[Sca-cooks] Camp Kitchen Tips Needed

[Stephen Bloch]

Someone wrote:

>>What we want are fresh baked breads and pastries for our
>>brave fighters, and fresh roasted meats for my belly.  I am pushing 
>>more and more for period
>>foods, but we'll need to get a bit more organized first :)

David Friedman replied:

>I'm afraid I don't have experience of camp cooking on the scale you 
>describe. I did want to suggest, however, that you look into period 
>recipes for producing breads and pastries without an oven. 
>Possibilities include:
>
>Murakaba--known in our family as "stack of pancakes." You make a 
>very sticky semolina sourdough. You fry a pancake of it, turn it 
>over, smear the cooked side with a bit more of the sticky dough, 
>turn it over, smear the cooked side ...   . Continue until it is as 
>thick as you want. All of it was at some point near the surface, so 
>all of it is cooked, even though you only have a frying pan.
>
>When done, turn it on its edge, roll around the frying pan just to 
>be sure you got the edge parts, then punch holes in it with the 
>handle of a wooden spoon and pour in hot honey and melted butter.

A similar example is muqawwara, aka "arena-bread".  You make a fairly 
eggy semolina dough, with some kind of yeast in it, but drier than 
the murakaba batter, so it rises like bread.  Once you have a 
decently-risen round loaf, you pan-fry it on both sides, then cut out 
the middle (at an angle, like an arena or amphitheatre, leaving the 
bottom crust intact), mix the stuff you scooped out with chopped 
almonds, pistachios, and sugar, then pour it back into the cavity in 
alternating layers with melted butter and honey.

At least, that's the way I used to make it fifteen years ago.  The 
translation on David's web site now says "walnuts" rather than 
"pistachios".  My redaction is on the Web at 
http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/articles/veggie.html while that of Dinah 
bint Asmai'l is at 
http://www.florilegium.org/files/FOOD-SWEETS/Andlsn-Pstres-art.html .
-- 
                                     John Elys
          (the artist formerly known as mar-Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib)
                                 mka Stephen Bloch
                                 sbloch at adelphi.edu