| Cooking with Katja | ||
| Carrot Quiche I was gathering research and my past recipes on period cheesecakes last week with the plan of writing about them when I got an intriguing email from Morgaine. (The former Thescorrean has been merrily redacting recipes in Atlantia and occasionally tells me what she’s done recently or asks for advice on feasts.) She told me that she was trying out the carrot/cheese quiche recipe from a late-16th Century Spanish cookbook, saw that I’d done it for a feast in recent years, and had several questions about not only how I did certain steps but also why I made the choices I did with my redaction of the recipe:
Here’s the original period recipe: Torta de Zanahoria Libro del Arte de Cozina, by Diego Granado, 1599 Wash and scrape the carrots, and remove them from the water and cook them in good meat broth, and being cooked remove them and chop them small with the knife, adding to them mint and marjoram, and for each two pounds of chopped carrots a pound of Tronchon cheese and a pound and half of buttery Pinto cheese, and six ounces of fresh cheese, and one ounce of ground pepper, one ounce of cinnamon, two ounces of candied orange peel cut small, one pound of sugar, eight eggs, three ounces of cow's butter, and from this composition make a torta with puff pastry above and below, and the tortillon with puff pastry all around, and make it cook in the oven, making the crust of sugar, cinnamon, and rosewater. In this manner you can make tortas of all sorts of roots, such as that of parsley, having taken the core out of them. [Translation by Mistress Brighid ni Chiarain (Robin Carroll-Mann), 6/6/2001 webbed here] Here’s my redaction: Carrot Quiche 1 lb. carrots 8 oz. ricotta 1 Tb. butter, softened 2 eggs, beaten pinch minced mint pinch ground marjoram 1 tsp. minced orange peel 1 Tb. sugar Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Drain the ricotta. Clean, peel, and boil the carrots until soft. Mash and mix with the ricotta, butter, and herbs & spices. Pour into a pie pan, smooth the top, and bake for 30 minutes. ©2005 Chris Adler-France On the face of it, quite honestly, it seems like I didn’t follow the original recipe very closely! <smile> It’s pureed, spiced carrots and cheese, baked in a sweet, rich pie shell as you would a tart or cheesecake. And yes, the version I served at a Spanish meal for the Feast of the Seven Deadly Sins in 2005 (http://www.katjaorlova.com/2005F7D.html) was simply in a pie pan, not in a crust in a pie pan. In addition to what Morgaine queried, I left out the rosewater and cinnamon, and also cooked the carrots in water rather than in meat broth. Why would I change all those things if I’m trying to recreate period recipes accurately? The really simple, short answer: it was a redaction for a feast. Whenever I recreate a recipe just for the fun or challenge of it, I try to deduce the ingredients and methods as precisely as I can because that’s good scholarship and it’s fun to play with a recipe that’s hundreds of years old. That makes sense: the point of an A&S entry is to demonstrate how accurately and well you can recreate something that would have been eaten during our period of study. The point of a feast, on the other hand, is to feed as many people as possible as well and thoroughly as you can, on time, on budget, and with good, yummy food based on period recipes. In order to meet the practical needs to feeding scores of people, I think it’s reasonable that the head cook may simplify or modify things, resulting in a redaction that isn’t strictly accurate. Yes, that’s right, I’m saying I think it’s okay if a feast redaction is not a letter-for-letter recreation of a period dish. Shocking, eh? <grin> So, when redacting something for a feast, I often adjust some recipes slightly so as to balance the whole menu. I don’t add different ingredients from those in the original; I just sometimes leave out certain ingredients, especially if they are common in several of the menu’s planned dishes. For example, as I noted in the menu booklet for that feast, many recipes in period Spanish cookbooks contain cinnamon and/or ginger. Since one or both of those spices were in more than half of the recipes––and I didn’t want everything to taste the same or for folks who don’t like either spice to not be able to eat anything!