A Modest Banquet

A Modest Banquet's Recipes--Ciorstan MacAmhlaidh, OHA, AA

Stew Jacobin

Clear chicken broth, a slice of thick sourdough bread with grated cheese layered on top. The original recipe calls for a little bit of sugar sprinkled over the cheese, but I omitted this as it triggered my internal ‘weird food’ warning.

Recipe: Take an 8 quart pot and fill the pot about ¼ full with cheap chicken bits (necks, backs), stalks of celery, a peeled and quartered sweet onion, leeks well cleaned, two carrots, and a fresh sage leaf, a twig of thyme, two fresh bay leaves, some whole Tellicherry peppercorns, grains of paradise and a little salt. Fill the pot to almost ¾ with water. Bring to a gentle boil and simmer for a few hours on low heat. Skim the scum off the top and strain through a strainer and then two layers of cheesecloth to remove the solids, which are then discarded. Chill in the refrigerator until the fat comes to the surface and remove it. Freeze.

This makes a fragrant, dark yellow chicken broth. Taste and correct salt, if necessary.

Method: Bring broth to a boil, put a slice of bread in the bottom of a shallow bowl and sprinkle with grated cheese (I used mozzarella). The broth has to be boiling or as close to boiling as possible otherwise the cheese will turn rubbery. Serve it forth.

Roast Lamb

Using a small knife, pierce meat and insert peeled garlic cloves into the roast. Sprinkle the exterior with ground pepper and garlic powder; I actually used Lawry’s Garlic Pepper. Great stuff.

In period the roast would have been covered with a flour-and-water paste and roasted in a shell to self-baste. I used a foil wrap for expedience.

Method:

Set roast in foil over brazier and allow fire to cook. Turn and move often because firepits are going to be uneven in temperature; observe standard cooking guidelines for lamb of about 20 minutes per pound for medium-rare roasting. Hack into gobbets and serve it forth.

Sallat:

Standard salad mix with an oil/vinegar/garlic/pepper dressing. I used a commercially prepared salad dressing for expedience.

Pork Chops with Sage-Ginger Sauce

Grill pork chops over the fire and serve with sauce on the side—not everyone likes to eat their meat with a sharp sauce like this.

Sage-Ginger Sauce

1 bunch sage (about a cup)
¼ cup fresh peeled ginger
dash vinegar

I actually messed this up when I made this— I had scaled the recipe up but started out with far, far too much ginger in comparison with my available sage. I had to pretty much strip my sage plant to get enough sage to balance out the ginger, but eventually it worked. It is easy to fool with the quantity of sage to adjust the sharpness of the ginger to one’s individual taste, but start off with the sage and add ginger instead of the other way around.

A Special Pie

For one pie:

3 pears, but quinces would be better if you can get them.
8 oz. small curd cottage cheese
1 ½ c. sliced blanched almonds
1 cup raisins
2 egg yolks
3 T. melted butter (optional)
1 t. cinnamon
dash of cloves (too much and you overpower the almonds)

Note that the filling yield is imprecise. I made up the filling and simply tossed out whatever extra liquids I had, making sure to use all the almonds and raisins. Peel and mash the pears and slowly add the cottage cheese and then the egg yolks, one at a time, then the butter. Stir in the raisins and almonds. Fill a 9 inch pie shell and bake at 325 until a toothpick in the center comes out clean—this is about an hour to an hour and fifteen minutes. Be patient. If you find your crust starts to brown too much, pull the pie out on the shelf and bind the edge with a strip of foil. This is a very high-fat item, and is fabulous when cold.

Pumpkin or Squash Tart

This custard pie is not too sweet, and the parmesan ‘note’ is really rather tasty.
I used a pink squash, however squash was not available in Europe during the Middle Ages, nor was pumpkin—they were New World foods. I did not plan so far ahead as to grow edible gourds and yet I did not want to confuse my guests’ palates with pumpkin, hence my choice of squash.

As an aside, I do not care for squash in any form, having been traumatically presented all too often with slabs of squash, baked with brown sugar. This is a fabulous pie.

This is Maestro Martino’s “Zucche,” recipe 160 from Libro de arte coquinaria.

Prepare the pie crust and chill, wrapped in plastic wrap.

1 ¾ pounds squash or pumpkin
milk
11 oz. small curd cottage cheese, drained
7 oz. butter (this is one stick short one tablespoon), softened
½ cup sugar (I like turbinado sugar for this recipe)
1/3 cup freshly grated parmesan cheese
4 eggs, beaten
½ t. ground ginger
½ t. ground cinnamon
salt to taste
rosewater (optional)

Peel and cube your vegetable (squash, pumpkin or gourd), discarding the seeds. Place the chunks in a saucepan and cover with milk Bring to a gentle simmer, being careful not to boil over, which makes a huge mess on your pot and stove! Cook until the chunks are tender, about 15 minutes. Drain. Beat together the cottage cheese and butter until smooth. Add the parmesan, sugar, eggs and spices. Mash or puree the vegetable and add it to the custard.

The recipe calls for lattice-work pastry on top, which I omitted. Fill a deep 9 inch shell with the custard and bake at 475 for 20 minutes. Lower the temperature to 400 and continue baking for about another 40 minutes, watching for over-browning. Cover with foil if necessary.

Optional: The original calls for sprinkling the top with sugar and rosewater. Serve ‘barely warm.’

Whole Pear Pie

This wasn’t actually a pie, simply pears baked in sugar until the pears and sugar formed their own syrup. The crust was not intended to be edible, more of a spectacle sort of thing.

Make up a quantity of pie crust and line a deep baking dish. Stand 6 cored pears in the dish and heap 1 ¼ c. superfine sugar in amidst the pears. Cover the pears with a layer of crust and seal; cut a vent or two or simply let the stem ends poke through the pastry. I decorated my pastry lid with cut outs of leaves and Caidan crescents, and glazed the whole thing with beaten egg for shine. Bake at 90 minutes at 400, again watching for singed crust. The sugar turns into semi-caramelized pear syrup. The dish is more successful if the pears are buried as highly as possible in the sugar, so the deepness of the cooking dish is important.

Break the crust and dish out a pear and some syrup as one serving.

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