[Sca-cooks] oop::: Zankou chicken

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Admantius wrote:
>SKORDALIA ME PSOMI -- Garlic Sauce With Bread
>
>12-18 slices white bread
>1 head (about 12 cloves) garlic
>2 cups olive oil
>1/3 cup vinegar
>parsley
>Calamata olives
>
>Trim and discard the crusts from the bread; soak in water and squeeze
>out thoroughly; measure to make 2 cups. Clean the garlic. Pound with a
>mortar and pestle or whirl in a blender. Add the bread, a little at a
>time, and mix or blend well with the garlic to a pastelike consistency.
>Add the oil and vinegar alternately, beating constantly. If the sauce is
>too thick, add a little fish broth or water to thin it. (But dilute with
>fish broth only when you plan to serve the sauce on fish; if you will
>serve it with eggplant, dilute with water.) Garnish with parsley and
>the olives.
>
>NOTE: This is a thick sauce with a pudding-like consistency. It does not
>flow off the spoon.
>
>From "The Greek Cookbook", by Sophia Skoura, Crown Publishers, NYC, 1967
>
>This seems to be served most commonly (at least by Greeks) with fried
>eggplant, fried fish, and grilled rabbit. Roast or grilled chicken
>doesn't sound bad with it at all. For a more Persian approach to
>something I'd be vastly surprised to discover does not exist in the
>MidEast, substitute the juice of a large lemon for the 1/3 cup of vinegar.

This sauce is very like the Andalusian Ajo Blanco/White Garlic Soup.
It is made similarly, and close to the same proportions of
ingredients, with the addition of ground almonds. It is thinned with
water to a liquid consistency and served with green grapes or green
melon instead of olives. Some recipes include a little lemon juice.
After making it with vinegar only, i think it would be improved by a
little spritz...

I used about 2/3 of a lb of crust-free white bread (can't remember -
it was about the same amount of bread as above), 8 cloves garlic, 8
oz. ground almonds, 1 cup olive oil, 2 tsp or more salt, more than
1/4 cup white wine or sherry vinegar. Add two cups water while
blending. Then pour into a bowl and stir in 2 cups water. Chill and
serves with a handful of peeled and seeded green grapes in each
diner's bowl.

This dish seems moderately wide spread, perhaps because of the
Ottoman Empire? Does anyone have any idea of the history of it? Ajo
Blanco is a considered a very typical dish of Southern Spain, and i
haven't run across anything like it in modern Morocco - although i
think i'll go looking again in my stack of Moroccan cookbooks. I'm
real curious about its history...

Anahita
Burned by the wind from a June Crown at a nearly grass-free site with
extremely stringent fire rules.
Had a good time anyway, and introduced our sort-of ad-hoc Near
Eastern encampment to authentic historic SCA-period Near Eastern
food. One woman brought food to tide her over because she was sure
she wouldn't like Medieval Muslim food. Needless to say it was all
eaten up.