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There are some odd triggers in my culinary habits. One of them is that I've become accustomed to having a supply of duck fat for those times when you just need to cook with duck. (I keep it in the freezer, because I don't use it that quickly.) This means that using up the last of the duck fat is a trigger for picking up a duck to roast. So that's what I did this week. The ducks at Ranch 99 come in several options of scrawniness, but some are "scrawny with lots of subcutaneous fat". So I now have about 1.5 cups of rendered duck fat in the freezer, a container of various bits of breast and thigh meat that will supply 2-3 dinners, and a stockpot full of potenez, the duck & lentil soup I invented to be part of Alpennian cuisine. I should come up with some more Alpennian dishes. It's fun.

The other fun food thing I'm doing at the moment is seeing to what extent I can live off the vegetables from my own estates. I'm currently getting reasonable supplies of tomatoes, squash, eggplant, and chard, with just enough green onions to get by. There are a few staples that aren't convenient for me to grow myself. Iceberg lettuce (and my leaf lettuce isn't enough currently to do my daily salad), corn, mushrooms. I thought I planed cucumbers but not sure what happened to them, so I get the occasional cucumber. And I don't grow my own avocados, not only because the trees take a long time to get established, and because it would take several trees to supply my wants, but also because I loathe and despise cleaning up after avocado trees. The leaves don't compost and they fall fairly constantly. But there you are. I suspect I could reasonably aim to grow all the fruit I need, if I was willing to forego having a long strawberry season. If I keep on top of long-range planning, there are more vegetables where I could grow all I need. Onions are a good possibility but it requires setting up a schedule to start new ones, which I'm working on at the moment. I'm still fiddling with getting the right balance of water to the plants. Last year the tomatoes were getting too much water, this year, not quite enough. Fine-tuning requires making fiddly adjustments to the micro-sprayers and drippers on the plants that don't need as much water, since they're all on the same circuit. Being on the same circuit means I can't simply do different durations. And at some point I'm going to expand to use the fourth circuit on the watering system in the back yard. I'm not sure why my landscaping guy didn't use all four, but since the basic system is all set up, I think I can manage to hook in another line on my own.

And the thing I'm not procrastinating about is writing a podcast script for the show I need to record tonight. So that's it for blogging.
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Sometimes you just need to have an intensive fruit-processing day. I've been soliciting interesting things to do with lemons over on facebook, and had an orange curd recipe that Lauri sent me, and I finally got the first serious crop of kumquats from my kumquat bush, plus the first two buddha's hand citron from that tree, so it was time to have some fun.

Candied Kumquats

I've done versions of this before that involved piercing the kumquats and then packing them in their syrup. So, more like kumquat preserves than candied. This time I went for a really simple version: Make a heavy syrup (2 parts white sugar to 1 part water). Wash the kumquats and heat them in the syrup until simmering, then turn it off and let sit covered until the next day. For as many days as seems necessary, bring the fruit and syrup up to a simmer, then turn it off and let sit. When the fruit is looking properly saturated (it's almost there) I'm going to finish them on racks in the food dryer on the lowest setting.

Candied Citron of Various Types

I had two citrons and thought I'd experiment with several recipes. (I did candied citron once before with store-bought standard citron and ... it was rather boring.) So I washed the fruit and pulled it apart into "fingers". I took the nicest looking finger-like parts, split them in half long-ways, and added them to the kumquat syrup bath process. Then I took the less presentable "fingers" bits and sliced them thinly across the grain. (Looks a little bit like slices of brain.) I added those to the kumquat syrup too, but once the candied fruit pieces are finished, I'm going to render the rest down to marmelade. Then I took the really pithy bottom parts of the citron, sliced them thinly, and stuffed them into the remains of the bottle of Everclear that I bought a year ago to make hand sanitizer with. (I'd promised I'd supply FOGCon with hand sanitizer and there was a run on it when Covid precautions were first being talked up, so I had to make my own.) So the idea is to get citron-infused alcohol to use as an ingredient in stuff.

Lemons

I got three great suggestions for lemons: preserved salted lemons, lemon pesto, and a recipe actually intended for oranges called "oleo-saccharum".

The salted lemons recipes all boil down to: cut lemons in quarters, pack in a quart mason jar with salt, let sit until pickled.

Oleo-saccharum is more ore less: thinly peel or zest your fruit and pack tightly in a jar with alternating layers of sugar. When the sugar has drawn out the citrus oil and formed a syrup, strain it off and use it to flavor things. (I'll probably freeze the spent zest for use as well.)

I haven't tried the lemon pesto yet, but I've found a couple of variants. They are all based around lemons, almonds, hard cheese, and olive oil, with various other optional additives.

Now for the really tricky part: remembering all the stuff I've preserved and remembering to *use* it!
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At first I thought the whole sourdough fad was silly. Then I thought, why not be silly? A friend offered to mail me some dried starter with a "lineage", another friend jokingly asked that for a birthday present she'd like to have a sourdough culture named after her. After that, how could I not?

At first, I worried over the culture, keeping it out in room temperature, feeding it daily, making more things with the accumulating discard than I did with the culture itself. Eventually, by experiment, I figured out that the culture was perfectly happy sitting in a loosely-capped jar in the fridge and only being fed when taken out for walkies. Lately I've been baking around 1-2 times a month and it's perfectly happy.

At first, I used an elaborate process from the King Arthur website that involved a lot of steps, some interim refrigeration, and took about 3 days to go from first feed to finished bread. But through trial and error (and mostly trial, to be honest) I've come up with an optimum process for the batch size that works for me and goes from feed to bread in 24 hours.

Here's my method. It may or may not work for others.

Start in the evening. Mix 1 cup flour and 1 cup warm water in a medium sized bowl. Add the starter and mix. (I tend to keep about 1/4 cup, but the amount doesn't actually matter since you remove the same volume to put back in storage.) Either cover with a damp cloth or put it in a semi-insulated place (e.g., in the countertop convection oven) and let work overnight.

In the morning, remove the starter to return to the fridge. Add salt and olive oil to the dough and mix. Then measure out another cup of flour and add enough to make a kneadable dough. Actually stop when it's still a little sticky, put a bunch of flour on the kneading board, and knead, adding flour as necessary, until it's smooth and elastic (as the saying goes).

Use a little more olive oil to oil your bowl, turn the dough in it so it's oiled (against drying out) then return it to your rising location.

Any time during the (work) day when you end up in the kitchen, dump the dough onto your floured kneading board and knead it thoroughly. Return to the bowl, turning to oil the exterior again. Ideally, you'll have at least three kneading sessions.

After work is done, heat your oven to 425F and knead the dough one last time, shaping it in the process to whatever type of loaf you want. (If you feel adventurous, roll it into a thin rectangle and sprinkle with additives: cheese & herbs, walnuts & chopped olives, whatever you please. Then roll it into your loaf shape.) Slash the top. All my commercial recipes say to give it another rise at this point, but honestly I get just as good results going directly to the oven.

Bake for ca. 30 minutes or until browned and when it sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom. If you've done your dinner planning right, you'll have fresh hot bread for dinner. If not, you'll have it for dessert.
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 Closed two investigations today at work, turned in an extension request for another one, and hope to have a fourth submitted for review by Friday. On top of that, I turned a request to shepherd a memo through our (recently upgraded) electronic document system into a "walk and talk" demonstration for the rest of the department, since I seem to have become the early adopter of the upgraded system in our group. That's all it takes to turn me from yesterday's sluggish "I'll never get caught up" to a feeling of accomplishment. Of course, all it takes to destroy that feeling is to get handed a couple more assignments before I have a chance to clean up my last oldie-moldy.

The Tuesday Movie Group watched Shakespeare in Love and I was reminded once again what a jewel of perfect what-it-meant-to-be-ness that movie is. I think it is to historic movies what Galaxy Quest is to sci-fi.

Biked down to pick up my car from the shop on my lunch break. Just a routine major service, with a couple add-ons for things that simply start needing replacement after (checks calendar) twelve years.

Yesterday the mail brought me a packet of dried sourdough starter from [personal profile] joycebre and I started the revivification process this evening. Too soon to see much progress yet. I have christened my culture "Sara" in honor of [personal profile] aryanhwy 's birthday request. May they both continue to be bubbly and effervescent.
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 Any time I check out a new breakfast cafe, one of the first things I order is Eggs Benedict. My theory is that a restaurant that can make good Eggs Benedict can be trusted for almost anything. And yet, what they heck kind of dish is Eggs Benedict anyway?

It is--let us be honest--awkward to eat. The layers that make it an exquisite visual creation are slippery, and the art of slicing it up into bite-sized pieces that include all the strata takes long to master and can fail at any point. The perfect poached egg that sits at the heart of the construction will immediately deflate into a pool of yolk when first addressed with knife and fork. If one is (as this one generally is) also juggling either an iPad or a book while eating a leisurely cafe breakfast, the need to wield two implements to eat the dish creates another impediment.

And yet... And yet...

One of my favorite breakfast cafes is Min's Kitchen on Clayton Road (a nice shortish bike ride away). In addition to the classic Benedict (Canadian bacon, eggs, hollandaise sauce) and the widely familiar Florentine Benedict (add spinach), the stereotypical California Benedict (with avocado & tomato) and a variety of seafood-based Californias (seafood is a speciality of their dishes) substituting shrimp and/or crab for the meat. Though Min's doesn't do this one, another favorite of mine is a smoked salmon Benedict--something of the love-child of a salmon bagel and a Benedict.

I regularly make Benedict breakfasts at home, thought it rarely feels like the result is worth the amount of work. (Because, of course, I make the Hollandaise from scratch.) But there's just something about creating a dish that is meant to be admired visually before being consumed. I don't usually have Canadian bacon around the house, so if I don't have smoked salmon on hand, I'll sub in regular bacon, nice and crispy. For a Florentine style, I find that sorrel, minced and sautéed up in butter, can make do for the tanginess of the Hollandaise as well as adding greenery. And, I confess, microwaving the eggs in a silicone cup is a lot easier than trying for the perfect poached egg (as well as making it easier to firm up the yolks to a less runny state).

