Adam Balic

Depends on the cut really. If it is a large chunk, pot roasted is good. If you would like a sauced meat this recipe is traditional in Tuscany. Not normally with pasta, but with pasta is good. 500 gm of lean wild boar shoulder (or other game meat) cut into 4 by 6 cm pieces 1/2 tsp of grated orange zest. 50 gms of finely chopped unsmoked pancetta 2 onions, one roughly chopped, one finely chopped 2 large carrots, one roughly chopped, one finely chopped 2 sticks of celery, including greens, one roughly chopped, one finely chopped 2 bay leaves, a sprig each of rosemary, thyme and sage leaves, tied in a bundle. 2 Tbs of white sugar 3 Tbs of finely chopped flat-leaf parsley 4 Tbs of good quality white wine vinegar 1 cup of dry white wine 1 cup of chicken stock Salt and black pepper Extra virgin olive oil Method: 1. Take the roughly chopped vegetables and gently sauté in a little olive oil. When beginning to soften, take off the heat and add white wine. Allow to cool. Place wine and vegetables in a bowl, add meat and allow to marinate overnight in a cool place. 2. Drain meat (reserving the marinade) and pat dry. Discard the vegetables. 3. In a large flameproof casserole, sauté the finely chopped vegetables and pancetta in a little olive oil. When the vegetables soften, add orange zest and meat. Gently brown the meat. Add the reserved marinade, chicken stock and herbs. Bring to boil then reduce to a simmer and cook for 2.5 hours or until meat is tender. 4. Discard the herbs. Strain the meat and vegetables, reserving the liquid, and put both aside. 5. In a small saucepan, gently heat the sugar until it begins to dissolve and caramelize. Add the vinegar and mix until sugar is completely dissolved. Heat gently for 1 minute then add the strained liquid that you set aside in step 4. Reduce liquid to one cup. Taste and season with salt and pepper. Add the parsley and the reserved meat and vegetables. The sauce should be very slightly sweet and tangy, but the flavours of the herbs and meat should dominate. Keep sauce warm. It looks like this.

Dinner for six. Mostly Italian. The pasta is an unusual one I had in Lipari, one of the Aeolian islands of the coast of Sicily. The original was a swordfish recipe, but these are not common in Scotland, so this a mixture of cod and wolf-fish/seacat. The flgavours are:mint, capers, pinenuts, tomato, garlic and cooked green apple. Odd but always popular. The main is fish baked in vine leaves, again with capers, tomato and mint and from the same island. Originally, the fish was a scorpianfish, this is a red snaper. Dessert was Artusi's frittelle di riso I. These were really, really good. We ate many of them.

The greens are pasta with a local sauce called 'pesto'. Quite unusual, but it could catch on.

Kevin - I love this thread and especially the food from Liguria. Thanks for putting so much effort. This is a happy snap of my last meal in Liguria (your thread reminded me that I had some from a while ago). The dish is called an 'amphora' and is named after the vessel it is baked in. Basically, a seafood stew.

This is about right. You have to remember that "Roast" beef is now pretty much baked in an oven rather then being roasted in front of a heat source. This site explains it best, scroll down to Dripping pan puddings.

During the pig killing season a congealed blood clot thing and sugar is eaten in Chinati. Tastes like blood. In Syracuse I ate wild artichokes (= very damn spikey thistles) that a chap was selling cold and cooked from the back of his Ape. Tasty, but ultimately not worth the pain. Oh yeh, raw sausage are spread on bread in Chinati and eaten with new oil. Trichinella yummy.

I am willing to swap....Any time really.

A friend gave me a 8lb trout, so I had a few friends over for dinner. This was a variation on brandade de morue, using Scottish Abroath Smokies, rather then salt cod. Abroath Smokies have recently been given regional protection by the EU, as well they should because they are delicious. Hot smoked haddock, sold in pairs like these The finished dish looked like this, you know white gloop. The main was the trout cooked in brioche, with cod for contrast. Unfortunately, the damn oven turned itself off 15 minutes into the process, so the pastry didn't rise or brown as much as I would have liked. The scale is poor, but it is about 60 cm long. Next days left overs. For dessert I made a Normandy Apple, calvados, almond and creme fraiche tart. This was great, but I forgot to take a photo.

