SC - A Real Siege Cook Challenge

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Greetings unto the Noble Readers of this List from Gideanus Tacitus
Adamantius!

I accidentally deleted Baron Tibor's original challenge, but I had
printed it out, so I am able to refer to it.

After a brief period of consideration (around 15 minutes), here's my
plan. Given further time to actually reflect on it, rather than saying ,
"Yeah, yeah, I'll get to it...", I might change my mind on some of these
issues. So. Here goes.

I have:

Unlimited dry herring, salt, water, and, essentially, whatever I can
grow in my gardens.

Also, I've been issued (and this is almost as bad as the time I invented
Tripes a la Mode de Caen after that Viking raid, or that chicken dish
after the Battle of Marengo, I can confidently tell you ;  ) ) :

3 # unshelled almonds (# = pounds)			10 white onions
2 # roast pork								1 head garlic
1 # sugar 									6 loaves bread (my choice what & why)
1 # raisins								1 qt oil or 2 # lard
1 # other dried fruit (again, my choice)			5 # flour, unsifted and
unbolted
2 gallons red wine							1 oz. galingale, cloves, cubeb, stick 
1 qt. sack or sherry								cinnamon
16 eggs									1 race dried ginger (appr. 1 oz.)
1 chicken, live								1 oz. any dried green herb (my choice)
1 # butter									1 oz. any spice (again, my choice)
2 qts. milk								1 ugly old lemon
1 pint cream								2 qts vinegar with a handful of pickles

That's pretty much it. My comments on the shopping list are simply
these: 

This is Savoy and there's no goose fat? I'm thinking of cheating and
trading in some of my oil or fat ration for some, since I believe even
then it was the Savoyard fat of choice. Can I get 1 pint olive oil, 1/2
pound lard and 1/2 pound goose fat, please? Is this permissible? If not
I'll choose half oil and half lard. If I have to go with all oil or
lard, I'll go with oil, but you're mean and rotten, Tibor ;  ) .
	
This is Savoy and there's only one head of garlic?

I figure I have a crew of one master cook (master being a relative term,
considering the humbleness of my manor) with perhaps three scullions,
one skilled (looking for a promotion one day).

I have all the same pots, pans, knives, etc. I would have had all along,
the men of the Ukraine having slunk home to eat borscht, etc.
Specifically, I have a tart trap, a couple of posseynets (sp?) or
"spiders", essentially saute pans or skillets, a couple of sieves, a
large stockpot (mysteriously emptied during the siege; perhaps we threw
the stock on the invaders from the roof), several knives and cleavers, a
rolling pin, a mortar and pestle. Plenty of spoons. Possibly a small
quern or mill for grinding grain and such, since this is a manor, and
not the village. Also, for the same reason, I probably have an oven of
sorts.

Okay. Here's my menu, served in this order:

Porreyne: (a pottage of fresh plums, which in this case will be dried
tart yellow prunes [3/4 of my full pound of unallocated dried fruit] ,
soaked to reconstitute) made with the aforementioned prunes, some bread
crumbs, butter, cinnamon, cloves, sugar, and a splash of red wine to
mask the flavor of prunes disguised as plums. The dish will therefore be
a peculiar orange color, which I will of course pretend was intentional
:  ) .

A Tart of Fish: 1 1/2 # pound of herring, also soaked to reconstitute,
skinned, boned, etc., 1/2 # raisins and 1/4 # yellow prunes, both soaked
in red wine and then drained, in a custard base made from 5 whole eggs,
1 cup cream and 2 cups milk. This gets seasoned with about a third of my
ginger and a tiny bit of galingale, pounded by the tireless scullions,
sieved, and repounded. The pastry is of 1 pound flour, after bolting
suitably, but tarts can be just a bit more coarse than manchets, so this
flour is not especially white, 1/3 pound lard or 1/3 American pint thick
olive oil boiled with just under a cup of boiling water, a teaspoon of
salt, and one or two egg yolks kneaded in as it cools to make it yellow.
Baked in my oven , of course, and sprinkled just lightly with rasped
sugar.

Cuminade of fowl (yeah, I killed the old lady): the ever-industrious
scullions are at it again, this time blanching and peeling 2 pounds of
my almonds, and reserving 1 of those pounds for later use. They use one
pound of peeled almonds to pound for almond milk, made especially rich
by using 1 quart of milk instead of water. In the meantime, my poor old
bird is simmering, suitably prepared, in my stockpot. I should get about
2 quarts decent stock from the chicken, if I remove the meat from the
bones when it is tender, reserve the meat just covered with some of the
stock, and finish the rest of the stock with the skin and bones of the
fowl put back in. My almond milk will be simmered until nice and thick,
with a small dash of sack, some ginger, a little cubeb (since I seem to
be without pepper) and some pounded marigold petals from the garden,
lacking saffron. Luckily Count Amadeus is famous for his dislike of
saffron dishes anyway. This is the sauce, to which my chicken meat is
returned. Needless (I hope) to say, my unspecified spice is cumin seed
(white), pounded and used pretty copiously to flavor my sauce. I thought
about doing a bukkenade instead, which would have been in a sort of
savory custard sauce. Maybe next time.

