RedHeadedGirl’s Historical Kitchen: A Lunch Spread

I spent the past month or so planning out a small buffet lunch for a friend of mine. In my historical re-enactment group, my friend Bethany was given a VERY large honor (in celebration of all the work she’s put into making our society run), and tradition is that when you get this type of honor, your friends put together a buffet of snacks during the day. When we got word that Bethany was getting this honor, I jumped on the chance to do the food.

Now, every party should, in theory, have a unifying theme. My unifying theme was “stuff that’s good for hot weather.” It was outside, and late August, so I went for cold meats with sauces, various kinds of pickles, fruit, bread, butter, and lemonade and sekanjabin for drinks.  Sekanjabin is an Iranian drink syrup that made with vinegar and sugar, and something for flavoring- mint, ginger, something like that. Mix it with water and it’s got flavor and electrolytes and it’s easier on your tummy than plain cold water.

To make things  a bit more challenging, B has a number of food allergies that I needed to be able to work around. I didn’t want there to be anything on the table she couldn’t eat, and I didn’t want to have to worry about cross contamination. The most vital thing to avoid was gluten, which was actually pretty easy. I also needed to avoid onions and garlic and black pepper, which was limiting but again, not even a little bit impossible.

Of course the conversation with B involved a lot of her going “Oh, don’t go to any trouble, I don’t think anyone should have to deal with my issues” and me going “THIS IS YOUR DAY THIS IS HOW IT WORKS OH MY GOD SHUT UP now tell me, can you eat dates?” All I needed to do was be flexible and creative and know exactly what my limitations were.

It’s like a sonnet. You have a specific form you have to adhere to, but within that form, you can do WHATEVER YOU WANT.

Happily I had several months to work on this. Back in late June, I made pickled asparagus and pickled carrots. I didn’t use period recipes for those, but pickled veggies where I could control all the ingredients was a really good call. Also I got a new canning pot. I CAN CAN ALL THE THINGS NOW (too bad we have a drought and all the farmer’s market produce is sad). The carrots are something I’m especially proud of: I used apple cider vinegar, honey, and fresh ginger and they were REALLY GOOD.

The two meats I picked were chicken and beef – classic reception choices, right? After considering several variations on chicken, I eventually settled on a Roman recipe from my BFF Apicius called Parthian chicken. Apicius calls for wine, lovage, caraway, silphium, pepper, salt, and oil (and chicken, obviously). Three of those ingredients I couldn’t use – wine, pepper, and silphium. Wine and pepper because they’re on the banned list, and silphium because it’s extinct.

This is one of the joys of historical cooking!

Lucky for us, it became extremely scarce during the Roman era (because it was used SO MUCH IN FOOD) so we have a period substitution for it: Asafoetida. It’s used in a lot of Indian cooking, so it’s not even hard to find. I have some left over from a feast I did three years ago, and luckily I’d made it a point to find a gluten free version in liquid form (in powder form, it’s got wheat powder in it to keep it from clumping). It’s got kind of a funky smell, and what it mainly does is deepen flavors and add another layer of complexity.  Just don’t overuse it.

For the wine, I got 100% grape juice and added lemon juice to it. Lovage is an herb that tastes a little like celery, but like, WAY MORE celery. I have a friend who grows it and gives me a bunch of seeds every year.  I dry-roasted the lovage and caraway, ground them up, and put the chicken in baking pans with an inch or so of the “wine” and the spices, then splashed on some oil and salt and let it cook at 375 until I had an internal temp of 165. This method gets you a sweet, tender chicken with salty, slightly bitter (but not in bad way) notes. Then I threw it in the fridge and dragged people over to make them try it cold (“HERE TRY THIS” “What is it?” “WHO CARES DOES IT TASTE GOOD?”). It was all proclaimed to be good.

And roast beef is a roast beef, and I used the method from my OTHER BFF Markham (English, 1615) that I’ve used twice before: get a roast, put it in a baking dish with the fat layer on top, and stud the fat layer with whole cloves, and then do what the Joy of Cooking tells you to do.

I made a green sauce for the beef with vinegar, fresh parsley, fresh sage, olive oil, salt, lemon juice, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, and gluten free bread crumbs. It’s based on a 14th century French recipe, and is VERY good on cold beef and VERY good for hot days. Basically anything vinegar-based will be.  In addition, I also had a mustard. I like giving people options.

In addition, we had fresh berries and hard boiled eggs, and four different kinds of cheese.

Another friend made gluten free bread (Bob’s Red Mill now has a gluten free whole grain variety so the bread was REALLY good for GF bread!) and got GF cookies. We both had moments of “Oh, god what if there’s not enough food” and I had her talk me down from getting another roast – which was good, because we did have leftovers.

I really like putting meals together. I’m not allowed to head up cooking feasts anymore because I kept getting injured (it’s hilarious NOW, but both the 2009 feast and the 2013 feast had me in the ER before the events so everyone said I was done. Including my mom). But a small (well, “small”) spread like this is a lot of fun. It’s not uncommon to see these types of tables not have period food at all, which makes me, as a historical food nerd, sad.

And I liked being able to provide good, period, safe food for Bethany! I told her that it wasn’t easy, but it also wasn’t actually difficult; it just required a lot of thought, and a little experimentation, and flexibility. You’re always deciding which battles you want to fight when re-creating historical food, and I feel very good about how this one came out.

I just wanted to share with y’all what I do with all this knowledge and cooking I do!