Scappi’s Turkey Stuffing (made as a meatloaf)

I have been inspired by my friend Avelyn to try this recipe. It is one of three meaty stuffings she tested for her contribution to the Ealdormere Cooks’ Guild cookbook. As Avelyn doesn’t cook much, I went to her house to keep her company while she tested things out. This isn’t quite her recipe, but it is a variant made after watching her cook, and discussing other ways to serve it for a feast.

115. To make various mixtures with which to stuff every sort of commonly eaten animal, quadruped and fowl, for spit-roasting.

Get four pounds of pork fat that is not rancid and with knives beat i finely together with two pounds of liver of a goat kid or some other quadruped or commonly eaten fowl, and cut it up into small pieces, adding in beaten mint, sweet marjoram, burnet and parsley, four raw egg yolks, an ounce of pepper and cinnamon combined, half an ounce of ground cloves and nutmeg combined, half a pound of prunes, visciola cherries and morello cherries combined, – in summer instead of those use gooseberries or verjuice grapes. Mix everything well together. Optionally, you can put grated cheese, garlic cloves or sautéed spring onions.

You can also do them in a different way: when the pork fat is beaten with the same amount of lean veal or wether meat or young pork, without skin or gristle, put in with that four and a half ounces of marbled prosciutto, mixing in the above condiments, four ounces of raisins, a few parboiled artichoke hearts or field mushrooms peele and well cleaned – or instead of mushrooms, truffles. (The Opera aof Bartolomeo Scappi (1570), translated with commentary by Terence Scully, University of Toronto Press, 2008, p 193).

For my recipe, I decided that I wanted some of the flavour of turkey that Avelyn had been hoping for with her turkey stuffing recipe, so I used turkey instead of pork. I didn’t have pork on hand so I used beef, and I think the perfect combination might be turkey and pork. I decided that the above condiments” included all the spices and the prunes, but not the cherries, cheese, garlic and onions. However, I think that green onions could be quite nice in this.

• about 3 lb ground beef and turkey, or pork or veal, in the proportions you like (I used almost 2 lb turkey with 1 lb beef). I had beef liver available, but decided this would not be particularly tasty as a meatloaf, but it would go well with the prunes and prosciutto in a stuffing or as little meatball canapés (reminiscent of rumaki)
• 1 1/2 tsp dried mint
• 1 tsp dried marjoram
• 1/4 c fresh parsley, chopped
• 3 large whole eggs (no point wasting the whites)
• 1/2 tsp pepper
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp cloves
• 1/4 tsp nutmeg
• 1/2 lb (about 20 pitted) prunes, chopped finely
• 4 1/2 oz prosciutto, chopped
• 1 c mushrooms, chopped
• 1/4 c raisins

Mix all the ingredients thoroughly, then place in a greased meatloaf pan and bake at 350F for about 90 minutes. The result is a rich and complex meatloaf.

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Parsnips

This is an excerpt from The Neapolitan recipe collection
(Italy, 15th c – T. Scully, trans.)
The original source can be found at University of Michigan Digital General Collection

Parsnips. Clean big ones well and remove the woody part in the middle, and boil them; when they are cooked, flour them and fry them in good oil- but before that, dry them well on a small board; then, to make them better, get a bowl of flour tempered with water, add sugar, cinnamon, saffron and rosewater, coat the parsnips with this mixture and put them in the pan with hot oil; then put spices on top of them and serve them properly seasoned like that.

• 4 parsnips
• 1/4 c flour
• 1 Tbsp sugar
• 1 Tsp cinnamon
• Pinch saffron
• 1 tsp rosewater
• water sufficient to make a liquidy paste
• olive oil (2-3 Tbsp, or enough to coat your frying pan)
• pinch of sugar and cinnamon to sprinkle on top at the end

Peel parsnips and chop into spears. Boil until soft. Mine didn’t have any woody parts, but really old parsnips may be tough in the centre, so remove that section before cooking.

Drain the parsnips then dip each piece into the flour mixture and place in the heated frying pan to cook. Turn to ensure all sides are cooked until golden, and remove from the pan. Sprinkle with a bit of sugar and cinnamon before serving.

