Medieval Cookout: Chickpea and cabbage potage, wheat/barley flatbread, and pork steaks with a wine and garlic sauce.

I have a demo coming up and it will be my first exercise cooking in that sort of venue, so I wanted to give my setup a trial run. I am pretty pleased with how things worked out overall and only had to tweak them a little bit.

The potage was delicious, the powder fort and fried onions gave it a very rich and savory flavour. I mixed a couple of recipes from “The Forme of Cury”, one for chyches and the other for caboches in potage. The only thing I would have done differently is to grind ½ of the chickpeas up a little finer to thicken the broth. I also used vegetable oil, which I wouldn't recommend but I am trying to keep this stuff vegan for the faire. If this was for you and yours, throw in some butter/bacon fat/lard!

The flatbreads were pretty boss. The recipe is posted elsewhere, this time I rolled them a little thicker than usual and they we're great.

The pork steaks were sirloins and not fatty enough, I rolled the dice and lost. They were still pretty good, just not tender enough for me. The sauce had a delicious flavour and just needed to be thickened somehow, so I looked into period ways to accomplish that and found that making a rice flour roux made it spot on. I am NOT serving these at the demo, but since friends were coming over I though I would class things up with some meat haha. 

Chickpea and cabbage potage

Yield: 6 stand-alone dinner sized portions

Ingredients:

1 medium cabbage cut into ½ x ½ inch pieces

2 large onions finely diced

4 large cloves of garlic minced

4 carrots in ½ x ½ inch thin slices

1lb of dry chickpeas, soaked and pre-boiled until very tender

(Canned chickpeas simply don't taste as good, and that's a fact Jack!)

¼ C fat of your choice

(Bacon fat would be pretty prime)

1 heaping TBS powder fort

(Mine was 3 parts ginger, 1 part black pepper, ¼ part cinnamon, ¼ part cloves)

3 TBS minced parsley

Salt to taste

Method:

1. Heat up your fat to med/high and fry 2/3 of your garlic until golden.

2. Add your onions with some salt and fry until golden

3. Add your cabbage, carrots, and ½ your parsley with enough water to cover them and let it boil until the cabbage nice and tender.

4. While your cabbage is boiling, grind up ½ of your chickpeas into a fine paste, then add your whole chickpeas and let it boil for 5 minutes or so.

5. Finish it off by adding your chickpea paste, powder fort, remaining garlic and parsley.

6. Pull it off the heat and eat it!

Pork steaks with garlic wine sauce

Yield: As many pork chops as you buy

Ingredients:

Pork chops

(Whichever cut you like the best, I like them fatty.)

Salt, ginger powder and pepper to taste

1 C Sweet to medium bodied red wine

2 tsp Powder fort

2 TBS butter

2 cloves of garlic finely minced

¼ C almond flour

Sugar to taste (Depends on how sweet your wine is, I used 1 TBS)

salt to taste

1 tsp minced parsley

Method:

1. Season pork chops with salt, pepper, and ginger powder

2. Fry until cooked to your preference, I like mine sauteed at a med/high heat in some kind of fat until brown and removed while they're still a little pink inside so they finish cooking while resting.

3. Make the sauce: Fry garlic in butter until golden

4. Add almond flour and sautee until golden

5. Add wine and reduce heat and let simmer for 2 minutes

6. Add sugar, powder fort and parsley with salt to taste

7. Let it sit for a few minutes to thicken

8. Serve over pork, or any white meat of your choice.  

The updated thickened sauce

#medieval #pork #potage #cabbage #chickpeas #sauce