Orange Sauce

Orange Sauce
Originally uploaded by laurelfactorial.

Original recipe:

Chicken with orange sauce
"Roast chicken. To prepare roast chicken, you must
roast it; and when it is cooked, take orange juice or
verjuice with rose water, sugar, and cinnamon, and
place the chicken on a platter, and pour this mixture
over it and send it to the table."

I learned it from Rafaella, who says it's from The Medieval Kitchen. I could track down better docs for you but I won't.

Anywho, so I have some sour oranges and I decided to try this out. I don't have any rose water on hand (I suspect that my better half finally threw out the ancient bottle that's been lurking in the fridge for who knows how long). I juiced one of the oranges, then added sugar and cinnamon to taste while whisking the heck out of everything (that's a technical term). I ended up with a fairly sweet and spicy mixture, although very thin since the sauce has no thickeners. At final count I probably had a couple of tablespoons of sugar and at least a teaspoon of cinnamon. I was pretty pleased with the color I ended up with, I think it's pretty. I use Ceylon or true cinnamon, not cassia, which I think helps the color.

I ate this with a semi-fancy pork tenderloin roast.

Notes for further experimentation: do it with rose water next time. Ratio of rose water to orange juice? My gut says the juice is the primary ingredient here. I'd also like to see what happens if you cook this sauce, not because the recipe says to, but just because I wonder what it's like if it's thicker.

Final assessment:

Difficulty: Easy-peasy! Would have been even easier with a stick blender. My only reservation on difficulty is that I used fancy, highly seasonal oranges that are supposedly closer to period oranges. A substitution might be to use sweet modern oranges and spike the mixture with a little verjuice or even vinegar. (It's my understanding that sweet oranges are relatively recent; corrections are welcome.)

Taste: Quite good. I like sour things, though.

Recommendation: Would be good for a potluck or a formal feast as it is easy for the cook and approachable for modern palettes while also being authentic and exotic-seeming. Great way to dress up something non-threatening like chicken. Might be fun to take to a camping event, and would even have a chance of surviving without refrigeration due to the acidity. No guarantees on that one.

Beaded Goutte

Being a big fan of Grizel's work, I wanted to see if I could make beaded Goutte de Sang medalions. Right now I'm trying to make basically a prototype just using the beads that I happen to have around the house (not so good craft store beads) to see if this is even remotely feasible. If it works (that is, if they aren't too hard to make), I'll get in touch with someone official to find out if there's any interest. I suspect that this will be a dead end project, mostly because I don't imagine that there's much appeal in handing out a few medalions that are very different from all the others.

Anyway so far it is working out all right, the design is really quite simple and the red beads I have are quite flashy. Pictures when it's done.

If I were smarter, this would be easier

Book 2
Originally uploaded by laurelfactorial.

I have this really bad habit of trying to learn something by doing it, making a whole bunch of mistakes, getting frustrated, and giving up midway through. For reasons I don't entirely understand, I am not good at seeking information before starting a craft or project.

For example, I got interested in bookmaking. So I read a few tutorials online, looked at pictures of historical bindings, looked at websites maintained by SCAdians, and looked at the bindings of a few traditionally-bound books, then tried it out. (I think I also read about book binding in an art history class which looked at binding methods from a historical perspective.) This is what I have so far.

Actually, this isn't that bad. What's bad is I have no idea how to actually attach the cover to this. That is, I think I could figure it out, but I know that what I need to do is talk to someone in the SCA or go get a book from the library to find out how it was done in period. I'm pretty good at researching period materials. I am not good at all at researching period methods.

I'm working on it.

But look! I'm making a book!

Eulalia Hath A Blogge

In which our heroine shall catalog her activities in the Society for Creative Anachronism.