Attelets Sauce - An American Civil War recipe

Do you know what an attelet is?  I didn't.  I had to look it up.  Autocorrect wanted to change the word to "athlete," but I insisted I had spelled it correctly.  That taught me that an attelet is a small, metal skewer, often decorative and made of precious metals such as gold or silver.  Attelets are used to hold food, often hors d'oeuvres, to display it elegantly.

So now you know.  An attelet is basically a small, decorative metal spit used to show off food in a fancy way.

An attelet.  Click here for attribution.

I was preparing for a Civil War reenactment and looking through the 1833 cookbook for recipes that I could make as a demonstration item.  That is, I was cooking over charcoal while wearing a period outfit and talking to the public about what I was making.  I needed to be able to fix it in front of the public, with the exception of when I walked into the tent to get items from the ice chest.

This sauce looked interesting and tasty.  I didn't have metal attelets, but hey, we were in a war setting, so wooden skewers would have to do!

My plan was to make the sauce to serve with thinly sliced, grilled beef on skewers.  I did that and then made the recipe again at home for this post.

The recipe is from Mrs. N.K.M. Lee's The Cook's Own Book, page 182, in the sauce section, which is why the "________" is in the title.  Click here to see an 1854 reprint of her book.  

My Redaction

1 to 2 tablespoons each of finely chopped parsley, mushrooms, and shallots

1 tablespoon butter

1 tablespoon flour

1 cup beef broth

1/4 teaspoon pepper

salt to taste

2 egg yolks, well beaten

1/2 pound thinly sliced beef

Sauce ingredients.

First, soak wooden skewers in water while preparing the sauce.  Cut the beef into 1-inch-wide strips and set aside.

Mix the mushrooms, shallots, and parsley and then sauté them in the butter over low heat until the shallots are translucent.  

Sprinkle the flour over the mixture (avoid lumps) and stir well.  Let it cook for 1 to 2 minutes.

Whisk in the broth, stirring it vigorously.

Bring the mixture to a boil, then reduce the heat to make the mixture simmer.  Add the pepper and salt to taste. 

When the mixture thickens slightly, remove from the heat.  Add the yolks by pouring them in while stirring the broth briskly.

Once the yolks are thoroughly mixed, put the sauce back on the heat while stirring well to slightly cook the yolks.

Put the beef strips on the skewers and grill the meat.

Serve the skewers on a plate and the sauce in an open cup or bowl.  Dunk the beef in the sauce to eat.

Roughly equal parts.

The finished sauce.

Grilling the meat.

My Notes

At the reenactment, I didn't have parsley.  I aimed for roughly equal parts of shallots and mushrooms.  In both attempts, I used baby portabella mushrooms.

The idea is to make a roux with the butter and flour, then use the roux to thicken the broth.  The egg yolks make it even thicker and richer.

The broth I used had salt in it, so salt your sauce to taste.

The Verdict

Oh my, that is one good sauce.  At the reenactment, I walked around with the platter of skewers and a cup of sauce.  People used their fingers to pull the meat off the skewer and dunk it into the sauce, then pop the meat into their mouths.  You could see the sauce was thick enough to stick to the meat and not drip all over when transported to a mouth.

It was similarly thick when I made the sauce at home.  

Note the thick sauce.

The flavor was rich with shallot and mushroom flavors, enhanced by the savory umami of the beef broth.  The pepper added a nice bitter flavor, too.

Everyone in both attempts enjoyed it.  I had sauce left over from the reenactment, so I served it as a gravy over mashed potatoes, which was quite excellent.  At home, I used the extra gravy as a sauce over baked chicken thighs; this was also good.

I think the reenactment version was a bit tastier; I probably used more shallots.  I wasn't measuring except by visually comparing quantities.  I am usually moving quickly, too.  

Success!  Quite a wonderful success, really.  Make this sauce as it is easy and tasty.  

I think I would use bigger chunks of beef instead.  The very thin slices grilled quickly (a bonus, so the sauce didn't get cold or get overcooked) but they did get chewy.  I probably need to improve my grilling skills.