 

 

 

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Ravioli

This is another recipe I did for the Ealdormere Cooks’ Calendar last year and forgot to post. I couldn’t decide which recipe to enter, so I did both. In the end, only my herbatella made it in. Last night, as I was helping Marina with her raviolis for this year’s calendar (my job was taste testing), I remembered that this recipe had never been used.

XIII Fantastic common ravioli with herbs
If you want to make ravioli with herbs or with other things, take herbs and peel (strip from stalks) and wash well. Put them to boil for a little time (parboil) and pull them out (of the pan) and squeeze out all the water. Beat them with a knife (chop) and then in a mortar (grind). Take fresh strained cheese, eggs and strong and sweet spices and mix these all well together and make a paste. Then take a thin layer of pasta, in the way of lasagna sheets, and take a large measure (spoon) and make the ravioli. When they are made put them to cook and when they are well cooked powder them above with enough spices and enough good cheese and they are very good.

* There is no mention here of appropriate cooking technique. The previous ravioli recipes, which were lacking a pasta covering, were all fried. However, later recipe collections (from the 15th and 16th centuries) clearly state that such stuffed pasta, and any other form of pasta, should be cooked in plenty of boiling water with salt.

Citation
Libro di cucina/ Libro per cuoco (14th/15th c.) (Anonimo Veneziano). Translated by Louise Smithson from the transcription of Ludovico Frati (ed.): Libro di cucina del secolo XIV. Livorno 1899 prepared and made available online by Thomas Gloning. Last updated March 28th 2005.

1 ½ c unbleached white flour
¼ tsp salt
1 egg
¼ tsp water
Enough herbs to make about 1 Tbsp of paste when boiled, then choppped and ground in a mortar (I used a mix of lovage, sorrel, wood sorrel, oregano, chives, and garlic mustard)
2 Tbsp parmesan cheese
¼ c mozzarella cheese
¼ tsp poudre fort

Mixed together the first four ingredients and knead until you have a stiff dough. Set aside for 10 minutes to rest.
Meanwhile, strip the leaves from the stems of your herbs and drop into a bit of boiling water just until they change colour. Drain, then squeeze out all the liquid with your hands, then chop into small pieces and grind with a mortar and pestle. Mix the herbs with 1 Tbsp of the parmesan plus the mozzarella.
Divide the dough in half and roll into two thin squares or rectangles. Drop a spoonful of the cheese mixture at intervals on one piece of dough. Cover with the other piece, then press between the lumps of filing to seal. Cut the ravioli into squares and check to make sure each edge is well sealed.
Drop into a large pot of boiling water and cook until the ravioli float up to the surface.
Drain well and serve with a sprinkling of the remaining parmesan and a dusting of poudre fort.
Serves 2.

Note – you can use different spice mixes, but I was surprised to discover that poudre fort was actually very tasty.

 

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Herbatella

This is a recipe I made for the Ealdormere Cooks’ Calendar last year but forgot to share here.

XXXV Herbatella, a herb omelet, etc.

If you want to make a herb dish cooked in a frying pan. Take mint, sage, parsley, marjoram and every good herb that you may have. Grind everything together in a mortar with lard and temper with eggs, and cook it thus in a frying pan with fat.

Citation
Libro di cucina/ Libro per cuoco (14th/15th c.) (Anonimo Veneziano). Translated by Louise Smithson from the transcription of Ludovico Frati (ed.): Libro di cucina del secolo XIV. Livorno 1899 prepared and made available online by Thomas Gloning. Last updated March 28th 2005.

A mix of fresh and dried herbs, to taste, ground in a mortar and pestle to yield 1-2 tsp of green mush. I used 3 lovage leaves, 3 sprigs of thyme, 1 mint leaf, 4 oregano leaves, and 4 chives (all fresh), plus 2 sage leaves and about 2 tsp of parsley (both dried).
1/2 tsp lard (or other fat of choice)
A dash of salt and pepper
2 eggs
Lard or other fat for frying.

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Egg Omelet Without Eggs

The Treasure Trove of Benefits and Variety at the Table, a 14th C Egyptian cookbook translated by Nawal Nasrallah, has a recipe for an egg omelet without eggs (recipe 171).  Naturally, I had to try it.

