Monthly Archives: April 2013

Baqsamat bi Sukkar (Twice Cooked Middle Eastern Cookie), Pancakes (Quata'if) and Biscuts (Khushkananaj)

Baqsamat bi Sukkar (Twice Cooked Middle Eastern Sugar Cookie)

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So I picked up a few new books for my birthday.  One of them, “Enchanting Recipes from the Tales of the 1001 Arabian Nights” was one of those “Hmmm, Let’s see.” type of books.  I am actually very please.  There are not 1001 sweets in the Arabian Nights but the 25 recipes they do have are very nice.

It seems that every culture that has access to flour, sugar and butter makes some sort of sugar cookie.  Sweet subtle and very tasty!

Baqsamat bi Sukkar

(Middle Eastern Twice Cooked Sugar Cookie)

 

Translation:

Take flour and sugar, moisten, and knead with butter.  If it is not sweet enough add finely pounded sugar to it.  Make for it a liquid mixture of yeast with a little water.  Make baqsamat in any variety that you wish.  Bake on a tray in the oven a second time after having baked it once. (Ibn al-Adim, Kitab al-Waslah ila al-Habib fi Wasf al-Tayyibat wa al-Tib/Salloum, pp. 58)

Ingredients:

2 C flour

1 C sugar

2 sticks butter

¼ C water

2 Tbs yeast

Optional:

¼-1/2  tsp (total) spices i.e. cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, cloves

 

Redaction:

This recipe is based on both the Arabian Nights and a period recipe.  Salloum suggest treating this as a typical sugar cookie, with the twist of adding yeast and water per the recipe.

Take about a teaspoon of sugar and add to the yeast.  This will get the yeast going while you mix the other ingredients together.

Basic recipe is to take flour and sugar, mix well.

Next cut butter into small chunks/cubes.

Then add in cubed butter,

till the butter is mixed with the flour and sugar in to pea sized granules.

Next add in yeast/water.

This will form a dough.

Cut into forms,

and cook once and allow to cool.  Then cook a second time till a little harder.

My thought is with the original recipe saying “Make baqsamat in any variety that you wish” they are saying one of two things (possibly both).  Make the shape of the cookie into any form you wish and/or add spicing of your choice.  Even with cooking twice, there is a sufficient amount of moisture that the cookies are very moist.  Almost to moist to hold any actual shape that isn’t round.

For this recipe I went with the shape first.  Next time I am going to add a few spices for a subtly sweet dry cookie.

 

Midieval Middle Eastern Books, Uncategorized

The Nimatnama Mansucript of the Sultans of Mandu (The Sultan’s Book of Delights)

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For my birthday, I received a few books.  One of which was a cooking/court life book.  I was a little hesitant as cookbooks and court books are usually separated into different books.  I am pleasantly surprised, my first run through on recipes yielded at least 8 recipes I want to try this weekend!

The Nimatnuma Manuscript of the Sultans of Mandu

The Sultans Book of Delights

I enjoy this book quite a bit.  There are recipes for different meat dishes, soups, and birds.  There are also recipes for perfumes and what we would call body splashes (which have been rare as hens teeth to find information on).  There are recipes on drinks and sweets.

As for the hunting portions, I really enjoy these sections as well.  The details are not so much as stories but a list of what to bring and why.  Not only favorite dishes/drinks and perfumes are included for the Sultan but on ways to reward his generals with tokens of gold/silver as well as food and drink.  There is also an account on how to to cook at a camp site with skewers, meat and bread.

The book also contains quiet a few pictures of hunting scenes and camping scenes as well as pages and pages of manuscripts.  There is also a section on measurements and a section with period words and their English definition.  A real bonus!

The down side is that all the hunting and cooking scenes are in not in color.  The cooking section (and hunting portions) are roughly 1/4 of the entire text.  My feelings are that while the manuscripts in the original writings are pretty…the book could probably have benefited from a good pruning of pages.

