The Cook-A-Long is a virtual kitchen for Medieval and Renaissance Cooking enthusiasts in the SCA. Each month a period recipe will be posted in the original language (when available) and a translation. All cooks are encouraged to try their hand at redacting and preparing the monthly dish and post his/ her results to the blog. If you are interested in becoming a participant in this cook a long, or would like to submit a dish for the month please send an e-mail to valkyr8 (at) yahoo (dot) com.

Sunday, December 30, 2007

Alinore's redaction - Plum Tart

I chose to make the first recipe using dried plums, because they are so readily available in the dried fruit section. I was a bit skeptical of the dough recipe given, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to try it. It did make a passable dough, although I think that perhaps I didn't roll it thin enough because it was a little tougher than I'm used to. The other interesting thing was that it had a flavor that was similar to homemade noodles, which makes sense given the ingredients, but was rather unexpected in a pie.

It's a fairly straightforward recipe, and I did exactly what they said to do. I cut up about 15 dried plums and boiled them in about 1.5 cups of red wine, 3/4 cup of sugar and a tsp. of cinnamon until they were reduced to a thick syrup. I had forgotten about mixing in some eggs into the filling, so I didn't do that, but the fruit mixture was so rich and delicious that it didn't need it.

I think that when I make this again, and I will because it passed both the adult and the 3 year old test as a yummy dish, I will probably use a traditional pie crust because I didn't like the texture of the egg and flour crust.

I also think that if you didn't add quite as much sugar and added more cinnamon to this mixture that it would be a lovely sauce for poultry or beef. It was so fruity and good that we were scraping the pan with a spoon to get all of the syrup out of the pan.

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