Hmmm... supposed to be working on viking cockatrice...
Problem is I'm completely wrapped up in the concept of the Breugel Feast. The Peasant Wedding for Midwinter. Its an area that I've always wanted to play with and have flirted with on and off over the years with major sidetracking issues like Viking. So now being given it on a plate to play with makes everything else look dull for the moment.
My current task is pastry. Everyone is agreed that a fish pie is a must. We just cannot afford the expensive fish we see in most recipes, like lamprey and eel, so we are going to have to make do with salmon, which is apparently cheaper and more easily obtained. Which i guess i would have known if i was a big fish fan.
Small aside: I have just read about coquinaria's website getting ripped off without attribuition. Truly shocked, and disturbed. WHY? Why take someone else's work? By all means use their research, even words if you are not doing your own, but why would you leave out an attribution??? That is beyond rude.
Anyway, so now i'm on the hunt for fish pie. Salmon pie if i can get it. As close as possible to fit in the timeframe of BPW (Breugel's Peasant Wedding - it had to happen, my penchant for TLA's has struck again). With a dutch spin if i can help it. And from the purely selfish perspective that those of us queueing up for the feast are of dutch rather than flemish stock. Come to think of it, I cannot remember having met any Flemish emigrees in Australia, let alone their children in the sca...
So, starting with Chrissie van Tets' translation of Een Noatble Boecxen van Cokereyen (NBC hereafter - which you can see here: http://users.pandora.be/willy.vancammeren/NBC/index.htm) Here is what I have:
Recipe 115: Pies of Salmon. Pies of salmon. "One shall not put anything [6] in them other than white ginger powder."
Well thats not so helpful. A good start, but no instruction on how to prepare. What type of pastry? Come to that, what type of pie?? I mean are we eating all the pie or just the innards? And what do you mean nothing but white ginger? Wouldn't the fish dry out??
If we look at recipe 94 from the same source, we get:
"[4] To make good pies. Take flour and [5] make dough from it and put therein eggs or [6] fat in order that the crust of the pie will be short. [7] And take the meat that you want to have in there [8] and cut it small as the meat allows. [9] Or take hens or capons or beef tongue [10] or other game and lay that whole in the [11] pie and one must stick them with cloves [12] if one wishes and some cut bacon into it. [13] And the spices for this are ginger, grains of paradise [14] and cinnamon mixed together. These spices [15] must be mixed with the meat when the meat [16] is cut up small. Then one throws it into the pie [17] together and takes a little wine if one wishes and one also lays [18] therein marrow bones because they should be fat. [19] Set it thus in the oven and let it bake. Then [20] it is complete."
That sounds a little more promising. But of course as per all our wonderful recipes within our time perid precious little in the way of measurements. And the pastry is nebulous, although we know it is a shortcrust, and that it contains flour and eggs. And we know that for standard meats, they are minced, spices, a little fat and maybe some wine added. Where does this leave our salmon? No wine, no fat (fair enough, greasy fish) with just a little white ginger powder in the mix... well that sounds boring. Maybe i should be saying delicate? Not to my mundane australian palate? Perhaps i need to be proven wrong?
If I look at recipe 95, butter is added to the list of pastry ingredients. As is warm water. "[22] Take butter, eggs, flour, warm water and [23] make therefrom dough of everything that was mentioned before [24]... " That just blows my mind. I have always been told COLD water. Always. Even run your fingers under cold water to make your hands cold enough to deal with dough. Have i been doing it wrong all these years??? But at least it is a more familiar bunch of ingredients for pastry.
As a side, totally taken with the recipe 99 for chicken pie with Sauce Robert ( but want to do something else entirely with the chicken). "Take verjuice and egg yolks; beat [21] them together. Then take fine powder. And when [22] the pie is to be baked so put it all together [23] and cut the chickens in pieces. Could we bastardize the salmon recipe to have no other spices other than white ginger powder. but maybe more in the way of a scrummy binding agent like this? Would it ruin the fish? Would it fit with the period palate? is it a legitimate redaction technique? After all the Sauce Robert option appears in the recipe book before the Salmon Pie, where the author seems ... well bored of repeating all the steps and is only giving spicing directions for pies of various meats... Wish I knew more about redaction. And cooking. Having looked through all the fish pie recipes in this book, most of them have a "nothing but" clause on spices... Hmmm.. still in the food for thought category. Think this distinction might have to come down to a taste test.