This is not a beginners book.  The recipes have some measurements for spices.  Each “section” or paragraph can have 2-4 recipes so a weathered eye on which ingredients need to go with which recipes in these sections.  Overall I give the book an A for period recipes, definitions, pictures and calligraphy.  For cooking an B, for multiple recipes and some measurements.

 

Digestive Beverages (Hadimat), Medieval Middle Eastern Redactions, Middle Eastern Mead with Raisins

Middle Eastern Mead with Raisons

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Here is another warming drink.  This one takes time though…lots and lots of time!  This not a one hour simmer with spices and serve as the Hipocris was.  This is a brew in the warming days of spring and serve next to an autumn fire.  So we need to get some brewing started!

Honey Wine with Raisins

 Translation:

Take fifty pounds of raisins and thirty (pounds) of clarified bees’ honey.  Put the honey in a pot with a quantity of water equal to half the honey.  Boil the honey and water over a strong fire, and when it is cooked add the raisons with twenty pounds of water and boil again.  Strain out the grape seeds and add a weight of five dirham of saffron, five dirham of spikenard, and three dirham of mace, along with the weight of 1 daniq of musk.  Keep in bottles in the shade and use after forty days.  It is a marvel.  (Zaouali, pp. 140)

Ingredients:

1 jar

1 package yeast

¾ C sugar

10 lbs of honey

10 lbs of water (divided in half)

3 grams each of Chinese cinnamon, nutmeg, saffron

4 lbs raisons

 

Redaction:  One week prior to starting, I mixed the sugar and yeast together in a jar (with about 3 C water) so that when the time came to add yeast there would be lots and lots!

Now the period method did not call for yeast.  Yeast in period was either salvaged from a previous batch of brewing or allowed to form naturally in or on any items by leaving them out a bit to gather the wild yeast.  My kitchen is geared, due to all the various cooking I do, to bread yeast.  Modern bread yeast at that.  Modern bread yeast does horrible nasty evil things to brewing.  So, to help circumvent any modern bread yeast from taking root into my mead, I make a HUGE batch of wine yeast (lost of sugar and time to get the little yeasty beasties growing) then add them to my bottle of brewing.

Roughly 5 to 7 days later I started to brew mead.

I took 10 lbs of honey and poured the liquid gold into a large pot.

Now the honey I bought was not regional to anywhere in the Middle East nor in Ansteorra.  I bought, for cost sake, Costco slut honey.  A decent clarified honey at a good price.  Regional honey is much better in my opinion but 2x the price for half the amount is not.  I chose to be cost efficient and go for decent mead instead of slightly darker sweeter mead.  If you can get regional flavored honey…do so, but don’t break the bank for brewing!

The next step was to add 5 lbs of water.  I used one of the containers of honey and refilled it up with water to equal ½ of the water needed in the first portion.

I allowed the honey and water mixture to boil just slightly.

Bubbles were just forming.  Then I added the 4 lbs of raisins.

Now the period method said 50 lbs of raisins (roughly) for the original recipe.  This recipe has been cut by half.  Raisins to be used in that quantity had to be as easy to come by as air.  Do not get me wrong the flavor is great; however I don’t think so much was or is needed.  I cute the quantity from what should be 25 lbs of raisins to 4 lbs.  My cooking pot would not have handled so much, though I wonder after reading the translation several times if the raisins were not cooked until dissolved in which case the 4 lbs of raisins I used should have been ground up then added.  But this is hindsight.   Next time I’ll try that step of making raisin paste instead of just using whole raisins.

After the raisins were added, I added the spices.

Now again I had to fudge a little on the spicing.  I did not have any mace so I went with nutmeg.  Mace is the outer covering on a nutmeg with a slightly subtler less heavy taste.  So instead of 4.25 grams times 3 = 12.75 grams or (3 dirhams) of mace I used 3 grams of nutmeg instead of 12.75 grams or 3 dirhams.  I want a flavoring of nutmeg not an overwhelming taste.  I used the poor man’s saffron in 3 grams as well and 3 grams of Chinese cinnamon.  For a truly heavenly period taste, get the Chinese cinnamon if at all possible.  The regular every day grocery store cinnamon has no flavor compared to the really good Chinese cinnamon!

