Eat! Eat! You're too thin...
(last updated 2/27/03)
Or, some plausibly post-Byzantine foods circa 1550.
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Reconstructing 'recipes' for this time and place is more difficult than cooking, say, a plausible English meal from circa 1550. There are no actual Byzantine cookbooks to turn to, and modern Greek/Turkish cookbooks rarely give more than a general nod to the history of a dish. So, what to do? I decided to stick to the 'plausible' idea: food items that would have been available (for example, pomegranate yes; tomatoes and potatoes no!) & have a long history of use. I'll be looking at some Islamic recipes from the middle ages (see Cariadoc's Miscelanie) and modern cookbooks, especially the recently published The Ottoman Kitchen. I'm luck in that I have easy access to a Greek specialty shop (Mariakakis, in Chapel Hill, NC), so not only will I be using some hard to find Greek spices (mahlep, for one), I will also use imported honey, olive oil, etc. It's true that these items, being the products of modern industry, won't be true representations of what was used in the past, but the subtle differences in flavor should add to success (?) of each dish. |
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| Click on an item to jump to the recipe Avgolemono Tiropeta with similar period recipes from Italy Variation on a Rice Pilaf Pomegranate Sherbert (coming soon) |
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| NEW! Click here to read Nicolay's description of 16th C Turkish food, based on his experiences in Constantinople. |
Avgolemono (Lemon, egg and chicken soup)
Supposedly this soup dates back well into Byzantine times. It's a classic chicken
soup, with lemon and egg added. I prefer mine with rice.
If you're lazy, use my favorite basic recipe: take a 46 oz of chicken broth, bring to a boil and add 1 cup of rice. Simmer until rice is tender. Strain out two cups of the broth. Mix two eggs together with FRESH juice of 1 good sized lemon (using the bottled stuff never works right IMO, but if you have to, eh, 3 tbs should do it), and add the strained broth into the egg mixture, slowly. This is important--adding the hot broth into the eggs (slowly) cooks the eggs in the proper manner...then combine the mixture back with the soup, stir, and serve. In The Ottoman Kitchen a version of this recipe notes that after adding the egg mixture to the soup "on no account allow [it] to boil after this stage or the soup will curdle." (p. 25)
If working with canned broth, remember to refridgerate it first so you can skim off the extra fat. Also, broth made from free-range chickens is available in some food stores...
If you're not lazy, make a basic chicken soup (3 lb chicken, a couple of quarts of water, seasonings to taste, simmer for a couple of hours...) instead of using prepackaged broth.
Tiropeta (cheese "pie")
1 box of frozen philo, properly thawed (I am not crazy enough to make my own
philo...although I thought about it VERY briefly)
1 stick UNSALTED butter, melted
6 eggs (from free range, cage free chickens, please)
1 lbs goats milk feta cheese (don't use sheep milk feta...I did once by accident,
and even the cat wouldn't eat the results)
Some milk (1/4 c?), some sugar...
Soak the feta in warm water until water cools, and pour it out. This leeches out some of the saltiness. Beat the eggs, crumble in the cheese, add some milk, & throw in some sugar to cut the sharpness of the feta. Lay down about half the philo in a baking sheet (9x11x2 works well), first brushing the pan and then each layer of philo with butter. Pour in the filling.Top it off with the rest of the philo (again, butter between each layer). Precut into squares or triangles, cutting through the top half only. Sprinkle water along the edges to keep them from burning, and bake at 350 degrees for about a half hour. If the top seems to be browning too much, cover with foil. Or, start off with it covered, and remove for the last 10 minutes or so. Serve either hot or cold. It's incredibly yummy if you peel back the top layers of philo and add a little sugar, especially if the feta tastes too sharp for you.
When my grandmother taught me to cook a few Greek dishes (tiropeta, baklava) she really did say things like "add some milk." I'd say, "well, how much?" And she'd say "oh, about this..." and pour in some milk...
Notes on using philo: The trick is, how to keep the dough moist, but not too moist? My grandmother always did so by keeping a damp, lightweight towel on top of the dough. Make sure it's not too damp, though--if the philo gets really wet it becomes a horrible mess. If it gets too dry it cracks and tears. So...peel off a sheet of philo, rapidly cover the rest with the towel, lay down the layer and brush with butter; or, lay down the layer, cover up the dough, brush the layer in the pan, uncover the dough again, peel off a layer...repeat.
