[Sca-cooks] Period Cooking Styles and Vessels Project
Stephen Bloch
sbloch at adelphi.edu
Thu Nov 18 04:26:43 PST 2004
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
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