[Sca-cooks] My dinner de-brief

[David Friedman]

On 5/31/12 8:38 PM, Laura C. Minnick wrote:
> ...

> I fed ten. We had:
>
> Roast pork (marinaded with rose instead of red, garlic, and some 
> pepper), a boiled chicken (stuffed with garlic, parsley, and lemon 
> slices, and boiled in white wine and broth), and trout (roasted in the 
> oven with the pork, stuffed with lemon slices and drizzled over with 
> lemon, olive oil, and a little white wine). I made a sauce for the 
> pork out of the leftover marinade and a little more wine, and a sauce 
> for the trout with shallots, white wine, lemon juice, and capers.
>
> There was a pot of black-eyed peas, cooked with pork neck bones, and a 
> bit of kale. And I made a dish of lentils with carmelized onions and 
> lots of cumin.
>
> There was asparagus, dressed with oil and vinegar, and a dish of 
> carrots, parsnips, and fennel, sauteed tender-crisp and then braised 
> briefly with chicken broth and white wine. We also had salad.
>
> For dessert we had a cheesecake (the recipe of which I am still 
> tinkering), 'Barbie Tart' (a strawberry pie made of strawberries I 
> smooshed through a strainer, mixed with egg and a little breadcrumbs, 
> a bit of pepper, and a bit of saffron- It looks like you've run 
> several Barbies through a blender...) . A bottle of athol braose went 
> around ( a friend brought it- I didn't have it because the last time I 
> had it I ended up showing a roomful of people my Mickey Mouse 
> underwear) and there was mead. I forgot teh wafers I had brought, but 
> I didn't have the red wine for ypocras anyway.
>
> No one went away hungry, and there weren't a whole lot of leftovers 
> either. I served late, which makes me absolutely crazy, but it was ok 
> after all, because court ran late. (I'm still not happy about being 
> late though.)
>
> The only dish I really can't make a 'possible in Frankish late 8th c' 
> is the cheesecake, and that mostly because I'm still tinkering with 
> the cheese. The rest of it I think I could see on a Carolingian table.
Where are you imagining the feast happening? Lemons might have been 
available in Italy, but I'm not sure how much farther north. Wikipedia 
claims that lemons entered Europe no later than the 1st century AD, but 
were not widely cultivated, and that  " The first substantial 
cultivation of lemons in Europe began in Genoa in the middle of the 15th 
century."

Athol Braose contains whiskey, which I don't think the Carolingians had.

-- 
David/Cariadoc
www.daviddfriedman.com
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/