[Sca-cooks] Ashkenazic Passover recipes

[galefridus at optimum.net]

The use of butter in these recipes renders them non-kosher, so they could not be used as written.  They might be adaptable, though.  I found the multicolored pancakes in the second recipe to be particularly interesting, although I'm pretty certain that I don't want to go to that much work for a home meal at which I'll be responsible for entertaining guests as well as cooking.  Maybe the sound of my swearing from the kitchen would serve as sufficient entertainment...

-- Galefridus

> Message: 7
> Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2011 10:25:51 -0400
> From: Saint Phlip 
> To: Cooks within the SCA 
> Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Ashkenazic Passover recipes
> Message-ID: 
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> 
> May I suggest Sabina Welserin?
> 
> http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Medieval/Cookbooks/Sabrina_Welserin.html
> 
> 153 To prepare an Easter lamb
> 
> Take the lamb and draw off the skin and leave him the ears and the
> feet and the tail , cover with a wet cloth, so that the hair 
> does not
> burn. Roast the whole lamb in this manner in the oven on a 
> board. And
> if you would like for it to be standing, then stick a spit into each
> leg. When it is almost roasted, then baste it with eggs and take it
> out. Let it cool, take a cloth that is three spans long, fill it full
> of butter and bind it up and press it through with a stick. It gets
> crinkled like real wool, then take it and make wool out of it 
> for the
> lamb. Stand it then on a nice board. Make a fence out of butter around
> it, in the manner which follows. [17]
> 
> 
> 154 A lamb of another sort
> 
> Make it exactly as the preceding description, cover it, however, with
> a multicolored covering. It is made like so: Take eggs, put the whites
> separate from the yolks, beat the eggs, put some salt into it and
> sugar, take a pan, put pure fat into it, let it become hot, pour the
> fat completely out of the pan, put the egg white into it, let it run
> here and there around the pan, hold it over the fire, not too long,
> however, only until it begins to quiver. Afterward hold the pan 
> on the
> fire, until it becomes dry, and hold it not too near, so that it
> remains white, and make in this way as many pancakes as you 
> wish. Do
> not make them too thick, not thicker than a thin cloth. Afterwards
> make the yellow ones exactly like this, put saffron in the egg yolks.
> Brown is made precisely so, take cherry jam strained through 
> with the
> eggs and make pancakes out of it. So you have four colors, cover the
> lamb with them and cut the colors according to the length, as 
> wide as
> you would like. After that take cinnamon sticks, make small 
> nails out
> of them, push them with the thick end into Strauben batter, which
> should be yellow and fry them in fat, then they have buttons. If you
> would like, you can gild or silver them. Then take hard-cooked eggs
> and cut them open at the end, take the fried cinnamon sticks, stick
> them through the tips of the eggs and fasten the colors in the fashion
> on the lamb. And color half the eggs yellow and leave the others
> white. Make a fence from good spices around the lamb, put the 
> lamb on
> the board. After that take smoked meat, that is very red, cook 
> it and
> cut off the outside. Chop it very small, then take eggs, cook them
> hard, cut them apart, the white from the yellow, chop each by itself,
> and when the lamb is ready, then put the white on one side of the
> board and the yellow on the opposite side, in one place or the other
> lay the whole hard-cooked eggs on it and also the pancakes, also if
> you have it or want it, honey. This lamb is better for eating than
> that described earlier. When the meat is prepared in this way, 
> it does
> not become ugly and everything is edible except the board.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 3:50 PM, wrote:
> > My wife and I are planning a medieval Passover seder this year 
> -- she has spent the past year or so figuring out the historic 
> development of the Haggadah, so we're pretty certain that we'll 
> have the correct order of service. ?And we've documented some 
> period practices and recipes with regard to most of the 
> liturgical foods (bitter herbs, charoses, etc.) ?One of the 
> places where we're getting stuck is the main course. ?Use of 
> poultry for the seder is a comparatively recent innovation -- 
> lamb was more commonly used, at least in Sephardic and Middle 
> Eastern Jewish communities. ?And that's the problem -- we're 
> trying to do an Ashkenazic (northern/central European) seder, 
> and nearly all of the historically documentable Jewish lamb 
> recipes that we've managed to find are from the wrong part of 
> the world -- Sephardic (Southern European/North African) or 
> Mitzrachi (Middle Eastern).
> >
> > Based in large part on our observations of how modern Jewish 
> cuisine works, my wife and I are guessing that medieval Jewish 
> cuisine was basically a kosher version of the local diet. ?This 
> would mean that almost any medieval French or German roast lamb 
> recipe could work for our purposes -- even if such recipe in its 
> original form included non-kosher ingredients (bacon, lard, 
> etc.) or involved the mixing of meat and milk (forbidden in 
> Jewish law), we'd have no problem with adapting it to make it kosher.
> >
> > Bottom line -- any suggestions of tried-and-
> true?medieval?northern European roast lamb recipes?
> >
> > -- Galefridus