[Sca-cooks] Home From Great Western War

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Stefan asked in several separate messages:
>Anahita commented:
>  >-- A Dish of Chicken or Partridge with Quinces or Apples - includes
>>chopped fennel bulb and is topped with a tharid (13th c. Anonymous
>  >Andalusian Cookbook)
>
>What is "tharid"?

It's moderately common in Near Eastern cooking, showing up in recipes 
both from the Levant and from al-Andalus. It's a mixture of bread 
crumbs (i've always used fresh), eggs, sometimes a little flour, 
occasionally other things for flavor. It's spread over the top of all 
the ingredients in the pot after they're cooked. After spreading in 
the tharid, i've always covered the pot with a lid and cooked it 
until the tharid is cooked through - just takes a few minutes.

It comes out like a giant dumpling topping (or a really good, 
spread-out matzoh ball). The top of the tharid is usually sprayed 
with rosewater and sprinkled with spices before serving. Muhammed 
apparently said a tharid was his favorite dish (that is, the "stew" 
with the topping) and likened his older wife, A'isha, to a tharid in 
quality.

>"Apple" was the special ingredient, then? Was this known ahead of time?
>I might do okay if I knew the ingredient ahead of time and could look
>through my library for recipes but on the spur of the moment with the
>pressure to get everything planned and cooked, I think I'd have trouble
>even coming up with possible recipes.

I only knew on Monday Oct. 6 - i left home on Thursday the 9th. 
Berengaria asked if i could come up with a few recipes - there was 
supposed to be another Western cook on the team, but he couldn't make 
it to the war. If i had known more about the character of the event, 
i could have planned a meal rather than a rather random collection of 
dishes i cooked. Aeduin's team actually presented their dishes as a 
meal. I had read on the GWW Iron Chef web page that part of the 
challenge was to cook as many dishes as possible in the allotted time 
period, which was one reason why i made so many...

>I like apples but a meal of this sounds like an overload of apples.
>Now no one on the team even wants to look at an apple for awhile?

Being on the Atkins Diet means i've been off apples since nearly the 
beginning of this year, so i only tasted the dishes to make sure they 
were ok. And if i weren't on Atkins, the event would not have put me 
off apples, since i only taste dishes i cook for feasts and generally 
don't eat the food (it's a mental thing - i usually can't eat when i 
cook a feast). I think the judges are more likely to have been put 
off by all the apples :-)

The original Iron Chef always features a particular ingredient. I saw 
an episode in which it was mushrooms - the mushroom ice cream one 
chef made was not well received by any of the judges...

>Anahita gave one of dishes in the food contest as:
>>-- A Good Food or Hens of Greece - layers of apples, armeritler
>>("French toast"), and shredded chicken (wrapped in bacon and cooked
>>over the wood and charcoal fire), all spiced between each layer,
>>topped with "a leaf of egg", and seasoned with "a condiment" of
>>honey, wine, and spices, then cooked on the fire in a Dutch oven (51.
>>in Das Buch von Guter Spiese)
>
>What is "a leaf of egg"? Fried egg white? Fried egg white and yolk?

 From what i've read about medieval German cuisine, no one is quite 
sure what it is. It could be a thin flat "omelette" (the Japanese 
make these often for rolling things up in), it could be an eggy flour 
dough rolled out like a crust. I really don't know. Because i was 
under pressure to finish, i mixed egg and flour to make a loose dough 
(more egg than flour), then poured it into a frying pan and briefly 
cooked it before topping the layered ingredients with it. It looked a 
little like the German pancakes my mother used to make (which she 
served topped with freshly cooked apples and lemon juice), although i 
didn't think about that until just this moment.

>I see both cooked and non-cooked apples, or at least not all baked apples,
>in this list of dishes. Did you use the same apple variety in all of 
>the dishes?

We were provided with sacks of apples by the good folks who ran the 
competition. I recall some Granny Smiths (tart and firm) and more 
smaller softer sweeter apple with skin streaked with red and yellow, 
and we had one or two red delicious.

Anahita