#sca kitchen

I had really meant to publish the menu before the event, but ingredient acquisition took more time and effort than expected. In particular, chestnut flour, which I wanted as a thickener for various gluten-free dishes, just could not be found anywhere I tried. I didn't find that out with enough lead time to order it online. Almond flour substituted, and was fine.

Anyway. Here's the full menu, which fed varying numbers of people, but I think about 45 for the feast.

Travellers' Fare (Friday evening): Beef stew with bread and butter (vegan stew on the side, plant butter available, GF bread available).

Saturday Breakfast was produced by the inimitable Lady Meadhbh Rois inghean Uí Chaoimh.

Saturday Lunch: Chicken soup (vegan soup alongside), bread, fruit.

Feast: Roast pork (vegan nut roast on side), Frumenty (rice on side), apple sauce, green sauce, meat pies (mushroom pie on side), creamed leeks (with fake cream), buttered turnips (with plant butter), roasted onions, purple carrots (with plant butter), olives, anchovies, apple pies, blackberry and apple pies (all pies with GF/vegan versions as well, where possible).

Sunday breakfast: Porridge with cream and fruit, stewed apples, boiled eggs, cold ham, and various leftovers, mostly fruit pies.

The emphasis here wasn't on any particular production of period dishes, but on making sure everyone got good solid food. It's also an entirely plausible English Tudor menu, including the frumenty and green sauce as dishes that didn't make it through the Early Modern. As far as I can make out, everyone enjoyed it (although nobody ever tells the cook they didn't). The coeliac and vegan/vegetarian folk expressed particular approval, which was important. Anything I could make GF and vegan was made so (plant butter and almond flour are the two main tricks here).

Gabrielle and Katie were in the kitchen every hour I was, and possibly a few more, and a great deal of credit for the weekend's food being on the tables on time is due to them. Katie also set in, with very limited prior experience, to making pastry for the non-gluten-free pies, and produced some of the best I've ever encountered. She's been designated Head Pastrychef in Perpetuity as a consequence. There were also many other kitchen helpers, who've been thanked appropriately on Facebook. The relevant note here is that we had 4-5 people in the kitchen at most times, which was more than enough, and kept everyone relaxed. The SCA Kitchen playlist (85% mine, 15% Gabrielle's) was also helpful.

So. The first thing that I want to improve is the gluten-free pastry. Making it vegan as well was trivial; replace the lard/dripping with plant butter, and it's absolutely fine. Any fat will do for that, it seems, although since the traditional use for the pastry is the raised pork pie, the meat fats help match the taste. The gluten-free flour, however, could only be persuaded to make a paste, not a pastry - trying to roll it out into sheets simply didn't work. It would take the form of a sheet, alright, but if I went to pick it up, it just broke. An experimental version that Gabrielle and I did before the event could be sort-of lifted into place on baking parchment, but it broke over the contents of the pie. In theory, with a very dense, relatively smooth pie filling (such as a meat pie that's been well-packed), you could get a coherent crust, but I don't know what would happen to that as the contents shrink in baking. Xanthan gum appeared to make zero difference.

So we've some more experimentation to do there. One suggestion is to use an egg or two, which will take it away from being vegan - but a vegan pastry, using plant butter instead, should not be a problem to produce as an ordinary cold pastry. Various things will be trialled.

The green sauce came out particularly well. Órlaith did her usual superlative job of chopping herbs, primarily sorrel and mint, with some basil and thyme, some black pepper, and garlic salt. The liquid base was about 2 parts olive oil to one part white wine vinegar. We only made a small amount, but nearly all of it was eaten. Green sauce is basically a table condiment for the latter end of the SCA period in Western Europe, and I have vague plans to make and bottle some at some stage, to see how it keeps and matures in the longer term.

I made far too much of the frumenty. Bulgur wheat isn't terribly expensive, so I don't feel too bad about it, and the carbohydrates are absolutely the area in which to over-provide. But for my future reference, about 400g of dry bulgur will provide enough for about 30 people without difficulty.

The roasted onions were surprisingly popular. I think we did 11 whole onions, and only one and a half came back to the kitchen.

The meat pies disappeared in their entirety, as far as I can tell. One was a combination of minced pork, minced lamb, and whatever vegetables were to hand; the other was filled with the remnants of Friday's beef stew. I was very pleased to be able to integrate leftovers into the feast; I am completely certain that a rolling use of leftovers in subsequent days' dishes was a standard feature of any period cookery, and we don't often get to do that over a weekend.

The purple carrots were entertaining. I can't detect any difference in taste from orange carrots, but they stain everything they touch a nice shade of purple-blue. I'll get them again if I can just for that.

