the eggs, before the flower bee put in.

Now where I found this recipe unfortunately only states "A recipe from 16th century Elizabethan England." I must further look for it though. So the original source is unknown to me. The source for the inspiration for the person is no longer locatable as well. I am digressing.

So with a quick glance we measure 1 for 1. Yes we measured, not weighed the flour and sugar. It was a tasty and lightly crisp cookie that resulted, but not what was intended, but still a success. So my memory of these being a nice little cookie I contemplated plates of them for the vigils. Being that I wanted it all done for Friday I started making them on Thursday so they would be fresher. I pulled out my book, and began to read, slower this time as there was no hurry, it dawned on me what we had done. I mean we re read the recipe at home and had discovered it much earlier but this time it really began to settle in. We had done it wrong and now I was faced with a challenge and dilemma. Do I do it wrong again and get what I expect, or do I do it right and not know what to expect?

Do it right won me over, I had the period recipe to work with and therefore did. I got out my scale and measured my flour and sugar first. I had yolks left over from a previous project and so opted for the "lighter" version. Problems arose when I measured my spices, to a modern palate this would have been overload! and so here I did deviate in favor of wanting people to actually eat them and scaled back but keeping the ratio. I noticed instantly that this batter was "wetter" than the previous ones I had made and thus would be harder to "form" and I also noticed that my oven would not be needed. I took the tact to butter a pan and cook them like pancakes! Well while they were turning out tasty and coming along they also stuck to my spatula on turning so not easy, and then it struck me, not pancakes but waffles! This would be wonderful in a waffle iron. My large problem came in the debate of weather they would hold well until the following night and my determination was it would not hold and while I would have loved to make them I did not want to be making them fresh before the vigil.

Now, we all know that for most recipes measure is important but in baking it is the key. All baking is formulaic and each small derivation is a catastrophe or success in the making.

Sca Politics post

Greetings to you your Majesties as well as our most noble seneschal,

I have been having a hard time formulating this letter so if it rambles a bit please forgive me.

First I am against the release of the Queens arms, second, I am OK with the release of the arms for the Prince and Princess.

I am not against change, in fact I am all for change! As long as I believe the change will do more good than harm. This subject is already doing great amounts of harm throughout the Kingdom and it is saddening me. People on both sides of this "argument" have had their feelings hurt and their toes stepped on. Harm is all done some people might say, I am not so optimistic I believe the worst is yet to come. We will see a decline in numbers as those who have already been placed "on the fence" by the harsh drive toward period practices leaving holes in our society, if indeed the precedent is put in place. On the other hand we may just as well lose that number in people who do not see us as period enough, or see us as archaic and static if the change does not take place. We are in a place of damned if if we and dammed if we don't. There is no easy answer.

I believe strongly in "playing period" but it is a standard I hold myself to and not everyone else. We are a Recreation (Rec- reation not re- Creation) society, not a reenactment group for a reason. We are hobbyists who pay to play in a group that so many others within Europe get paid to play in! We already have trouble keeping up numbers in various regions, Central being the hardest hit by the military draw down as well as a bad reputation that is over 20 years old. The saying where I am from is "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!", There are so many other aspects of our society that need tending to, so many more places that all this energy could have gone into to get us two steps ahead, instead of one step behind.

I know it is off topic but it will hopefully get some of my point across. I do not believe in inspirational equality, and I do not know how you can reconcile your drive for a step closer to period practice while advocating a step away from period practice. The true fact is at that point it is picking and choosing what period practices you will embrace or not. While there are instances of same sex "co rulers" they were familial and for a period of time, or there was a council that ruled until a regent was of age. Among the Russians there would an "uncle" or someone of blood relation to pull the strings of the "idiot czar" because he was not mentally capable of doing so himself. One monarch was killed by his constituents and people in a horrific manner and no one thought twice because he was in period "an abomination of God". To have period practices is to hold to period values as well. Is this the equality that is sought? This is period practice, but we do not want to see it in our society.

We choose as a society instead to see a consort who can stand strong under their own banner or if they chose, to stand together under the kingdom banner. The truth is the King has no banner, There is the Kingdom banner and the Consort's banner. If anything we should be angry that the fighting consort is denied something that belongs to them other than their victory on the field. Other than the honor of having placed either their loved one or their friend on the throne, having chosen them for whatever their reasons may be to be the one to rule alongside them as equal. Which by the way is a non period practice, The consort was and still is modernly a window dressing, but in our society we accept them as equal. Taking away the Consorts banner does not give them equality in a "period perfect" group, it strips that equality from them.

