Florentines, or Inadvertently Stepping All Over English Culinary Tradition

Guess who still has kidneys in the refrigerator from a Roman wine casserole!
Me, that's who. And while I might be inclined to chuck them out and pretend that offal never happened in my food, we're instead going to make something comparatively modern with them!

A Florentine of Flesh.Take the Kidneies of Veale and chop them very small with Corance, dates, sinamon and Ginger, Sugar, salt, and the yolks of three Egs, and mingle altogither, and make a fine paste with yolks of egges, and butter, and let there be Butter in your dishe bottome, then drive them to small Cakes, and put one in the dish bottom, and lay your meat in, then lay your other upon your meat, and close them togither, and cut the cover and it, when it is baked then strew Sugar and serve it out.

Don't you just love how the spelling isn't even consistent in the same recipe?
My take on this ^*:

Florentines 2 pork kidneys* 1-2 dozen dates, chopped 1 heaping tbsp. minced fresh ginger ⅓ c raisins ⅓ c dried currants† 3 egg yolks ½ c sugar Cinnamon to taste (be generous) Pie crust dough‡ Grease 10 holes in a cupcake pan well and line them with crust. Finely chop the kidneys, or if it proves too difficult since they slip all over the place whenever you try to put a knife to them, use a blender. Mix the kidneys and everything else up. Put into the crust-cups, leaving space for them to boil and bubble up as they bake. Cut out lids of pie crust and put them on top of the pies, dipping your finger in water and wetting the rims of the cups to glue the tops on. Cut vent holes in them. Bake at 350° until a meat thermometer registers 160°.§ *No one in my vicinity sold kidneys from a cow, whether it was a calf or an adult. Hopefully this didn't fundamentally ruin the recipe in ways I don't realize since I can't compare them. †Just chop some raisins into tiny bits (or put them into a small cup and have at them with scissors) - no one will know the difference. ‡I'm not writing out the instructions for this. I failed at making it so I don't think I ought to. §Bake it less if you like, but since some of the meat where I shop is changing color I don't undercook it.

Note: I said comparatively modern. Just like Cleopatra's reign is nearer to our time than to the building of the great pyramids, so too is this recipe nearer to now than when Apicius was dumping wine into patinas. But you know what? I don't want to actually face the kidneys, so why not make the crust first?

I have no idea what the egg yolks are supposed to do, but there they are!

And now, to the fridge with you!

The last time I tried resting and refrigerating the dough first, it worked better than I could ever have hoped. Seriously, that dough was sturdier, more flexible, and all around better than the ones you buy, much less the crumbly ones I've been rolling out all this time. I don't roll out a pie crust so much as flatten the dough and make a pie pan-sized patch job. So, assuming the refrigerator has magic fairies who bespell pie crust if it sits there long enough for them to find it, I bagged it up and put it in! No more patchwork pie crusts! Ha!

I still didn't want to get out the kidneys (they look like animal parts and I don't care that I'm revealing myself as a ninny about this). Therefore, I decided to spend a really long time making sure I had everything else just so (let's never mind that I forgot to add the salt).
I'm always somewhere between surprised and amused at how many old Western recipes require a trip to the middle-Eastern grocery store. In the past, I've gotten things like verjuice, asafoetida, fish sauce, and rose water (which shows up in a lot of desserts up to at least the mid-1800s). Today, it's ginger, dates, and kidneys. We'll get to the latter one later. Granted, I have seen dates for sale at most stores, but they're boxed like super fancy foreign delicacies and priced accordingly. The same goes for ginger. I never bother with powdered ginger; I've dumped so much into things I may as well have used a measuring cup instead of a spoon--- and still not been able to taste it.

As tasty as dates are, I can't stop thinking they look like they'll start crawling off the plate.

I'd picked this recipe out as an interesting way to use up the remains of my Roman failure, and figured either this would be my supper or I'd end up getting dinner out of the microwave. It occurred to me as I was getting out the other things-- I think this is mincemeat. Why the heck are they calling it a florentine? Am I seriously about to make mince pies? After all my ranting about Christmas starting earlier and earlier every year, am I about to make some of the inevitable recipes of a country I've never been to? Whatever, it's somewhere around 11:30 at night and I still haven't eaten.

