[Sca-cooks] 5 cooking laurels: Priceless - The Report

[iasmin at comcast.net]

Yesterday I wrote to the MK Cooks list describing some fun a bunch of us had 
during the first week of Pennsic. I've taken the liberty of copying that note 
here and adding, with permission, the response of another of the participants. 
Enjoy! -- Iasmin

****

I wrote:

Standard disclaimers apply here as I'm still riding high off probably my best 
day at Pennsic in the 20ish years I've been going....

So we get the email on MK Cooks about The Grand Plan (TM) to teach a class using hand-thrown Italian cooking pots and I thinks to myself "self, you needs to be learning to cook over an open flame someday." And in pure Iasmin fashion, I type said desire out loud straight out of my head and onto the internet. Helewyse, dear soul, sez "girlie, you come to my camp and I'll learn you good." cause she was learning too with those pretty pots and figured if one laurel could mess it up, well, five could mess it up right royally.

Thing is, folks, we didn't mess it up. In fact, the only thing that didn't turn 
out as we expected was really the peach pie and that was just because we forgot the bottom crust needed air space to get a good crisp to it.

I keep telling people the five of us were like the cast of a Mickey Rooney 
movie. You know the ones... "Hey, let's put on a play!" "Yeah, we can use my 
dad's barn!" "Cool! My mom can sew the costumes!" Me, Mistress Helewyse, 
Mistress Rachaol, Master Basilius, and Mistress Mairi Ceilidh (who most of you 
don't know but she cooks for the Cognizenti camp at Pennsic for both weeks).

We were a hoot. Two bags of groceries, plus a bit, and all of us at various 
times either clustered around those or around Helewyse's copy of Scappi (brave woman taking that brick of a book to Pennsic). "What can we cook?" "I don't know, do we have a recipe for kale?" "Sure, let me translate it really quick."

In the end, we cooked from 12pm to 8pm the first Thursday, trying out various 
recipes from Scappi and at least one other Italian manuscript so that  Helewyse, Rachaol, and Basilius could teach the two Italian pottery (classroom and practicum) classes they'd scheduled but which didn't make it into the Pennsic book. We cooked way more than what would be tested in class, but all the dishes were fantastic. If I'm remembering the recipes we concocted correctly we did:

- pasta (they were more like gnocchi) in garlic walnut sauce
- kale fried in garlic and olive oil
- fried eggplant with sour orange sauce
- gourds in casserole in a cheese sauce (Rachaol grew the gourds and promised me seeds)
- stuffed, grilled pork rolls
- meat stuff, meat flavored meatwrapped in meat fat (venison roast stuff with 
bacon/pancetta and wrapped in a fat caul, spit roasted)
- caramelized onions (I couldn't stand the fat dripping into the fire unused)
- peach pie

My god it was all good. I think those were all the dishes, but Helewyse or 
Rachaol can speak up and let you know if I missed anything. Good lord, I'm 
hungry again just thinking about it. I'm not sure what we'd planned to do with 
most of the food. We sort of lost track of cooking and then I realized "Ooh, 
someone's got to eat this. I didn't think that far." The camp valiantly threw 
themselves on the food grenade with nary a complaint among them. And I think someone went to go get more people. Master Hroar, Baroness Alexandra, and I think her son, perhaps. I had to eat and run but there was still food being eaten when I left. And to the best of my knowledge, everyone's still alive and smiling, so it had to have been decent to them too.

Additions to this... I remember a fruit tray. And Helwyse made us lunch while we were cooking. We ate the cheese stuffed fresh, red, sweet peppers and fought over who got the last one. Oh yes, and there was scotch. :) I'm confident the dishwashing went faster because of it.

And that, my friends, is how much trouble 5 cooking laurels and a copy of Scappi can get into in 8 hours. Rachaol? Helewyse? I'm still wearing rose-colored glasses from the day. Care to comment once you resurface from travel back to your homes?

Iasmin

***

And Mistress Helewyse de Birkstead responded:

OK, The house is still a disaster, wearing normal clothing feels odd but I'm  
awake enough to give a report.