Salsa á la española -- Spanish Sauce, a Pinedo recipe

Today I opened Pinedo's book to a random page and picked a recipe from that page.  I was happy to find a main dish, and my guest taster was happy it involved beef.

On page 241, I chose Spanish Sauce for pieces or slices of beef.  

Pinedo's recipe

My Translation

Spanish sauce.

(For pieces or slices of beef.)

         After the meat slices are fried in the pan, they are removed and in that fat, which must be very little, two chopped onions will be fried, leaving them to brown. To these, three tomatoes and as many finely chopped green chiles, garlic, a tablespoon of butter, oregano, pepper and salt are added. The sauce is allowed to cook over a low heat to make it juicy.

         Place the meat slices in the serving dish, covering them with the sauce and surrounding it with fried potatoes.

My Redaction

1.6 pounds thinly sliced beef steak

2 onions, medium sized

3 tomatoes

3 jalapeño chiles

1 tablespoon fresh oregano

1 tablespoon butter

2 teaspoons chopped garlic

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon pepper

Heat a fry pan to medium heat and fry the steaks for 2 minutes or less on one side, 1 minute or less on the other.  Adjust timing to suit the thickness of the steak.  Add a little olive oil to the pan as needed if the steaks are very lean.

Set the cooked steaks aside into the serving dish.  Arrange them nicely on the dish but don't overlap them too much.  

Peel, core, and chop the onions while the beef is cooking.  Once the steaks are done, brown the onions in the remaining fat.  Add a little olive oil if necessary.  Medium heat is fine and stir them occasionally.

While the onions are cooking, remove the stem ends of the tomatoes then chop them.  Remove the stem, seeds, and veins of the jalapeños, then finely chop them.  Strip the oregano leaves from the stems and chop them finely.

Once the onions are browned, add the tomatoes, chiles, oregano, garlic, butter, salt, and pepper.  Mix them well and turn the heat to low (2 or 3 out of 10).  Let the sauce simmer.  Cook until all the vegetables are soft and the flavors are melded; for me that was 15 to 20 minutes.

Spoon the hot sauce over the top of the meat, until the surfaces are completely covered.  If desired, place fried potatoes around the meat.  Serve immediately.

My Notes

Some of my steaks were very thin and cooked quickly.  I cooked one at a time.

I was being careful not to make the dish too spicy chile hot, so I made sure the seeds and veins were removed.  

I added the rest of the ingredients when the onions were somewhat cooked and a little brown.  Perhaps I should have taken them to carmelized.

My choice of fried potatoes was not available to Señorita Pinedo:  I baked frozen french fries in my oven.  

I arranged them better after this picture.  

I called this browned.

To give you a feel for their relative sizes.

All ingredients in the pan.

Well-mixed and starting to cook.

Done!

The Verdict

The sauce wasn't particularly "juicy" but it was very moist, which I liked.  The sauce was not runny.

I spooned most of it over the top of the steaks, which were cool but the sauce was hot enough to warm them back up again.  The steaks were completely hidden from view.

Then I placed the fried potatoes on the sides of the platter, where they would fit.  I noticed they started soaking up the released juices from the steaks.

A delightful presentation!

It was easy to pick up a piece of steak with sauce piled on it using a wide serving fork.  I successfully transfered each piece to a plate.  Then I used the fork to put potatoes on the plate.  That was dinner, along with some cabernet wine.

And wine!

The combination of sauce with beef was good!  Each bite was meaty with the tender vegetables' flavors included.  It was not a robust sauce -- not strongly flavored.  But I enjoyed the onions, tomatoes, and the unique flavor the chiles added.  In a way, I am glad the sauce did not dominate the meat as I wanted to taste both.  Overall, a very pleasant main dish.

I kept getting a "ratatouille" vibe from the sauce, but with chiles instead of squash.  I liked it and so did my guest taster.  We both felt the pepper quantity was just right.  I liked the salt level but he added more salt to his food.  (We both salted the potatoes.)

I think I would add more oregano next time, to make the sauce just a little more interesting.  But not much. 