Is philo dough period? Anecdotally,
yes. Also, there is an unusually detailed Italian recipe for a dish called a
"Hungarian Torta" that quite clearly involves layering multiple thin
layers of dough, just like philo. The recipe (quoted below) reminds me of my
aunt's recalling working together with her mother to stretch out their homemade
philo dough.
| Recipe for "Hungarian Torta" in The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy, Odile Redon, Francoise Sabban and Silvano Serventi, translated by Edward Schneider. University of Chicago Press, 1998, 149. | ...take some flour, enough to make three loaves, the best you can get....take the flour and mix it with fresh water, salted with a little salt, and knead it vigorously; when it is well kneaded, take a well-tinned copper testo and grease it with the fat. Take the dough, knead it, and flatten it with a large spoon and make it thin; two of you should stretch it thin, by the sheet, with the fat, and make as many as 18 sheets; and then take the stuffing of capon and other ingredients and make a layer of it on half [of the sheets], then put the other sheets atop this layer, each one well greased with the fat; and make a top crust for protection... |
A period recipe The recipe below for an Italian Torta Bianca is very similar to my recipe for tiropeta. By the way, there are also several periodrecipes for items very similar to spanikopeta using multiple greens, including spinach.
| Recipe for "Torta Bianca" in The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy, Odile Redon, Francoise Sabban and Silvano Serventi, translated by Edward Schneider. University of Chicago Press, 1998, 157. | Take a libra and a half of good fresh cheese and cut it up fine, and pound it very well; take 12 or 15 egg whites and blend them very well with this cheese, adding half a libra of sugar and half an oncia of the whitest ginger you can find, as well as a half libra of good, white pork lard, or instead of lard, good, fresh butter, and some milk, as much as needed...then make the pastry, or the crust, [put it] into the pan, as thin as it ought to be, and cook it nicely with fire both below and above; and make sure the that the top is a little colored from the heat of the fire; and when it seems cooked, remove it from the pan and put fine sugar and good rose water on top. |
Rice: a variation on the "Sultan Suleyman"
pilaf
"There are also to be sold pies of minced meat,
and rice dressed with butter and almonds very savory and of a good taste..."
From The Navigations, Perigrinations and Voyages Made into
Turkey. (16th Cetury)
This recipe is based on those for the Topkapi pilaf and the Suleyman pilaf included in the Ottoman Kitchen. I have altered the recipes to suit my own tastes (for example, they call for scallions, but I hate the idea of scallions in my rice...) Rice was a staple food for the Ottomans, and there were (and are) many different variations.
1 1/4 c long grain rice
1/2 c almonds
1/2 tsp cinammon
2/3 c currants
2 tbs pine nuts
6 back pepper corns
3 cloves
2 tbs butter
1 tbs olive oil
2 1/2 c chicken stock
salt to taste
Soak, rinse and drain the rice, and set it aside. Heat the olive oil in a pan
and cook the pine nuts and the almonds until the the uts are light brown. Remove
from the heat, and add in the cinnamon and currants.
Bring the chicken stock almost to the boiling point. In another pan melt the
butter, and when it foams add the rice. Make sure the rice is well coated, then
add peppercorns and cloves. Then add in the ckickenstock, and stir just once.
Bring to a boil, and then simmer for 10-12 minutes until the stock is fully
absorbed. Remove from the heat, and fold in the nut and currant mixture. Cover
the pan with a dishtowel, and on top of it a lid. Let the mixture sweat for
10-15 minutes--off the heat, and without removing the lid even once "just
to check on it." Fluff up the rice with a fork before serving.
Include small pieces of cooked lamb at the same time as you add the currant/nut
mix to come closer to the "Suleyman" recipe.
In the "strange things you start to notice while obsessing about a project"
category: I was buying my currants from the bulk section at the local
organic store, and the bin had a label on it explaining that yes, currants are
basically very small raisins, made from a specific type of grape. That grape
was (so the label read) orginally grown in Corinth (Greece) in ancient times,
and the name "currant" is derived from the name of the city.
About store bought chicken stock: While
listening to "The Splendid Table" on NPR recently (winter 2003), a
food critic survey of the best store bought chicken stock was reported. The
winner: College Inn broth in a can.
Pomegranate: From syrup to sherbert! (coming soon)