This morning's breakfast-in-the-garden is a bit of a "what's in the fridge" version of the dish. Base layer on the English muffin of cream cheese (left over from my salmon-bagel splurge), sliced black forest ham (impulse buy -- as noted, I don't normally keep ham around the house, but I though it might make a nice lighter protein addition to some meals), nuked egg, and sorrel sauce on top. This time, it worked perfectly. The roses are blooming, the birds are singing, the Eggs Floren-sorrel-ham-tine are delicious, and the world balances in its turning for just one moment.
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 This morning I encountered one of the hazards of shelter-in-place. I though I'd slip out early to hit the supermarket before "going to the office" only to discover that my car battery had faded to a cough and sputter. No problem! This is exactly why I own a battery-in-a-box as part of my car emergency gear. Except that the battery box has gradually been diminishing in how long it will store a charge. Originally I would top it off every two months, as recommended. Lately I've been doing it every month, since it's been lower than comfortable when recharged. But either I missed the last reminder (likely) or it's going shorter than that now, because it only added a little more juice and I had to put off the store run. Not a big deal. The battery box is fully charged again. And as I started typing this, I remembered that I have a plug-in battery charger too. (A relic of a time when I was having regular issues with a previous car.) So it's now juicing up the Element for later. But it's one of those aspects of "hunker down and don't go anywhere" that you don't necessarily think of. I checked back and the last time I took the car out was less than a week ago, so that seems a bit precipitous for losing battery power.

I've started watching the relatively-new PBS drama series on Queen VIctoria. I'm always behind the curve on these things. It looks rather nice so far. That was during dinner. Then I switched back to my Jane Austen marathon and worked some more on getting my financial records caught up. Even though the tax deadlines have been extended, there's no reason to keep putting off getting them done.

I've concluded my coffee mug "survivor" show on facebook and posted the results this morning. I'm down to 6 mugs to keep (which stack nicely into a single row in the cabinet rather than taking up the entire shelf). Because it's been fun and interactive, I'm tempted to do a "next season" of the show and tackle kitchen gadgets next. Even if I override people's opinions on what to keep and what to discard, the act of posting them, discussing them, and thinking about the comments helps me make my own decisions.

I almost finished clipping the rosemary and lavender in the parking strip yesterday. I could have pushed through and finished the last six feet or so, but I've been listening to my body more on when to stop so I can come back the next day. There's still enough room in the green can to finish this week, so maybe today. I pulled out a couple of the lavender bushes that had gotten really woody and scraggly. They have a finite lifespan, after all. But I'm only tidying up some of the more vigorous bushes because they're in the middle of blooming at the moment.

Did a sort of beef stroganoff thing last night by accident. I'd pulled out a round steak that had been in the freezer for quite some time, which wouldn't have been a problem except that the sealed plastic had gotten sliced at some point so there was a chunk of freezer burn. I decided not to risk treating it like a steak and instead chopped it up, browned it with onions, added a bit of powder fort (medieval peppery spice mix), poured in the remains of a bottle of red wine and a cup of Tomato Sauce Of My Estates (from a really good year--don't often have that kind of leftovers) and let it simmer all afternoon. Poured off most of the liquid then stirred in some plain yogurt and served it over noodles. Very nice. I saved off the liquid for soup base.

This afternoon I plan to turn the remaining poppy seed filling into a cake, using a pound cake base recipe. In this morning's department meeting we noted that my oldest investigation turned one year old today (or rather, tomorrow because of leap day), so we're counting this as a birthday cake. The tradition is that I have to share with the rest of the department, but alas that's out of the question. They can have pictures.
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 Let's see, I last posted on Tuesday and now it's Thursday. And I still don't know how that happened. The days are very very much the same. Tuesday was the day I decided to crack out the poppy-seed filling that might or might not still be good past its use-by date. (It was good.) Made a large batch of kolatchky, froze about half, put half in a large ziplock bag to keep them fresh a bit longer, and put the rest on my fancy cake pedestal.

I'd decided to do sushi from GrubHub and ordered in advance to get it around 6pm. Then just as I was closing down the office computer for the day, I got a text from Beth in New York asking if I was going to join the movie-night zoom like I'd said. Time: what is it even? So I quickly signed on and joined the group (half-and-half some DISTAFF folks and Beth's friends from other contexts) to watch the new Emma, with commentary from all of us running in the chat box. A minor infelicity in that the zoom host who is presenting the movie evidently can't participate in chat without disrupting the show. The sushi arrived early in the movie so it really was a dinner-and-a-show night. We decided to watch Clueless next week for a compare-and-contrast, since some of the participants had never seen it.

So no yard work Tuesday, but I'd been planning to take the day off anyway. No yard work Wednesday because I was still feeling a bit dragged out in the afternoon. Did something interesting with chicken and stir fry with a tomato-coconut-milk sauce and a bit of Sri Lankhan spice mix (that came with the cookbook kickstarter). Not any specific recipe. I really do need to try working through a bunch of those recipies seriously.

Just as I as finishing up dinner, [personal profile] threadwalker pinged me about our dinner night (which doesn't always align with actually eating dinner). We figured out how to play Splendor through zoom. The game is well suited to that purpose, given that the game play is all in the open so one person with the set can serve as moderator as well as player, as long as you can adjust your webcast camera to see the play on the board. I used some of the color-coded spice jars from the kitchen re-org as my tokens and tracked the rest of my hand on post-it notes. It's a fairly fast game, even with the ramp-up for figuring how to do the online play. (Yes, there is also an offiicial online play version, but this was more fun.) Great game. About 70% strategy and 30% luck of the turn of the cards.

So will I get to yard work today? Only time will tell!

ETA: During our monthly staff meeting yesterday, the topic came up of whether the company is going to be more open to general working-from-home after the Current Unpleasantness is over, and it sounds hopeful. I also brought it up earlier in the day with my boss in our regular one-on-one.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the possibility of doing WFH at lest two days a week routinely going forward.
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 Don't worry, I have not been consumed with fever and been eaten by my cats. I just somehow forgot to blog yesterday. I wasn't particularly busy or distracted, I just...forgot.

Fridays at work are always a bit of a scramble  because our deadlines are based on "calendar days" not "work days". So if there's a random distribution of due dates, Fridays get three times as many things falling due. We try to anticipate that and pack some of the work into the earlier part of the week, but...there you are. Most of my current investigations are spiraling toward the drain, which means it *looks* like I'm not actively working on them, but at any moment there maybe comments that need to be addressed and turned around immediately.

I have two new investigations, one of which I volunteered for because it happened as part of the same process as the other and since I was in the middle of immersing myself in the background, it seemed most efficient for me to do both. The first one involves some of the sort of document-history detective work I love doing. Where you trace back the problematic bit of the Standard Operating Procedure and discover that several years and multiple revisions ago, someone made a peculiar error that has never been caught and now you have to sort it out and ask how they were managing to perform the procedure correctly if they were actually using the SOP for guidance. And seemingly unrelated issues pop up in the mean time. Here's the basic issue: We have a procedure for shipping Object X from Location A to External Storage. We have a procedure for transferring Object X from Location A to Location B. We do not have a procedure for transferring Object X from Location B to Location A, nor do we have a procedure for shipping Object X from Location B to External Storage. Location B is full and we need to move some of the contents to External Storage. How do we do that? (Or rather, given that we *are* doing it, how do I deal with that because our procedure clearly doesn't allow for it.)

I also spent a fair amount of work time coaching my trainee (who, in theory, is fully qualified but that's different from being completely independent). I forget if I blogged about the investigation last week where, at the last minute, my reviewer required a whole slew of documentation on potential impact that was utterly unrelated to the actual failure I was investigating. Anyway, my trainee has an investigation for a similar part of the process being reviewed by the same reviewed and was told, "Provide me with this laundry list of documentation. Heather can help you because she did it for her recent investigation." Never mind that I explicitly said, "I'm giving up and I'll give you The Things because we need to get this closed, but I don't want this to be a precedent that these requests are reasonable or necessary and (to my manager) this is an official escalation that we need to address the question of irrelevant documentation requests." So the idea that my grudging capitulation is being used as precedent to require the same in another investigation is galling. (I told my trainee to talk to our manager and ask him to push back on her behalf.)

Yesterday I gamified part of my kitchen reorganization. The problem: I have a lot of coffee mugs. Far more than I need (especially given that I've got a full set of coffee cups as part of my china pattern). And I want to free up some cabinet space. (Currently one entire cabinet shelf is coffee mugs.) So every day I'll be using and posting a picture of a different coffee mug and asking facebook whether I should keep it. So far, the answer is: the vertebra-shaped novelty mug should be kept as a pencil cup on my desk, but removed from the cabinet, but the squat wide-bottomed "travel mug" should be ditched.

I had decided that, on my lunch bike ride, I was going to formally introduce myself to the regular I think of as "purple leash lady". (She has a very long, purple nylon webbing leash for her dog to let him run. Which means that any time someone is passing her and she needs closer control, she has to loop up 50 feet or so of leash. Which she does, but it's a bit funny to watch.) I've already spoken to her a few times (including apologizing for my initial comment, "you think the leash is long enough" because I realized that she's undoubtedly heard that joke entirely too many times before). But we missed each other's schedules because I was a bit late getting away from my desk, so I didn't see her.

To decompress over dinner, I've started getting caught up with some of the tv shows I've bought off of iTunes. I've been working my way through Versailles, but though it's a gorgeous show, I can't say I entirely *like* it. In part, it dwells too lovingly on physical nastiness (one of my squicks is body horror and it does a fair amount of that). But in part, I get restless because of how male-centered it is. Not that there aren't female characters, but with the exception of doctor-lady, their stories all revolve around the men. It gets tedious.

I'm having a bit more fun with Wolf Hall, though it's still a very male-centered story. I keep mentally comparing it with my memories of A Man for All Seasons and thinking about how entirely different stories can be told of the same events from different perspectives. Even as the viewpoint character in Wolf Hall, it's inescapable that Thomas Cromwell's story is that of a villain in some ways. And yet we're inescapably drawn into understanding the events from his point of view and seeing why every thing he does makes perfect sense.

I'm definitely getting starved for one-on-one social interactions, so I've set up a Skype call that I need to sign off here for soon. So I'll quickly summarize the food: breakfast - savory oatmeal with some of the lamb minced up and some of the lamb drippings mixed in. (I'm a big fan of savory oatmeal.) Lunch - lamb sandwich with apple chutney, lemon shortbread with mashed fresh raspberries. Dinner - hmm, trying to remember. Oh yes, the last of the lamb, reheated with some leftover steamed potatoes. 
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I was given a 5-question meme by [personal profile] ursula :

1. Tell us about a spice you had forgotten you owned.

Looking over the bottles (which I'm still working on reorganizing, I found a baggie stuffed inside one of the jars with a folded recipe rubber-banded to the outside reading "Lamb Tagine". The recipe may tell me who it came from, once I open it up. Since Lamb is one of the things I have a fair amount of in my freezer, I should try it. Even the spices that I can't really imagine using, I usually remember how and why I got them. Perhaps the oldest (and therefore least likely to be used) are some jars that are more in the incense range than spice (though they could be used in some medieval recipes: sandalwood, myrrh. Cynara gave those to me, I think when she was packing up to move to Virginia, which would be back the year after the SCA's 20th anniversary event (where she met the reason she moved to Virginia).

