{"id":199101,"date":"2007-09-09T13:14:00","date_gmt":"2007-09-09T18:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2007\/09\/09\/culinary-crashing-and-burning\/"},"modified":"2007-09-09T13:14:00","modified_gmt":"2007-09-09T18:14:00","slug":"culinary-crashing-and-burning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2007\/09\/09\/culinary-crashing-and-burning\/","title":{"rendered":"Culinary Crashing and Burning"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, yesterday was a small SCA event*<\/sup> called Trial By Fire<\/span>. It’s a cooking competition.<\/p>\n

The idea is that people present dishes in a number of categories that are prepared on site under Pennsic War<\/a>\u2020<\/sup>, and to prepare them in a 4 hour period, along with accompanying documentation of their use in the years covered by the SCA\u2021<\/sup>.<\/p>\n

Well, I went with two, or maybe two and a half recipes. The first was a chocolate recipe, which was translated from the 1631 Spanish treatise into English in 1652, called Chocolate, an Indian Drinke<\/span><\/a>. Which has the oldest, at least the oldest that I could find, recorded chocolate recipe.<\/p>\n

The second was a recipe for a meat pie from a history\/cook book called A Drizzle of Honey: The Life and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews<\/span><\/a>, which uses records of the inquisition, which frequently used food as evidence that people were secretly practiced Judaism.<\/p>\n

I actually combined two recipes, one for sausage, and one for pie, because the filling for the pie combined meat and milk, and my deliberate use with my wife’s cookware would result in a serious case of acute heavy metal poisoning\u00a7<\/sup>.<\/p>\n

I had done the sausage, though not the pie before, and I did a test run of the chocolate drink in our percolator about two weeks prior, so I thought that it would turn out OK, but I was unduly optimistic.<\/p>\n

With the chocolate, I made a small but significant change at Trial by Fire, I toasted the cacao nibs before grinding, which made the cocoa butter flow out of the nibs, so when I packed it into the basket of the percolator, it created a wax-like structure that the hot water did not effectively penetrate, so I ended up with weakly flavored sweet water.<\/p>\n

As to the pie, the the sausage was fine, as was the filling that was made from it, but due to time constraints and poor fire management, I attempted to fry them at too low a temperature, and they became oil sponges.<\/p>\n

On the brighter side, my wife\u20ac<\/sup>, won best dessert with her sage fritters, which were quite yummy.<\/p>\n

My recipes:
Chocolate Drinke<\/span><\/p>\n