Icelandic-Fst-art - 12/4/09
Review of an Icelandic feast for the "St. Andrews visits Iceland" event hosted by the Barony of An Dubhaigeainn - Center Moriches, NY. held on Saturday, November 7th, 2009. Cooked by Master G. Tacitus Adamantius.
NOTE: See also the files: Iceland-msg, Iceland-bib, fd-Iceland-msg, dayboards-msg, salmon-msg, meat-smoked-msg, chicken-msg, bag-cooking-msg, almond-milk-msg.
************************************************************************
NOTICE -
This file is a collection of various messages having a common theme that I have collected from my reading of the various computer networks. Some messages date back to 1989, some may be as recent as yesterday.
This file is part of a collection of files called Stefan's Florilegium. These files are available on the Internet at: http://www.florilegium.org
I have done a limited amount of editing. Messages having to do with separate topics were sometimes split into different files and sometimes extraneous information was removed. For instance, the message IDs were removed to save space and remove clutter.
The comments made in these messages are not necessarily my viewpoints. I make no claims as to the accuracy of the information given by the individual authors.
Please respect the time and efforts of those who have written these messages. The copyright status of these messages is unclear at this time. If information is published from these messages, please give credit to the originator(s).
Thank you,
Mark S. Harris AKA: THLord Stefan li Rous
Stefan at florilegium.org
************************************************************************
Date: Sun, 08 Nov 2009 11:42:06 -0500
From: "Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius" <adamantius1 at verizon.net>
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
Subject: [Sca-cooks] Partial feast debriefing while the massive leg
cramps do their thing... LONGISH
As some of you may have heard, I was asked by a friend to cook a feast
on fairly short notice, with a menu previously conceived by a separate
researcher and the original cook, who had to give up her job due to a
medical emergency, so I was given a menu and some recipes to work from.
I made a few changes to the menu as a conscientious SCA member and
foodie Laurel, and there was one dish that I felt I simply wouldn't
have time to prepare (a couple of hundred deep-fried, paper thin,
incredibly fragile cookies whose periodicity was a bit doubtful to me
in any case). I suggested that if they were important to the menu czar
she could find someone to make them off site and bring them in, and
apparently she did. There was one that I simply refused to serve
because I didn't want my name associated with it and the implication
that I had given it my official blessing as appropriately medieval/
Renaissance food.
The entire event was in an Icelandic theme, and the menu as handed to
me was mostly traditional Icelandic foods, some of which might be
period, some definitely not (the most egregious of these I simply
replaced with dishes from the Harpestraeng Codex).
Did I mention there was a dayboard, too, which I also put together?
And that we weren't allowed, for liability reasons, to actually cook
in the site's kitchen (we could reheat and keep things warm in their
ovens)? As a result, we had some cold dishes strategically placed on
the menu, a propane smoking box outside for roasting, two propane
turkey fryer burners with 60-quart pots of boiling water, and a lot of
boiling bags, courtesy of the amazing FoodSaver Vacuum Sealer.
I discovered that the smoker box was smaller than I had been led to
expect, contained less room and fewer racks and generally considerably
less muscle than advertised. We solved that by placing first our red
meat roasts (they were supposed to be lamb, but local availability and
pricing caused me to buy one leg of lamb and four large secondary cuts
of beef - round tips? Never dealt with those before) into the smoker,
got them looking vaguely cooked but not nearly done, brought them into
the inside ovens to "reheat and keep warm" for about an hour at 400
degrees F (doesn't everybody do it that way? We were just warming them
in the ovens; we were afraid they'd get cold). When the beef and lamb
went indoors, we did the same thing with about fourteen chickens.
The unscheduled extra attention this situation required threw a lot of
the other work off schedule (and then court ended early, and his
Majesty blithely announced he was ready for dinner, with the local
Baron in tow with frozen grin in place, knowing full well we had
agreed on dinner at 6:30PM, not 5:45...).
Well, in the end, like all proper clusterfudges, most of the insane
maneuverings were invisible from the outside, and to me the most
amusing thing was the dayboard offering of salt cod balls in a quite
rich salmon-essence cream sauce... well, people seemed unable to grasp
the simple fact that the clearly-labeled sauce they were eating was
not in fact a soup that I had accidentally dropped fish balls into. A
couple of people reported some mild gastric distress, and it wasn't
from any hygienic consideration. These were all the people who ate
huge bowls of cream sauce, when a tablespoon or two was what was
intended. (--That fish soup sure was good! --Really? I'm so happy you
liked it. What fish soup? I didn't make any fish soup... Ohmygosh you
ate two large bowls of cream sauce that was 90% heavy cream and 5%
butter??? <steps aside, guffawing, while other person runs to rest
room>).
In the end, it was quite satisfying, in a way, that the few people
that I made deathly ill did not, in fact, result from the raw salmon I
served, or the chickens cooked in inadequate ovens (one slightly pale
bird was sent back, I took its temperature, showed the still-above-157
to the person who'd brought it back, swapped it for a spare that was
browner).
Okay. So, as I recall, the dayboard consisted of rye bread, Icelandic
cheeses and butter, quince paste (we had scads of it already purchased
from the last time I had cooked a feast for this group), cream of kelp
and laver soup with oats, vegan vegetable soup (fill large pot with
shredded cabbage, soaked dried mushrooms, onion, and carrots, pour
mushroom soaking water over all, add water to cover, simmer for about
90 minutes, season). Salt cod (some unsalted torski/stockfish in
there, too) balls in cream sauce with dill, and platters of whole
apples and pears.
