I am cooking the annual SENEA dinner, taking some pages from An Early Meal (AEM). The AEM recipes are for four, and I'm having 5-6, so I doubled them. Le menu:
- Boar Stew (AEM)
- Boiled Turnips (AEM)
- Cheese with Berries and Honey
- Honey Drink (Ann Hagen)
And Lady Sabine is bringing some bread.
Boar Stew
Had I gotten my act together earlier, I could have had boar and wheat berries for this. As it is, we're having pork shoulder (2 lb, darker, more flavorful than pork loin) and einkorn wheat (1 lb box purchased). Einkorn is an ancient wheat variety that was mutated or cross-bred into bread wheat. I could not find wheat berries for love or money, even in Whole Foods. I used to be able to buy them at Weis. Maybe they are no longer 'on trend'? The dish also calls for kale (2 lb) and wild leeks (1+ lb, although it trimmed down to less). I don't know how wild leek compares to cropleek, but the picture for this dish looks as much like a pottage as a stew - everything cut rather small. Big inch-wide rounds of cropleek didn't seem to go, so I bought spring onions/scallions. There was no pancetta at the store, but there was salt pork (4-5 oz), and my Internetting tells me that those are approximately equivalent? I mean, bacon would have worked, too. The recipe also called for ground mustard seed (3 Tb) and fresh thyme.
Night before prep:
- Chopped spring onions. Should I have used all of the green leaves? I usually stop when the leaves go all hollow.
- I bought bags of pre-cut kale, so that's done
- Chopped the salt pork
- Ground mustard seeds in a mortar
- Meant to chop up pork shoulder but did not get to it
Turnips
One of those "no duh" recipes. Boil turnips (3 lb), mash with butter. I cut the root tip off of a turnip while I did some other prep, and it didn't seem to turn brown. So I peeled and chopped my turnips.
Cheese with Berries and Honey
The dessert course. I thought about making fresh cheese, but just punted and bought 28 oz of ricotta. I got frozen blackberries (2 lb) rather than fresh - first, less expensive. But second and more importantly, the frozen ones are usually smaller and more flavorful than the big but watery fresh ones, and closer to the wild blackberries my grandpa used to pick. Wildflower honey. It's just all going on the table and folks can have what they like from it - plain berries, berries on cheese, cheese with honey, etc. My prep here was just to leave the bags of berries in the fridge to thaw.
Honey Drink
Ann Hagen suggests, in one of her Food and Drink in Anglo-Saxon England books, that an unfermented drink of water boiled with honey may have been drunk as well as fermented mead. I could have made Mistress Sorcha's quick mead recipe if I'd thought about it ahead of time, but I didn't, so... honey drink.
I go back and forth with serving this or cold maythe (chamomile) tea.I like chamomile, but a lot of people don't. Also, it's not at all clear that a tincture of maythe would have been drunk as a beverage.
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