Pretty happy with the list of pastry ingerdients buy now, and know that most good cooks would not require any more direction than this, but have my curiosity peaked now. So what can I find?
Just as note, i found out what dutch cooks did before tv. Have you seen the lists of recipes? Half are how to make your food in technicolour!! I kid you not, they dyed their food interesting colours... and I'm talking purples, blues, bright reds, pink... how boring must our dishes look comparatively?
And as another note, at least three of the books have recipes for porpoise. Given Krae Glas, I wish I had a chance to have a go...
Looked at the Coquinaria website. Nothing more on dough in the flemish manuscripts, although an interesting recipe for cheese biscuits. Its a good website. Check it out at: http://www.coquinaria.nl/kooktekst/index.htm
Hmmm. So while there are other period dutch cookbooks, notably "Eenen seer schoonen ende excellenten Cocboeck", which i wish was available in English though i cannot find it. A few recipes can be found here, but without transalation before redaction hard to know how good they are: http://www.kookhistorie.com/
So on to a contemporary German source. I have no idea how valid this is. I have no idea if there was a strong overlap in culinary traditions, or if it was strikingly different. I know i think of german cooking now as different. Similar, but different in that thousand tiny ways so as to make it alien. But Sabrina is in many ways a legend not least of which for giving very full instructions.
Anyway, the full version of Sabrina Welserin's cookbook (Hereafter SWC) is here: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Medieval/Cookbooks/Sabrina_Welserin.html
Her recipe for dough is as follows:
Take flour, the best that you can get, about two handfuls, depending on how large or small you would have the pie. Put it on the table and with a knife stir in two eggs and a little salt. Put water in a small pan and a piece of fat the size of two good eggs, let it all dissolve together and boil. Afterwards pour it on the flour on the table and make a strong dough and work it well, however you feel is right. If it is summer, one must take meat broth instead of water and in the place of the fat the skimmings from the broth. When the dough is kneaded, then make of it a round ball and draw it out well on the sides with the fingers or with a rolling pin, so that in the middle a raised area remains, then let it chill in the cold. Afterwards shape the dough as I have pointed out to you. Also reserve dough for the cover and roll it out into a cover and take water and spread it over the top of the cover and the top of the formed pastry shell and join it together well with the fingers. Leave a small hole. And see that it is pressed together well, so that it does not come open. Blow in the small hole which you have left, then the cover will lift itself up. Then quickly press the hole closed. Afterwards put it in the oven. Sprinkle flour in the dish beforehand. Take care that the oven is properly heated, then it will be a pretty pastry. The dough for all shaped pastries is made in this manner.
How good is that??? seems hot water is the way to go though. Even better than this, recipes 64 & 65 are how to prepare the fish and make fish pie dough (albeit salmon doesn't rate a mention):
64 To make a fish pastry from trout, carp, Selbingen[9] or bream
Open the fish and pull out the entrails and cut diagonal slashes in it, let the fish remain otherwise whole. Take pepper and ginger, mix them together well and a little cloves, and salt the fish well inside and out. Take butter or another fat and put it on the inside and outside of the fish. Make the pastry as for any fish and let it bake.
65 The dough for the pastry
Take rye flour, according to how large the fish is, take it, and put water, about three pints, in a pan and a good quarter pound of fat into it, and let it cook together, put the flour on the table and put the solids from the melted fat-water on top, until it makes a good firm dough. You must knead it well so that it becomes good and sticky. Afterwards make two parts out of it. First the bottom, roll it out as large as the fish is. After that lay the fish on the bottom crust and roll out the top crust just as wide and put it over the fish and shape it like the fish. Make fins on it and take a small knife and make dough scales, also eyes and everything which a fish has. And put it in the oven and spread it with an egg. Then you have a fish pastry.
