Feast of the Hare

This year was the 40th Anniversary, and the theme was Viking, so I was delighted to be head cook. My very first feast as cook was Hare X, and I also cooked Hare XXX. As my time was limited, I decided to forego experimentation and cook a lot of recipes from “An Early Meal”, one of my favourite cookbooks. It takes ingredients from Viking Age archaeological sites and uses them in plausibly period recipes, all beautifully photographed. My menu was:

Skyr, Kettle Worms, Rye Bread with Smoked Barley, Mustard

Fish Stewed in Ale

Boar stew

Buttered Turnips

Peas in a Bag, Greens in Vegetable Broth

Apple Frumenty

Malt Patties and Hazelnut Treats (shaped as carrots, rabbits, and bunny tails, because it was Feast of the Hare and the Hare is part of our Barony’s heraldry)

 

I also made beef with berry sauce, which was both delicious and very pretty, but disappeared so quickly I didn’t have a chance to get a picture.

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Cheese!

I am feeling a bit like Wallace AND Grommit with the cheese making this week. I started out by trying to make skyr, following the instructions in An Early Meal. First, I made some creme fraiche. Creme fraiche turns out to be delicious, and I will definitely do it again. Then I used some with soured milk to make skyr.

I suspect the first batch was insufficiently sour and I wasn’t happy with the results in a pot. So for the next batch, I tried the yoghurt function on my Instant Pot. That came out as a lovely yogurty cream. So I threw the first batch in the Instant Pot. That came out as big curds, so I threw them into a cheesecloth and squished them into a mould. The remaining batches came out somewhere in between, but getting more and more curdy as time passed and my milk got increasingly sour. Lesson learned for next time is buy milk in smaller batches (I had purchased 21 litres and the yoghurt normally takes 8 hours, though I did shorten it to as little as 2 hours by the end).

The skyr pictures will need to wait until my next post, on the feast I am serving tomorrow.

In the meantime, let me tell you about what I did with the things that aren’t going to the feast. The messed up batch that is now a pretty round cheese (right) will get coated in fat and salt, and set aside to age. The whey went into ricotta (left, still in the cheesecloth after draining), and Brunost (Norwegian brown cheese), also known as Mysost (whey cheese) in the centre.

 

 

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