The sauce was also good spooned over the potatoes.  

Success!

I look forward to trying the leftovers.  Hopefully the flavors developed even more.

A Little Foodie Fun, with Fire! Mole Colorado

It was another cold and rainy day, so I made a fire in my fireplace.  At this point, it is almost a reflex to want to cook with that fire, so today I decided to create a mole colorado, Oaxacan style.  (Pronounced "moh-lay".)

A mole is a sauce, and this particular one needed to be tomato-based.  My challenge was to create it without a specific recipe.  I wanted to make it using general guidelines for moles and many of the traditional ingredients as I had read about them.

The guidelines are:

• Moist ingredients (tomatoes, onions, garlic) - char the exterior on a comal or dry skillet
• Dry ingredients (chiles, spices, nuts, seeds) - toast on a dry skillet
• Blend everything together with just enough water
• Simmer until the flavors meld and the sauce thickens

Some of the ingredients I picked were not appropriate for charring or toasting, so I held those out until the blending step.  But I get ahead of myself.  

My Creation

1 large brown onion, unpeeled

4 Roma tomatoes

3 cloves of garlic, unpeeled

3 New Mexico chiles

3 costeño chiles

1/4 cup white sesame seeds

1-3 inch long stick of cinnamon plus another 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

3 allspice berries (you might want more)

1 ounce bittersweet chocolate

1/2 cup raisins

1/4 teaspoon salt

about 2 1/2 cups water

First I needed to char the tomatoes, onion, and garlic.  The onion was big, so I cut it in half and placed the pieces cut-side-down on the dry skillet.  The tomatoes went whole over hot coals.  The garlic cloves were also placed in a dry skillet.

Coals cool down and sometimes they do that faster than I anticipate, so the garlic and the tomatoes got moved around as needed to find the heat.  You can see in the picture above that the live fire was closest to the pan with the onions, so that is where the garlic and tomatoes ended up.

I wanted to do more than just char the onion halves on the cut side.  I wanted them to be pretty cooked once they were ready to leave the fire.  So after they cooked on the cut side, I turned them to cook on the skin sides.  In all, they were on the fire the longest and were soft almost all the way through.  They also got a nice char on the cut side.

I charred the garlic with their skins on until the skins split.  This had cooked the garlic to soft.  The chiles were charred in the dry skillet until they had turned mostly black and puffed up.

The big chiles are New Mexico, the small are costeño.  Note the garlic cloves.

The tomatoes didn't get much charring but they did get soft and the skin broke up.

I toasted the sesame seeds until they smelled nutty, which also made them more ivory than white in color.  Toasting the cinnamon stick didn't change its appearance much, but it smelled more spicy than usual.  The whole allspice berries also smelled a little fruity once toasted.

Use more allspice

Once everything was done with the fire, I moved to the kitchen.  I removed the peel from the onion and the garlic cloves.  I did not remove the stem ends from the tomatoes.  I pulled off the stems from the chiles and removed their seeds.  

All the ingredients went into the blender *in batches* with some water to get it all moving.  This included the chocolate (broken into pieces) and the raisins but not the ground cinnamon and salt.

The first batch needed one cup of water.  Once that was blended, I poured most of it into a kettle.  I left some behind to act as liquid for the next batch, which only needed 1/2 cup water to get it going.  The third and fourth batches didn't need more water at all when I left some of the previous batch with them.  Then I used about 1 cup water to rinse out the blender jar.

All batches went into the same kettle, then were stirred together.  This means it is not important what ingredients went into which batch -- as long as they were blended to smooth each time and added to the kettle.  By "smooth", I mean that there were no visible chunks, even though the mixture looked grainy.  The chiles became tiny, dark flakes in the liquid, so it wasn't perfectly smooth looking.  

This is smooth!

The kettle went onto the fire, where I put coals below it, a few around it, and it was near the live fire.  I stirred it often.  I also rotated the kettle so the hot side near the live fire was switched with the cooler side away from the fire.  I added more coals around the edges as needed.

It started steaming quickly.  Sometimes it bubbled and blurped on the hot side, reminding me to stir it more.  