So that would be no eggs, but with fishy fatty water. So what is right? Time for a taste test i think. Roll on Thursday...
My current task is pastry. Everyone is agreed that a fish pie is a must. We just cannot afford the expensive fish we see in most recipes, like lamprey and eel, so we are going to have to make do with salmon, which is apparently cheaper and more easily obtained. Which i guess i would have known if i was a big fish fan.
Small aside: I have just read about coquinaria's website getting ripped off without attribuition. Truly shocked, and disturbed. WHY? Why take someone else's work? By all means use their research, even words if you are not doing your own, but why would you leave out an attribution??? That is beyond rude.
Anyway, so now i'm on the hunt for fish pie. Salmon pie if i can get it. As close as possible to fit in the timeframe of BPW (Breugel's Peasant Wedding - it had to happen, my penchant for TLA's has struck again). With a dutch spin if i can help it. And from the purely selfish perspective that those of us queueing up for the feast are of dutch rather than flemish stock. Come to think of it, I cannot remember having met any Flemish emigrees in Australia, let alone their children in the sca...
So, starting with Chrissie van Tets' translation of Een Noatble Boecxen van Cokereyen (NBC hereafter - which you can see here: http://users.pandora.be/willy.vancammeren/NBC/index.htm) Here is what I have:
Recipe 115: Pies of Salmon. Pies of salmon. "One shall not put anything [6] in them other than white ginger powder."
Well thats not so helpful. A good start, but no instruction on how to prepare. What type of pastry? Come to that, what type of pie?? I mean are we eating all the pie or just the innards? And what do you mean nothing but white ginger? Wouldn't the fish dry out??
If we look at recipe 94 from the same source, we get:
"[4] To make good pies. Take flour and [5] make dough from it and put therein eggs or [6] fat in order that the crust of the pie will be short. [7] And take the meat that you want to have in there [8] and cut it small as the meat allows. [9] Or take hens or capons or beef tongue [10] or other game and lay that whole in the [11] pie and one must stick them with cloves [12] if one wishes and some cut bacon into it. [13] And the spices for this are ginger, grains of paradise [14] and cinnamon mixed together. These spices [15] must be mixed with the meat when the meat [16] is cut up small. Then one throws it into the pie [17] together and takes a little wine if one wishes and one also lays [18] therein marrow bones because they should be fat. [19] Set it thus in the oven and let it bake. Then [20] it is complete."
That sounds a little more promising. But of course as per all our wonderful recipes within our time perid precious little in the way of measurements. And the pastry is nebulous, although we know it is a shortcrust, and that it contains flour and eggs. And we know that for standard meats, they are minced, spices, a little fat and maybe some wine added. Where does this leave our salmon? No wine, no fat (fair enough, greasy fish) with just a little white ginger powder in the mix... well that sounds boring. Maybe i should be saying delicate? Not to my mundane australian palate? Perhaps i need to be proven wrong?
If I look at recipe 95, butter is added to the list of pastry ingredients. As is warm water. "[22] Take butter, eggs, flour, warm water and [23] make therefrom dough of everything that was mentioned before [24]... " That just blows my mind. I have always been told COLD water. Always. Even run your fingers under cold water to make your hands cold enough to deal with dough. Have i been doing it wrong all these years??? But at least it is a more familiar bunch of ingredients for pastry.
As a side, totally taken with the recipe 99 for chicken pie with Sauce Robert ( but want to do something else entirely with the chicken). "Take verjuice and egg yolks; beat [21] them together. Then take fine powder. And when [22] the pie is to be baked so put it all together [23] and cut the chickens in pieces. Could we bastardize the salmon recipe to have no other spices other than white ginger powder. but maybe more in the way of a scrummy binding agent like this? Would it ruin the fish? Would it fit with the period palate? is it a legitimate redaction technique? After all the Sauce Robert option appears in the recipe book before the Salmon Pie, where the author seems ... well bored of repeating all the steps and is only giving spicing directions for pies of various meats... Wish I knew more about redaction. And cooking. Having looked through all the fish pie recipes in this book, most of them have a "nothing but" clause on spices... Hmmm.. still in the food for thought category. Think this distinction might have to come down to a taste test.