Dried fruits and ginger. Keep in mind this is a meat recipe.

The kidneys can wait because unlike last time I made a recipe that called for them, I did in fact find dried currants! Those would be the little black things on the plate. They are so tiny! I was really disappointed when I tried them though- they taste just like raisins. Now I know that next time I'm supposed to use currants to just put raisins in a little cup and scissor them to bits.

All right, we've put it off long enough. Time to open the refrigerator and get out the kidneys. I know it said veal kidneys, but the only ones I could find anywhere were pork. I do hope that isn't the ruin of me.
They were impossible to chop (they just slipped and slithered everywhere). A stick blender got involved. You know how sometimes what you're doing makes you question everything you've ever done to bring you to what you're up to at that moment?

Well, they did say to mince it finely.

Also, if you're going to use a stick blender on raw meat in a mixing bowl, set said bowl in the sink. Let me be the voice of experience here forewarning you of error and preventing kidney splats all over the place.
Anyway, time to add all the other stuff!

I know whenever I eat kidneys, I want them with lots of dried fruit and seasoned like apple pie.

Maybe I was supposed to just use a little of everything, but I didn't. And honestly, it smelled... well, the meat was strong with this one, but on top of it was the smell of dessert. It was good, so I'd like to think I was doing this one right.

Stranger things have happened.

Then I realized I was missing something:

They look so bright.

Yep, I nearly left out the one ingredient in this entire recipe that comes with an amount. I guess their purpose in this endeavor is to make them set.

Great, now it's even runnier.

All right, that's the florentine done. Now let's see if the refrigerator fairies did their magic on this pie crust like the last one!

Looks like they didn't.

The recipe says I should be encasing the meat between discs of crust by now. The phrasing's a bit tricky, but it looks like I should be making a few little pies and not one big one. Therefore, to the cupcake pan!

There was a lot of work turning all those little crust pieces into this.

And here are my attempts at putting lids on top. While I had been planning for there to be vents on them, I'd hoped for something nicer than this. Thinking of how easy it was to mess with the crust for the patina, I'd actually imagined cutting out pretty designs. You can kind of see a progression as the dough gets less and less brittle, so maybe if I'd had enough to keep going, I could have started cutting out something better.

You know those Pinterest "nailed it" pictures?

As I am presently without a meat thermometer and really not in the mood for getting sick off of an undercooked pig kidney, I baked this for 45 minutes. It probably was a bit too long, but I'm not sick and love staying that way. When it was done, it smelled like a kitchen when a big dinner is underway and the roast and the apple pie are both partially made.
When the time was up, I opened the oven and realized the pan will be soaking overnight.

It is very odd when your kitchen smells like dessert and your pan has meatloaf drippings all over it.

And despite the butter I put in the dishe bottome, my florentines were not coming out. So I grabbed a fork and ate out of the pan. And...
It tastes like something you'd get cravings for. That's honestly the best way I can think to describe it. Meat taste under all the spices and raisins is unnerving at first, but I can definitely see how people would want this because they had it when they were little. And once you get past the "I've never had this before!" and "I don't know if this is dinner or dessert!" stages of confusion, this is really tasty.
It's really strange today because it's neither dinner nor dessert; it's kind of both but mostly neither. From what I've read, apparently main meal/dessert distinction came later in culinary history. The leftovers, scooped out of the pan, refrigerated well. Honestly, as weird as this was, I already kind of want to make it again.
And so, to close, here is the one that came closest to coming out in one piece:

---

* We at A Book of Cookrye makes no claims to doing this in any way that even vaguely resembles "period correct." Even if we did have the requisite background knowledge, we don't have the kitchen supplies. Oh, and I just figured out how to make footnote links that jump back and forth, which is awesome. I am amazed at myself for making the arrow after this sentence take you right back where you left off. ⤴

Portuguese Farts are Honey Tarts

Today, to ensure a dignified tone, we're starting with a quote from Great Literature.

