I found this recipe similar to the potato dauphinois (http://alicethecook.com/?p=565). I enjoy paring this dish with an easy roast beef or lamb.
Ingredients: 2 lbs potatoes
4 medium leeks
1 tablespoon flour
salt and pepper
1 teaspoon nutmeg
4 cloves of garlic, minced
2 cups hot whole milk
pinch of rosemary
1 -2 tablespoon butter
Directions:
Prep Time: 15 mins
Total Time: 1 1/4 hr
Begin heating the milk in a saucepan on low heat. Peel the potatoes and slice thinly. Wash the leeks thoroughly and slice thinly discarding about the last 2 inches of the green tops. Sauté the leeks in butter with a pinch of rosemary.
Mix together the flour, salt, pepper and nutmeg. Grease a casserole dish with butter. Put in alternate layers of potatoes and leeks sprinkling each layer with the seasoned flour, small chips of butter, sprinkling the garlic throughout. The top layer should be potatoes. Dot the top with butter and pour hot milk on top of the casserole.
Unless readily available, spices we’ve grown accustomed to today were very expensive and hard to obtain during the Renaissance. Salt was rarely used and the spices from the Silk Road – cinnamon, clove, allspice, mace, and ginger, gradually migrated from the Silk Road, across the Arab nations, up the Mediterranean, and north throughout Europe. France, one of the first cultures to embrace these new spices, would blend them with other, more familiar ingredients, and present the dishes to the royal family and visiting nobles.
Although this recipe was prepared originally for nobles, it can be recreated in one’s own kitchen. This dish is ideal for an evening of wine, candlelight, and romance. The brandy and apple sweetened duck meat, complements the baked apples and the carrots and can become even more decadent with toasted bread, truffle oil, and a dessert small enough to share.
Ingredients:
1 whole duck (4-5 lbs.)
3 tart apples (more apples may be used as well)
3 cups brandy
1.5 cups of apple cider
¼ tsp ground cinnamon
¼ tsp of fresh orange zest
1/8 tsp ground clove
1/8 tsp ground allspice
1/8 tsp ground cardamom seed
pinch of mace
3 tbsp butter
2 cups of young carrots (baby carrots may be used instead)
salt and pepper to taste
Begin the recipe by rinsing the inside of the duck with cold water and pat dry with a clean towel. Blend the brandy and apple cider together in a bowl. Take one apples and remove the core, and slice it into quarters. Place those quarters into the cavity of the duck. Invert the duck, so that the opening of the body cavity is on top, and place into a separate, deep bowl or freezer bag. Pour the brandy/cider mixture into the body cavity. The liquid should overfill the duck and the remaining liquid should remain in the bowl, and set aside to chill for one hour.
Pre-heat over to 400 degrees.
Take a pot large enough to all the duck to lay flat. Melt butter in the pot; add the carrots, and sauté lightly. While sautéing, mix the clove, cinnamon, allspice, cardamom seed, orange zest, and mace together. Once the carrots are covered in the butter, lay t
hem flat in the pot. Drain the brandy/cider mixture from the duck and reserve. Place the duck on top of the carrots and score the skin of the duck so that the fat may run into the pot. Pour the reserved brandy/cider mixture over the duck.
Sprinkle the spice mixture on top of the duck and cover. Bake for 1 hour. Remove half to two-thirds of the juices
from the pot to let simmer to a reduction in a separate pot. Core the other two or more apples and add to the pot. Uncover the duck and bake for an additional half an hour until juices of the duck run pink. Remove the duck, baked apples, and carrots from the pan and let it sit for 10 minutes before carving the duck. Sprinkle some salt and pepper to taste and serve with the sauce reduction as a garnish. Serves 4
The recipe requires some time to set up, but it is easy to prepare. While cooking, one can set the table and get ready for an evening of flirtatious conversation and romance.
Preparing food with heat or fire is an activity unique to humans and over the years it has perfected into an art form. Many anthropologists believe that cooking over a fire developed around 250,000 years ago. From cooking, developed agriculture, commerce, and transportation across different regions, offering cooks new ingredients and techniques. New inventions and technologies, such as pottery to hold and boil water, expanded cooking techniques.
The most common cooking techniques included roasting with a firedog over an open fire where instead of cooking on a single spit, they use multiple spits. Meats roasted on these firedogs included joints of larger animals or multiple smaller animals being cooked together.
Boiling meats was also popular. Using large cauldrons, cooks would place meat in boiling water or wine and place the meat into the pot using large hooks called flesh hooks. Meat was often parboiled before they were roasted on a firedog. Other cooking techniques include frying, hearth baking, and oven baking.
Photographic timeline of technique
One of the techniques that fell out of favor over the years is salt baking. Baking in salt is not difficult. This technique has become popular in many of the fine dining establishments where servers will crack and remove with flourish. Inside the white salt dome lies perfectly cooked, moist and fragrant fish. Baking fish (or vegetables, even other meats) in a salt crust creates a sort of oven within an oven. The salt seals in moisture essentially steaming the fish inside. Because the salt absorbs the moisture, the texture of the fish ultimately is more like roasted than steamed fish.
