Octo-Lutfisk-art

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Octo-Lutefisk-art - 10/20/19

"Octo-Lutefisk" by Gwyn Chwith ap Llyr. Roasted Octopus preserved in lye.

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This article was added to this set of files, called Stefan's Florilegium, with the permission of the author.

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Thank you,

Mark S. Harris...AKA:..Stefan li Rous

stefan at florilegium.org

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This author is the one behind the creation of "The Transylvanian Cookcook project and you can find more work by him on his blog (The Leather Notebook) at:

http://www.fibergeek.com/leathernotebook/

Octo-Lutefisk

by Gwyn Chwith ap Llyr

…in which our brave hero, having deciphered the cryptic manuscript, [The Transylvanian Cookcook - Stefan] quested for and received in turn the most necessary Ingredient, and followed all the steps of the Dance Culinaire, does finally put the pieces together and assemble the Dish at Last.

Well. Yeah. We did this. Octo-lutefisk has been made and consumed. No one died in the making of this except some cephalopods, who were already deceased before I conceived this mad notion. Let’s recap, shall we?

(413) Octopus in a different way.

Wash the octopus in three pots of water, then let it soak in clean water for two days, but change the water frequently, especially in the summer, elsewise it will go bad. Once you put it in a new pot of water, wash it. Once two days have passed, make some alkali out of ash, but don’t make it too strong, for that will devour the fish, and your lord will be angry with you.

Let the alkali cool, and put it in the same pot with the octopus, let it stand for one night, then boil it in clean water, pass through a strainer the water, put it in cold water, and keep it with ice in the summer so that it will not go bad. Once you’re about to cook it, remove the black skin, put it on a skewer, roast it, paste it with tree oil. Once done, put it on a skewer and add some black pepper, then serve it while it’s hot.

So, we acquired said dried octopus. We rinsed it off in three pots full of water before letting it soak in the fridge for two days, changing the water about every 8 hours. We then made lye, determining a pH of 10 or so would be a good starting point, and found happily what we made from wood-ash was about the pH we wanted, testing it with a cool hack involving red cabbage juice.

Last night, I put the rehydrated octopi in the lye, and left it in the fridge overnight. Today, I put my firebox together, assembled olive oil, black pepper, tools, and such and got to work.

Yes. A fire extinguisher is by definition medieval. Don’t argue, I live in California and it’s still fire season.

Here’s the thing. It worked -just- like the instructions said. No black skin formed until after the octopi were boiled. It rubbed off very easily. The head easily was skewered, the tentacles, not so much. Brushed on some tree oil (olive oil), ground some black pepper over it, and held it over the coals. When it looked like it was nicely heated through, off the skewer and into the mouth!

Here's the boil

Watch you don’t burn the tentacles!

The whole Head of an octopus rehydrated, lye treated, boiled and roasted. Not very big, is it?

So, now you’re wondering, what was it like? I confess, I had imagined it would become some gelatinously mushy, meaty gel thing. It didn’t come out like that at all. The tentacles were a little chewy, not bad, mind you, but that’s where the muscles are. Nothing was jello-y at all. The head was actually rehydrated quite well for something that had the thickness of construction paper to start.

Taste? It was…rather like cod or sole…some fairly bland white fish. Royce, pictured above, and I agreed it could use a touch of salt! If I’d cooked it over the fire longer, it might have gotten a touch crispy around the edges…so a combination of fish and chips? Probably not. Longer over the fire is generally a bad idea with a lot of sea-life unless you’re going to cook it a LOOOONG time.

What did I do that wasn’t period? Primarily, I kept it in the fridge when rehydrating for safety. And the octopus had some sulphates in it that you wouldn’t find in period. I also used it as fast as I reasonably could, rather than leaving it on ice, as it says we can. If you want to go nuts, I also didn’t time days and nights at that latitude in the times octopus would have been available. But it talks about doing it in summer, and summer is just about done-ish now…good enough.

My cooking methods were as medieval as I could manage, and there is nothing a period cook would have found out of place in the preparation of lye (except trying to explain the concept of pH would be a challenge). You can see I got out my pipkins, and natural hardwood charcoal is the period cooking fuel of choice.

Was it exceptional? No. Would I refuse to eat it if it showed up on my plate? Not at all! I will say, that after trying this, the recipe before, with less detail, interests me more. It tells you to cook it in “oily sauce”. As it happens, there are three basic oily sauces given…one that basically cabbage broth with olive oil, one that shows up with a lot of dried fish which is vinegar, wine, honey, and olive oil. And one that’s the same, but with grapes, chopped apples, and dill! Those are some decently strong favors for something that is fairly bland. So, since I have some left over, and in fact a whole package that hasn’t been rehydrated yet…I might not be done with tentacles yet!

So, questions? Comments? Ready to send me off with a jacket that has sleeves in the back?

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Copyright 2018 by Glenn Gorsuch. <ggorsuch at gmail.com>. Permission is granted for republication in SCA-related publications, provided the author is credited. Addresses change, but a reasonable attempt should be made to ensure that the author is notified of the publication and if possible receives a copy.

If this article is reprinted in a publication, please place a notice in the publication that you found this article in the Florilegium. I would also appreciate an email to myself, so that I can track which articles are being reprinted. Thanks. -Stefan.