Adam, where are you located that you were able to find Pomfret? ← percyn - I am located in Edinburgh, Scotland of all places. There is one great fishmonger that imports Austral-Asian fish. Eddie's Edinburgh

Pomfret with three flavours sauce, streamed rice, braised veg and prawn crackers.

Glad you llike the pictures CB. Eddie and his staff are incredibly nice people, even for a punter like me they make a hugh effort.

Andy's thread on the state of the Brighton market remined me that Edinburgh often lacks a variety of decent fish in its fishmongers and resturants, which is bizarre since we are located near some great fishing grounds. However, if in Edinburgh you don't have to get sucked into eating mushy farmed seabass. Great fish is found at "Eddies Seafood". These people are lovely and they stock a range of North Atlantic and Austral-Asian fish. The latter being fresher then the majority of 'local' fish I see elsewhere in Edinburgh. Dublin bay prawns, razor clams and crab Sabre fish. I have seen these in Sicily, but they are also very popular in the local Chinese community. Kingfish from the Indian Ocean and some local Halibut. The king fish is about 120 cm long. A mixed bin of South-East Asian fish, including tonights dinner. Which will be these Pomfret.

Paula - I have a mid-80's paperback printing (I think), a brown cover with a tagine that looks suspciously similar to this one:

There are too few English language regional cookbooks. Several exist, but although very good many of them pick a few examples from several regions, rather then concentrating on one region. This means that there is a lot of repetition in the recipes and sometimes a lack of details in the text.

Kevin - I read about the post and though 'I bet the chestnut flour was oxidised', I see you thought the same. What a bugger, as the trofie look great. Chestnut flour is very perishable (which I found out in a similar way to you) and therefore, it has a very short shelf life. One suggestion I have seen is to buy small batches of fresh flour and to keep it in the freezer.

One last thing. I have mentioned it before and so have other people, but I would like to say how much I appreciate Paula's knowledge and ability to communicate it, both here and especially her books. It is fun to recreate historical recipes, bring tagines back from Morocco to play about with temperature probes, but none of this would have occured for me if I hadn't found a copy of her Moroccan cookbook some years ago. The book is brilliant, the amount of information in it is staggering and the recipes always turn out.

Nancy - the book is called "Medieval Arab Cookery, essays and translations by Maximime Rodinson, A.J. Arberry and Charles Perry", published by Prospect books in 1998. I paraphrased the title a bit originally. You can order it from the publisher. Only the lamb recipe is from this book, the other two are from Paula's books. Regarding the above rant of mine. The lamb dish is an indulgence. I make these extinct dishes it for myself and some friends, if the don't work, well that is OK*. The original recipe is pretty exact on weights and amounts of ingredients. I cut back on the fruit slightly, as I thought it might be a bit too sweet for some of my guests. When I spoke of old new, I actually ment extant cooking v some of the new stuff that gets marketed as 'Moroccan'. Not that I have any trouble with new ideas and techniques, that is the nature of cooking. What I don't like is bad food and sometimes a new idea based on a established cuisine or cooking technique just doesn't work or is bad. Moroccan cooking sometimes sufferes from this as it commonly seen as 'that cooking with fruit'. It isn't easy creating new recipes and really good natural cooks are rare. I'm not one and I wonder how many people are. Hey, I posted this yesterday! "OK, Lamb was put in the tagine at 4:00 pm, it took 1.5 hours to the probe to reach 75.C. At this point I mixed the meat about, the probe meat which had been at the bottom dropped to 68.C when placed on the top. By 6:00 pm the meat had reading was 78.C. This is on the lowest gas setting. Just tested the meat, I think it will require another half an hour our so. It seems that from a cold start a tagine is very gentle, but once up to temperature it delivers quite a bit of heat on a very low setting". The meat got up to 82.C in the end, a little too hot maybe. I took it off the heat for 40 minutes and with the lid on the temp dropped to 72.C. * I always learn, even if the dish is dodgy. This time around I learnt a lot about jujubes and that nigella seeds, which are sold as onion seeds when ever I see them, are not onion seeds, not related to onions, but are the seeds of a plant that is closely related to flower 'Love in the Mist'.

