Cooking medievally in the comfort of your own home

Cooking medievally in the comfort of your own home
Originally uploaded by laurelfactorial

I recently hosted a hearth cooking night at our house, and while I was having too much fun to remember to take pictures during the event, when I repeated some of the experiments on my own later I decided to document it. Here are two pipkins and some chestnuts.

At our hearth cooking gathering, we (me, Better Half, my mom, Lady Qaratani, Master Hrafnir) made:
-Pork chop bits coated in mustard, salt, and pepper and fried in lard
-Pork bits cooked in lard with sauces (mustard, quince)
-Meat apples (lamb/pork meatballs coated in parsley) - very good with mustard sauce
-Parsnips with onion
-Peasant glop (bacon, peas, barley, onion)
-Quince paste (served with aforementioned pork, manchego, and -- my favorite -- shortbread cookies)
-Homemade crackers with sour cream / caramelized shallots
-Roasted chestnuts

sooooooooo goooooooooooooood -- this event will definitely be repeated. My fireplace holds three pipkins! Astounding! A big appeal for me was getting together with like-minded foodies to page through cookbooks, gnosh, and talk about food. It was informal and not over-planned, which definitely made it more fun. And Hrafnir always brings the best beer :)

It's much easier to cook in a fireplace than you might think. Our apartment fireplace is actually rather small, and you can see how much we managed to do in an afternoon (okay okay, so some of those things were made in the oven or on the stove, but not many). You could also experiment with roasting (I need a spit!) or grilling, and cast iron will work just fine if you don't have pottery.

Some tips: get the fire going well in advance of when you want to cook. Start with a BIG fire and let it burn down to coals. You'll actually be cooking over small piles of coals moved off the main blaze. It's basically the same as using a fire pit, and I've even used charcoal in my fireplace for cooking. For roasting chestnuts, I heated the base of the hearth with coals, then scraped them back into the fire and put the chestnuts (slashed) on that.

For my second round on my own I made (pictured here):
-Purple carrots (just cooked in a little salted water)
-More quince paste!
-Chestnuts

This has been a great discovery and I can't wait to do more!

darn it darn it darn it!!!!

I made myself a very cute version of St Birgitta's cap, my first attempt at the Maciejowski head covering I've been coveting, and what do I find?

I HAVE TOO MUCH HAIR.

I made it WAY bigger than the original, way bigger than I possibly thought it would need to be, and what do I find out? I can't get my flippin' hair into it without pulling the whole flippin' hat off!!!!

RRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!! EULALIA SMASH!!!!!!!!!

Whew. Deep breaths. Probably this prototype will become Better Half's, and I'll make myself a new one. Bigger.

Culinary Symposium Wrap

I went to Dragon's Laire for an amazing weekend of food, cooking, foodies, classes, and all things related to the joy of eating medievally. It was awesome!

I took a class on cheese, for which there are not sufficient superlatives in my vocabulary. Best. Thing. Ever. I love cheese, and I learned a lot about how to actually make it. I was actually kind of shocked at how much I already knew about the history and the theory of cheese and dairy processing. The teacher confirmed many of my long-held beliefs, such as: milk was not usually used whole, the cream was skimmed for butter and cheese made from the remaining (still fatty) milk, and liquid milk was rarely used both from a perservation aspect and because we just can't digest the stuff. (So I'm not defective because I can't drink modern ultra pasteurized milk but do great on cheese and yogurt, I'm just historically savant!)

I taught two classes, one with Rafaella on simple sauces and one on my own about medieval medical notions (especially the humors) and diet. I felt like both of them went pretty well, and I'd like to teach humors again soon. (I've posted the class handout in .doc format, minus an image that I hand-drew and will have to scan at some point, online; read it here.)

It was good to be around foodies. I spent the weekend with some of my very favorite people (you know who you are!), ate lots of huckleberries, talked and laughed a lot, and came home with awesome new pottery and some chanterelles.

The site was very nice, a girl scout camp so perfectly woodsy. And the food was good, of course! A great event. I'm really hoping we can put one together down here in our neck of the woods.

PS: I ate the chanterelles last night and they were so good I thought I might faint.

Tooth care display

eulalia_teethentry_20081018
Originally uploaded by rafaella13

My tooth cleaning display at 3M A&S. (Photo by Rafaella.)

The cauldron was used as a spittoon.

It burns!

It burns!
Originally uploaded by laurelfactorial

This is the face of experimental archeology, baby!

I took this when I was testing tooth cleaning preparations. I'm chewing a mix of marjoram and mint, and as you can see, it is working.

You can read my tooth research here.

Three Loaves

Three Loaves
Originally uploaded by laurelfactorial

These are the loaves of bread I made for my entry in 3M's A&S championship.

You can read my documentation here.