Now we'll clear the table and get ready for the second course.

We'll start that with:

A Sop of Onions: Made from 6 peeled, sliced onions sauteed in butter
until nice and golden, salt, a quart or so of my chicken stock, poured
into my onion saute pan with a bit more sherry and a tiny dash of
vinegar, reduced to a rich sauce, which then gets thickened a bit with
about two ounces of butter, suitably beaten in so it remains emulsified,
not greasy. Served poured over golden toasted sops made from the second
finest of my bread. The finest, whitest, will be served as is throughout
the meal. The coarsest will be made into trenchers for the pork dish to
follow. 

A Vinegar Dish: Ideally this would be made with various pork viscera --
stomach, intestines, etc. However, the count doesn't do organ meats and
this is what I have. We will saute finely chopped onion until brown, but
not burnt, in fat or oil, add a bit of crushed dried sage, some salt and
a bit of ground cubeb, and lay slices of pork on top of the onions to
reheat in the steam, shaking the pan every now and then to keep the
onions from burning. Our cooks will arrange the pork slices nicely on a
platter, deglaze the onion pan with vinegar and a splash of red wine,
and pour the oniony vinegar sauce over the meat. Garnish woith chopped
parsley from the garden. This would be eaten on toasted slices of brown
cheat bread, sliced in the morning (crosswise for big slices) to get
good and stale before toasting. 

Sawgeat (Lenten style): I still have something like nine eggs left,
don't I? Our cooks will make buttery scrambled eggs of perhaps six of
them, almost like an omelette but a bit more lumpy, with salt and more
of my dried sage. Plenty, in fact. Where it was a sort of adjunct
seasoning in the Vinegar dish, it will be a primary seasoning in the
Sawgeat. Cooked in butter to grease the pan, with more buttter stirred
in as it cooks. The meat-day variety would have fried smoked sausage
instead of butter stirred in. This could go on the trenchers next to the
Vinegared pork.

A Sallet: Mostly from the garden. Our cooks, who by now have earned any
remainder of our sack (since we all know their master has a bottle of
Laphroaig single malt Scotch stashed away for emergencies like this)
will pick and shred, with their fingers, some parsley, some cress, some
purslane, and any green tops from the garlic, ditto onions. Also, since
their master is an insomniac, they will include the peculiar Roman wort
he has developed a taste for: it is a soporific called lettuce. To these
shredded greens they will add some salt, some vinegar, and some fine
oil. Some sallets are cooked, but this one is served raw. Garnish with
shredded pickles, which I guess are cucumbers, but not necessarily.

Now we'll clear the table again for...

A Subtlety -- Test de Ukran: This is a variant on the Test de Turt, or
Saracen's Head, which seems to have been popular in Europe during and
after the Crusades. That would have been made with appropriate Eastern
nuts like pistacchios. This will be made, more or less, like a marzipan
sculpture of a Ukranian's head, from both peeled (white) and unpeeled
(brown) almonds, made separately into two batches of marzipan with most
of the remaining sugar. Lacking rosewater, we have elected to grate the
lemon rind finely into the pastes, using plain water as our liquid.
White paste for the face, with brown paste for the hair and beard. We
will add a touch of cinnamon to the brown paste. Details and highlights
made with pastes of any remaining raisins and prunes. This will be
sugared and lightly baked. We may have a tablespoon or so of sugar left.
We will decorate the the heraldically dismembered neck with a tasteful
splash of gore, courtesy of the local berries, after baking.

Wafers: I didn't mention we have a wafer iron, did I? Bad Adamantius, no
biscuit. However, considering there's a good chance we'll all starve
anyway after this is over, what does it matter? Actually, strange as it
may sound, I haven't been especially profligate with the food usage, I
feel, and we have enough supplies to carry on with, although the menus
get much more boring after this. I just hope the Count remembers
pressing business that takes him away at first light. Anyway, the wafers
would be made from flour bolted and sifted as white as possible (around
two cups), made into a thick batter with our remaining couple of eggs,
some more cream (which will use that up), some oil, our last bit of
sugar, and maybe a hit of cinnamon and another splash of sack. Don't
look at me like that, cooks. He saved your lives, remember. Show some
respect! Anyway, I'm inclined to push the egg whites through a strainer
several times to aerate them before adding them to the batter. We will
use the last of the butter to grease our iron.

Wafers served with red wine...

Staff, still muttering obscenities, resigns themselves to an austere but
otherwise plentiful meal of herring and faux frumenty of
flour...possibly also an herb pottage if there's any chicken stock left.
Oh! Sorry! Did I say Staff? There's still the household to feed!
However, we will share.

Adamantius 
______________________________________
Phil & Susan Troy
troy at asan.com
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