2. What was your favorite book when you were ten?

It may not have been exactly ten, and I don't know if it was my favorite, but the most memorable book from that era was Alexander Key's The Forgotten Door. There's a bit of a story around me reading it. Sometimes at my grade school they'd rearrange the classes temporarily for special subjects and we'd find ourselves sitting at someone else's desk for an hour or two a day for a week. I forget what the special subject was, but I was bored with it and was looking around in my temporary desk and found a copy of that book. I desperately read it during all the sessions I was sitting at that desk because I didn't know if I could ever find it again if I didn't finish it. That book convinced me that I really was an alien child from another continuum and all I needed was to find the door that would let me go home again.

3. Tell us about a personal experience with fencing, archery, or another martial sport.

Let's stick with when I was in grade school. My older brother and I were always coming up with imaginative play in our suburban back yard (also on camping trips), cobbling the props together out of whatever we could find. Once we made bows and arrows out of old curtain rods and bamboo garden stakes and practiced shooting by rolling a bicycle tire across the yard and trying to shoot through it.

4. What's a fictional trope that consistently intrigues you?

Intrigues or haunts? I'm a sucker for the misunderstood loner who some persistent person breaks through and befriends. (What can I say?) I used to fixate on "noble vampire" types for that reason until I had a surfeit of the type and pretty much stopped reading them entirely.

5. What's something you are anticipating in the garden right now?

The summer crops are too far away to really anticipate yet, so I'll have to say I'm anticipating the blooming of the gallica roses that are planted at the corners of my herb garden. This year I think I'd like to try doing something other than admire them. Maybe sugared rose petals.

* * *

And now for the usual daily update. I'm starting to recognize some of the "regulars" on my lunchtime bike ride, especially since I generally see the walkers twice: once going and once coming back. Yesterday I was joking with one pair of women about which of us was stalking the other. Today I said hello to Woman With Very Long Purple Leash For Her Dog on the way out. On my way back, she was heading down a side lane to one of the apartment complexes and waved and I said "See you tomorrow."

My evening yard work was to finish the weed-wacking of the back yard. That's the first time in years I've finished the First Mow before the foxtails appeared. One of my back-fence neighbors was working near where I was and we chatted over the fence a bit. I occasionally meet one of the neighbors from the private lane behind my property, but there's so much turnover I rarely meet them twice. He's a heavy equipment operator in San Francisco (didn't specify what type of equipment) and still going to work. Not exactly a job one can do from home. Perhaps in a vital industry, so I won't judge.

My boss dropped a mention in the group teamroom this afternoon that our department has a new employee--since several days ago! (I believe we're about to hire one of our contractors permanently too, but that's not official yet.) I can't imagine trying to learn the investigation job remotely without a mentor beside you. But maybe he's done this type of work before somewhere.

Breakfast: oatmeal with plum puree* and yogurt. Lunch: boxed mac & cheese made up with yogurt rather than milk (tangier that way) and extra cheese. No Estates ingredient, unless you count the lemon* shortbread snack as part of lunch. Dinner was sorrel* soup made up with some of the lamb broth, plus toasted cheese and bacon sandwiches.
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(Posted early because I'll be on the road all day Tuesday.)

I’ve written previously about some of my food-related research for the Alpennian books. It might be fun (some distant day in the future) to bring together all the food references in the books (when there are more of them) with recipes and whatnot. In the meantime, I decided last fall that I should come up with at least a couple of Alpennian dishes that I could serve on the occasion of readings and whatnot, just for fun. I haven’t had a chance previously, but when I was brainstorming for offerings to entice people to my Kaffee Klatch at Sasquan this Friday, I realized this was the perfect opportunity.

Not all food items are equally suited to transporting to a convention (or throwing together in someone else’s kitchen—which is what I had in mind originally), but the sorts of light snacks one serves visitors are ideal, and I had a reference to Jeanne serving Antuniet “almond cake” which seemed promising enough. The book reference mentions slices, so I had in mind something more classically cake-like, but my 18th c. French cookbooks turned up something more suited to my needs.

From The Art of French Cookery

Almond Cake – Gâteau d’Almandes

Beat a pound of almonds, add a quarter of a pound of sugar, a little confected orange flowers, and half a glass of cream; have puft paste sufficient for a cake; give it a half turn more; roll it to the thickness of a crown; cut it round of the proper size; put the paste on it, and cover it with another round of puft paste; nick it across; finish the edge of the cover, put it into a quick oven; when baked; sift sugar over and serve.

Another Almond Cake - Gâteau Pithiviera

Prepare the almonds as in the foregoing recipe add a pound of sifted sugar, a little lemon peel minced, half a pound of butter; put in by degrees six eggs, have puft paste as in the above article; proceed and finish in the same manner. It may be made into small ones.

* * *

One of the reasons I chose this version is because it can be made primarily using commercial shortcuts, i.e., almond paste and frozen puff pastry sheets. So here’s my quick-and-dirty version.

Take ca. 25 g candied Seville orange peel and mince finely
Mix with ca. 250 g commercial almond paste (not marzipan, but almond paste)
Take one package of commercial puff pastry sheets (2 sheets, each folded in thirds) and thaw per directions.
Cut each sheet into thirds on the folds, and then each third into a dozen small rectangles (2x6)
On a lightly floured board, roll each piece out either into a square or an elongated rectangle so that it’s about half the thickness of the original.
Place a flattened knob of the almond paste mixture on the pastry and fold over either into a triangle or square shape. (I originally thought of cutting them into rounds, but this would have been more work and wasteful.)
Bake at 400F for 15 minutes or until lightly browned.

This has the advantage over a loaf cake of coming in bite-size pieces, although the disadvantage of being somewhat fragile. (We’ll see how well they’ve survived!) As you can see, I simplified the filling slightly and drew from both versions (orange peel rather than orange flowers or lemon peel, in part because I have a large quantity of home-made candied orange peel lying around). Someday I’ll try a version where I’ve done the fancy finishes around the edge and nicking the top.

I'll post pix from the Kaffee Klatch when they're served!
hrj: (doll)
On twitter, I mentioned something to [livejournal.com profile] catherineldf about an early hot chocolate recipe I'd once made that was best described as "chocolate tea", which led to promising to post it if I could track down my notes. Well, it meant getting back to doing more of my ongoing archival file conversions (because the only copy I had was in a PageMaker format for some reason) but I did find the original.

I couldn't manage to get the ingredients properly ground, which is why it comes off as "tea" more than as proper hot chocolate. That and the fact that it's early enough that it's made up with water rather than milk. So in addition to being a bit of a hybrid of two early recipes, it would be better for some more experiments in texture. The occasion of working this up was a "chocolate potluck" at work for Valentine's day quite a number of years ago -- which makes it notable that I still have the rest of the dry mix in a tupperware container in the fridge. It still smells good, so maybe I will try a finer grind sometime soon.

* * *

17th Century Hot Chocolate

Original recipes are taken from: Coe, Sophie D. & Coe, Michael D. 1996. The True History of Chocolate. Thames & Hudson, New York. ISBN 0-500-01693-3

The recipe of Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma (1644)

100 cacao beans
2 chillis (black pepper may be substituted)
a handful of anise
ear flower [a spice]
2 mecasuchiles
(powdered roses of Alexandria may be substituted for the two previous ingredients)
1 vanilla bean
2 oz. cinnamon
12 almonds and as many hazelnuts
1/2 lb. sugar
achiote to taste

The recipe of the Grand Duke of Tuscany (1680)

10 lb cacao beans
jasmine flowers
8 lb sugar
3 oz vanilla beans
4 to 6 oz cinnamon
2 scruples ambergris

* * *

My recipe

I liked the idea of nuts and flowers and the sweet spices, but enough of a non-fan of chili peppers that I wasn't about to add them to my experiment. And ambergris was a bit out of my budget for this project. So here's my ingredients:

1/4 c. cacao nibs
4 t sugar
1/16 t ground cinnamon
approx. 1.5” vanilla bean
1/4 t dried jasmine flowers
1/4 t dried rose petals
1/8 t anise sead
1 T blanched almond
1 T blanched hazelnut

Process all ingredients in a cuisinart until completely powdered and blended. Mix approximately 1 T powder to 8 oz boiling water. There will be sediment, so either leave the dregs or let sit for a short period then strain into your cup.

The jasmine and rose flowers were sourced from an herb company (Lhasa Karnak, I believe) to be sure they were culinary grade. The food processor simply wasn't up to the job of grinding the ingredients finely enough. The result was … interesting. You had to approach it without any preconceptions of what it was supposed to taste like. Pleasant, but definitely unexpected.
hrj: (doll)
Today’s book theme will be food and cookery.

Hieatt, Constance B. 2013. The Culinary Recipes of Medieval England. Propect Books, Totnes. ISBN 978-1-909248-30-4

This book has a simple but ambitious premise: to provide a single “basic standard version” for every distinct recipe appearing in the corpus of medieval English cookbooks. Hieatt had a headstart on this project in her previous Concordance of English Recipes: Thirteenth Through Fifteenth Centuries (written with Terry Nutter and Johnna H. Holloway) which indexed the entire corpus and grouped recipes that were variants of each other. The current work then choses from each recipe grouping the one that Hieatt considers to be the most basic, most correct, or most informative version. The recipes are presented in modernized language but without interpretation. The citation is given for the source(s) used but context (e.g., date) must be retrieved from the bibliography. Significant variants are given in footnotes but it isn’t the intent of the work do to a comparative study of the evolution of the dishes over time or to comment in detail on why one version is considered corrupt and another used as the standard. I mention these things not as a criticism, but only to note what the book does and does not aim to achieve.

The great advantage of this work is in the accessibility of the modernized text (and the thematic organization), making it easy to skim for particular recipes and dish types. The intended audience would seem to be the more experienced culinary historian for whom it will be a reference work rather than a practical cookbook. I say this because much context and background knowledge is needed to interpret the recipes, and those with that knowledge are likely to prefer to work from the original texts. However in combination with the Concordance, it could be enormously useful for further study, either of the variety and development of specific dishes, or of the conceptual understanding of recipe categories (e.g., what makes a dish “Saracen” style? or what makes something a “brewet”?).

Dalby, Andrew. 2011. Geoponika: Farm Work. Prospect Books, Totnes. ISBN 978-1-903018-69-9

The subtitle is “A modern translation of the Roma and Byzantine farming handbook.” I am a complete sucker for historic texts detailing this sort of everyday practical knowledge. Topics include weather lore, agricultural personnel, advice on planting and harvesting various crops, weed and pest control, a calendar of seasonal tasks, and sections on viticulture, olives, fruit trees, decorative plants, vegetables, bees, and a surprisingly small section on domestic quadrupeds. There is a great deal of superstition mixed in with practical advice and interesting observations that may or may not have validity. The sections on edible crops have a certain amount of incidental information on consumption, including some recipes though most are medicinal in intent.