Yesterday, though, we heard the king of farts,
It smelled as sweet as honey tarts,
While it wasn't in the strongest of voice,
It still came on as a powerful noise.

-Mozart

Yes, yes, earlier I promised Portuguese Farts, and as with any recipe with a name like that, by all the Gods I'm going to deliver! This comes from the online transcript of A Book of Cookrye. The last time we made a recipe out of A Book of Cookrye, it was only slightly scary looking and tasted disappointingly normal. Hopefully, today's recipe will be a real gas (rimshot!).

I'd like to note that unlike a lot of my other middle-of-the-night baking escapades, not only did I have friends over, but friends bearing cupcake pans! So Mike, thanks for bringing your mom's pans. After you repeatedly told me not to, I made damn sure not to scratch them so when she finds out you lent them, it won't be from finding new claw marks all over them. And Maria, who cleaned the kitchen when we weren't looking. Seriously, it was like we like a benevolent kitchen spirit- we'd turn around and hey look, the stove's been wiped!

Here's the original:

To make Farts of Portingale*.
Take a quart of life Hony, and set it upon the fire and when it seetheth scum it clean, and then put in a certaine of fine Biskets well serced, and some pouder of Cloves, some Ginger, and powder of sinamon, Annis seeds and some Sugar^†, and let all these be well stirred upon the fire, til it be as thicke as you thinke needfull, and for the paste for them take Flower as finelye dressed as may be, and a good peece of sweet Butter, and woorke all these same well togither, and not knead it.

*Portingale- the 1500s name for Portugal. Thanks, OED!
^†I decided after dumping in all that honey that I could leave this out.

I desperately hope that this recipe's name is not a mistype. If the original book calls it Tarts of Portingale, I will be very very sad.

Portuguese Farts ½ c. butter Flour (sorry, didn't measure) Water Pinch salt 2 sleeves graham crackers* 1 (24 oz.) honey bottle† Cloves Nutmeg Cinnamon Anise Extract Heat oven to 350°. Make the little crusts:‡ Mix the butter and flour together salt, adding more until you've got a kind of coarse meal that barely holds together when you squeeze it in your hand. Add enough cold water that you can roll it out (some people use iced water, I just take it right from the tap), and then roll it thin. Tear off pieces of the dough and press them into ungreased cupcake tins- you should end up with 12. Bake until cooked through and somewhat golden. Take out of the tins- they should fall right out. Set them on an ungreased cookie sheet. Make the filling: Pulverize the graham crackers- I just set them on the counter and took a rolling pin to them. Put in a saucepan and add honey to get a sort of thin paste. Add the spices- be very generous with the cinnamon and nutmeg, moderate with the anise, and conservative (but not overly so) with the cloves. Cook it a bit over medium-low heat to soften the crumbs, and add more spices to taste. Pour or spoon into the shells. Bake until the tops are crispy, but don't leave them in too long. *Apparently biscuits in the UK are cookies in the US, so I'm figuring it was also true in 1590s England. Also, I'm being shamelessly cheap- or at least as cheap as you can be while dumping a whole bottle of honey into one recipe. †No, you won't use all of it. ‡Or you can buy premade shells; I was just too cheap curious how it'd taste in the crust the recipe specifies.

I brought this book home to show my mother when I'd printed it, and she was reading it out loud to get past the spellings. I laughed so hard when she got to this one: "...then cast in your dredge and serve it out hot or cold. That one actually sounds good. To make Farts of Portingale. Take a quart of life honey, and... wait a minute, FARTS OF WHAT!?"

Making the crust- I just threw in a stick of butter and guessed at the flour.

This book's really interesting- obviously, given all the heavy spices and such, you can tell this was for those rich enough to afford it.

I deliberately went for that "homemade charm."

Just about all the really fancy recipes have lots of dried fruit, especially ones you'd have to import from who knows where like dates. And everything from cherries to chicken is liberally sugared because- well, have you seen sugar prices of the late 1500s? What better way to show your guests how much richer you presumably are than they than to literally put it down their throats?