See the blurp?

I tasted it occasionally.  Before cooking, the dominant flavor was raw tomato, bright and acidic.  I knew the mole had to cook at least until that raw tomato flavor was gone.  That took about 30 minutes.  Then the dominant flavor was onion (it was a very large onion), and I wanted to cook the sauce long enough to get that onion flavor blended with the others.  That took about another 30 minutes.

After 1 hour of cooking, I decided it needed more cinnamon, so I added 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon (untoasted) and it needed salt, so I added 1/4 teaspoon.  I wish I had added more allspice, but I was reluctant just in case I over-seasoned it.

It cooked another 10 minutes when I declared it thick enough.  You can see by comparing the first kettle picture to the one below that the level reduced about an inch, mostly from steaming.

Notice, too, that the color darkened considerably.  That isn't from the lighting -- the uncooked sauce was red; the cooked sauce was brown.

The Verdict

I had some roasted pork tenderloin and some roasted turkey in my refrigerator, so I sliced them up and warmed them in the oven.  A few slices went onto each plate, some mole was spooned over the top, and was garnished with sesame seeds.  There were flour tortillas and a tossed green salad on the side.  And wine!

Pretty!

We liked the mole with both meats.  We couldn't really decide which one was better with it.  (This was not a problem!)  I particularly liked dunking the flour tortilla into the extra mole and eating it without any other meat or garnish.  I thought the flavor of the mole was emphasized this way.

That flavor was ... complex...  Not that this was unexpected, with all the different ingredients involved.  It is just challenging to describe.

My guest taster thought there was meat in it, so I would say it had an umami taste.  We both thought it was fruity, probably from the raisins.  It was bitter, but not in a bad way.  That could be from the charring, but also from the bittersweet chocolate.  My guest taster had wondered if there was chocolate in it, and was happy to learn there was.  I could taste the cinnamon but not the allspice.  I wanted more of both spices.

I could not taste the garlic, but I don't know if it needed any more.  I would say not.  

The chiles were there, adding a lot of flavor and only some heat.  I had been warned that costeños were hotter than what I was used to, and to use them with caution.  This was good advice!  While I didn't get a burn from the chiles, their heat was present.  Maybe I could have put in one or two more, but considering I am a chile newby, it was good that I didn't.

The sesame seeds, surprisingly, didn't get broken up much by the blender.  I was surprised at how many were still whole or nearly so after the mole was cooked.  This added a nice little sesame flavor blast while I was eating it.  

In summary, it was sweet, bitter, deep, rich, mildly spiced with a little chile heat.  As I said, it was complex.  We loved it.

The next day we heated up some of the pork roast, covered the slices with a fried egg, and spooned some mole over the top.  That, with some flour tortillas, was breakfast.  Excellent.

I don't know how my mole would compare to a "typical" mole colorado from Oaxaca.  I don't think it matters.  It was good and we wanted more.  I achieved success.

A Good Sauce for Chicken -- 15th Century Italy

I was given a copy of a Ken Albala book I did not know existed:  Cooking in Europe 1250-1650, part of the Daily Life through History series published by the Greenwood Press in 2006.  (Thank you, DS!)

ISBN 0-313-33096-4

Some of the recipes I had seen before, but many I had not and it was a fascinating read.  It has several organizational lists which I found to be very helpful.  One is by era (Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Late Renaissance and Elizabethan Era), and within it, subcategories (Cold Foods, Soups, Meat, etc.)  The other is by country (France, England, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Switzerland) with subcategories by era.  There is a list of recipes for special occasions (novelty, holidays, illness).

Ken includes a glossary at the beginning of the book.  Each recipe has a title and cites the source, location, and time period it came from.  He also puts comments after the recipes to define unusual words specific to the recipe or to clarify a technique.  Some of his comments help interpret the recipe to more modern, smaller quantities, since most of us are not cooking for large groups of people.  Clearly he has tried most of the recipes, so his experience and knowledge of food history are a valuable aspect of this book.

I recommend it as worthwhile for a better understanding of historical cooking and to get a feel for how a master historical cook would approach these recipes.