After much, much rumination, and reading of Peter Brears' Cooking & Dining in Tudor & Early Stuart England, and going back through the Arabic books again, and thinking about what effects I want the feast to have... I've settled on English.

There's quite a bit of thinking behind this, but essentially, the flavour I want to hit with this is "harvest". And one of the key things about harvest foods is that people look forward to them, they're familiar, they're comforting and comfortable, and they don't need explanation. The fact that we can do that better with medieval English food than medieval Irish food in Ireland will be a matter of discussion for a later post.

So. Brears gives exactly five recipes that include apples: three desserts (an apple cream , an apple mousse and apple fritters), an apple pie and a rather odd apple omelette. I'm going to leave out the apple omelette, I think, because of the familiarity issue (and also, it's not the most practical dish for a meal for more than about 8 people).

The rest will all be done. The remainder of the current plan is for a good-sized pork roast (maybe two, depending on the numbers attending) with apple sauce as the main feature, with frumenty, a couple of vegetable dishes (to be sourced from Brears), a couple of plain-cooked vegetable options (carrots and peas, say), and some savoury pies (at least one vegan). Then a few different apple pies (fairly plain; with cinnamon; with blackberries), the desserts from Brears, and a few other fruit desserts.

We're catering to at least one vegan (which will take care of incidental vegetarians) and probably at least two coeliacs, so I'll work up options for them against the dishes they definitely can't have. That'll almost certainly be rice in vegetable stock against the frumenty (which contains both gluten and eggs), and I'll make up a nut roast against the meat. I'm not very picky about allergy and diet-matching food being period; I'm more intent on feeding people good food first and then, if possible, being period-plausible. Vegan food simply isn't period-plausible*, so a nut roast will be fine.

I have a theory that I'll be able to do a gluten-free hot-water-crust pastry fairly easily (there's almost no kneading for it, so no development of gluten), and if I can do that with a plant-based butter, it allows for the vegans as well. If it turns out good enough, I'll just use that for all the pies. I love hot-water pastry; my hands are much too warm for me to ever have been very successful with the more ordinary as-cold-as-possible pastries.

I might look at adding a few more savoury dishes to fill out the table a bit, optimising for colour as much as anything else. Tudor food has an awful tendency to be brown, so I'll be looking to vary that as much as possible. The carrots and peas will help with that already.

I noted some time back that I was going to do some work on post-SCA-period Irish recipes, with an eye to working backwards from there. I finally got that started this week by seeing some documents from the Smythe of Barbavilla Papers in the National Library of Ireland. These are a collection of stuff with dates from 1621 (so barely post-period) up to 1930, but the papers I've been looking at are from the 1690s to the early 1700s.

The whole collection is listed here. I've been looking at MS 41,603, which is a bundle containing a very varied set of stuff. Deeds, devotional material, covers of letters, actual letters, poetry, musical notation, and most importantly, a whole pile of loose recipes, commonplace books, and recipe books. Honestly, I reckon it was everything in the collection that didn't belong in any other clear category. Thus far I've looked through one folder of letters, two books (one of which is definitely a recipe book, the other more varied but containing some recipes), and about half of one folder of recipes. Some of the recipes I'm finding are for food, some for medicines, some (I think) are not recipes at all, but the ~1700 equivalent of prescriptions, and some are downright alchemical.

The latter are for the most part due to "A Book of Reaseats", which is clearly attributed to "Eliz Hughes" and dated "August 03 1701". From the handwriting, I reckon Ms. Hughes was in her teens at the time of writing (working out who she was will be research for another day), and the first few formulae in the book don't dissuade me from this idea: To make a candle burn underwater & not go out, How you may put your fingers in boileing tea with out burning your self at all, To make Steel as soft as Paste, How to wright Letters secretly, To fetch oyles or grece out of cloues, How to make a glase not burn being set by ye fire, To make a blown blader skip from place to place, To make flames suddenly come out of a pot full of water, and How to bray fine gold to write with. The recipes after this are a more conventional set of preserves, cakes, and some meats.

The medicinal recipes outnumber the rest, though some of those are of interest in their own right. Here's a particularly mysterious one, which seems to be in some form of shorthand Latin.

I'm going to be cooking at the Barony of Eplaheimr's Féile na nÚll (The Apple Festival) in late August. I have my kitchen crew lined up, the playlist has been edited, and we're starting to think about the feast menus. I'll no doubt have a number of posts along the way, which I'll edit in as links here, but this is the basics of my thinking on what needs to happen.

First item is that the menu should contain apples, in quantity. This is basically a thematic element, and shouldn't be hard to fulfil.