The bisteeya was excellent and my wife loves it. I think that some of the issues with New Style or Moroccan inspired dishes is that I think that people in the English speaking world have not really mastered all the traditional recipes and cooking techniques yet. No sure how far you can go forward without having a good grasp of the past. I would love to see, just once, lamb cooked with cardoons, rather then yet another bland chicken with apricot dish. I was thinking about the ginger thing. I don't have an issue with fresh v dried, except they taste quite different, the dried being more 'warming', rather then a bright flavour like the fresh stuff.

More of last nights tagine cooking. This is the appearance of the lamb after over night contact with the spices and grated onion. The is no liquid added, the tagine is then very gently heated, the meat being moved about until it becomes fragrant. After 40 minutes the lamb is still pink, but has released a great deal of liquid. After two hours the meat is nearly done, most of the liquid has been reabsorbed. At this point the meat is pink on the inside, that sauce is a medium brown. At this point the vinegar and sugar are added, this ressults in a colour change, resulting in a dark brown sauce. The meat is well done, but still pink (due to the slow initial warm up), the fruit has completely disolved While this is resting, I prepared Paula's seafood bisteeya. The only changes I have made are to use turnip greens, rather then spinach, and to mix shredded carrots braised in butter and cumin. Not very neat presentation and shoddy couscous, but the cook had been drinking for a while at this stage. For dessert, "The Snake". This was pre-the final presentation, it was very popular. Both the Bisteeya and the tagine were very well recieved. I was concerned about the tagine as it was very sweet and the spices are quite full on. But six people ate two kilos of meat, most had never eaten a Moroccan dish before, let alone a recipe that hasn't been made for a few hundred years.

Yep, caught on a fly. It is illegal to fish in most rivers on a Sunday in Scotland, so this was caught in a stocked loch. Hence, it is a North American rainbow trout, rather then a local brown trout.

So I guess it is not gutted! Elie ← The blueing is what happens when the mucus layer on the trout becomes fixed. The same type of thing what happens to egg white proteins when they denature by heat, or by acid etc. They coaggulate and turn the white from clear to opaque. In the case of the trout, the mucus layer is thin and goes only semi-opaque, hence the blue look. It isn't essential that the fish is alive, just that it has an intact mucus layer. What I did was to put the fish into hot mild acid solution (1:4 vinegar to water), until the colour change occured, then poached it in a court boullion until cooked.

The main thing I notice with my tagine is that I never add liquid. The liquid that comes out of the meat is more then enough. OK added the vinegar/sugar syrup. Taste tested. Is very good. Meat tender, liquid reabsorbed and very dark. Interestingly, because of the vinegar this dish tastes more European (eh, medieval that is) than typical extant Muslim. Definately a keeper.

OK, Lamb was put in the tagine at 4:00 pm, it took 1.5 hours to the probe to reach 75.C. At this point I mixed the meat about, the probe meat which had been at the bottom dropped to 68.C when placed on the top. By 6:00 pm the meat had reading was 78.C. This is on the lowest gas setting. Just tested the meat, I think it will require another half an hour our so. It seems that from a cold start a tagine is very gentle, but once up to temperature it delivers quite a bit of heat on a very low setting. Paula - the blender did a good job of the spices, I have pounded them a bit to get rid of the fluffy quality. I mostly order seperate spices, but I will give SP a go, as sometimes I haven't got time to blend 20 spices. It is well worth trying some of the recipes, especially since some of cooking styles don't really exist in Muslim cooking now. But it is a bit of a crap shoot.

One of the issues with producing a workable recipe from this transaltion is that although a blend of spices is required, the exact formula isn't obvi ous. So I have made my own blend with what I have. Some of the ingredients would definately not be in use in 14th century North Africa. The spices I have used are:Ceylon cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, star anise, tumeric, ginger, allspice, green cardamon, black cardamon, wild fennel, long pepper, rose buds, cloves, grains of paradise, black pepper, chiles, coriander and cumin. Blended they look like this. These are the plumped fruits, the jubjubes are the red fruits.

Thanks for the advice (where were you 3 years ago? ), I have cooked with it a couple of dozen time, orginally on a diffuser, but now I put it directly on the gas. No problems yet (crosses fingers).