[Sca-cooks] Not about mooses at all

[Pixel, Goddess and Queen]

[I am relating this because I have no experience with the recipe or
cookbook in question, and I have a few wonderments as to how the dish is
supposed to go together.]


So, I was at the baronial meeting on Wednesday to give someone her
copy of Nola and I get accosted by one of my kids [My love and I spend
more of our time with the local college group because they need the help
and the barony manifestly doesn't, and we tend to refer to them as our
kids.]

Anyway. She comes up to me with a plastic container of *something* that I
can see through the side has black specks in it, presents it to me with
both hands like a communion chalice, and wails "What did I do
wrong?! Help!"

So I open it and poke at it a bit and ask what it's supposed to be (and
one of her roommates laughingly says "Oatmeal.") and she hands me the
paper with the recipe on it. I continue to investigate, without actually
reading the recipe yet. Smells pretty appetizing, tastes reasonably
ok. What it is, is bits of chicken in goo with some onion bits. The goo
looks like it might have egg in it, and a bit of flour. Then I actually
look at the recipe.


Recipe for a Dish of Chicken or Partridge with Quince or Apple

Leave overnight whichever of the two [birds] you have, its throat slit, in
its feathers. Clean it and put it into a new pot and throw in two
spoonfuls of rosewater and half a spoonful of good murri, two spoonfuls of
oil, salt, a fennel stalk, a whole onion, and a quarter dirham of saffron,
and water to cover the meat. Then take quince or apple, skin the outside
and clean the inside and cut it up in appropriate-sized pieces, and throw
them into the pot. Put it on a moderate fire and when it is done, take it
away with a lid over it. Cover it with breadcrumbs, a little sifted flour
and five eggs, after removing some of the yolks. Cook it in the pot, and
when the coating has cooked, sprinkle it with rosewater and leave it until
the surface is clear and stands out apart. Ladle it out, sprinkle it with
fine spices and present it.


This is *not* what is staring at me out of the tupperware.


So, we go through the recipe step by step.

1) The chicken needs to be whole. If a whole chicken isn't going to work
(small pots, not available for whatever reason) is a quartered chicken a
reasonable substitute?

2) She has never seen fennel that wasn't seed, and the person at the
grocery store told her anise was the same thing. Sigh. I think we might
have to have a field trip to my local supermarket for ingredients. [I am
getting a very strong urge to say something about not being in Kansas
anymore, seeing as that's where she's from...]

3) She's used the murri recipe from _A Drizzle of Honey_, which I have no
idea of besides having read it. Anybody want to comment on this one?

4) I am reading the breadcrumb/flour/egg thing as a dough to cover, like a
pot pie. She mixed it in, which is why it tried to set up like cement.

5) Lastly, being unfamiliar with Arabic cookery (I am, after all, a
Norman in Wales), I am not sure what "fine spices" ought to include.

Many thanks,

Margaret FitzWilliam