SC - Interesting website

[Philippa Alderton]

Master A, you and your lady and child are welcome at my table any time you find
yourselves in Dragon's Aerie!

I did use the vehling, with a grain of salt...in a manner of speaking [I couldnt
find my others, with 4 people in a very small house for several weeks [I love
visiting relatives, when they leave in a timely fashion!] and as the whole house is
20x40 with 2 bedrooms, it was sort of like Fibber McGee's closet or a small box with
lots of puppies.


> With regard to Margali and her Apician Pernam recipe, I've been meaning to ask,
> and this was really the first opportunity: whose translation is this? It
> looks rather different from the Flower and Rosenbaum version I have here, but
> based even on simply looking at it in Latin I have a few questons...
>
> Lady Aoife Finn wrote:
>
> > 1)Ham means HAM, in other words cured and smoked pork leg meat, not fresh  pork
> meat.

Master A commented:

> This appears to be the case;  "poples" seems to refer to the anatomical
> portion, and presumably a fresh pork leg, while "pernam" seems to refer to
> cured ham. "Petaso" seems to be the shoulder, but it's unclear to me whether
> fresh or cured is indicated.
>

I did not find the connective tissues so softened that the piece fell apart, it was
done just right.

Lady Aoife's second point:

> > 2)Braise means to cook with a small amount of liquid. Boiled ham
> >  cooks with hot water (making the ham an  ineffective support for later baking,
> as the connective tissues have  disintegrated).
>
> Yes, but the original Latin distinctly calls for boiling, which, while not
> necessarily requiring a full rolling boil throughout the cooking process,
> would indicate to me that it is covered by the water in which it is cooked.
> I'd simmer this in water to cover, which would probably help with the salt, too.
>

My point exactly, it needed something, and as it was a fresh bit of pork, it didn't
have all the salt and smoke from a preserved ham. I added garum [ok, worchestershire
sauce. I hate plain fish sauce.] I had contemplated must, condensed wine and
condensed cider. I felt the must would be too syrupy/grapey, whe wine would have
been good, and the condensed cider also would have been good-I felt that the figs
added enough of the sweet/fruity taste, and went with herbal/salty.Lady Aoife's 3d
point:

> > 3)The figs' natural sugar gets a sort of caramelization thing going there
> > (be careful of scorching!), and the thick liquid is your sauce (I added
> > lemon juice rather than the garum you added---it needs something!).
>
> I'm sure there are all sorts of ways this dish can be improved upon, but I
> wouldn't want to suggest that if I were starting out with a Smithfield ham,
> Phlip would hurt me. It's my understanding that the figs don't appear in the
> final dish. At least no further reference is made to them in the recipe, and
> the pastry is stated to be wrapped around the ham. They may help absorb some
> of the salt, as a potato or the little bag of meal some of the medieval
> sources speak of might. There  may even be either an enzyme in figs that might
> function as a tenderizer of some kind, or perhaps the sweetness might help
> counteract the strong flavor of a cured ham. It's sometimes hard to say why
> things are done in a particular way. Maybe the figs are eaten separately.
>

(and I think a smithfield pernam would be absolutely sybaritic and worth the expense
of trying just once!)

It did call for oil and flour. I made it with oil and flour.

Lady Aoife's 4th point:

> > 4) Try a hot-water crust rather than a pie crust. I firmly believe that the
> > hot-water crust is a descendant of  excessively thick pottage,
>
> All this sounds like excellent advice, which may simply mean many of us are
> smarter than Apicius. He advises us to make a pastry from flour and oil and to
> cover the ham with it, after first removing the ham's skin, scoring the ham, and
> filling the incisions with honey. I've made this dish too, according to the
> Apician instructions, and found a dough made only from oil and flour to have a
> rather unexpectedly odd texture: kinda like shortbread run amok, with absolutely
> no gluten development. One possibiity is that freshly pressed olive oil might have
> had a certain built-in water content, which would make this more like a
> recognizable pastry dough.

( I enterpreted vehling to mean that the skin was pulled off and macerated in honey
and stdded back onto the dough, so that is what I did, sweet cracklings)

I didn't read it as that at all, I felt the crust was to keep the meat moist and
pale, and it did so admirably.

Lady Aoife's 5th point:

> > 5) This dish is supposed to resemble a baked ham when finished, at least
> > somewhat. Think of it as  roman double-illusion food: "Oh, look, it's ham!
> > Noooo, wait, there's a crust, so it must be something else.......No, wait,
> > It's a Ham in fig sauce!" Those romans had no sense of comedy!



> Terence? Plautus? For that matter, Caesar? No sense of comedy? Perhaps you mean
> the good people of Rome, New York? Now, although I'm a little curious as to how
> some of these decisions were made (I suspect we've been Vehlinged again!), please
> understand that I will be utterly shameless about inviting myself to the dinner
> tables of either of these two ladies, at the earliest opportunity...
>
> Adamantius

Well, since Phlip has been so kind as to invite my lord and I and another couple to
camp with her at Pennsic, and we might have enough room to make the beehive oven, we
can give it a whirl and perhaps with enough of us kibbitzing, we can doo something
great!
margali

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