Second item is that it should cover carbs, vegetables, and protein for everyone, coeliacs, vegetarians and vegans included. I generally do my best to produce period-accurate food* that works for people with allergies, and then ease off a little for the people who are on voluntarily restricted diets like vegetarians and vegans (vegans can't be fully fed with period-accurate foods at all, so we just can't manage that). The cold-weather menu should be forward on stews, hot pies, and other warming stuff - think of sterotypical medieval/fantasy tavern food. The warm-weather menu should have more fresh fruit, cold pies, and so on - think Edwardian picnic. I'd like to be able to say "this feast menu is as accurate as we can make it for late August in the year XXXX in Y place". Y place is either Ireland (preferred, but hard to verify), England (much easier to verify), or Baghdad (also relatively easy to verify). For Ireland and England, we'll go for later period, 1550+, so we can have pies from good ovens. For Baghdad, it'll be ~1025, because that's when Nawal Nasrallah's translation of al-Warraq was current.

Further thinking on the Arabic/Irish/English question

Decision Made (English)

Menu & Post-Cookery Analysis

Today, at Dun in Mara's Arts & Sciences Day, my ward Gabrielle and I tried out two of the recipes we're looking at for Féile na nÚll. Both are Arabic, one from al-Warraq, one from the Kanz, both from Nasrullah's translations.

From the Kanz, we did Receipe 119, tuffāḥiyya bi-zaʿfarān (meat with apple and saffron). It's a fairly simple stew of meat (lamb, in this case) and apples, with spices, and a thickener made of vinegar, sugar and wheat starch. For a variety of reasons, we had a few substitutions in there - the wheat starch was replaced with rice flour, the saffron with turmeric, and the aṭrāf al-ṭīb spice mix was definitely debatable in its makeup (spikenard replaced with fennel, and the lisān al-ʿaṣāfīr (fruit of Syrian ash) replaced with a little Sichuan pepper). It came out pretty good, I think, although the three kinds of pepper (long pepper, black pepper, sichuan pepper) put it at the edge of some people's spice tolerance, so I'll want to go easy on those for larger amounts. From my own point of view, the betel leaf in the aṭrāf al-ṭīb was strong enough to be distinctly tastable in the end product, even though there was only a tiny amount in there. But overall, it was a good stew, and with some adjustments to the spicing, I'll make it again. I probably won't look to include saffron in it; the amount won't really carry much taste against the peppers and betel and cloves, and the colour is adequately provided by the turmeric.

From al-Warraq, we did a ḵẖabīṣ of apples from Chapter 95 (except with apricots, because getting dried apples proved impossible, for no good reason I can imagine except the mysteries of supply lines). From the recipes around it, and from the words used in the translations, I expected the outcome to be a thick mousse, or thereabouts. What we got was a slightly apricot flavoured toffee, pretty much. It was good, but it was very unexpected.

Now, there were a number of substitutions (most notably apricot for apple, walnut oil for the almond and pistachio, and rice flour for wheat starch), any of which may have made it go weird; we didn't have anything like the exact utensils described, and we had no idea of how thick it should have been in the pot. I think our substitutions were ok (all were made in the context of recipes in the same chapter), and I don't think we went too far from the the instructions. However, I don't think we added nearly enough oil. There are actual amounts given in the recipe, for once, which makes that an even more egregious error, but they do look like vast amounts in proportion. So when we're trying that recipe again, we'll use more oil (and also see if we can get the proper apple powder, almond oil and pistachio oil).

My kitchen crew are currently discussing which of the three possible cuisines we're going to go with for Féile na nÚll. So far, we're not even close to a decision. Here's (mostly) some cut-and-pasting from the Discord conversation.

If we go with Arabic, I have found fantastic looking recipes for an apple and saffron stew (from the Kanz), an apple pudding, and something that I think should probably be described as an apple chutney, both from al-Warraq. We can build that out into a pretty solid menu, and it covers our vegetarian and coeliac requirements pretty easily.

If we go with English, we get pies. And it's kind of easy to make a good havest-feeling spread of stuff when you have pies. At that time of year, we should have apples and also blackberries, pears, and plenty of other fruit, and as much in the way of meat and fish for savouries as we like. We will need to work out a gluten-free pie crust, but I'm hopeful

Irish gives us cheese and flavoured butters as a major component, and we can use cabbage, kale, garlic, and plenty of berries. We could also hit the pottage-with-purple-berries, which is at this stage becoming more of a comedy bit than a specific dish. Irish also allows for large roasts of pork, which goes well with the apple theme. Not, that is, that medieval England wouldn't have had roast pork, but they were legendarily obsessed with roast beef.