Pretty happy with the list of pastry ingerdients buy now, and know that most good cooks would not require any more direction than this, but have my curiosity peaked now. So what can I find?
Just as note, i found out what dutch cooks did before tv. Have you seen the lists of recipes? Half are how to make your food in technicolour!! I kid you not, they dyed their food interesting colours... and I'm talking purples, blues, bright reds, pink... how boring must our dishes look comparatively?
And as another note, at least three of the books have recipes for porpoise. Given Krae Glas, I wish I had a chance to have a go...
Looked at the Coquinaria website. Nothing more on dough in the flemish manuscripts, although an interesting recipe for cheese biscuits. Its a good website. Check it out at: http://www.coquinaria.nl/kooktekst/index.htm
Hmmm. So while there are other period dutch cookbooks, notably "Eenen seer schoonen ende excellenten Cocboeck", which i wish was available in English though i cannot find it. A few recipes can be found here, but without transalation before redaction hard to know how good they are: http://www.kookhistorie.com/
So on to a contemporary German source. I have no idea how valid this is. I have no idea if there was a strong overlap in culinary traditions, or if it was strikingly different. I know i think of german cooking now as different. Similar, but different in that thousand tiny ways so as to make it alien. But Sabrina is in many ways a legend not least of which for giving very full instructions.
Anyway, the full version of Sabrina Welserin's cookbook (Hereafter SWC) is here: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Medieval/Cookbooks/Sabrina_Welserin.html
Her recipe for dough is as follows:
Take flour, the best that you can get, about two handfuls, depending on how large or small you would have the pie. Put it on the table and with a knife stir in two eggs and a little salt. Put water in a small pan and a piece of fat the size of two good eggs, let it all dissolve together and boil. Afterwards pour it on the flour on the table and make a strong dough and work it well, however you feel is right. If it is summer, one must take meat broth instead of water and in the place of the fat the skimmings from the broth. When the dough is kneaded, then make of it a round ball and draw it out well on the sides with the fingers or with a rolling pin, so that in the middle a raised area remains, then let it chill in the cold. Afterwards shape the dough as I have pointed out to you. Also reserve dough for the cover and roll it out into a cover and take water and spread it over the top of the cover and the top of the formed pastry shell and join it together well with the fingers. Leave a small hole. And see that it is pressed together well, so that it does not come open. Blow in the small hole which you have left, then the cover will lift itself up. Then quickly press the hole closed. Afterwards put it in the oven. Sprinkle flour in the dish beforehand. Take care that the oven is properly heated, then it will be a pretty pastry. The dough for all shaped pastries is made in this manner.
How good is that??? seems hot water is the way to go though. Even better than this, recipes 64 & 65 are how to prepare the fish and make fish pie dough (albeit salmon doesn't rate a mention):
64 To make a fish pastry from trout, carp, Selbingen[9] or bream
Open the fish and pull out the entrails and cut diagonal slashes in it, let the fish remain otherwise whole. Take pepper and ginger, mix them together well and a little cloves, and salt the fish well inside and out. Take butter or another fat and put it on the inside and outside of the fish. Make the pastry as for any fish and let it bake.
65 The dough for the pastry
Take rye flour, according to how large the fish is, take it, and put water, about three pints, in a pan and a good quarter pound of fat into it, and let it cook together, put the flour on the table and put the solids from the melted fat-water on top, until it makes a good firm dough. You must knead it well so that it becomes good and sticky. Afterwards make two parts out of it. First the bottom, roll it out as large as the fish is. After that lay the fish on the bottom crust and roll out the top crust just as wide and put it over the fish and shape it like the fish. Make fins on it and take a small knife and make dough scales, also eyes and everything which a fish has. And put it in the oven and spread it with an egg. Then you have a fish pastry.
So that would be no eggs, but with fishy fatty water. So what is right? Time for a taste test i think. Roll on Thursday...