I didn't know if this was a promising or ominous beginning.

But honestly, while a lot of things are just shoved into foods to show you can afford them (much like today, where the more expensive the restaurant, the more likely you'll find truffles and lobster in everything from the artisan grilled cheese to the spaghetti sauce), the combinations are actually really good a lot of the time. Okay, the fresh grapes in the chicken pie I did once (I may make it again, but I'm trying the stuffed fish first) were kind of strange, but in a weird way they actually worked.

It's ominous. We have gritty sludge.

 In the 1500s, showing off your grocery budget to guests apparently meant sugar, rose water, lots of seasonings (usually cinnamon, mace, cloves, ginger, and black pepper), and dried fruits (preferably imported from really far off, like dates).

Enough time on the stove and it actually got really smooth.

And I'm not kidding about sugar in everything. Just about all the meat and most of the vegetables have a lot of sugar stirred in and then dumped-- er, cast on top. Did all those Lord and Lady Whoevers have diabetes? Have their descendants built up an immunity to it? I'll have to look up UK diabetes stats when I'm bored enough.

Y'know, it honestly doesn't look so bad.

Portuguese Farts is actually a bit of an odd recipe for A Book of Cookrye- it's a dessert sweetened with then-cheaper honey (beehives cost a bit less than a sugarcane field and refinery). Also, unlike nearly every other recipe including a lot of the fish ones, there's no rose water. I wonder if this was meant to be a family recipe- you may make the Cherries Baked in Confection when you're entertaining, but if it's just your husband and kids it's farts or nothing.

Surprisingly fluffy farts.

These smelled really good baking. And I'd like to announce a first on A Book of Cookrye: We let them cool completely before eating them! (They were still kind of liquidy in the middle, and no one wants to scald their tongue on hot farts). We set them outside to cool, and since it was a nice night, just sat out on the picnic table and talked as we waited for them to cool. Since it was kind of stuffy, we ate them outside as well- leading me to ask whoever I saw coming in the front door "Honey tart?" (which, considering it, sounds like what some stupidly saccharine couple might use as a term of endearment). I think it says a lot about how often I'm making desserts in the middle of the night that no one thought anything of seeing some people at the table by the door randomly offering desserts around midnight.

Other things that are really satisfying at midnight: Cooked pie crust scraps.

And these were delicious! I baked them a bit too long thinking they were supposed to get completely set, but the flavor was really good and oddly like pumpkin bread. Fortunately, the insides were still soft even though the tops were kind of crunchy due to an inability to realize they were ready to take out of the oven.

There should have been more gooey center, but I was just guessing at when to take them out.

The crust itself was very plain, which went well with the very sweet and flavorful filling. I think it was actually better for me not buying those tartlet shells that are pretty much pie crust-shaped cookies. Mike suggested, and I think I will do this next time, adding nuts into this.

Yes, the only reason I made this was because it's called farts (And who wouldn't at least look twice over a recipe like that?). But it turned out good enough to make again.

Farts.

Baked Chicken from 1591 (with Surprise Mincemeat!)

Today we have something really special- a recipe from the cookbook I named this for! You may be wondering "Whyever did you name this for a random old cookbook?" I shall answer: When I decided to write a blog, I had no idea what to name it and went with the closest cookbook at hand when I had to come up with a title.
I love reading really old cookbooks- food from the past is often as foreign as food from the opposite hemisphere.
 I've made a few recipes out of A Book of Cookrye, and have found the results very good (but like I said, the taste is so different you have to taste it with the same open mind you have trying foreign food). However, you do have to allow for changes in English when reading the recipes- for example "To boyle a Cony with a Pudding in his Belly" would today be called stewed stuffed rabbit and does not involve injecting the stomach of a rabbit with custard. Similarly, Farts of Portingale (you know that one's coming up) today would be Farts of Portugal.

