[Sca-cooks] Period Cooking Styles and Vessels Project

[Stephen Bloch]

Christianna wrote:
>Two years ago many of you who attended the SCA Cook's Potluck at Pennsic saw
>the pottery cooking vessels I'd been playing with that day.  Mistresses Cori
>and Honnoria from Aethelmearc had thrown a variety of pots, a skillet, a
>pipkin, and a few bowls for cooking with, and asked me to bring some period
>recipes to try them out in.  The object was to test the cookware out to see
>how it worked, held up, where improvements needed to be made, etc.  I had
>great fun squishing in the mud up on top of Mt. Aislinn and had a lot of
>success and good opportunities for feedback.  One thing we noticed for sure
>was that the cooking method definitely affected the food product.  I did "An
>Excellent Boylt Sallad" with spinach in the pipkin and it was fabulous.  I
>have not been able to reproduce it the same way since.  I've come up with
>some tasty spinach glop, but nothing that approached the texture I got with
>a slow coddle in hot ashes.

Last spring Lady Andrea MacIntyre decided to do a careful, 
scientifically controlled experiment on cooking vessels: she mixed up 
a large batch of some chicken-stew sorta thing from Menagier (I don't 
remember exactly what recipe), divided it in thirds, and cooked one 
third each in a stainless-steel pot, a cast-iron pot, and a tinned 
brass pot, all over the fireplace in her home.  She brought all three 
to an event the next day and invited the populace to do blind 
taste-tests.  To my palate, one tasted "thin", "metallic" (turned out 
to be the stainless steel); the second tasted more robust, but a 
little harsh (cast-iron), and the tinned-brass was clearly the 
richest and most flavorful of the three.  I gather this is consistent 
with what other taste-testers said.

-- 
                                     John Elys
          (the artist formerly known as mar-Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib)
                                 mka Stephen Bloch
                                 sbloch at adelphi.edu