In 1 week, I will sit on the sidelines of a glorious tournament. In 1 week, I will be sitting pensive wondering who will be the heirs to the Black Dragon throne. In 1 week, it could be me. As many have spoken from a consort point of view and the dreams we have had of proudly being able to display the arms that we hold dear as a symbol of the Consort. I have never thought it wrong, un period or demeaning to want to sit beneath that banner, I still do not find it to be any of those things.

I keep feeling like I have more to add but it will not come, so for now I leave this missive to your hands.

Yours in service,
Magdelena Grace Vane

Modern food thoughts #1

(hand written in the states and transcribed now)

I guess I have spent too much time while in the US watching food network. Though in some ways not enough.lol. I have been enjoying the competition element of the show "Chopped". A show that starts with 4 contestants and a mystery basket with 4 ingredients and a timer to make an appetizer. The next round it is 3 contestants and a new basket to make an ente and the third and final round is 2 contestants and a new basket to make a dessert. After each round a contestant is "chopped" frm the competition. I am trying to think of ways to run a competition like this with medieval foods and an outdoor setting! This would be fun!

Anyway what really prompted me to put pen to paper is the breakfast I just had. I have always thought it was the one meal of the day that a person couldn't majorly screw up, but I was wrong! How does this relate to the show? Well, on the show they are usually talking about finding a harmony of flavors with the 4 ingredients or making them some how part of a whole. My breakfast was not part of a whole. It was horrid! the eggs tasted plain, no butter or bacon grease flavor, the sausage was from a box frozen and overcooked, and the homefries were seasoned to heavily and only on one side of them and no onions! though that may be a local thing.

All of this though did get me thinking of medieval cooking and the fact that while redacting we are looking for balance of flavors. Stepping out of the box and going out on a limb to try to achieve what we think is "their" flavor. Stepping beyond the modern palate and into the unknown.

My first venture was balancing mint and garlic in an eggplant dish (talk about in an earlier post) Trying to balance the heat of garlic with the coolness of mint and not have one overpower rthe other and also not having them muddle together into a mess.

How do we do it though? I know I have talked about the "to taste" before, and how will we ever truly know what "to taste" is, but have our mouths changed that much have our tastebuds "evolved"? Probably not. We still crave the 3 same basic things that have kept us alive for millenia, Salt, Fat and Sweet. These flavors are still the ones that appeal to us the most.

Back to the breakfast I ate, my eggs had little flavor. Why? Probably for 1 they were old and 2 they were not cooked in enough fat or a flavorful fat like olive oil, butter or bacon grease. Try this experiment at home, cook 4 eggs, in the first barely wipe the pan with a vegetable oil so it won't stick, second use butter, the third use bacon grease and the fourth use olive oil. you only need about a teaspoon to fry in but the more the better :) My bet is that the higher fat eggs will traste better and that overall the palate will be happiest with the one cooked in bacon fat because it gets both fat and salt. The most common fats of the time for cooking were rendered anomal fat, butter and olive oil. They were used to cook the food as well as enhance flavor of foods.

The media talks about diet and obesity and why it  is on the rise but rarely does it talk about the why of it. Talk to a person who is "dieting" and they will talk about food, the foods they crave, the foods they miss most because they feel they have to cut them out, and most often you will find that they are sweet, salty or fatty or a combination of flavors like chips that are salty and fatty or cookies that are sweet and fatty. The something and fatty is the perfect combo as fat transports flavor.

Anyway just thoughts....

Elderberry custard from Apicius, a starting point.

Nothing was really measured so this is all guess work on ammounts.

I use 1 bowl, large that held icecream, filled with elderberries that I had picked and washed then frozen. roughly 16 cups  would be my best guess.

20 eggs (whole and beaten)
2 cups of white wine
1.25 cups of raisin liquor (would have used more if we had had it)

250 gm liqid honey

1 tsp sea salt

4 oz of butter in leiu of oil

again rough estimates but a starting point to work with for redacting, this recipe will be tried again!