––I left one or the other out of certain recipes. I did not replace them with a different spice than was specified, such as nutmeg or pepper, since that would be straying too far from the original, in my opinion. That’s the same reason why I left out the rosewater: that flavoring was in two other dishes in the meal, and I felt it was more crucial in those recipes than in this one. Sometimes, I modify an ingredient so as to make it possible for more gentles to eat it, taking into account common food allergies, issues, and preferences. The broth versus water is a prime example. If I cook a vegetable in animal broth, as was done in period, vegetarians or gentles with allergies to chicken or beef can’t eat the dish. Substituting vegetable broth or water for meat broth is a simple, fairly equivalent substitution. (Many period Lenten recipes substituted almond milk for broth, but I rarely do that for a feast redaction, no matter how accurate, since so many gentles have nut allergies.) For this same reason, I sometimes sauté vegetables for a feast in oil rather than in bacon or butter. The dish obviously won’t taste as rich and flavorful as if the vegetables were simmered in broth or fried in animal fat, but it means more people are fed and less food comes back to the kitchen at the end of the meal. Another reason for modifying recipes is cost, plain and simple. If I want to serve hearty amounts of meat or other expensive ingredients, I need to balance the rest of menu with less-expensive items so as to keep to the budget I’ve agreed to with the autocrat. Puff pastry is expensive: it requires more butter than normal pie crust. Plus, it can be tricky to work with. I experimented with regular pie crust, which seemed too heavy for the custard-like filling I sought, and phyllo, which had a nice result but really gave the recipe a very different, non-medieval feel. On a whim, I tried the filling in a plain pie pan, much as you would bake a custard, and it was quite successful. Although I preferred the recipe with a crust of some kind, it was cheaper and still yummy to bake it “naked.” In addition, it made the dish a little lighter, which was nice since several other items on the menu were rich. So, I believe my redaction is less sweet and cheesecakey than the original. A final reason may be simply because of lack of ability to determine the correct ingredient. I chose solely ricotta because the original specified “fresh cheese,” and ricotta or drained cottage cheese is a decent working substitution for homemade bag cheese. At the time, I couldn’t find anything about the other two cheeses noted in the original, Tronchon and Pinto. The recipe did note that Pinto was buttery, but gave no descriptions of Tronchon. Based on my experience with other period tarts, I thought it might be a harder cheese, similar to a Parmesan, to balance the flavors and provide some structure. However, I couldn’t verify what they were…and I didn’t want to just toss in Cheddar or another modern cheese and stray far from the intended taste…so I stuck with the ricotta since it was a known ingredient in the recipe. Plus, cheese is expensive in quantity and ricotta can be gotten in bulk at relatively good prices. Now that Morgaine piqued my interest, I took another stab at figuring out the cheeses. Yes, the recipe worked with solely ricotta, but what could I have used? To my delight, this time I managed to track down Tronchon! It’s still manufactured in Spain. It’s a semi-soft, tiny-holed cheese made of sheep, cow, and goat’s milk. However, it’s pretty darn expensive (of course). Reasonable substitutions might be queso blanco (mild and buttery) or possibly havarti (mild, with small holes), I’m thinking. Colby would probably give the same texture, but I think the taste would be too different from the original recipe. I still couldn’t find Pinto queso anywhere in my reference books or on the Internet. The translator of the original couldn’t find it either and substituted mozzarella in her redaction since it was a period cheese, used in other recipes in the Spanish cookbook, and would likely have the same texture. (Plus, once again, it’s relatively cheap in bulk!) Would a Gouda work, or would that change the taste too much? I don’t know—it’s worth trying. I didn't try make it with fresh cheese, since the amount of milk and/or cream needed would have been prohibitively expensive. However, I have made my own cheese and butter for tarts and cheesecakes in the past when I entered them in competition. (Go to http://www.katjaorlova.com/MedFoodPapers.html and scroll down to “Tart in Ymbre Day” for an example.) The freshly made cheese definitely gives the tart a very fine, smooth texture, but I think ricotta (drained for about an hour) worked perfectly fine. Although the recipe didn’t specify a serving temperature, I served it warm. It was a winter event, so warm dishes are generally preferable. It’s possible that it could be tasty at room temperature. Since it looks like I am intrigued to play with this again, I’ll let you know…! |
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