Today was a cold and rainy day, which made it perfect for building a fire in my living room fireplace.  This inspired me to cook something over that fire, and I found a recipe in Ken's book.  On page 51 is A Good Sauce for Chickens, cited as from Italy in the 15th century, by "Anonimo Veneziano", which Ken says means "Anonymous Venetian."  

To Make a good sauce for chickens, take pomegranate and make wine by hand, and place in this wine good sweet spices, and if it seems too strong, add pounded anise, or rosewater.  Others use wine of sour pomegranates and wine of good sweet grapes, and place these two wines together with enough sweet spices.  If you don't have grapes put in a bit of honey and let it boil, the spices should be raw, you don't want to let it stand so it spoils.

Ken notes that "wine" means "juice" and that the goal is a sweet-and-sour fruit sauce with spices.

It is winter, and my grape vine is merely empty twigs, but I did have a bag of frozen grapes from it.  After they partially defrosted, I put them in batches into the blender to coarsely chop them.  Then each batch went into a small cloth bag, where I squeezed out the juice.  This resulted in grape juice that was light in flavor and tart, not sweet.  

Grapes, stems and all

Pulsed to coarsely chop

Squeeze to nearly dry

The juice, more than enough for this recipe

I also had a bottle of homemade pomegranate molasses.  Using fruit from my own tree, I had mixed the juice with a little sugar and lemon juice, then reduced it to 1/4 of its volume.  This stores the juice well for a long time and takes up a small space in my refrigerator.

I was ready to give this recipe a try.

My Redaction

3 large pieces of boneless, skinless chicken thighs (about 2 pounds total)

olive oil

1/4 cup pomegranate molasses

1/2 cup grape juice

1 teaspoon poudre fines (a mixture of cinnamon, cloves, ginger, grains of paradise, pepper, and saffron)

1 tablespoon honey

The honey and olive oil were added later.

The chicken meat was coated on all sides with olive oil and placed on a hot, oiled grill over live coals.  While it was cooking, I kept track of the heat from the coals and added more coals as needed.  It took about 40 minutes to cook the meat through, turning it over once after about 20 minutes.

I mixed the pomegranate and grape juices with the spices, then tasted it.  Both juices were tart, and the mixture was less tart than the molasses but still too tart for my preference.  So I added the honey.  The mixture was put in a small ceramic pan near the fire to begin warming it.  Once the chicken was nearly done cooking, I put the pan on a trivet closer to the fire and with hot coals near one side.  I stirred it with a fork often to even the heating through the liquid.  Once it was steaming, I considered it ready.

Cozy, warm, and welcoming.

Starting to cook the chicken

Warming the sauce while the chicken cooked

Heating the sauce in earnest

The Verdict

Dinner is served!

A piece of chicken was set on top of a slice of sourdough bread, then the sauce was spooned over the top.  This put sauce and some spices on the meat.  Most of the sauce, though, ran off the meat where it was soaked up by the bread.  This was served with a simple side salad of greens, tomato, and croutons, with a raspberry vinaigrette dressing.

View from above.

My guest taster had no idea what was in the sauce, so I had him describe what he tasted.  He thought there was citrus in it, and said it was fruity.  He could taste some spices but none were dominating.  He did not think it needed salt and that the sweet-and-sour ratio was just right.  Over all, he loved it and had seconds.  He particularly enjoyed how the bread soaked up the sauce; he cut a piece of soaked bread with each bite of chicken, which I did, too.

See how the bread soaked up the sauce?

I thought the sweet-and-sour ratio was just right, too.  It was not "balanced" as it was more on the sour side.  The sweet was just enough to temper the sour; the sour was just enough tempered to make my taste buds tingle, my mouth water, and inspire me to take another bite.  If it had been any sweeter, I don't think I would have had the same physical reaction, and I wanted that reaction.

It is possible I could have put in more spices, but I'm not sure I wanted them to be more prevalent.  They were there and they added depth to the sauce.  I really enjoyed the emphasis on the fruit flavors.  