Frantzen, Allen J. 2014. Food, Eating and Identity in Early Medieval England. The Boydell Press, Woodbridge. ISBN 978-1-84383-908-8

A book, not so much on food per se but on the equipment, context, nomenclature, and practices around food. This is not a comprehensive and systematic study, but more a series of academic meditations on specific topics: literary descriptions of feasts and the artifcacts that can be associated with them; food vocabulary and word-lists; querns and pots; food in the laws; fasting and fish. The majority of the book has a very practical, material focus and is concerned first with description and only secondarily with interpretation. I wouldn’t consider it a book for the casual amateur, nor is it intended for someone with primarily practical culinary interests. But for someone interested in the larger context of early English foodways, it will have significant value.

Henisch, Bridget Ann. 2009. The Medieval Cook. The Boydell Press, Woodbridge. ISBN 978-1-84383-826-5

When I first saw the publication date I wondered how I’d missed this before, but a closer look indicates that it has only just been issued in paperback in 2013 and it isn’t quite so necessary a book that I would have sprung for a hardback copy.

This is a broad survey of the occupation of cook, across all ranks of society, covering literary as well as literal cooks, and giving examples of the activities, products, and concerns of the job. It’s more of a tasting menu than a hearty meal, and while it’s a very readable and varied text--likely to engage readers of all levels of interest in history--its broad coverage is by necessity superficial. Give this to someone whose interest in culinary history goes one step beyond trying out recipes, and then hand them on to more specialized and comprehensive works.
hrj: (doll)
As I sit here on a Saturday afternoon, enjoying the 75F weather on my patio and looking out over my garden (hey, look! I've got flowers on the quince, cherry, and medlar trees!), it occurs to me to post a review of the Adult Beverage in my hand, since it represents an interesting variant on the plethora of hard ciders that -- much to my delight -- are infiltrating the adventurous end of the local market. The bottle notes say, "First sampled on a warm winter day while grilling, this dry, tannic blend gets tilted with smoked apple. Racy, with notes of earth, spice, smoke, and of course, apples. Pair with aged cheese, burgers, and a side of derring-do."

Let's see: paired with aged cheese, check; burgers, nope have to settle for smoked salmon; and a side of derring-do, (peeks at novel in progress) check. Alas, I can't say that the smoke flavor does anything much for me. I mean, it's an ok cider. Quite pleasant and nicely dry. Perhaps it would pair better with a robust red meat than my current crackers-and-cheese lunch. But it seems more like an interesting gimmick than a real flavor winner. Ok, ok, and I'm really more of a light and fruity sort of gal. Still, it's nice to have a lot more selection than good ol' Woodchuck like in the bad old days.
hrj: (doll)
(For previous posts in this series, see items tagged with 'messisbugo'.)

Identifying distinct 4th and 5th courses in the template is, perhaps, a bit of a stretch. A clear distinction between the 3rd and 4th courses only occurs in two menus (1536 & 1537). Two menus have similar dishes to these but include them all in the 3rd course.  The 1524 menu (as we previously saw) inserts a duplicate 2nd course labeled “Third” and lists the dishes ordinarily appearing in the 3rd course under the label “Fourth”. The 1524 course labeled “Fourth” also includes the dishes found in the Fourth Course for the 1536/1537 menus, but in this is follows the the other two with combined 3rd/4th templates. The last menu (1540) does not serve any of the dishes found in the Fourth and Fifth Course templates.

A distinction between the Fourth and Fifth Course templates only occurs in the 1524 menu. The 1536/1537 menus include the same dishes but in under the 4th course label. The 1548 menu includes these dishes in the 2nd course list. And the other two menus do not have any dishes corresponding to the Fifth Course template.

Yes, this is very confusing. Let me sort it out by labeling the “course templates” A, B, C, D, and E and the menu list groupings 1-5. Then we get the following:

15?0: 1A, 2B,         3C, 3D, xx
1524: 1A, 2B, 3B, 4C, 4D, 5E
1536: 1A, 2B,        3C, 4D, 4E
1537: 1A, 2B,        3C, 4D, 4E
1540: 1A, 2B, 3B, 3C, xx,  xx
1548: 1A, 2B,        3C, 3D, 2E

Moving on to the actual dishes, the universally more elaborate 1524 menu has an extra set of seafood dishes as part of the Fourth Course list that don’t have counterparts in any of the other menus. (Remember that this menu is the only one with non-oyster seafood of any kind, and it has several seafood dishes in every course (with the exception of the Fifth Course, though the standard template there has oysters). The “extra” seafood dishes in the 1524 Fourth Course are sea-crabas with a gilded motto on their backs and a soup of calcinelle (a type of shellfish).

The common template for the Fourth Course consists of the following:

  • Wafers (5 of 6 menus) - Sometimes listd as “clouds and wafers” though I haven’t looked further into what “clouds” might refer to.  In any event it seems to be distinct from the following, as both occur in two menus:

  • Clotted Cream (4 of 6 menus) - In one case, this appears to be a “mock” clotted cream, listed as “Faux junket with sugar, almonds, and rosewater in place of clotted cream”.

  • Cheese (2 of 6 menus) - Unspecified in one, given as “Piacentino cheese” in the other.

  • Pasta (2 of 6 menus) - A sweet pasta in both cases: macaroni with sugar and honey, or buttered vermicelli with rosewater and sugar.


The template for the Fifth Course is even shorter and more universal:

  • Oysters (4 of 6 menus) - No cooking method is specified for these but I don’t know if that should be taken to imply that they were eaten raw as is common today. A very large number is specified -- over a dozen for each diner in most cases.

  • Oranges with pepper (3 of 6 menus)


One menu also lists Hypocras in the 4th/5th Course listing whereas drinks are not typical given at all (except for the sugar-water in the collation). So it may be that the other menus would include a similar drink at this point. Although I’ve grouped it with the 5th course template, there’s insufficient information even to include it as a standard offering.

Summary

So our basic standard template would be:

Fourth Course

  • Clouds and Wafers

  • Clotted Cream

  • optional: Cheese or sweet pasta

Fifth Course

  • Oysters

  • Sliced Oranges with Pepper

Menus

Dishes that I consider to fall in the Fourth Course template are in bold. Dishes in the Fifth Course template are underlined. Dishes that are listed in the 4th or 5th course but that I’ve placed in an earlier template are in italics. Otherwise, see the notes regarding where the dishes are listed in the actual text of the menus.

15?0
(listed in the 3rd Course)

  • Cheese, 10 plates.

  • Butter vermicelli with rose water and sugar, with fine sugar on top in 10 plates.

  • Clotted cream [lattemele], 20 plates.

  • Clouds and wafers, 20 plates.

(No 4th or 5th Course list)

1524
4th Course list

  • 20 little apple tarts in 20 little plates.

  • Marzipan pastries, 20 little plates.

  • Guaste pears and apples in large pies, 20 little plates.

  • *Large sea-crabs with a little motto in gold on their backs that said, “Vsque, and nothing more is found,” in 12 little plates.

  • *Soup of calcinelli [a kind of shellfish] in 20 little plates.

  • Neapolitan-style macaroni of fried royal dough, with sugar and honey on top, in 20 little plates.

  • 100 caroelle pears in 20 little plates.

  • Piacentino cheese in 20 little plates.

  • Clotted cream [lattemele] in 20 little plates.

  • Clouds and wafers in 20 little plates.

5th Course list

  • Oysters in 20 little plates.

  • 100 sliced oranges with pepper in 20 little plates.


1536
4th Course list (no 5th Course)

  • 500 oysters in 10 plates.

  • Hippocras, 30 cups.

  • 30 oranges and pepper in 10 plates.

  • 500 wafers in 10 plates.


1537
4th Course list (no 5th Course)

  • 1000 oysters in 14 plates.

  • Clotted cream [lattemele] in 51 plates.

  • Wafers [cialdoni] in 51 plates.


1540
(No 4th or 5th Course list)

1548
(from the 2nd Course list)

  • 400 oysters with oranges and pepper, 20 plates.

(from the 3rd Course list)

  • Faux junket with sugar, almonds, and rosewater in place of clotted cream, 7 plates.

  • Small and large wafers, 140 in 7 plates.

(No 4th or 5th Course list)

My Mini-Messisbugo

I’ve been waiting to discuss the dishes from the numbered courses that I served in my “mini-Messisburgo” dinner because I greatly conflated and condensed the course templates.  Just as a re-cap, here are the stripped down basic templates for each course.

Course 1

  • Multiple fowl dishes (partridge with tomaselle, pheasant with oranges, capon, pigeons, small birds with meatballs, duch with torteletti)

  • A liver dish

  • A quadruped dish

  • A fresh fruit dish

For the mini-banquet, I served:

  • roast stuffed game hen with oranges

  • torteletti

  • an artichoke pie

  • grapes (left on the table)

The fowl dish was intended to combine reasonable price with several of the repeating features (oranges as an accompaniment, torteletti as a side dish). The Carnival menus are almost completely void of vegetable dishes with the exception of the salads in the pre-course. Messisbugo’s recipe book, however, has a good selection of dishes that either focus on vegetables or use them as a significant accompaniment to a meat dish. I’ve included a couple of vegetable dishes in part as a nod to modern dietary preferences and in part because they’re just such fun recipes.

Course 2

  • Multiple fowl dishes (capon, pheasant, partridge)

  • A roast of a young quadruped

  • A roast loin

  • A sauce

  • A flan or torte

  • A fruit pie

For the mini-banquet I served:

  • pork loin

  • plum sauce

  • eggplants

  • a torte of apples

Again, the inclusion of a vegetable dish was done for variety and as a nod to modern expectations (though the recipe is from Messisbugo). As I’d done a fowl dishi n the first course, I went with the quadruped dish in this course for variety.

Course 3

  • Oyster pies or fried oysters

  • Olives

  • Fresh grapes

  • Pears and sometimes also apples in pies

  • A decorative dish in jelly or pastry

Course 4

  • Clouds and Wafers

  • Clotted cream

  • Cheese or Sweet Pasta

For the mini-banquet I served:

  • olives

  • wafers with clotted cream

  • cheese

Although the oyster dishes are clearly a standard part of these menus, I omitted them due to the unpredictability of their reception. (I didn’t know who most of my guests would be until the day of the banquet as I’d left it to the guests of honor to make the invitations.) Without oysters, there seemed no reason to serve a separate Fifth Course, although I could have included sliced oranges in this group.

Course 5

  • Oysters

  • Sliced oranges with pepper


And that brings my Excessively Geeky Messisbugo Analysis to an end. At some point I’ll be cleaning this all up, putting it into a more logical order, and adding it to my web site.
hrj: (doll)
(For previous posts in this series, see items tagged with 'messisbugo'.)

