Eariler this year, I dragged my girlfriend and roommates back in time. Well, their taste buds, anyway. Jennifer, my significant other, had wanted to gather 'round the hearth and do some cooking while I was in the mood to recreate another medieval recipe. After doing a spot of shopping, we were in the kitchen preparing to cook like it was 1399. Or, truth be known, some indeterminate time in the 14th century. In Poland. On the menu from days of yore were Kurczak Pieczony z Suszonymi Śliwkami and Kluski z Bryndzą. To bolster the meal, I also prepared some kielbasa domowa while Jennifer fried up some Swiss chard as she need some extra iron.
I began prepping the Kluski z Bryndzą first. These are cheese dumplings with the emphasis on cheese. I misread the recipe and had to take emergency measures as you'll see in a moment. The first thing to do is to combine equal parts bread crumbs and barley flour along with some mace.
I hated to buy the barley
flour because I had about half a dozen kinds of flour in my pantry
already – wheat, buckwheat, seminola, white rice, et al. For a
while I contemplated making my own bread crumbs but I wanted to use
white bread and didn't have any. I wanted the white variety because the
dumplings were associated with dishes of the aristocracy. Today white
bread is cheap but, back in the day, only the wealthy could afford the
stuff while everyone else suffered with the brown variety.
Melted butter came next and then the cheese. I had a pound of farmer's
cheese but discovered that the recipe called for two pounds. Two pounds!
And so I scrounged around the refrigerator and found some mozzarella and
cheddar for the cause. Needs must when the devil drives.
The dumplings next required egg yolks and then 20 minutes to dry but I held off in order to start prepping the Kurczak Pieczony z Suszonymi Śliwkami or Chicken Baked with Prunes.
I want to admit the I fudged on the
chicken. Back in the 1300s, it would have been prepared in one of two
ways: either with a hen cut in half and the parts wrapped in dough or
with the hen just split in half. Back in the Middle Ages, baking was
partly about cooking your food and partly about not burning a large
chunk of it while the rest remained raw. You think that hot spot in your
oven makes baking a pain in the butt? Try using an uncontrolled flame
featuring you stoking it attempting to keep a relatively steady
temperature. Meat was often wrapped in dough in order to keep it from
burning. (Pastry was also used as a primitive Tupperware. You'd make
yourself some beef y-stywyd – that's beef stew – in dough and you'd be
able keep your meat pies for a bit as the dough would keep the stew from
being exposed to the air.) As ashamed as I am to admit it, I went with a
chicken cut into pieces. Truth be known, none of my French knives were
sharp enough to deal with a chicken at the time. My last admission of
cheating is that I didn't use a large earthenware container and instead
used two glass baking dishes.
Here's how you assemble the dish:
Start by laying down some julienned onions followed by shredded white cabbage.
Next scatter a bunch of prunes (retain those pits, please) and juniper berries.
Next use up all that dried parsley that your roommate bought but never uses.
Then put your chicken atop
the bed of vegetables, herbs, and spices. Place bay leaves between the
chicken pieces and lay down bacon strips.
Next get yourself some Hungarian wine. I found Bull's Blood at Woodman's. Their selection of Hungarian wine consisted of 2 varieties and this was the cheapest. It is in the "Other Imported Wines" aisle next to the shelf with about a million wines from South Africa and beneath all the bottles from Greece. I'm forced to wonder how long it had been there because the cork was so dry that it crumbled as I inserted the corkscrew. The recipe called for 2 cups and into it went some powdered ginger and cinnamon. Pour over the bird'n'bacon.
Lastly throw some more parsley on top along with dill seed. Wrap and put it in the oven.
As the chicken cooked, I put the egg yolks into the dumpling fixins. After mixing by hand, I rolled some out. Here's what they looked like as they sat to dry:
As the chicken neared completion, I got the kielbasa boiling along with the dumplings while Jennifer sautéed cherry tomatoes with garlic in some butter & olive oil. Then she threw in the chard. A short while later I pulled the chicken out of the oven.
When all was said and done, our plates looked like this:
The chicken tasted like chicken but the onion/cabbage combo which has been sitting in wine and spices the whole time was just fantastic. The key was to spear a piece of chicken and get some of the vegetables on there too. The ginger & cinnamon complemented the flavor of the wine very well and weren't overpowering. Stewed prunes – who doesn't like those? The dumplings were like cheese curds except the breading was on the inside. They were so dense that I had reason to suspect that they had their own gravitational field of some magnitude. This explains why they were often served with dishes that utilized sharp herbs – they sucked the flavor right in. I mean these were real rib clingers, let me tell you. The kielbasa was great. Nice coarse grind, lots of garlic, and heavily smoked. The greens were excellent too. I gave mine a bath of sherry vinegar which was another foodstuff of the wealthy back in medieval times. A tasty meal and plenty hearty for those chilly spring nights.