Today, we present this:

To bake Chickins.
Season them with cloves, mace, sinamon ginger, and some pepper, so put them into your coffin*, and put therto corance^† dates Prunes, and sweet Butter, or els Marow, and when they be halfe baked, put in some sirup of vergious^‡, and some sugar, shake them togither and set them into the oven again.
Bake Sparowes, Larkes, or any kinde of small birds, calves feet or sheepes tunges after the same manner. 

*Coffin: Free-standing pie crust. Some brief reading told me that instead of using pans, English cooks used to encase everything in a crust- sometimes it was an inedible container, other times it was meant to be eaten.
^† Corance = currants. Many words are easier to figure out if you read them out loud.
^‡ Vergious = verjuice: juice of unripe grapes (at the time, it also came from unripe apples). Used waaay back in the day to add a sour flavor to foods.

-A Book of Cookrye: Very Necessary for All Such As Delight Therin, 1591


And here's how I had at it (obviously, we're not going for authenticity):

Baked Chicken   Heat oven to 350°. Take a lump of ginger root* about the size of a new potato, peel it, and grind it. Add a lot of pepper†, a lot of cinnamon, a generous but not excessive shake of mace, and a few shakes of cloves. (Cloves tend to get unpleasant used promiscuously.) Mix it with to a paste with the ginger and set aside. Remove giblets from the chicken and set it in a covered roaster. Mix together around 6 ounces of raisins‡ and about a third of a pound of dates§. Stuff the chicken with this at both ends. Put any excess under the chicken skin which you have pinched and pulled until it's loose enough to slip your fingers under. Any excess can just go into the pan with the chicken- since you've touched it with raw-meat hands you weren't exactly going to keep them for snacking on anyway. Rub the chicken with about half a stick of butter (ie a quarter cup) and then with the paste. Cover and bake until a meat thermometer inserted into the thigh but not quite touching the bone reads 160°. Meanwhile, set about three-quarters of a cup of verjuice‖ to boil and dissolve enough sugar in it that it's as sweet as pancake syrup (in retrospect, I should have used more verjuice). Set aside. When the chicken's about half done (and it'll be a while since it's so tightly stuffed and all that, mine took around 2 hours), pour the syrup all over the chicken and cover it back up. Leave to bake until it's done. *In my experience, ginger powder has just about no taste to it. So if I can't get it fresh, I leave it out. †Black pepper is best used by the heaping tablespoon. And use several of them. ‡Apparently the word currants used to be interchangeable with raisins. Also, I couldn't find currants (dried or fresh) anywhere. §You may have noticed I didn't mention prunes. That's because I forgot to get them. ‖I found it in a middle-Eastern store. If the bottle label's telling the truth, verjuice is often used in Iranian food, which is worth keeping in mind when trying to find who the hell still sells it.

I'm not gonna lie, I was really excited by this. I've never had chicken seasoned like this or stuffed with all this dried fruit. I had no idea what to expect. So herewith follows my experience making this!

First, I tell you I spent forever trying to find verjuice. The stuff was used practically as often as salt back then, and these days no one has even heard of it. I looked up online and saw a few people selling it for embarrassingly high prices, and someone suggesting you call some wineries to ask if they sell it since they usually thin their grapes before they ripen. Purely for the heck of it, I went ahead and called every winery within about 2 hours' drive to ask if they made verjuice. Responses ranged from "Sorry, we've never heard of it" to "Is this an obscene phone call?"  One woman sympathetically explained that given the drought we've had, they were "using every grape." Then I happened to see this when I was at the middle-Eastern supermarket:

I'm as surprised as anyone else.

I was embarrassingly excited to find the one ingredient I've never found for half the recipes in this book, snatched a bottle off the shelf, and decided to make this chicken.

I've tried using vegetable peelers and paring knives to peel ginger, but the best thing I've used is a cheese grater.

Just break it up to reach any crevices where you can't get to the skin.

However, I didn't feel like bothering to grate the whole thing, that gets tedious and finger-nicking.

Now, to dump in a bunch of spices!

I was a bit afraid I hadn't made up enough spice paste, but didn't feel like running out to get another ginger knob.