The boundaries between the 3rd through 5th courses are necessarily somewhat fuzzier, given that 3 of the menus only have 3 courses and only one has the full 5 numbered courses. But if we take the contents of the menus with more numbered courses as defining the cut-offs, then the template for the Third Course is what remains.

But even this approach leaves some very sloppy edges. The 1548 menu (as mentioned previously) includes in the Second Course two oyster dishes that the majority rule would properly place in the Third and Fifth Courses. And then the 1524 and 1540 menus seem to have a reprise of the non-fowl parts of the Second Course as part of the Third Course. (The 1524 menu, which had the extra fish dishes in the Second Course also reprises these in the Third Course.) The 1524 menu also has placed several fruit dishes in the Fourth Course that the other menus all place in the Third.  So this chapter will analyze what appears to be the common template for the Third Course even when specific dishes in specific menus are listed elsewhere. The “reprise of the Second Course” dishes are going to be treated separately as a sort of “Course 2b” as the majority rule identifies them as excluded from the standard Third Course template.

The 1548 menu gives us a clue to the basic theme of the Third Course when it explicitly labels it “Fruits and Others”.  Overall, the dishes here are somewhat lighter and have almost no focus on meat (with the sole exception of the oyster dishes). In contrast to the Second Course, we again see a clear set of common dishes across all or most of the menus.

Second Course Reprise

Roast Suckling Quadruped (2 menus)

The 1524 menu, which had stuffed lamb and kid breast in the Second Course, reprises it with whole stuffed roast kid. The 1540 menu, which had whole stuffed roast kid in the Second Course, reprises it with roast suckling pig.

Roast (Veal) Loin (2 menus)

These might better be considered “displaced” dishes, as the 1524 and 1540 menus were the only two that had no roast loin dish in the Second Course.

Sauce (2 menus)

Mustard is listed separately in the 1540 menu while Peacock Sauce has its own line item in the 1524 menu but follows the listing for roast peacock (see below).

Other Dishes (1 menu)

The 1524 menu, which has been noted previously as the most extensive and elaborate,  also includes roast peacock (with the aforementioned peacock sauce), hare in black broth, and three fish dishes: small fishes, stuffed lobsters, and fish gelatin. These “reprise” dishes constitute all but one of the items listed for the Third Course in the 1524 menu, so in terms of conceptual structure it really is more of a duplicate Second Course. That is, this menu has five numbered courses, not because it adds an extra at the end, but because it duplicates one in the middle.

The True Third Course

Fruits

Olives (6 of 6 menus)

Fresh grapes (5 of 6 menus)

Note that the 6th menu is the one where grapes were put on the table in the First Course and explicitly noted to be left on the table for the rest of the meal. So we can count grapes as being present for this course in 6 of 6 menus.

Guaste pears (5 of 6 menus)

Two types of pears are listed: Guaste and Caroele. I don’t know the difference.  In 3 menus, these are cooked into pies or pastries.

Caroelle pears (2 of 6 menus)

These are listed simply, in one case accompanied by “paradise apples”. All of the menus have at least one pear dish.

Apples (1 of 6 menus)

Little apple tarts

Oyster Dishes

5 of 6 menus have some sort of oyster dish. Interestingly, the exception is the 1524 menu which is the only one with non-oyster seafood dishes. I’m sure there’s some sort of story behind this.

Oyster Pies/Pastries (4 of 6 menus)

Fried Oysters (2 of 6 menus)

In both cases, a sauces is also mentioned.

Other

A Decorative Dish (3 of 6 menus)

These are grouped, not by material, but because the dish is  clearly intended as a visual decoration. One is custard-filled pastry in the shape of a fleur-de-lys. One is described as “various arms, German-style, fried with sugar”. And one is an Italian jelly with a mantle and laurel leaves.

Jellies (1 of 6 menus)

In addition to the above decorative jelly, there is a “French jelly”.

Pastry (2 of 6 menus)

Pastries of wafer dough and “guanti” which are hand-shaped fried pastries.

Marzipan (2 of 6 menus)

In one case listed only as “marzipan pastries”, in the other a detailed description “tegole of beans of faux royal pastry, fried, filled with marzipan” which would be baffling except that it is included in the detailed recipes and is apparently little marzipan “beans” enclosed in a fried pastry “pod”.

Misc. (1 of 6 menus)

Three of the remaining dishes occur in the same menu: pistachios and pine nuts, butter pats stamped with armorial designs, and “tall farate(?) without skin on them” whatever that might be. Another menu has "Fennel and other fruits in vinegar"

Summary

So if I were going to design a basic Third Course template, it would be something like this:

  • Olives

  • Grapes

  • Pears in pastry

  • An oyster pastry or fried oysters

  • A visually decorative dish, either of pastry or jelly


The full listings are complicated here by my attempt to show not only the dishes listed in the Third Course, but also to indicate dishes listed elsewhere that fall under this template, and to indicate which items listed as Third Course seem to belong under other templates. Because of this, there are a couple places where I’ve moved one of the dishes from the original order given, in order indicate these groupings.

15?0 (order altered slightly for thematic groupings)

  • Olives, 10 plates.

  • Fresh grapes, 10 plates.

  • Caroele pears and paradise apples, 10 plates.

  • 10 large oyster pies in 10 plates.

  • 200 fried oysters, covered in cameline sauce, in 10 plates.

Listed here, but belonging thematically to the Course 4 template

  • Cheese, 10 plates.

  • Butter vermicelli with rose water and sugar, with fine sugar on top in 10 plates.

  • Clotted cream [lattemele], 20 plates.

  • Clouds and wafers, 20 plates.


1524
Course 2b

  • 20 suckling kids stuffed and roasted, in 20 little plates.

  • 20 loins in cavezzi in 20 little plates.

  • 20 spit-roasted peacocks in 20 little plates.

  • Hare in black broth in 20 little plates.

  • Small fishes, 20 little plates.

  • Stuffed lobsters, 20 little plates.

  • Fish gelatin, 20 little plates.

  • Peacock sauce, 20 little plates.

Course 3

  • Olives, 20 little plates.

Listed in Course 4 but thematically included here

  • 20 little apple tarts in 20 little plates.

  • Marzipan pastries, 20 little plates.

  • Guaste pears and apples in large pies, 20 little plates.

  • 100 caroelle pears in 20 little plates.


1536

  • 10 tall farate [?] without skin on them, with fine sugar, in 10 plates.

  • 40 oyster pasties in 10 plates.

  • 90 pasties of wafer dough in 10 plates.

  • Fresh grapes, 10 plates.

  • Olives, 10 plates.

  • Peeled pistachios and pine nuts, 10 plates.

  • Guaste pears in 10 plates.

  • Washed butter stamped with various arms, with candied cinnamon on top, 10 plates.


1537

  • 350 fried oysters, covered in strong sauce on 14 plates.

  • French jelly in 14 plates.

  • 14 large fleur-de-lys in 14 plates. (That is, a fleur-de-lys shaped pastry filled with custard)

  • 14 large pastries filled with guaste pears in 14 plates.

  • 140 tegole [lit. “tiles”] of beans of faux royal pastry, fried, filled with marzipan in 14 plates.

  • Guanti in 14 plates. (a fried pastry shaped like a hand or glove)

  • Fresh grapes, 14 plates.

  • Olives, 14 plates.


1540 (order altered slightly for thematic groupings)
Course 2b

  • 12 suckling pigs, roasted, in 12 little plates.

  • 12 veal loins cavezzi in 12 little plates.

  • Mustard in 12 little plates.

Course 3

  • Large pies of currants and guaste pears in 12 little plates.

  • Various arms, German-style, fried with sugar, in 12 little plates.

  • 12 large oyster pastries in 12 little plates.

  • Olives in 12 little plates.

  • Fresh grapes in little plates.


1548
Listed in the Second Course, but belonging thematically here

  • 7 large oyster pies in 7 plates.

Course 3

  • Italian jelly with a mantle and laurel leaves, 7 plates.

  • Olives, 7 plates.

  • Fresh grapes, 7 plates.

  • Guaste pears with candied aniseseed on 7 plates.

  • Fennel and other fruits in vinegar, 7 plates.

Listed here, but belonging thematically to the Course 4 template

  • Faux junket with sugar, almonds, and rosewater in place of clotted cream, 7 plates.

  • Small and large wafers, 140 in 7 plates.

hrj: (doll)
Note: I don't trust my proofreading on this because I'm extremely tired (but wanted to get it posted). I may come back later and tidy it up.

(For previous posts in this series, see items tagged with 'messisbugo'.)

The First Course analysis was fairly straightforward. There seemed to be an obvious overall template to what was included, despite a wide range of variation. But moving on to the Second Course things get a bit less obvious.

There is no single dish type that appears in all 6 Carnival menus. In large part, this is because 5 of the menus continue to focus on fowl dishes, with general single (or at least few) dishes in other categories, but the 1548 menu has only a single dish with fowl and of a specific type found in only one other menu. It would be interesting to determine whether this variability of the second course is an expected thing. That is, perhaps the individuality of a menu is most expressed in the second course. As before, I’ll group these by general type and then by the number of menus they appear in.

Fowl Dishes

There is enormous variability in how many fowl dishes are served, from one (for the odd menu out) up to 5, hitting all the numbers in between.

1) Pheasant (4 of 6 menus) - The pheasants all have specific cooking methods and accompaniments mentioned. This isn’t so much a category of recipe as one defined by primary ingredient. The birds are served: German-style in pieces in a pipkin with thin slices of persutto; roasted with sliced lemons on top; roasted with bastard sauce; and spit-roasted with yellow sausage topped by peacock sauce.

2) Partridge (with other items) (4 of 6 menus) - Two of the dishes include partridge along with other creatures. (This provides a categorization conundrum as the partridge/pigeon combination could belong in either slot.) The several recipes are: roased with cameline sauce; stewed German-style in pots; roasted along with pigeons served over cabbage with sliced zambudelli (sausage); served (cooking method unspecified) with rabbits and francolins (another bird species).

3) Capon, roasted (3 of 6 menus) - Capons are less omnipresent in this course, although two categories mention them. They are served here: accompanied by red sausage; accompanied by roast rabbit; covered in tortelletti (as a contrast to duck served in this way).

4) Pigeons (3 of 6 menus, if we count the partridge + pigeon dish in both categories) - The birds are served: stuffed Lombard-style with yellow sausage over cabbage; quite similarly to the previously mentioned partridges and pigeons served with sausages over cabbage; and served in “mirasto” (the one recipe using this word involves a paste of almonds, pine nuts, and raisins).

5) Ducks (2 of 6 menus) - One is served, as before, with pasta, in this case “Neapolitan-style” macaroni. The other is served in pastry covered with white sauce and pomegranate seeds.

6) Capirota (2 of 6 menus) - A dish with a slightly thickened cheese broth poured over capon meat on slices of bread.