Boil chickpeas and Lund them until they become smooth. Boil onion and pound it with the chickpeas. Pour some olive oil and murri (liquid fermented sauce) on the, and throw on some salt and dried spices, namely coriander, caraway, and black pepper. Also, add some gum Arabic. Fry it in a pot until it is cooked. Those who eat it will have no doubt it is an egg omelet.

My version:

• 1/4 c onion, chopped and boiled
• 1 c chickpeas, cooked until soft and then mashed in a mortar and pestle
• 1 Tbsp olive oil (you can add more to taste, or add a bit of water until the mixture is like fresh eggs stirred in order to scramble)
• 1 1/2 tsp murri (salt will do as a substitute, but use less and adjust to taste)
• 1 tsp of coriander
• 1/2 tsp of caraway seed
• 1/2 tsp freshly ground pepper
• Pinch gum Arabic (about 1/4 tsp)

Mash the onions with the chickpeas, then mix all ingredients together. Add a little water if needed so that you get a runny mixture similar to raw eggs.

Heat more oil in a frying pan, then pour the chickpea mix in to cook. Flip over carefully and cook until both sides are brown. Serve immediately. While still hot, it actually does fool you for a moment into believing it is scrambled eggs.

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Eggs on a Stick (much more complicated than expected!)

I was testing testing recipes today and decided there was time to test some egg on a stick recipes from Speisen wie de Abte, Essen wie der Monche (Dine Like the Abbot, Eat Like the Monks), a 14th C cookbook from the monastery of Mondsee in Austria (best-known today as the scene of Maria von Trapp’s wedding in The Sound of Music).

It was a learning experience!

I gave up completely on the first recipe, because it called for boiling the eggs, then somehow removing the yolks without doing too much damage to the shell. I have seen Youtube videos that show how to do it, but the shells rarely survive intact. This is one of the best. I tried, and failed miserably.

The remaining recipes called for blowing out the raw yolks. I couldn’t do that either, but I could blow out the entire egg, thanks to prior experience making Ukranian Easter eggs. I had five different recipes to test, so I did one egg with each (and a second one of the first recipe).

Recipe 1: Eggs stuffed and fried on a skewer

From stuffed eggs. Note. Take eggs and open them at both ends, bubble at one end, that yolk on the other end drive out. Chop sage, mix it with the yolks and bring them back. Boil them in hot water, peel and fry them, sprinkle with egg, sprinkle with spices and saffron and serve.

The first big challenge was how to get the egg back ino the shell. I made one hole larger than I wanted, but it was still too small for the smallest funnel. Using a spoon to pour raw egg in was even messier! My brilliant friend Melanie came up with the idea of using a baster with a syringe tip. That worked quite well. Obviously 14th C monks would not have had access to a baster, but we decided that a quill or even a straw would have done the job (just suck the raw egg up, cover the top, transfer to the hole in the egg, and let air in so the egg drops into the shell).

Recipe 2: Fried eggs on a skewer

Grind white bread, grate it in butter, mix with eggs and dried sage and pepper. Fill the eggshells with it, fry them on a skewer and serve.

Since the eggs can then be stuck with the shells on the skewer, one can assume that they are cooked as in the previous recipe first and then peeled and put on the skewer.

Note to self: if the recipe says “grind white bread” use a grater or something to make really fine crumbs! The syringe baster kept getting clogged up and it took forever to transfer all those bits of bread into the shell.

Recipe 3: Stuffed eggs

From stuffed eggs. Chop up sage, fry it in butter, mix with eggs and spices, saffron and salt, and make a mass out of it, fill in the as-blown eggs and cook them in boiling water.

The instruction about making a mass was unclear even to the author/translator, and so interpreted it as frying the sage in butter, then adding that mix to my raw egg and spices. The alternative (effectively making scrambled eggs and stuffing them back into the shell) would have been impossible. This egg was fairly tasty, but its best quality was the ease with which I could peel the shell off the cooked egg.