Below is a fairly easy-to-follow recipe on how to create your own salt baked fish. I have created this dish using a multitude of seafood including salmon, trout, eel, and other local white fish. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.
Ingredients:
4 cups kosher salt
1 whole red snapper, striped bass, or porgy (1-1/2 pounds), cleaned and scaled (we used tilapia in this recipe and it was delicious)
1 lemon
3 rosemary or thyme sprigs
Preparation:
Preheat oven to 450 degrees F. Line 13-inch by 9-inch baking pan with foil; spread 2 cups salt in bottom of pan.
Rinse fish inside and out with cold running water; pat dry with paper towels. From lemon, cut 3 slices. Cut remaining lemon into wedges. Place lemon slices and rosemary or thyme in cavity of fish.
Place fish on bed of salt; cover with remaining 2 cups salt. Bake until fish is just opaque throughout when knife is inserted at backbone, about 30 minutes.
During the Renaissance, cooks would place parchment, leaves, or husks in the bottom of the pot and place the fish on top of it. It would allow the fish to bake in the salt without burning or scorching the salt or the fish.
To serve, tap salt crust to release from top of fish; discard. Slide cake server under front section of top fillet and lift off fillet; transfer to platter. Slide server under backbone and lift it away from bottom fillet; discard. Slide cake server between bottom fillet and skin and transfer fillet to platter. Serve with reserved lemon wedges.
Yield: 2 main dish servings
As you can see from the photo timeline, we pulled it from the open fire, removed the crust, and plated the dish for presentation.
This past weekend, we made 10 different meals. Two of the meals got quite a positive response and I was asked to post them here. The dishes are a Pomegranate and Raspberry Wine Pork and a Mushroom and Barley Stew. Both dishes are fairly easy to create and I hope you like them.
Pomegranate and Raspberry Wine Pork Ingredients: 1 pork shoulder (4 – 5 lbs)
2 cups of pomegranate juice (unsweetened)
2 cups of Raspberry wine
1 tsp black pepper
1 tsp sea salt
Place the pork in a large pot and add the wine and juice together and cook on a stovetop on medium heat for 2.5 hours. After the first hour, add the black pepper. After the second hour, add the salt. The pork is done when it falls apart (like pulled pork). We served it with the Mushroom and Barley stew. It also works well with Wild or Brown Rice.
Mushroom and Barley Stew Ingredients:
2 medium onions diced
4 cups of button mushrooms, chopped (portobello mushrooms may be used instead)
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1.5 cups of barley
3 cups of water
2 tbsp olive oil
salt and pepper to taste
In a large pot on medium heat, add the olive oil and onions. Sweat (cook) the onions until clear, add half of the mushrooms and stir occasionally. After the mushrooms have cooked down a bit, add the rest of the mushrooms. Add the barley, garlic, and water. Continue to simmer over medium heat, stirring occasionally. Keep an eye on the barley so that it doesn’t scorch. The goal is that the barley should be al dente and tender. Take off of the heat and let set for 5 minutes, stirring at 2.5 minutes and another stir at 5 minutes. Serve.
At the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, I perform various cooking demonstrations with my assistants. In past years, we’ve created a lot of food that needed to fill empty bellies, but we didn’t have the means to do so. A couple of years ago, we developed a way of performing the cooking demonstrations and feeding the cast. Last year, we dubbed the concept as The Family Table.
There, cast members could get some hand crafted meals, water, and a place for the community to connect. We prepared a meat and vegan dish each day. On a couple of the list serves, that I belong to, I posted some facts about the family kitchen.
Each day of the 2010 run of the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, The Family Table served between 85-125 people.
On Saturday, October 2, 2010, we broke a record by serving 122 cast members in 40 minutes (shortest time for service). We believe it was due to the cold weather. On Sunday, October 3, 2010, we prepared for the day and fed 185 cast members.
MRF provides a stipend for a food budget, but following it would allow us to feed the cast through 5th weekend. The cast’s tips and donations help us stretch the budget to feed the cast throughout the entire season.
Each week, Cub, Rainbow, Kowalski’s, Lunds, Sam’s Club, and Costco are all shopped to get the best prices
Every bowl is washed and bleached so that they remain food safe. At the end of the run, every bowl, cast iron pot, and wooden utensil is oiled and prepped for storage over the winter.
All of the equipment for The Family Kitchen weighs 1750 lbs and includes two tables, tent, fly, cast iron pots, travel stove, shelving, period kitchen, shelving, coolers, etc.
I kept a running tally through the season. We went through a lot of food (roughly):
Black Beans 14 lbs
Chickpeas 22 lbs Lentils 8 lbs
Zucchini 100 lbs
Rice 100 lbs
Bread 65 lbs
pumpkins 23 lbs
leeks 30 lbs
onions 15 lbs
potatoes 117 lbs
carrots 130 lbs
chicken 140 lbs
beef 150 lbs
pork 72 lbs
meatballs 27 lbs
kielbasa 30 lbs
turkey 60 lbs
mushrooms 16 lbs
I hope that The Family Table can become a not-for-profit entity for next year. I am looking for a lawyer who specializes in filing for not-for-profit status in Minnesota and is willing to work pro-bono. If you have any referrals, please let me know.