Misc. One menu each has a dish of turtledoves in broth or spit-roasted peacock.

Quadrupeds

In this category I don’t count “processed” meats or organ-type meats. There are only two categories here, both used in multiple menus: loins, and young animals appearing as either a stuffed breast or a whole stuffed animal.

7) Loin (4 of 6 menus) - Twice these are described as “cavezzi loins” or “veal loins in cavezzi”, a term I’m not familiar with. Sauce is mentioned in two recipes.

8) Whole young animal or breast, stuffed (4 of 6 menus, one with two dishes) - Kids, lambs, veal, and suckling pigs are all represented. Twice a breast is described as “Lombard-style”.  The presentation may be simply roasted (the whole kid and whole suckling pig), or braised or cooked in broth. Some sort of sausage or organ meat is often mentioned as an accompaniment.

Processed Meats and Organ-type Meats

Only two menus have any items in this category, each with two items.

9) Polpette (2 of 6 menus) - In one case served in pies, in the other served with black broth and pistachios.

10) Other (2 of 6 menus) - One dish is a sort of head-cheese (thick jelly with pork trotters, ears, and snouts) while the other item perhaps being shoehorned in here is tongue in sauce.

Sauce

As in the First Course, sauces are often mentioned in the context of specific dishes, but some menus also have a sauce listed as a separate item.

11) Sauce (3 of  6 menus) - Royal sauce, mustard, sweet green sauce.

Pastries and Starches

Given the number of dishes served in crusts or with other types of dough-like containers, I’m not going to claim that “pastries” is a natural category. But I’ve grouped these items because  they have no obvious or major ingredient other than doughs, pastes, and grains.

12) Flans (3 of 6 menus) - As described in the recipes, a “flan” in this source sounds a great deal like a sort of ravioli, but with any sort of filling (including sweet fillings). Two of the flans here are filled with something starchy:pureed frumenty, or wafer dough. (Dough filled with dough! Then fried!) The third involves shelfish (morona).

13) Tortes (2 of 6 menus) - The recipes describe a “torte” in a way that sounds like it should be translated “pie”. I.e., a raised crust in which things are filled for cooking that may have an upper crust or not.  The fillings of these tortes are wafers or bread.

Misc. (each 1 of 6 menus) - The starches are rounded out by a blancmange and a type of fritter called a “guanti” (hand) due to its shape.

Fruit

14) Fruit Pies (3 of 6 menus) - We have an apple pie and a fruit pie. Also a pie filled with currants and dates which probably doesn’t make a natural category with the others as currants and dates usually categorize with nut dishes and sweets.

Fish

Only one menu has any dishes featuring fish and that menu has 3 fish dishes: braised sea bass, sardines with oranges, and breams in vinegar.

Dislocated Dishes

One menu includes two dishes in the Second Course that normally occur in the Fourth Course (or equivalent) in other menus. These are an oyster pie and a dish of oysters and oranges (which otherwise are typically listed as separate dishes but served in the same course).

Summary

As can be seen above, there are few obviously common factors in this course. If I were putting together a “majority rules” template, it might look something like this:

A capon dish
A pheasant dish
A partridge dish
A roasted (veal) loin
A whole roast young animal (stuffed): lamb, kid, or pig
A flan or torte with some sort of starchy filling
A fruit pie

The Menus

15?0

  • 10 spit-roasted pheasants with 20 pieces of yellow sausage with peacock sauce on top in 10 plates.

  • 20 partridges stewed in pieces German-style in pots, in 20 plates.

  • 8 pieces of veal breast stuffed Lomabrd-style in broth with yellow mortadella together in 10 plates.

  • 10 bread tortes in 10 plates.

  • 10 cavezzi loins in 10 plates.

  • 10 quince pies in 10 plates.

  • Guanti [fritters] in 10 plates.

  • Sweet green sauce in 10 plates.


1524

  • 40 roasted pheasants with bastard sauce in 20 little plates.

  • 20 capons covered in tortelletti in 20 little plates.

  • 20 stuffed lamb and kid breasts, Lombard-style, and veal sweetbreads in 20 little plates.

  • 40 rabbits, 20 francolini [small birds], 20 partridges together in 20 little plates.

  • Flaky pastries of royal pastry filled with currants and dates in 20 plates.

  • Braised sea bass in little pieces, in 20 little plates.

  • Hot fried freshwater sardines with oranges, in 20 little plates.

  • 80 gilthead breams in vinegar, in 20 little plates.

  • Blancmange in 20 little plates.


1536

  • 10 fat capons, roasted, with ten pieces of red sausage, in 10 plates.

  • 38 pigeons stuffed Lombard-style, with 28 pieces of yellow sausage over cabbage, in 10 plates.

  • 100 little flans of Morona in 10 plates.

  • 10 pheasants in a pipkin in pieces, German-style, with thinly slices persutto in 10 plates.

  • Royal sauce in 10 plates.

  • Loin [lonza] in 10 plates.

  • 40 turtledoves in larded broth in 20 plates.


1537

  • 28 roast pheasants with sliced lemons on top in 14 plates.

  • 28 pigeons in mirasto in 14 plates.

  • 56 roast partridges with cameline sauce on top in 14 plates.

  • 14 ducks covered with Neapolitan-style macaroni in 14 plates.

  • 56 little flans of puréed frumenty in 14 plates.

  • 14 spit-roasted peacocks in 14 plates.

  • 14 veal loins in cavezzi with French black sauce on top in 14 plates.

  • Mustard in 14 plates.


1540

  • 12 large pies filled with polpette in 12 little plates.

  • 24 partridges and 24 domestic pigeons over cabbage with six zambudelli [sausages] in slices, 12 little plates.

  • Whole stuffed roasted little kids in 12 little plates.

  • Capirota of capon meat in 12 little plates.

  • 12 little tortes of wafers in 12 little plates.

  • Ducks in pastry covered with white sauce and pomegranate seeds in 12 little plates.

  • Thick jelly with pork trotters, ears and snouts in 12 little plates.

  • 12 spit-roasted capons and 12 rabbits in 12 little plates.


1548

  • 7 pieces of veal breast, stuffed and then braised with roasted liver sausage, 7 plates.

  • Polpette in black broth, with pistachios on top, 7 plates.

  • 7 stuffed roasted suckling pigs, 7 plates.

  • Beef tongue in sauce [dobba] of malmsey wine, roasted, 7 plates.

  • 7 roasted loins together in the same dobba, 7 plates.

  • Capirota morella with slices of bread and capon meat underneath, 7 plates.

  • Small flaky flans filled with wafer dough, 35 in 7 plates.

  • German-style tarts of sliced apples with sugar and cinnamon, 7 in 7 plates.

  • 7 large oyster pies in 7 plates.

  • 400 oysters with oranges and pepper, 20 plates.

hrj: (doll)
(For previous posts in this series, see items tagged with 'messisbugo'.)

No, you haven’t missed parts 11-13. Those are scheduled to cover the other numbered courses and I’d already set up the file templates with those labels. But I decided to add one more overview discussion concerning how the various dishes were served to the diners. You may have noticed that each dish provides serving amounts indicating the number or quantity of food and the number of plates it’s served in. For example: “80 thrushes, 120 polpette, 80 turtledoves, together on 20 little plates” from which we may calculate that each of the 20 plates contained 4 thrushes, 6 polpette, and 4 turtledoves. Or “80 large fried kid livers with yellow sauce, 10 pounds in 20 little plates” from which we calculated each plate to have contained 4 kids livers comprising half a pound total. But how does this relate to the number of diners? Did each diner get their own thrush and turtledove? Perhaps. The per-plate count of items ranges from one each for larger items (e.g., capons, ducks), 2-4 for smaller items (pheasants, turtledoves, tomaselle) and 6-10 of small items such as pastries. And in general the total number of smaller items will be a multiple of the total number of diners (or at least of ordinary diners).

The number of diners (including the host(s) and guest(s) of honor) is enumerated for each menu. And each menu will tend to have a default number of plates of each dish served. A typical example is: “A dinner that was given by the magnificent Messer Girolamo Giliolo for the Most Illustrious and Most Excellent Lord Duke of Ferrara and other Gentlemen and Ladies, who numbered 38 at the first Table.” That is, counting the host and guest of honor, there were 40 diners. (The reference to the “first table” suggests that there may have been other tables, but the menus only seem to be describing what happens at the “first” table.) The default number of plates per dish in this case is 10.

In general, the default intent seems to have been to have one plate per 4 diners. The complication in this arithmetic is that sometimes this only works if you don’t include the host(s) and guest(s) of honor in the count of diners. In most cases, they do seem to have been included. It isn’t clear to me whether this represents two different styles of serving (one where the hosts/GoH’s may have been served something different that isn’t specified -- though this would seem a bit odd for the type of document we’re examining) or whether they hosts/GoH’s quantities simply weren’t included in the totals listed (though this would seem odd if the intent were to document quantities of food served).

After going through each menu in detail, I’ll synthesize the results into a generic serving template.

15?0

44 diners (1 host, 3 guests of honor, 40 “ordinary” guests); not counting the confection and collation courses, 30 dishes in 4 courses

10 plates for each dish (i.e., 4 diners per plate counting only “ordinary” guests) except:

  • 40 marzipan biscuits

  • both salads specified as “one per person”

  • 20 plates of partridges

  • 20 plates each of clotted cream and “clouds and wafers”

Items per plate range from 1-6 but there isn’t a clear focus around a “typical count” that matches the number of diners, though the plurality revolves around 40 -- the number of “ordinary guests”.

1524

78 diners (2 hosts, 2 guests of honor, 74 “ordinary” guests); not counting the confection and collation courses, 44 dishes in 6 courses

20 plates (i.e., 4 diners per plate) for each dish except:

  • 37 plates of each salad

  • 12 plates of crab (this is a “presentation” dish with a motto gilded on the back of each crab)

This time the diners per plate comes out neatly to 4 including the hosts and GoH’s with a couple servings to spare. The exception is the salads where the count matches one for every two ordinary guest. Items per plate range from 1-4 in most cases with 80 total items being typical. Odd exceptions are 25 pheasants in 20 plates, 30 capons in 20 plates.

1536

40 diners (1 host, 1 guest of honor, 38 “ordinary” guests); not counting the confection and collation courses, 36 dishes in 5 courses

10 plates  (i.e., 4 diners per plate) for each dish except:

  • 32 each of salads

  • 20 plates of turtledoves

  • 30 cups hippocras

At 10 plates and 4 diners per plate, the hosts and GoH’s are covered in the serving count as well as the ordinary guests. The salads, on the other hand are insufficient for each ordinary guest to have their own and too many for them to be shared in pairs of diners. Foot items per plate range from 1-4 generally with a plurality having a total of 40 items, matching the total diner count. In addition to the odd number of salads, the 30 cups of hippocras don’t match any obvious diner grouping.