Recipe 4: Seasoned and stuffed eggs

Again of filled eggs. Take milk, eggs, white bread, saffron, salt, mix well and put it in the eggshells. Cook and serve.

This time, I used a grater on my bread, so it was easier to suck up into This was the tastiest version.

Because I had lost so much of the first egg trying to get it into the shell, I made a second one with that recipe. That’s when I learned the next lesson. Don’t overfill the shells! I put the filled eggs into a steamer rather than boiling them, because I worried about losing too much of the filling. The steamer came with instructions on how long to cook the eggs. I should not have used the timer without watching the eggs:

From top left and working clockwise: Recipe 1 through 4, and Recipe 1 (second attempt) to end.

The next step was to peel the eggs, skewer them on a stick, and roast them over a fire. I used a branch from the Manitoba Maple growing on the edge of my property, peeled and cut down a bit at the thick end. Fortunately, it turned out the eggs had retained more filling than expected so they went onto the stick without difficulty.

From bottom to top: Recipe 1 original, Recipe 1 (2nd try), Recipe 2, 3 and 4. An odd thing I noticed was that the sage tended to sink to the bottom of the egg as cooked. That was less of an issue in the eggs cooked with breadcrumbs.

I then put them on the barbecue for a few minutes, until I got some nice grill marks on each side.

 

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Leonardo da Vinci’s Chickpea Soup

For the cooks’ guild meeting today, I decided to try a recipe I had heard described on the local radio show as “Leonardo da Vinci’s favourite recipe”. This is because Leonard owned a copy of De honesta voluptate, a 1475 cookbook by Platina. (1) Leonardo was known to be a vegetarian and supposedly chickpea soup was one of his favourite dishes, though his references to “la minestra” are just to “soup”. (2)

Since Platina is largely a plagiarism of The Art of Cooking by Maestro Martino of Como (The Art of Cooking: The First Modern Cookery book, edited by Luigi Ballerini, University of California Press, 2005, p. 10), and my translation of Platina (On Honest Indulgence, Susan J Evans, Falconwood Press,  1989) is a bit dodgy I went back to the Martino version (p 72) , which is almost identical:

Red Chickpea Broth

To make eight servings: take a libra and a half of chickpeas, wash with warm water and put in the pot where you want to coo them; and they should be dry; and add a half ounce of flour that is, sifted flour, a little good oil and salt, and about twenty crushed peppercorns, and a bit of crushed cinnamon, and mix well with your hands. Then add three jugs of water and a pinch of sage, rosemary, and parsley root, and simmer until reduced to the quantity of eight servings. When it is almost done, add some oil. But if you are making this broth for someone who is sick, ad neither oil nor spices.

For the purposes of this recipe, I assumed that Martino was working with fresh chickpeas. I only had access to dried, so first I needed to cook them thoroughly. I started with a pound of dried, and probably should have re-weighed them once they had been cooked. I added more spices to compensate (though I probably should have added a bit more flour and oil too). By volume, I probably had three times as much chickpea as when I started, though I am guessing that the weight was more like double. The other thing I didn’t do was mush the chickpeas with the flour, oils and spices. I just mixed them in. After I was done, I realized that my chickpeas were still whole in a lovely broth, so I needed to smash them down to a more soupy consistency. They are much prettier whole, but not as tasty.

Wash 3/4 lb dried chickpeas, bring to a boil in lots of water, then cover and let sit for at at least six hours to soften. Then cook until really soft (this could take another hour or so).

In a bowl, mix 1/2 oz wheat flour (about 1 Tbsp), 1 tsp olive oil, 1 1/2 tsp salt (or to taste), 1 tsp freshly ground pepper (or 20 grains crushed in a mortar and pestle), 1/2 tsp cinnamon and mix together until you have the texture of a roux. Stir into the chickpeas and mash everything together with your hands (or the back of a spoon). Add 4-6 c water and 1/4 tsp each of ground sage and rosemary. Add in 1/2 c parsley root chopped into small pieces. I used fresh parsley stems as parsley root was not available. Bring to a boil then reduce to a simmer until thickened. Add a little more oil to finish.

Not nearly as pretty, but much tastier as the spices and herbs are right through the chickpeas, not just in the broth.

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