Where are the vile beginners of this fray?

To start this blog off with a bang (ye olde bange, as it would have been called), I decided to kick off this past Sunday with not one but two recipes from Shakespeare's Kitchen. Actually, that's a bit of a lie. I started off with two dishes because the entree would have been very lonely on the plate without a side, and because I was really worried about falling behind on the project right off the bat.

NOTE: The previous sentence is also entirely lies. I was so worried about falling behind in my cooking that I began with three dishes, since one of them involved ingredients cooling overnight in the fridge. Renaissance Rice Balls will be featured in the next post. For now, let's just acknowledge that I had already been slaving away for a while, turning on rice cookers and purchasing the wine I had forgotten to pick up earlier, before I actually started cooking.

For my first foray into early modern cookery, I chose Chicken with Wine, Apples, and Dried Fruit and Six Onions Simmered with Raisins, which (I kid you not) involves three onions and sauteing. The Six Onions seemed like a fairly simple dish to make, and since it takes about 17 minutes from start to finish I thought I might be able to squeeze it in during the 30 minutes of occasional stirring at the end of the Chicken. The Chicken was chosen for a number of reasons: it didn't look extremely difficult, didn't take an incredible amount of time, didn't involve kitchen tools I don't possess, and didn't serve ten people. It also didn't involve the two "ingredients" that are going to become the bane of my existence: Renaissance Stock and Renaissance Dough. Many of the recipes in the book involve these two things, which are separate recipes in and of themselves. The Stock in particular is going to be a bitch, since it's fairly labor-intensive, will use up my one big pot, and will overall be annoying to deal with. I know I can freeze it in useful quantities, but some of the recipes call for a tablespoon or two and I don't want to thaw out a cup to get a spoonful.

Let's move on to ingredient prep. This is always the thing that takes the longest when I cook, and I harbor no small amount of ill-will towards cookbooks that promise 15/30 minute recipes but fail to mention that prep time is extra. I'm also really bad at judging what I can do while the cooking is actually occurring, so I like to have everything out of the way. Prepping for the Six Onions was really simple, and mostly involved slicing onions and onion-related vegetables. The great thing about the recipe is that the ingredients are added in two batches, which makes it simple to get everything ready. Onions, leeks, and scallions in the bowl on the right; raisins, brown sugar, salt, and five-color pepper on the left.

Also, did you know this is what leeks looks like in their natural state? I did not. This is the first time I've encountered them outside of a production of Henry V.

I did run into one issue with the recipe, which was the presence of verjuice. I'd never even heard of the stuff before this week, and it turned out that my Whole Foods doesn't carry it. Some in-store internet research later, and I learned that both white wine vinegar and lemon juice could be used as substitutes. I decided to hedge my bets and use a combination of the two.

I'm already beginning to think that ingredient substitution is going to be a running theme of the blog. I couldn't find real currants for the Chicken, so I settled for Zante currants (basically small raisins from black grapes). Although, if Segan wanted currant currants, you'd think she would have specified red or black or etc.

But moving on to the Chicken. Here we have the fruits and spices and such. I learned that dates are absolutely magical, and I would like to eat them all the time.

That's cinnamon and nutmeg over everything. Interesting fact about fresh cinnamon and nutmeg: the good folks at Whole Foods are convinced that if you shake the jar really, really hard, something useful will happen. Note the plastic tops. I'm not a real chef, though, so I had to settle for a grater.

Also! I accidentally poured too much wine into the measuring cup, and there was only one good solution.

Note to self: do dishes before cooking so sink full of dishes doesn't end up on the blog. End note.

The most important thing I learned from prepping the chicken itself was that I am not cut out to be a butcher. The recipe calls for four legs with thighs, separated. I watched two videos and read three tutorials on how to do that, and in the end wound up cutting all four apart through the end of a bone rather than through the joint. Slight fail on my part. Luckily, aside from some ugly drumsticks and marrow bleeding out, there were no ill effects.

At this point, it's a little after 9pm, and I'm starving. Luckily, I have some cold leftover pizza, known in Elizabethan England alternately as "the time-traveler's special" and "what devilry is this?"

Moving on to the cooking. Step one was to brown the chicken, and I was already at a loss. I know that when I brown ground beef, I'm basically cooking it all through. But what about chicken? Was I cooking it, or just putting a crust on it? How long would it take for everything to be cooked completely? Would the 30min simmering in the wine later be enough to keep me from dying if I didn't cook the chicken all the way now? I had no idea.

Here's the chicken browning:

Deglazing with some of the white wine:

Fruit in the pan to make the sauce (can you spot my next mistake?):

Chicken back in the pan with the rest of the wine, and then set to simmer:

Cover that up, and back to the onions! Into the pan they go:

After those saute for a while, the other ingredients get tossed in. Some stirring, then the verjuice-replacement, and then they're done.

The finished product:

I had almost ten minutes to spare when that was finished, which gave me time to check on the Chicken a bit more thoroughly and drink my wine a bit more thoroughly. After determining that the chicken was actually cooked and would not kill me, I was done. 10pm, and dinner was served.

For dessert, I splurged on a pint of Goat Cheese and Cognac Fig ice cream from jeni's Splendid Ice Creams. I did not eat the whole pint. I did manage to fling a large amount of it onto the floor.

The Verdict

Everything turned out delicious! The chicken was really tender, and had a nice fruity taste. I find that a big problem with chicken (at least when you don't marinate it) is that the flavor is all concentrated in the skin. That was the case here to a certain extent, but I was pleasantly surprised by how much of the taste the meat picked up. The dish needed some salt, and in the future I may reduce the sauce a bit more or thicken it so that it sticks to the chicken better.

The Onions were great, but they don't exactly go with the Chicken. Combining the two in one bite was a good way to erase the Chicken completely. I had hoped that the raisins would be a flavor match with the fruit, but they don't seem to add anything to the flavor of the Onions as a whole - they're just bursts of sweetness in the middle of everything else. I was also afraid that all the strong tastes in the Onions would somehow overpower each other (I'm not sure how that works, now that I think about it), but that wasn't the case. The really interesting thing is that when I added the bootleg verjuice, the flavor of the whole dish went in a completely different direction than it seemed to be heading previously. Next time I may just stop the recipe before that step and see if it plays better with others. Interestingly, the original recipe for the Onions involves boiling and an egg tossed in with the verjuice. 

The Chicken is also good cold. The Six Onions is a great sandwich topping.

The ice cream was delicious, as was the wine.

I need to decide on a tense for this blog.