[Sca-cooks] Iron Chef Medieval Persian...

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

This past weekend, the Principality of the Mists, in the Kingdom of
the West, held its Fall Investiture of our new Prince and Princess.
Instead of the usual Medieval feast, a sort-of Iron Chef feast was
held. The theme of our food was "Trade and/or Conquest".

There were three teams. Each team had to cook one course for one
hundred people. Each course had to have at least one meat dish, one
vegetarian dish, one side dish, and one dessert. The autocrat said we
could have more, if we wanted.

Because the kitchen was somewhat limited, she also suggested we make
some of our dishes ahead of time. The "secret ingredient" would be
announced the morning of the event and only had to be in one dish.

I had volunteered to be on a team, but had not volunteered to head a
team, as i've only been in the SCA 2-1/2 years and i don't feel i'm
familiar enough with the corpus of Medieval and Renaissance cookbooks
as i'd like to be.

A couple weeks before the feast, the autocrat said to me, "You'll
head a team, won't you?" and i said, "Uh, sure." And my course was to
be served first.

Bear in mind that almost all my possessions are in storage and that
for the past couple months i've been couch surfing. I did have most
of the Travelling Moorish Reading Room in a small accessible storage
space along with my SCA camping gear and garb. So i got out my
cookbooks - "In a Caliph's Kitchen" by David Waines, "Medieval Arab
Cookery" by Rodinson, Arberry, and Perry, and Cariadoc's 2-vol.
"Medieval and Renaissance Cook Book Collection". I even began to
dream recipes - there was one i really wanted to make, but after
searching and re-searching, i have come to the conclusion that i
dreamed it - but it is a very plausible recipe which i may make
sometime to see how good the dream inspiration was...

I settled on NINE recipes, most which are Persian in origin or
inspiration, and worked up recipes for them:
Zaitun Mubakhkhar - Smoked Olives (cold dish)
Sals Abyad - White Sauce - spiced walnut-sesame butter (cold dish) -
served with Lavosh and a modern Persian flat bread
Badhinjan Buran - Princess Buran's Eggplant (pureed with yogurt and
spices) (Persian) (cold dish)
Saffron Rice cooked with milk (a sort-of composite dish on my part,
Persian in inspiration)
Bustaniya - From the Orchard - spiced chicken and lamb cooked with
pears, peaches, and almonds (Persian, probably)
Rustab Mu'assal - Honeyed Dates (for which i stuffed 100 dates with
200 almonds) (as a garnish)
al-Mauz - Fried Battered Bananas (Persian, probably)
Lauzinaj - Phyllo-wrapped Rosewater-scented Marzipan (Persian)
Laimun Safarjali - Quince-Lemon-Rosewater Syrup for Beverage (Persian)

All the recipes were from actual period sources, except the rice,
which was derived from period sources, as there don't appear to be
any recipes just for rice. Also, i didn't make the meat balls that go
with that particular Badhinjan Buran recipe and i served the bananas
as they were, rather than with roasted chicken.

The origins of several of the Persian dishes go back well before the
Muslim conquest of Persia, although only names and descriptions of
dishes survive. They entered Muslim Arab cuisine after the Muslim
Arabs conquered Persia. Although no purely Persian cookbooks have
survived, there is a late 10th century cookbook by al-Waffaq who
collected recipes from earlier cook books, some recipes from which
are translated by Waines in his book. I did NOT use Waines'
"redactions", just the original recipes. I also used many recipes
from "The Book of the Description of Familiar Foods" as translated by
Charles Perry and reproduced in "Medieval Arab Cookery" and a few
from al-Kitab al-Tabikh by al-Baghdadi, also in "Medieval Arab
Cookery".

While searching Near Eastern shops for synthetic musk flavoring for a
couple dishes (i never found any), i discovered a Persian-American
Quince-Lemon syrup!!! It didn't have any rosewater in it, but i
bought it to see how it tasted. It was delicious. Of course, for the
feast, i made my own, which was even better.

The Feast ended with a tie between me and Euriol, Minister of the
Silver Spoon, who made food primarily from "Le Menagier de Paris", i
think. It will be resolved with a cook-off at Mists Principality
Spring Coronet.

I couldn't have pulled anything off without the help of several
people, especially Rose de la Mans and Juan Santiago, who let me
spend nearly 12 hours in their kitchen making the eggplant, quince
syrup, and lauzinaj. They also put me up for the night, and loaned me
all sorts of pots and pans, cooking utensils, and serving containers
to use at the feast.

And i had help from some local friends, who let me spend a few hours
in their kitchens earlier in the week to make three other dishes. And
I cooked three dishes on site: the meat, the rice, and the bananas. I
ended up spending 10 hours in the kitchen there (i thought i'd only
take about 4), prepping, cooking, dishing, and garnishing, with the
assistance of 3 other people.

Anahita
Iron Chef Persian