Skip to main content

Eating Medieval Art: Chykens in Hocchee and Cariota

 

I'm starting this project by focusing on the cooking aspect and, for now, I'm not worrying about connecting the cooking to medieval art-making practices, but am focusing on getting familiar with medieval techniques and tastes.   Focusing on the cooking allows me to integrate this work into my everyday life, by simply making one of the meals I prepare each week a medieval recipe.  This should allow me to make progress on this new project even while I keep up on my work as department chair, teach, and put finishing touches on the book.

Since I am integrating this aspect of the work into my regular cooking, it is being shaped by my preferences and practices when it comes to food.  To set some of that out: I do eat meat and I eat a broad range of meats - chicken and beef but also pork, lamb, veal, duck, and occasionally rabbit.  Sorry if that bothers anyone.  I don't eat much fish, but I do like shellfish.  I try to avoid carbohydrates, only because if I don't try to avoid them I'll end up eating mostly carbs.  And I have a problem digesting dairy, although I really like cheese.  I will sometimes put up with a bellyache for a good cheese and sometimes will remember to take a "milk pill" first.   I typically cook more elaborate things on Saturday and Sunday nights and I look for recipes that will reheat easily later in the week.  I live alone so I half most recipes to get 2-3 servings.

For a first medieval meal I picked "Chykens in Hocchee" and "Cariota" both from Pleyn Delit.  The original recipe for "Chykens in Hocchee" is: "Take chykens and scald hem.  Take persel and sawage, with obere erbes; take garlec and grapes, and stoppe the chikenus ful, and seep hem in gode broth, so that they mey esely be boyled therinne.  Messe hem and cast therto powdour douce."

I chose this because it didn't seem so strange and so seemed approachable, but it ended up being stranger than my first reading suggested.  Making it required first stuffing a game hen with a mixture of grapes, herbs, and garlic; then sealing that shut; and then poaching it in broth.  You are supposed to add some lemon juice in with the grapes to compensate for the grapes available today being sweet and medieval grapes sour.  I forgot to do this and so added the lemon juice to the poaching liquid insead.

 


Poaching isn't my favorite way of cooking a bird: the flabby white skin doesn't appeal.  That's probably why Pleyn Delit suggests removing it.  My biggest surprise in cooking this one was that the grapes didn't break down at all, but stayed whole and firm.


Before the serving, the meat is sprinkled with "powder douce," a mixture of cinnamon, ginger, sugar, and salt.  It's not a combination of spices that I associate with meat - more with baked goods.  It's not bad, just, strange.  It makes everything smell a bit like Christmas.  I boiled the poaching liquid down  to create some sauce.  To go with it, I made "Cariota," roasted carrots mixed with some chopped herbs.  I kept my carrots whole for the visual appeal.







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Virgin at Chartres, White Supremacy, and Medieval Studies

Medieval Studies blew up online this past weekend when a Rachel Fulton Brown, an Associate Professor in the History Department at the University of Chicago (my graduate institution, although I did not study with her), published a few pieces on her blog aimed at Dorothy Kim (an Assistant Professor at Vassar College, who I know from the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship) for her insistence that medieval studies as a field needs to grapple with the way its materials have been and are currently being used by white supremacists to support their ideology and that those of us who teach medieval materials need to signal our rejection of white supremacist beliefs to our students. While the first post begins (and the second continues) an attack on Kim, the bulk of it is given over to an argument about the Virgin Mary that is framed around a famous window from Chartres Cathedral, known as Notre Dame de la Belle Verriere (our lady of the beautiful window).  According to Fulton Brown, th
7 comments
Read more

À mon seul désir

This post has been brewing for a while - since my Spring Break trip to Paris.  It springs from one of my visits to the Cluny during that trip, when I ended up in the Unicorn tapestries room. I've been in there before of course, if only because it is the only air-conditioned space in the museum.  My first month-long trip summer trip to Paris I took in July instead of June and it was hot (and a little smelly).  I was spending my afternoons in museums looking at Virgin and Child statues and most of the Cluny's are gathered in a gallery right next to the tapestries room, so I would duck in there to sit in the a.c. for a bit whenever I got just too uncomfortable.  On this most recent trip, in March, it was freezing cold and I got routed through the room because that space with the Virgins was briefly closed for some reason. And for some other reason I was struck by the panel above, sometimes labelled as the Lady and the Unicorn.  Struck not so much by its imagery, as by its
12 comments
Read more

Paris, patterns, textures, textiles: A photo-essay

I head home from Paris tomorrow.  I've done a lot of work here: finished drafting an article and wrote my talk for Kalamazoo.  But I've also taken a lot of photographs of the city and done a lot of knitting, producing two now of these yarn-bombs for lamp posts (I'll install the second tomorrow morning before heading to the airport.  It was intended to replace the first, but since it's actually still there, the second will have to go on a different lamp post).  This blog post is meant to tie those last two pursuits together, very visually.  It's also, then, a meditation on one of the things I love about this city; the textures, the patterns, and the details in the architecture, the street furniture, and the street itself. Yarn-bomb in the Place Louis Aragon on the Ile St. Louis.   Crosswalk on the Rue St. Antoine. Yarn-bomb detail.   Detail of wrought-iron work on a tomb in Pere Lachaise.   Yarn-bomb detail.
27 comments
Read more