SC - chicken on string (and beef)

[Stephen Bloch]

Rosalinde wrote:

> Any fool proof medieval recipes for a beef roast?  I've got a great pork
> roast recipe that I'll trade for it!

I can't contribute one of my own, as until I got married I
(a) was mostly vegetarian, and
(b) cooked for myself and would have taken forever to use up a beef
roast of any reasonable size.

However, Master Basilicus Phocas of Dragonsmark (Lexington, KY) did a
wonderful, and wonderfully simple, beef roast at a feast a few years
ago: I wasn't in the kitchen, so I don't know the details, but it looked
to me as though he poured rock salt (enough to cover) over the roasts a
few hours before cooking them.  There may have been garlic and other
spices as well.  The effect was a roast with lots of flavorful juice
inside a somewhat salty crust.

Since then my wife and I have tried to recreate the effect, but
following directions we got from somewhere (the Rialto?), we made a paste
of coarse sea salt and water and coated the roast with this paste.  The
paste hardens into a crust, and the meat shrinks away from it, leaving
a small air pocket.  This may explain why our results haven't been as
flavorful as Basilicus's... or maybe it's just because he's Basilicus....

					mar-Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib
                                                 Stephen Bloch
                                           sbloch at panther.adelphi.edu
					 http://www.adelphi.edu/~sbloch/
                                        Math/CS Dept, Adelphi University
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