The Thursday trial run was really a trial run.  We honestly had never made any 
of those dishes before.

The kale - simply boiled in water, drained and then dressed with olive oil in 
which garlic (lots of it) had been simmered.  Amazingly good, kale can be bitter 
but somehow it wasn't.
  
The peach pie - we used a pastry recipe that was forgiving of the heat and  
overwork (in fact the recipe calls for kneading the dough). Sadly we didn't heat 
the bottom enough to make it crispy.  What we did find out in the next weeks 
class was that ceramic pie plates make all the difference it cooked much better 
than a tin one in a dutch oven.  We had tried cooking it under a testo.  The 
testo failed most obviously in the first five minutes of cooking.  Right about 
the point that we were talking about pottery failure on the fire .  The lady who 
took our class asked when they failed, the answer was first time you use it and 
loudly.  As the loud crack happened just at that point.  So it ended up as a 
valuable lesson.   

Gourds in the spanish style - was cooked in a pignatta.  The interesting thing 
about this is that the original recipe calls for egg yolks to be added and the 
whole cooked for another half hour.  This led to a discussion whether the end 
product should be an egg thickened sauce or more like an egg drop soup.  The 
result, when you cook with eggs and juice in a pignatta for half an hour you get 
thickened broth, not curdled eggs. Something we really weren't expecting.  In 
other words the recipe was correct for the heat source in use (coals) but would 
be wrong for a modern stove.  

Pork rolls - oh my god the pork rolls, I have to find an excuse to make these 
for either a feast or a vigil.  Pork loin slices, pounded thin, marinated in 
vinegar salt and pepper (the second time we marinated with sour orange and if 
anything they were better).  Then stuffed with a mixture of golden raisins, 
garlic, parsley, fennel and an egg.  Rolled around the filling, wrapped in caul 
fat and then grilled.  I have to get me some caul fat, it made the rolls 
succulent and so good. 
 
The gnocchi - still haven't managed to master that particular recipe.  The 
original recipe calls for 12 oz breadcrumbs, 12oz flour, pinch saffron and oil 
bound together with water and then grated into boiling water to cook. 
Breadcrumbs are funky, one minute the dough is too stiff, next minute it  is the 
biggest gluey mess you have ever encountered.  In the end we cut bits of the 
dough into the water, I would still like to master that recipe.  The sauce was 
pounded walnuts, garlic and breadcrumbs with water.  Great sauce and the gnocchi 
eventually kind of worked. 
 
The eggplant - soaked in water to remove bitterness, parboiled, coated with 
flour and fried in olive oil.  The recipe says you can use either sour orange 
juice or a sauce made of fresh basil, garlic and verjuice.  I wish we had had 
basil it is even yummier then. 
 
The venison - I had a whole leg roast brought from home (actually it was 
originally road kill, butchered by myself shortly after the accident).  We 
marinated it in wine, wine vinegar, rose water, grape must and spices (nutmeg, 
cinnamon, clove, pepper, salt), then rolled the slices of bacon in the same 
spice blend, larded it and wrapped it in a caul prior to spit roasting.  Oh 
yeah, it was good.  Once the fire was in the right spot we could add a pan 
underneath and do some onions.  

All in all we had fun, my camp used it as a boasting point for the rest of war.  

Hey we had five cooking laurels in camp yesterday, cooking dinner.  
What did they cook?  
I don't know but it tasted great.

We did create a heck of a lot of dishes but they forgave me anyway.  The only 
down side was that only one person actually attended the hands on class in the 
second week.  It is our lesson for next year, make it shorter and get it in the 
book early.  We might just do a single dish.  I think that one of the problems 
is that the second week everyone is just so busy  
that 5 hrs is a lot of time to commit.   

Honestly I became slug like for the last four days of war, I was a little strung 
out and needed extended nap times.  The camp still ate well but looking dinner 
every night for two weeks led to some dashing around at  times. 

War was fun but as usuall I never did manage to do about half a dozen things I 
wanted to, or see half the people I wanted to.  Where did those two weeks go?  

Helewyse