1537

55 diners 1 host, 3 guests of honor, 51 “ordinary” guests); not counting the confection and collation courses, 33 dishes in 5 courses

14 plates (i.e., 4 diners per plate) for each dish except:

  • 32 each of salads


  • 51 plates each of wafers and clotted cream

Food items per plate range from 1-4 generally, with 4 being the most common number for a total of 56 items. (This would appear to cover all diners, including host/GoH’s.) The most plentiful food items were fried oysters (25 per plate) and plain oysters (cooking method unspecified, 1000 total in 14 plates which comes to almost 20 per diner!) Note that once again the number of salads is too large to suggest they were intended as multi-diner servings, but too small for each diner to have their own. The very specific number of wafer and cream servings matches the “ordinary guests”.

1540

48 diners (1 host, 1 guest of honor, 46 “ordinary” guests); not counting the confection and collation courses, 31 dishes in 4 courses

12 plates (i.e., 4 diners per plate) for each dish except:

  • 24 plates of each salad (i.e., one for every 2 diners)

  • 46 [plates, presumably] of capon livers and sausages

The plate-count is sufficient to cover diners in all categories. Food items per plate range from 1-4 though in this menu the total count is not always given (e.g., “whole stuffed roasted kids in 12 plates” where we may presume one per plate but it’s not explicit).

1548

30 diners (1 host, 2 guests of honor, 27 “ordinary” guests); not counting the confection and collation courses, 34 dishes in 4 courses

We get a clue to a possibly uncounted category of diners from one of the non-food activities: “While they were eating the confections, my Consort sent two baskets with 27 packets of scented flowers, some real and some faux, one for the Most Illustrious Lord Duke, and one for the Most Illustrious Lord Prince, which their Lordships distributed among the dinner guests.” This reaffirms the notion of “ordinary guests” as being a key number and introduces for the first time the question of whether (in general) the host(s)’ wives should be included in the diner counts (even though never mentioned in the description).

7 plates (i.e., 4 diners per plate) for each dish except for:

  • 16 plates each of both salads (note that this would be sufficient for 2 diners per serving even including host/GoH)

  • 20 plates of (total of 400) oysters with oranges

Items per plate range from 1-4 with the majority involving a single larger item on each plate, though there are several items were 28 are specified. Exceptions to this pattern include 30 tomaselle (along with 28 chickens) on 7 plates, 35 small flaky flans in 7 plates.

Summary

The total number of guests ranges from 30 to 78. There is only a slight correlation between this number and the total number of dishes served or the number of courses, though there is a rule of thumb that the greater the number of courses, the greater the overall dish count. (Keep in mind that “number of courses” here includes the “pre-course” not just the numbered courses.)

  • 4 courses: 30, 31, 34 dishes

  • 5 courses: 33, 36 dishes

  • 6 courses 44 dishes


The 6-course dinner also has the largest guest count, but this would seem to be a feature of elaborateness of the banquet, not that a greater number of distinct dishes was needed to provide a greater amount of food. (That is, this dinner featured a greater amount of food per person, not just a greater amount overall.)

If we may generalize by a majority rule: dishes are normally served in plates that serve 4 diners each. One consistent exception is the salads, where each salad (remember there are normally two) may be intended to serve either one or two diners. (In two menus, the salad count falls between these two and I have no idea what’s going on.)

Without getting to too detailed a level, here are some typical quantities of food per (4-person) plate:

Fowl

  • Capon 1

  • Duck 1

  • Partridges 2-4

  • Pheasant 1-2

  • Peacock 1

  • Pigeon 4

  • Quail, thrush, turtledove 4

Quadruped

  • Hare or rabbit 1

  • Roast kid, lamb, or suckling pig 1

  • Veal or unspecified loin 1

  • Veal breast 1

Processed Meats

  • Sausages (various types, some sliced) 1

  • Small “meatball” types dishes such as tomaselle and polpette 4-6

Oysters

  • Oysters, fried 20-25

  • Oysters, unspecified 50+/-

Pies and Pastries

  • Small pastries 4-10

  • Large pies, tarts, tortes (various contents) 1

Confectionary and “Desserts”

  • Confections 1 lb

  • Marmalade boxes 2-4 (sometimes with different specified contents)

  • Fruit (oranges, pears) 3-5

  • Wafers 20+

hrj: (doll)
(For previous posts in this series, see items tagged with 'messisbugo'.)

As discussed in the overview, this course consists of multiple fowl dishes, a liver dish, a quadruped dish, frequently a fruit dish (often fresh), and other dishes with no general pattern. I’ve numbered the identifiable “template slots” or thematic groups for clarity.

Fowl Dishes

1) Partridges and/or pigeons, rarely chicken, sometimes with tomaselle (a sort of liver meatball wrapped in caul fat) served in various manners (6 menus)

This isn’t so much a clear “template slot” as a fuzzy grouping with overlap of a selection of primary ingredients.  Furthermore as two of the partridge dishes are served with oranges, this group also overlaps fuzzily with a second fowl dish:

2) Roast pheasant, usually with oranges (4 of 6 menus, with the other 2 menus being those that have roast partridge with oranges)

This complex fuzzy grouping may be clearer if one identifies the two category slots as “A” an “B” as shown in the following table of characteristics. (I hope the formatting works for all browsers.)


15?0 1524 1536 1537 1540 1548
Other Characteristics (A) (A) Roasted with sugar and cinnamon on top (A) Roasted (A) Roasted, with French sauce (A) In fried pastry
Pigeon/Chicken Dish A (pigeon) Dish A (pigeon) Dish A (chicken)
Tomaselle Dish A Dish A Dish A
Partridge Dish A Dish A Dish A Dish A Dish B
Oranges Dish A Dish A Dish B Dish B Dish B
Pheasant Dish B Dish B Dish B Dish B
Other Characteristics (B) (B) Roasted (B) Roasted (B) Roasted, with pieces of yellow sausage

It’s this sort of complex “theme with differences” that really piqued my interest when I first started looking at these menus.

3) Capon, generally served with some sort of salami, typically served on bread (5 of 6 menus)

This is another example of how varied the specific dishes can be while still having a thematic unity. The capons may be described as boiled, boiled in pastry, in pastry, boneless, or boneless and stuffed.  All five include some sort of salumi (2 with salami, 2 with mortadelle, 1 with persutto). Three mention being served “with slices of bread underneath” (either the capon or the salumi or both). In one case the capon in pastry is accompanied by veal breast in wine as well as the preserved meat.

Other Fowl

Each of the six menus has at least one other fowl dish in the First Course and one has as many as four additional fowl dishes. (The 15?0 menu has one of each of the following except the peacock.) There are three conceptual groups and two singleton dishes.

·      4) Pigeons, in pastry or in a pie (3 of 6)
·      5) Small birds & meatballs (3 of 6) - I’m cheating a bit because one of the three is rabbit with tomaselle and polpette, but this connects it with the other two dishes (thrushes and turtledoves with polpette, and quails with tomaselle and polpette).
·      6) Ducks in pastry with torteletti (2 of 6) but see also one menu with a dish of torteletti with no duck
·      7) Jelly with capon meat (1 of 6)
·      8) A roast peacock in pieces, covered with white sauce and mustard,  [with] the device of His Excellency (1 of 6)

9) Liver/Organ Dish(es) (5 of 6 menus)

This was a bit of a startling group to me, given modern attitudes towards liver and organ meats. (That is, not that I was startled to find liver as a standard menu item, simply that it stood out as different from modern tastes.) All 5 menus with this item have a liver dish, one that also includes sweetbreads, and one menu that has a separate sweetbread dish. The meat may be fried (2) or served in a torte (2) and may be accompanied by sausage or salami (2). A sauce may be mentioned (1) but a majority describe being served with sugar (3). Now there’s a daring taste sensation: “little tortes of liver with sugar and cinnamon inside and on the top”.

10) Quadruped Dish (5 of 6 menus)

I almost feel guilty for grouping these into a single template-slot, given the variety of animals and recipes that are represented. But when you look at the menus as a whole, “red meat” is quite rare. So when the pattern seems to be that a course includes one (and typically only one) dish focusing on “red meat”, it seems reasonable to think that there is intent and purpose. With regard to this category, note also the rabbit dish (with tomaselle and polpette) that I grouped with the “small birds with tomaselle and polpette” above. This was part of the 1537 menu which you may recall is the most elaborate, and which is the only one with multiple quadruped dishes in this course. (In addition to the rabbit, there are dishes of veal and boar.) Due to the variety of dishes in this group, I’ll simply list them.

15?0: none
1524: 80 little heads of kid and lamb split open and gilded.
1536 Boar in black broth with candied pine nuts on top, 10 plates.
1537: 14 pieces of veal breast, stuffed Lombard-style, with 14 salami in 14 plates.
* Boar Hungarian-style, in pieces in 14 plates.
* (note also the rabbit dish with tomaselle and polpette that I’ve grouped with the “small birds” above)
1540: Hare in pepper sauce, 12 little plates.
1548: 7 whole stuffed roasted little kids in 7 plates.

11) Sauce (2?, 3?, 5? of 6 menus)

It’s hard to know how to count this group in terms of how many menus include it as there are dish descriptions that include a sauce for that specific dish. Only 2 menus have a listing  or a sauce as a separate item, not attached to another dish. (Mustard, and “sweet certosina sauce” about which nothing further is known.)  But 5 other items mention a sauce accompanying a specific dish (carp with white and red sauce, livers with yellow sauce, partridges with French sauce, hare in pepper sauce, peacock with white sauce and mustard).  So overall 5 of 6 menus mention sauces in some fashion. I’d be disinclined to consider this a true “separate dish” in the course template, though. In Messisbugo’s recipe collection, the word “sauce” seems frequently to be used in a sense familiar to modern cuisine, i.e., a thickened semi-liquid accompaniment poured over a dish. But there are also some dishes called “soups” where the soup is also referred to as a sauce. In fact there is a recipe for “royal soup” that is described in this fashion, so perhaps the “gilded royal soup” mentioned in the “misc.” category below could be included here instead.

Fruit ( 3 of 6 menus)

There is a later course where fresh fruit is much more clearly a standard template-slot. These may not be intended to be a unified conceptual category, given the variety of types. We have apple pie, fresh grapes (that are explicitly mentioned as being left on the table for the rest of the meal), and a dish of oranges and lemons.

Miscellaneous

I’ll leave off numbering the dish groupings as we’ve come down to the “one-off” items. 4 of the 6 menus include dishes that can’t be shoehorned into any sort of general pattern.