I set out dates and raisins so I wouldn't ruin the rest reaching into the bag with chicken hands. I mashed and pressed the fricken dried fruits in and realized that I had overestimated the chicken's capacity. Afterward there were still this many on the counter:

Either that or some very wrinkly ants and roaches are swarming.

Someone dumbfoundedly watching me shove raisins up a chicken asked "Are you sure that counter's clean?"
I answered "Eh, they're going up a raw chicken anyway."
And since I'd gotten icky raw-chicken hands all over them picking up handfuls to shove up the bird, I decided that rather than throw the rest away, I'd do just like I did with the mushrooms and shove them under the chicken's skin.

A quick rub with the butter, then with the spice paste (why didn't I just mix the two?) brought us here.

Chicken phthiriasis strikes again!

And now, reposing in a covered casserole after being very violated with dried fruit, it bakes. After a while, the kitchen smelled like I'd detonated a Christmas shop in the oven.

This is my covered casserole. It is also a mixing bowl and cake pan.

I thought it odd to make syrup for a baked chicken. Then I realized that some barbecue sauce is practically as sweet, and we pour that all over meat without thinking anything of it.

For something that was such a pain in the ass to find, verjuice looks so ordinary once it's in the pot.

 And here we are, syrup poured halfway through (okay, so I poured it on 30-45 minutes too early),
baked, and ready to eat!

Flee for your lives! The chicken has ruptured and now the phthiriasis lice are swarming out!

This is one of the scarier-looking baked chickens I've seen. One leg and both wings fell off as I lifted it out of the saucepan roaster, which I took as a good sign of how tender this was going to be. This is the bird fresh out of the roaster before I even touched it with a knife:

Does anyone else think it looks like a gigantic beetle has landed on it? Between the last chicken having a horrid mythological disease and this one spontaneously turning into a beetle, I think we can safely establish that if you stuff things under a chicken's skin, it's best not to let anyone see it until you've got it carved.

And if you're carving it Fanny Cradock style, don't let them see you doing that either.

And now we finally reach that magical moment, when we put it on a plate and get ready to be wowed!

I took a bite and... well, it tasted like baked chicken. It's definitely a good baked chicken, but I'd really been hoping all those other flavors of the raisins, dates, spices, and verjuice had gotten in there a lot more. It was delicious, but anticlimactic. Maybe I should have baked it backside-up so the breast meat would be immersed in the pan sauce. The sauce tasted like something off a Christmas table, but it went well with the chicken so I dunked each forkful in the sauce.

Then it occurred to me... meat, dried fruits, all those spices (which definitely flavored the fruit if not the chicken), I think this is could be where mincemeat comes from. It's easy to imagine the cook chopping up the leftover chicken, mixing it with whatever fruit remains, and pouring some form of alcohol on it to make it keep.
Or was I supposed to chop up the chicken meat to begin with? I mean, nowhere did the recipe say that it was supposed to stay whole. Recipes this old often leave out instructions like that assuming that the cook would have known. Elsewhere in A Book of Cookrye a fish recipe lists everything for the stuffing and seasoning and doesn't tell you to get out a fish.
Since the chicken really was best swimming in the pan gravy, so it shall be.

The potted plant is creeping up to the table to steal my food.

I poured off the pan gravy and refrigerated it long enough for the fat to solidify so I could just lift it off instead of tediously spooning it up while it was still liquid. The next day I threw out the fat, chopped the chicken, sliced the dates (the raisins were already small enough), and mixed all of it up with the pan gravy. It's really good, but the sauce was hardly thicker than water (you can see it puddling in the plate). If I make this again (which won't be unless I see dates on special) I'll add something to thicken it. Also, I may or may not have upended my plate and drank the sauce (seriously, it's that good) when I finished the food on it.
 It was better after a night in the refrigerator. The only thing is when I'm cutting up chicken there's always little bones I miss and then find midbite.
All in all, this was surprisingly normal yet delicious recipe.
Later I was thinking, the chicken-pieces-in-syrup I ended up with is a lot like the chicken in Chinese restaurants; maybe next time I'll fry the chicken like they do and see how that comes out...