[Sca-cooks] [Fwd: Question on the Melitta Weiss Adamson Guter

[Mark.S Harris]

Bear commented:
> It is possible to use wood in cooking utensils.  Hardwoods tend to stand up
> to heat as long as you don't get them hot enough to burn.  I've planked fish
> on a hardwood board and cooked it by the radiant heat from a fire without
> turning the fish or the plank to charcoal.
>
> I believe the term used in Guter Speise is "einen hulzinen rost" (with an
> umlaut over the u).  I don't have my dictionaries handy to check, but Alia
> Atlas translated this as "wooden grate."  It may be that the grill under
> discussion is a wooden frame suspended from the ceiling over a fire (cooking
> in Germany and the Lowlands appears to have been often done on raised
> firestands rather than in fireplaces, a situtaion suitable for a suspended
> grate).

However. Consider the item being cooked, a suckling pig. I've not cooked
one of these before, but my impression is of something the size of an
American football not a slice of meat or something flat. Would such an
item cook well on a grill? Would it cook evenly without having to be
constantly turned? The recipe already says to "boil without damaging
the skin". I would think having to flip/rotate the piglet would increase
the chance of damaging the skin. Do we have period pictures of anything
but broad flat things being cooked on a grill?

I think a wooden spit would be the better way to go with this. However,
without the original text it is hard to guess on things like this and
I'm
certainly not a translator myself.

> I.e.  In recipe 8. A stuffed roasted suckling pig she has translated it
> partly as follows:
> "Put it gently into a kettle, let it boil without damaging the skin.  Then
> take it, put it on a wooden grill, and grill it on low heat.  When it is
> well roasted, take a board and put it on top of a platter."

We have discussed the use of spits and I think wooden spits in period.
See this file in the FOOD-UTENSILS section of the Florilegium:
spits-msg          (9K)  4/11/01    Period and SCA spits for roasting
meats.
http://www.florilegium.org/files/FOOD-UTENSILS/spits-msg.html

Stefan li Rous
stefan at texas.net