[Sca-cooks] Ashkenazic Passover recipes

[Daniel And elizabeth phelps]

There are two recipes in "Early French Cookery" but they both call for cheese.

"an Ordinance of Pottage" has a bare bones recipe that calls for roasting breast of mutton or lamb and saucing with lemon or tart fruit juice (Seville oranges) seasoned with ginger and heated.

"The Medieval Kitchen, Recipes from France and Italy has several recipes but most call for pork products to be used as well.

"The Sensible Cook, Dutch Foodways in the Old and the New World" has a number of recipes that you would need to work out.  They tend not to have objectionable ingredients but are probably later period that you want.  Let me know if you are interested and I will scan and send off list.

Daniel 
----- Original Message -----
From: galefridus at optimum.net
To: sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org
Cc: mcmendelsohn at optimum.net
Sent: Friday, April 1, 2011 3:50:33 PM
Subject: [Sca-cooks] Ashkenazic Passover recipes

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
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