[Sca-cooks] medieval boil-in bag meals

[Anne Murphy]

Frumenty is good for camp cooking even without a boil in bag. I use
the slight cheat that I use bulgar wheat, which has been parboiled,
rather than regular cracked wheat. (Bulgar is also usually easier for
me to find.) I use the packaged almond milk (won't work for many
recipes, as it doesn't thicken properly, but does for this.) You just
need to bring it all to a boil, simmer a couple of minutes, and then
cover set it aside while you cook the rest of the meal - not using up
propane or a valuable burner.

Yes, it would be nice to have a chance to learn to cook over a fire. I
cook at one event a year, unless I get to Pennsic (which I've only
managed twice.) I can't practice at home in my apartment, and I don't
want to be building a fire instead of participating. So, for now, it's
propane...

This year, for that event, Friday night I brought pre-cooked and
frozen polenta and sauce. Not even faintly medieval, but available in
my freezer (the week before spun a bit out of my control) and easy to
reheat for a quick meal after set up. Breakfast was sausage, eggs and
oatmeal, and coffee. Lunch was a magnificent dayboard (Hi, Jadwiga!)
Dinner was the frumenty, sausage supplied by my campmate, and a green
salad. (I'd originally planned more vegetables - see above about the
previous week.) Quite pleasant.

AEllin



>
> to whit I reply:
> what recipes DON'T work with boiling bags? :). Any sort of stew thing works.
> Herbolades work. Sauces work. Braised greens. Benes. Frumenty. Funges.
> Basically any dish that you would have boiled, or simmered into a glop, so
> pretty much most of the English and French medieval corpus ;).
>
> I've even done roast pork with sauce by making the sauce ahead of time,
> roasting the pork at home, sliceing the pork and packaging WITH the sauce
> and reheating on site.
>
> Again, I vastly prefer to cook in a period manner, but when modern site
> rules dictate, I have come up with this work around :)
>
> --Anne-Marie
>
>