SC - Poisonous Tomatoes?

[LrdRas@aol.com]

Liam Fisher wrote:
> 
> Yeah, it's not something normally served and it falls into the "strange
> food"
> category, so most people will just taste, not eat it.

A shame, too, since I believe the original postor was referring to
feeding such dishes to folks in Meridies (at least I thought so). Seems
to me a chilled fish jelly (or meat or poultry) would be extremely
refreshing on a hot afternoon.
> ________________________
> And Adamantius sez some more:
> 
> > You  might try it as an integral part of another dish, like, say, the
> > jellied brawn mentioned above. In late period this would have been made
> > from a boned-out whole small pig. For SCA feast purposes, this would be
> > something like a boneless piece of fresh ham with some skin on it,
> > brined, rinsed and boiled like corned spareribs, then pressed into a
> > mold, skin side down, and covered with the reduced cooking stock. You
> > can then chill it all, and you have the option of removing it from the
> > mold and coating it with more gelatin layers. It is served cold, in
> > slices. Then you can tease the diners and suggest that if they don't
> > want to eat it, it's probably that they're too wimpy to try the mustard
> > you made for it.
> 
> I was reading through the jelled foods from platina, and I like the looks of
> the fish gelatin that used the whole pike to make the gelatin.  Pike's not a
> bad fish and it's not a strange tasting fish, I might try that myself, but
> it's
> not feast food in my book because it'll almost all come back, but it IS
> water soluble, but why waste the pike?

Now, bearing in mind that I don't have the recipe in front of me, I do
think something that is like pieces of fish suspended in jelly might be
preferable over just the jelly (I suspect it would have a lot of the
character and flavor of gefilte fish, often served cold in a similarly
jellied stock). I would say that you need the jelly to be sufficiently
flavorful in its own right that the fish meat itself will no longer
necessarily add flavor, _and_ it needs to be so flavorful that it will
seem flavorful even when cold (warm foods' flavors are easier to pick up
with the taste buds than cold foods', which is why you tend to have to
season foods to be served cold more highly than similar warm foods. And
once you reach that point, the chances are that most of the flavor of
the dish will be in the jelly rather than the flesh anyway. Then there's
the fact that pike is a moderately bony fish, especially for those not
familiar with the anatomy: you can't just lift off two flat
mostly-boneless fillets off the sides. If you want boneless fillets (and
pike have those funky y-shaped bones like carp and shad, too!), you
actually get _five_ of them, not hugely symmetrical -- three from the
back and two sides above the dorsal fin, and two from either side of the
tail section below/behind the dorsal fin. A solution for those not up to
the challenge of deboning a pike either in the kitchen or at the table
is to simply cook most of the flavor and the nutritional value into a
jelly, and throw away what amounts to an empty husk of overcooked fish
muscle tissue. It would also be essential to use as little added liquid
as you can get away with, I suspect. Even when you roast or steam a
whole fish you get some juice which actually begins to congeal on the
platter while you're eating it; it seems a shame to dilute the protein.

Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com