First course for dinner was gravlax done with juniper berries instead
of dill, which we served on half of a large platter, with the other
side filled with sliced, jellied pork brawn -- I used picnic
shoulders, peeled off and reserved the rind after simmering the meat,
then packed the boneless meat into a mold lined with the skin, pressed
it all down, topped with the rest of the skin, and added reduced stock
to gel when cold. It all set up into a slightly rubbery block of
highly seasoned cold meat. No sheep's heads were harmed in the
production. No, I did not pickle the jellied meat in whey, per
tradition. All served with a bowl of honey mustard dill sauce in the
middle of the platter. White porrey of leeks and onions in thick
almond milk sauce at one end of another large platter, mashed rutabaga
with a little carrot in there to improve the color and reduce the
sharpness, at the other. People apparently thought it was pumpkin
until they tasted it. Looooots of butter in those.
We sent out an entremet of bilberry soup with cream on the side (I got
a screaming bargain on dried bilberries), the ultra-fragile leaf
breads made by one of the locals of the group, and some other,
commercial multi-grain flatbreads that closely resembled the Swedish,
potato-less version of lefse.
The second course was beef and chicken, all macerated with lots of
fresh thyme, with the thyme stems added to the wood chips in the
smoking box to add additional perfume to the meat. High table got lamb
and a braised goose (semi-roasted brown on a bed of chopped mirepoix
veg, then braised in red wine and some quince paste added at the end,
sauce and veg pureed before serving) instead of chicken.
The only real casualty of the day was the non-appearance of the sauce
for the chicken -- it was just about the only job I wasn't willing or
able to leave up to someone other than myself, or take the time to
teach the technique in detail -- I did, however, give an impromptu
lesson in proper salmon slicing. The sauce was to have been a red wine
and stock reduction with fried, chopped red onion, thickened like a
custard with egg yolks. This is from one of the Harpestraeng recipes,
and perhaps the dish on the menu that I was most looking forward to
myself, but the oven problems took up enough my time that when the
time came, I had to choose between staying inside and keeping an eye
on things, and going outside to cook the sauce over a propane burner
in the pitch blackness, I decided the chicken was actually pretty
darned good on its own. Next time. The meats were served with a
separate platter of rice cooked in milk with butter, a little sugar,
and ginger (unabashedly gloopy and risotto-like -- I love a good pilaf
but this is an SCA event, darnit, the rice is SUPPOSED to be gloopy --
and a sweet-and-sour red cabbage.
The meal ended with skyr (a thick, yogurt-like cheese made from
cultured skim milk) with stewed apricots and berries, and little
marzipan tartlets (I had found about eight pounds of marzipan in the
baron's freezer, left over from a feast I had done last Spring for
that group, so this was a good chance to use it up).
Baron Ateno is cool. Not only is he a very old friend (I wouldn't have
done this had anyone else asked me to), but he endeared himself even
further to me by talking the king into eating the neck of the goose
(which is supposed to be served to the lord), and, at a strategic
moment, poured everybody brimming flagons (he is a brewing Laurel) of
his special vintage of the day: the chilled whey from the skyr.
So, overall, not quite the menu I would have chosen had this been my
project from the beginning, but we did okay, all in all. We apparently
came in under budget, even after subtracting sub-budgets from mine for
the imported Icelandic butter, cheeses, and a mysterious dark brown
confection very popular in modern Iceland, but which surely comes from
the furthest southern tip of Iceland. Say, Venezuela, maybe? Also the
lovely dark rye bread (46 loaves, I think?) baked by one of the
locals, and the lovely but extremely labor-intensive leaf breads
prepared by one of the local ladies...
As per my usual, I arrived with camera in hand to get photos of the
food, and then everything went slightly insane and I did not get a
chance to get too many. I have a shot of the marbled/jellied pork, and
some shots of the skyr curds setting up, and, I think, one of myself
in kitchener-ey cap and cote of office, so to speak.
So, should I make cabbage, pea or bean soup with my gallon of extra
rich, jellied, ham-pinky pork shoulder stock today?
Adamantius
Date: Sun, 08 Nov 2009 13:50:32 -0500
From: "Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius" <adamantius1 at verizon.net>
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Partial feast debriefing while the massive
leg cramps do their thing... LONGISH
On Nov 8, 2009, at 1:43 PM, Johnna Holloway wrote:
<<< Congratulations on what must have been a most interesting experience. >>>
Thanks! It was interesting; it's a not-hugely-well-documented slice of
period life that we don't always have much a venue to visit, so I was
grateful for the chance.
<<< One must ask -- Do people in the East kingdom usually eat the sauces
as soups? >>>
As far as I know, not generally. I suppose if the sauce is fairly
thin, there's enough of it, and the little card falls down or
something, it's an easy mistake to make. Another possibility is that
the group didn't provide us with too many serving utensils; either
they don't have too many or they forgot to bring them; it's possible
someone took one of the 8 or 12-ounce ladles from one of the soup pots
to serve with, and people drew the wrong conclusion. Luckily the honey
mustard was served in small cups... ;-)
Adamantius
<the end>