Stefan's Florilegium

cauldron-cookg-msg

caldron-cookg-msg - 5/9/02

caldron cooking. How to cook foods in a caldron over an open fire.

NOTE: See also these files: Camp-Cooking-art, drying-foods-msg, puddings-msg,
broths-msg, thickening-msg, roast-meats-msg, stews-bruets-msg.

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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
seperate 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
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Please respect the time and efforts of those who have written these
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Thank you,
Mark S. Harris AKA: THLord Stefan li Rous
mark.s.harris@motorola.com stefan@florilegium.org
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To: sca-cooks@ansteorra.org, SCA-Cooks maillist <SCA-Cooks@ansteorra.org>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Cauldron cooking
From: Kirrily Robert <skud@infotrope.net>
Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 22:56:46 -0400

Stefan wrote:
>Maeve asked:
>> I have been cooking over a fire for several tourney seasons, I want to
>> expand the repertoire from roasting on the meat fork, wrapping meat in hard
>> pastry (or foil on occasion) and stews cooked in the cauldron. Has anyone
>> worked with the type of cauldron cooking where you cook things in pudding
>> bags or in crock in the cauldron?
>
>I have not personally tried the puddings in a bag technique. However,
>maybe the comments in these files in the Florilegium might be of use

I missed the original post, so I'll reply to Stefan's instead.

Peter Brears' "All the King's Cooks" talks a bit about the process of
cooking in these ways in a large cauldron.

Take a look at the English Huswife for recipes:
http://infotrope.net/sca/texts/english-housewife/
There are sections on boiled meats and on puddings.

From what I've gathered from these and other sources (oops, almost
mis-typed as "sauces") here are a few tips:

- the cauldron liquid will rapidly become broth. Take advantage of
this. You can probably safely keep using the same liquid from day to
day if you boil it *thoroughly* each time and keep it covered in
between. I kept a soup going one Rowany festival for five days with
no problems, and it just kept getting better.

- Don't worry about mixing different kinds of meat in the broth; they
didn't seem to distinguish too much in most of the stuff I've read.
That is, they just say "boil it in fair broth" and don't mention
whether it's chicken broth, mutton broth, or whatever.

- Boil your meats *large*. Whole chickens. Whole legs of mutton.
Stuff like that. Carve them when you serve and not before. This
makes it easy to get the meat out of the pot -- you won't be fishing
around for lots of little bits, just for one big chunk. And you can
boil different kinds of meat together without them getting mixed up,
apart from the fact that the broth will be mixed.

- You'll need pipkins or other small pots for making sauces and so
forth. The common sauce-making method is to take some of the broth,
put it in a separate saucepan, add flavourings and thickenings, then
serve the meat (whole) on a dish of sippets with the sauce poured
over.

- Most recipes refer to "skumming" the broth (i.e. skimming off the crud
that floats to the top). Probably a good idea :) But don't skim off
all the fat -- the fattest part of the broth is especially good for
making sauces.

Note that most of what I've been reading is 16C English cookery. Others
who specialise in other areas may have totally different advice :)

Katherine
--
Lady Katherine Robillard (mka Kirrily "Skud" Robert)
katherine@infotrope.net http://infotrope.net/sca/
Caldrithig, Skraeling Althing, Ealdormere

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