[Sca-cooks] Camp Food)

[Bonne de Traquair]

I've seen such diagrams elsewhere, and thought that
they were showing the full range of possibilities
rather than what might be done on a daily basis.
Thinking of using the largest cauldrons as a permanent
hotwater bath/steam cooker doesn't seem unreasonable.


>  There is a diagram of
> a cross-section of a medieval cauldron, showing a
> piece of bacon covered in
> flour and water paste and wrapped in linen at the
> bottom of the pot; a
> wooden board pierced with holes is placed on top of
> that; on the board
> stands a jar packed with fowls resting upon a
> lubricating piece of suckling
> pig and held down under their juice by heavy stones,
> or hard boiled eggs;
> another jar holds a piece of beef resting on birch
> twigs (so it doesn't
> stick) and the lid is sealed with paste and tied
> down with plastered linen
> [i.e. a pressure cooker].  Hanging from the handle
> are an oatmeal pudding
> and a bag of beans.
> ...  I would
> think that a person who
> was willing to eat all boiled food probably wouldn't
> care if they were
> cooked separately or not.  Throwing everything in
> the pot would be much
> easier that all these jars.  Take this information
> for what it's worth.
>

Except of course that not all the foods are boiled.
Some are boiled, others are cooked in a bain marie
technique which might have no water in the food
itself, others are sort of pressure cooked, as you
said, and again might be quite dry inside the sealed
pot. The pots would allow for different seasoning.
Certainly the less experienced cook, or one who
couldn't afford the jars or  a large enough cauldron
or the wider variety of foods to justify using them
probably did cook all in the same pot.   But in the
method diagrammed there no reason to think all the
foods came out tasting of each other and might as well
have been cooked together.  Indeed, it indicates the
opposite, the trouble one might go to to have a
variety of tastes in a meal.

I've never done it, but I've seen similar diagrams in
modern cookbooks indicating that a pot of grains might
be sat inside a larger pot of beans and both cooked at
the same time to save energy.  I have cooked baked
beans and brown bread at the same time in the same
oven - which is akin to two sealed pots in the
cauldron - and yet I wouldn't mix all the ingredients
of both recipes together and bake them in one pot.

This all give me an idea of steam baking honey custard
from Apicius rather than oven baking in a water bath.
 Does anyone have instant access to the text and is
oven baking described in it?  Say I was a Roman woman
with a brazier or hearth but no oven, how would I cook
a custard?

Bonne

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Shopping - Send Flowers for Valentine's Day
http://shopping.yahoo.com