[Sca-cooks] medieval capirotada

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Brighid ni Chiarain said:
>  The medieval capirotada consists of layers of bread and roast fowl
>  with a sauce on top.  I don't see much relationship to an olla podrida.

Stefan li Rous replied:
>  Sounds like an interesting dish. Recipe? or better, a redaction?

Well, i think the original recipe is always better than a redaction: 
i can always come up with my own interpretation of an historical 
recipe, but i cannot come up with the original based on an 
interpretation.

>It sounds somewhat similar to a dish that Master Cariadoc mentioned 
>recently which was layers of flat bread with something in-brtween 
>which was backed underneath a roasting chicken so the drippings fell 
>on to it.

Nothing like. There is an entire class of judhaba recipes within the 
Arabic language corpus, which involve placing a tray of something 
sweet at the bottom of a tannur, then hanging a chicken over it and 
roasted the chicken, so that the chicken drippings fall into the 
sweet.

For the preparation of a judhaba. generally the sweet is placed 
between layers of flat bread (its description suggests something 
modern lavash, which is unyeasted and quite thin). The sweet may be 
khabis (sort of like a thick sweet porridge, sometimes rolled into 
tiny balls ("the size of a hazelnut") and dipped in more sugar; fanid 
(pulled sugar taffy); bananas dipped in batter, fried, and coated 
with a lot of sugar syrup. The sweet is then layered with flat bread, 
etc. The sweet (some seem toothachingly sweet) and the chicken are 
then eaten together.

There is a rather funny story Perry repeats in one of his essays in 
"Medieval Arab Cookery" about a medieval con man getting a rube to 
buy him massive amounts of prepared foods in the bazaar, one of which 
is judhaba.
-- 
Urtatim [that's err-tah-TEEM]
the persona formerly known as Anahita