Here are the spices, still dry and in 1 cup ramekins.

I allowed everything to come to a bit of a simmer with lots of bubbles and a slight roil before turning off the heat.

Everything sat and melded for a few hours till cooler.

I then put a strainer over a cleaned bucket to pull out the raisins (and not just grape seeds) which is why I think the original way this was made was to cook the raisins till they dissolved.

Pour the boiled raisin/honey mixture over the strainer and into the bucket to strain out all the raisins. (Do NOT throw the raisins away!  They are excellent in other dishes with a slightly honey/spiced flavor)

Once the raisins had been strained,

I poured the mead into a clean glass carboy and added the remaining 10 lbs of water.  I added the water at this juncture instead of in the pot as my pot was not big enough to handle another 10 lbs of water.  This cooled the still fairly hot mead enough that the yeast could be added.

The finishing touch was a vapor lock as I know the yeast will do its thing and I prefer a non sticky floor due to a blown glass jar, which was a real possibility in period.

Now, this carboy has not been uncorked as of yet.  It needs another couple of months before I can start decanting the wine.  I’m already picking out the perfect meal to go with this!

Elizabethan, Hippocras

Hippocras (Mulled Wine)

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Spring has sprung!  Yet the nights can be a little bit on the cool side requiring a little warming.  I had this recipe on hand from the cold nights at Gulf Wars this year.  The wine, excellent blankets and a faux fur ankle length coat kept me warm during 2013 freezing nights!

Hippocras

 Translation:

To make hippocras, take a pottle of wine, two ounces of good cinnamon, half an ounce of ginger, nine cloves, and six pepper corns, and a nutmeg, and bruise them and put them into the wine with some rosemary flowers, and so let them steep all, night and then put in sugar a pound at least; and when it is well settled, let it run through a woollen bag made for that purpose: thus if you wine be claret, the hippocras will be red; if white, then of that colour also.

(Markham, 150)

Ingredients:

Chinese Ciniman stick

½ oz ginger peeled,

9 cloves

6 pepper corns

Nutmeg whole (1/8 tsp ground if not)

1 cup brown sugar

Optional:

Rosemary flowers if in season.  Not rosemary stems just the rosemary flowers.

 

Redaction:

I had to take a few liberties with this excellent recipe.  I used a descent wine but not a great wine.  Some thing that I could and would drink plainly but one that would not be ruined by adding of spices.

I put roughly 1 Tbl spoon of a hippocras blend that contains Saigon cinnamon, allspice, Ceylon and Madagascar cloves, blade mace and inner cardamom seeds.  My opinion is that each house or even each bar had a different recipe containing some the brewers favorite spices.  My spice blend did not have the ginger nor the pepper corns, though it did have mace instead of nutmeg as well as cardamom seeds and all spice.  I can live with this substitution!  I do plan on using the ginger and peppercorns as I love both flavors; a spiciness that combines very well with sweet.

Instead of letting the wine settle over night (as the event was an hour away when I made this) I settled for warming the wine to just at simmering (the bubbles just are forming) when I turned off the pot and added a Tbs of spicing and 1 cup of brown sugar.

I  used a combination of the hard Mexican sugar and regular brown sugar.  Roughly about ½ of each.  I have since made this recipe with just the hard Mexican brown sugar found in specialty sections or stores, with excellent results.   If you are unsure, do ½ and ½ or just regular brown sugar.

I let the wine sit for roughly 30-45 minutes, then cleared out the spices.  Once the spices were skimmed from the wine, I poured everything into a clean bottle and served.

This is really good to drink.  Almost to good, you can get very toasted on the hippocras and never realized you drank 2 bottles worth on a cold night!