Cook Like It's 1399

Last night I dragged my girlfriend and roommates back in time. Well, their taste buds, anyway. The Dulcinea 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 it, I also prepared some kielbasa domowa while The Dulcinea fried up some Swiss chard as her body had a hankering for 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've got 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 have some great Polish rye and didn't want to buy anymore bread. I opted for white 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 bloody 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 think it was around this time that The Dulcinea and I paused for some kirschwasser which is cherry brandy.



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 ass? 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 doughh 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 are sharp enough to deal with a chicken right now. I have to pull out my knife sharpener and get me some edges! You know, when I was a kid, there was a tinker or whatever title there is for someone who sharpens knives who would come through our neighborhood and sharpen knives. Whatever happened to such people? This was only (gasp!) about 30 years ago. 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 The Dulcinea 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, lemme tell ya. The kielbasa was great. Nice coarse grind, lots of garlic, and heavily smoked. The greens were excellent too. I gave mine a douche of sherry vinegar which was another foodstuff of the wealthy back in medieval times. A tasty meal and plenty hearty for these chilly nights.

I couldn't shake my hankering for chocolate and so I did a spot of night-baking by making a chocolate bundt cake. The recipe called for a glaze but, again, I misread the recipe and didn't buy enough bittersweet chocolate so it was served naked.



Finally, I want to apologize for my photography. It seems like everyone but me can take nice, tempting photos of food. I swear to you, dear readers, that someday I'll learn how to use my camera followed by Photoshop. For now, we'll have to suffer with my lackluster culinary photography.