[Sca-cooks] Favorite Healthy period dishes, recent study on vitamin absorption

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Aug 14, 2006, at 2:34 PM, <tom.vincent at yahoo.com>  
<tom.vincent at yahoo.com> wrote:

> How about a Great Pie?  With lean beef, chicken, duck and/or  
> rabbit, these pies with dates, currants & prunes (and minimal  
> yolks) could be healthy meat dishes.
>
>
> Grete Pye
> Two Fifteenth Century Cookbooks, 1430
> Take faire yonge beef, And suet of a fatte best, or of Muton, and  
> hak all this on a borde small; and caste thereto pouder of peper  
> and salt; and whan it is small hewen, put hit in a bolle, And medle  
> hem well; then make a faire large Cofyn, and couche som of this  
> stuffur in. Then take Caoins, Hennes, Mallardes, Connynges, and  
> parboile hem clene; take wodekokkes, Teles, grete briddes, and plom  
> hem in a boiling pot; And hen Couche al this fowle in the Coffyn,  
> And put in euerych of hem a Quantite of pouder of peper and salt.  
> Then take mary, harde yolkes of egges, Dates cutte in ij peces,  
> reisons of couraunce, prunes, hole cowched all thi foule, ley the  
> remenaunt of thyne other stuffur of beef a-bought hem, as thou  
> thenkest goode; and then strawe on hem this: dates, mary, and  
> reysons, &c. And then close thi Coffyn with a lydde of the same  
> paast, And puttte hit in the oven, And late hit bake ynough; but be  
> ware, or thou close hit, that there come no saffron nygh the brinkes
>  there-of, for then hit wol neuer close.

The one thing that immediately comes to mind is that by mixing the  
beef with the fat and sealing it in a container, what you're probably  
going for is a consistency similar to sausage meat -- moist, but  
probably not so fatty that it's leaking grease all over the place,  
and the fat is a hard type that holds up well to cooking without  
turning into rendered grease and stringy shreds, which is probably  
why it calls for suet and marrow. There are still sausage recipes  
that call for lean meat augmented with fat. Basically, it gives  
better control than by simply using fatty meat.

Now, sausages have been known to contain 35% fat or more, but are  
still quite recognizable as sausages with only 10% fat and 90% lean  
meat. Less than that and the texture tends to be regarded by most as  
unpleasantly dry.

That would be one way to reduce the fat content without egregiously  
changing the most likely character of the dish. Of course, whether  
it's enough of a decrease to suit everyone, I can't say, but it  
should be relatively easy to do a per portion calorie count, if not  
get more specific than that.

Adamantius