The 1524 menu has 3 fish dishes (fried pike tails, turbot in pottage, boiled carp served decorated with the device of one of the guests of honor).  The 1524 menu, in fact, has several fish dishes in every numbered course and -- with the exception of oysters (which clearly have their own template-slots) -- is the only menu that has any fish dishes at all. Given that these are carnival banquets, and therefore a prelude to Lent when fish would dominate the menu, the general absence of fish is, perhaps, not surprising. That makes the 1524 menu stand out all the more for featuring them so heavily.

The 1536 menu includes two pastry-type dishes: fried pastries filled with genestrata (a sort of thickened pudding with spices, nuts, and dried fruits) and a flaky “pizze”. (I’d need to check with the translator to know if this name is in any way related to the source of “pizza”.)

The 1540 menu includes a dish of Turkish style rice (which appears to be a sort of sweet rice pudding with rosewater) and mantegate (pine-nut pastries).

The 1548 menu has a “gilded royal soup” (for which he gives a recipe elsewhere: an egg-thickened soup of ground almonds with spices and raisins) and a dish of tortelletti served with sugar and cinnamon. (Tortelletti are described as thin sheets of pasta filled with various fillings and then cooked in broth or fried, so you may mentally translate it as “tortellini” if you please, though the specific shape isn’t indicated.) Note that this dish connects with the set of “duck served with tortelletti” mentioned among the fowl dishes. And among Messisbugo’s recipes there are several places where it is mentioned that “these tortelli can be served either alone or for covering capons, ducks, pigeons, and others, if you like” (and similarly) so perhaps the template-slot should be thought of as “tortelletti, sometimes with duck” rather than the other way around.

The Lists of Dishes

Here I give the full lists of dishes in the original order for each menu.

15?0 - Note that this menu might be considered the "basic bare-bones" template

  • 60 tomaselle, 60 polpette, 40 quails, together in 10 plates.

  • 40 roasted partridges with oranges and sugar and cinnamon on top in 10 plates.

  • 10 domestic ducks in pastry, covered with tortelletti, in 10 plates.

  • 10 pies of guaste apples in 10 plates.

  • 10 broiled tortes of large veal livers and sweetbreads, in 10 plates.

  • 40 domestic pigeons in fried pastry in 10 plates.

  • Thick jelly with capon meat at the bottom in 10 plates.

1524

  • 80 roasted partridges with 200 tomaselle and oranges on top, together in 20 little plates.

  • 80 little heads of kid and lamb split open and gilded.

  • 80 large fried kid livers with yellow sauce, 10 pounds in 20 little plates.

  • 80 thrushes, 120 polpette, 80 turtledoves, together on 20 little plates.

  • 30 boiled capons in pastry with 10 salami in quarters, with slices of bread underneath, in 20 little plates.

  • 20 fried pike tails in 20 little plates.

  • Large turbot in pieces in pottage, 20 little plates.

  • Boiled carp covered with white and red sauce, the device of our Most Reverend, 20 little plates.

  • Fresh grapes that always stood on the table [i.e. were there for the rest of the meal], 20 little plates.

1536

  • 20 roast pheasants with 40 split oranges, in 10 plates.

  • 40 roast partridges with French sauce on top, in 10 plates.

  • 10 stuffed boneless capons, with 10 liver mortadelle, in 10 plates.

  • 60 little fried pasties of royal pastry filled with genestrata [a sort of thickened pudding with spices, nuts, and dried fruits], in 10 plates.

  • 40 tomaselle, 40 capon livers and 30 slices of fried salami with sugar, in 10 plates.

  • Boar in black broth with candied pine nuts on top, 10 plates.

  • 10 ducks in pastry covered with tortelletti, 10 plates.

  • 10 flaky pizze in 10 plates.

  • Mustard in 10 plates.

1537

  • 18 domestic pigeons and 28 partridges in fried pastry, in 14 plates.

  • 56 roast pheasants with 28 split oranges in 14 plates.

  • 14 rabbits, 56 tomaselle and 56 polpette together in 14 plates.

  • 14 pieces of veal breast, stuffed Lombard-style, with 14 salami in 14 plates.

  • 56 little French-style pigeon pasties in pieces, in 14 plates.

  • Boar Hungarian-style, in pieces in 14 plates.

  • Fat boiled capons with slices of bread underneath and 14 yellow mortadelle, in 14 plates.

  • Sweet certosina sauce [nature uncertain] in 14 plates.

1540

  • 24 pheasants and 48 partridges with 36 oranges in 12 little plates.

  • 48 domestic pigeons and 100 tomaselle together [30r] in 12 little plates.

  • 80 fried capon livers and yellow sausages in pieces, 46.

  • 40 veal sweetbreads fried, with sugar, in 12 little plates.

  • 12 capons in pastry and 12 big pieces of veal breast in Vernaccia wine and minced persutto, in 12 little plates.

  • 12 pies of large French pigeons in 12 little plates.

  • Turkish-style rice in 12 little plates.

  • 12 mantegate [pine nut pastries] in 12 little plates.

  • Hare in pepper sauce, 12 little plates.

  • Oranges and lemons, 12 little plates.

1548

  • 28 young chickens and 30 tomaselle together on 7 plates.

  • 7 boneless capons with meat salami split in slices, with slices of bread underneath, 7 plates.

  • 7 roast pheasants and 28 little pieces of yellow sausage together in 7 plates.

  • Gilded royal soup, 7 plates.

  • Broiled little tortes of liver, and other kinds, with sugar and cinnamon inside and on top, 7 plates.

  • 7 whole stuffed roasted little kids in 7 plates.

  • A roast peacock in pieces, covered with white sauce, sauce and mustard, the device of His Excellency, 7 plates.

  • Tortelletti in plates with sugar and cinnamon on top in 7 plates.

hrj: (doll)
(For previous posts in this series, see items tagged with 'messisbugo'.)

We now enter the home stretch by circling back to the “numbered courses”. To review: after the diners finish with the course that was on the table when they were seated (if I’m interpreting correctly), we enter a sequence of courses that in most of the menus are numbered “first, second, third, etc.” although there are exceptions to this labeling system. (For the 1537 menu where the courses start numbering from the “pre-course” I’m treating them as renumbered from 1 after the pre-course.)

Of the six Carnival menus, three have three numbered courses, two have four courses, and one has five courses. When the specific dishes are matched up across the various menus, it makes sense to discuss five groupings, though specific dish groups may be combined into a single course in some cases, and more rarely may be shifted in position in the meal from what appears to be the majority case. The general distribution of dish types and their appearance in the six menus looks something like this:

Course 1: Multiple fowl dishes, a liver dish, a quadruped dish, frequently a fresh fruit dish, and other dishes with no general pattern -- This appears as the First Course in all six menus.

Course 2: Multiple fowl dishes (in most cases), a roast of a young quadruped (veal, kid, lamb or suckling pig), a sauce, a flan or torte (in most cases), in a few menus there are other dishes with no general pattern -- This appears as the Second Course in all six menus. However one menu includes dishes in this course that more commonly appear in the Third and Fifth (that is, they’re displaced from the majority position).

Course 3: Oyster pies or fried oysters, olives, fresh grapes, pears and sometimes also apples in pies, a decorative dish in jelly or pastry, a dish focusing on nuts (in various forms) -- This appears as the Third Course in most of the menus, but the 1524 menu places most of this group of dishes in the Fourth Course and instead has a Third Course that recapitulates some of the Second Course with the addition of fish. (If I were relabeling the courses to match up conceptually, I’d call this recapitulation “Course 2B” and then identify the oyster pies through nuts as “Course 3”.)

Course 4: Wafers (often with “clouds”, whatever that might signify), in some cases cheese and a pasta dish, in some cases clotted cream, and in isolated cases other dishes with no general pattern -- These appear as the Fourth Course in three menus, in reduced form as part of the Third Course in two menus, and is entirely absent in the 1540 menu.

Course 5: Oysters, sliced oranges with pepper -- This is a separate Fifth Course in one menu, appears as part of the Fourth Course in two menus, and is entirely absent in two menus. In the 1548 menu, these dishes appear but as part of the Second Course.

So that’s the basic overall structure. But the specific dishes within those themes may differ, and there are some dish types that only occur in a single menu or perhaps two and so don’t seem to be part of an overall template. In looking at the courses in detail, my general format will be to match up dishes across the menus that seem to be variants of the same template slot, group them according to the general topics given above (with “miscellaneous” coming last), and then to discuss them in decreasing order of the number of menus that dish-group appears in. In some cases, if one or more menus seem to duplicate a template slot, I may discuss the duplicates along with the “main” grouping. In previous discussions, I’ve give the original text first, but in this group of discussions I’ll add it at the end.
hrj: (doll)
(For previous posts in this series, see items tagged with 'messisbugo'.)

The overall review of the non-dining activities in Part 7 provides a useful context for the course identified as a “collation”. After the main banquet is served, the guests enjoy dancing and perhaps other entertainments (such as the distribution of presents). After some time of this, they are presumed to need some additional refreshment, either before returning home or continuing with the dancing. This is introduced by name with a brief statement. In only one of the menus is this item omitted.

15?0

  • Then came the evening collation, that is:

1524

  • The evening collation was of...

1536

  • Then at night this collatione was brought:

1537

  • And the collation for the evening was of...

1540

  • [no collation mentioned]

1548

  • At 9 there was a collation of...

Like the confectionary course, the collation seems to have been served with knives and napkins. (So if people are using plates, then they are not considered noteworthy to mention. I keep trying to imagine snacking on “confections in syrup” with only a knife and napkin as my tools. Either my expectations are wrong, or not everything is being mentioned.) These are only mentioned explicitly in two of the menus, so it’s likely that expected default items may not always be listed. The format for the collation is very consistent confections in syrup and white confections (the contrast leads me back to the theory that “white confections” are dry candied items), fresh fruit (apples or grapes), and sugar water. (I’m not entirely sure what “sugar water” is beyond the obvious.)

15?0

  • Confections, white and in syrup,

  • and sugar water,

  • with napkins

  • and knives.

1524

  • confections in syrup and white,

  • and apples

  • and sugar water,

  • with knives

  • and napkins

1536

  • 20 ewers of sugar water.

  • Fresh grapes, 10 plates.

  • Dece apples, 10 plates.

  • Lettuce, gourd and melon in syrup, 10 plates.

1537

  • various confections,

  • fruits

  • and sugar water

1540

  • [no collation mentioned]

1548

  • sugar water,

  • fresh grapes,

  • and apples

  • and other little things

So our basic template for the collation is exceedingly simple:

  • Sugar water

  • Fresh fruit (grapes and/or apples)

  • Confections in syrup and in sugar (the specific examples include vegetables as well as fruit)

  • served along with:

  • Knives

  • Napkins

And now there’s nothing left to tackle except the intimidating bulk of the numbered courses. Don’t expect another update  for at least a week at the minimum.

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