Success!

It was great fun cooking over fire in my home.  It doesn't get cold enough in sunny Southern California to build fires often, so I take advantage of it when I can.  It reminds me of the times I've spent demonstrating historical cooking to the public, which I miss.  And the chicken, by itself, had that wonderful grilled meat flavor you can only get from cooking it over fire.  Mmmmmmmmm!

Capon with Raisin Sauce -- Another recipe from the Transylvanian Cookbook

It is time to pick a recipe from the Transylvanian Prince's Cookbook!

This is the digital translation of a book in Hungarian that I have tried recipes from before.  Here is the book reference:

The Prince of Transylvania’s court cookbook 

From the 16th century 

THE SCIENCE OF COOKING

You can find a copy of it here:
 http://www.fibergeek.com/leathernotebook/files/2018/05/Transylvanian-Cookbook-v3.pdf

The recipes I have tried are here:  Prince of Transylvania's court cookbook

Before I get started, I want to say that reading this book and considering how I would redact the recipes is quite a joy.  Some look straightforward and some are intriguing and some make me wonder what I'm supposed to do.  Parsing through these categories inspires me to think, create, and experiment, all of which are activities I love to do.  I am so glad I get to do this.

Today I picked recipe number 175, found on page 40.

Capon with raisin sauce.

Don’t boil the water to be as hot as for the old geese; then remove the feathers, scorch it, wash it, cut the animal’s nails; put its gizzards into another clean water pot; then put it into another pot, and keep it there until you cook it. When cooking it, stitch it and add some salt; while you’re cooking it, make some sauce. Do it like so. Take a very good wine or mead, we use wine in Transylvania. Add some honey to the wine so that it will be sweet, break some juniper berries; add some currants, saffron, but don’t add black pepper. Chop a loaf of white bread into cubes, fry it in butter, but don’t burn it; add some spices and ginger. Put equal amounts of sugar, cinnamon and ginger into it. When serving it, put the fried bread into the sauce. Slice the capon and put it into the plate. Add some spices. Serve it when hot. Do the same with a fat hen.

My Redaction

Fortunately I don't have to deal with preparing a live chicken for cooking (although I have done that in my ancient past).  The focus of this recipe is really the sauce and that is what my redaction addresses. 

So for my "fat hen", I simply rinsed and dried it, then put it in my Dutch oven and sprinkled it with  1/2 teaspoon of salt.  It baked, covered, in a 400 degree F oven for about 1 hour, where the last ten minutes had the lid off to allow it to brown a little.  The result was tender and moist, and perfectly ready for serving.

Sauce Ingredients

2 cups white wine (I used chardonnay)
2 tablespoons honey
1/2 tablespoon juniper berries
5 threads saffron
2 tablespoons raisins or currants (I used raisins)

about 6 ounces white bread (I used sourdough), crusts removed
1/2 tablespoon each of cinnamon, ginger, and sugar (*see note below)
butter for frying (I used about 1/2 of a stick or 1/8 of a pound)
more raisins or currants for garnish (I used currants)

Sauce ingredients

Timing seemed important here:  I thought the juniper berries and raisins would need time to hydrate in the sauce (no crunchy berries wanted) and for the sauce flavors to blend.  So I started the sauce as soon as the hen went into the oven and worked with it from there.

First I crushed the juniper berries in the mortar.  I decided I didn't want finely crushed particles, but I did work them until there were small bits with just a few larger ones.



This is a two-part sauce. 

I put the wine, juniper berries, raisins, honey, and saffron into a pan over a very low heat.  I stirred them to mix and then put the lid on the pan. 

After about 10 minutes, the liquid was simmering slowly.  I let it simmer for a few minutes and then turned the heat off. 



While that was sitting, I cubed the bread into about 1/2 inch pieces and mixed the equal parts of cinnamon, ginger, and sugar in a small bowl.



I decided to fry the bread cubes in small batches, adding butter as I needed it, and stirring them often so they wouldn't burn.  It worked well to add butter twice:  once at the beginning just before I added the cubes, and then again about half way through, when the pan started looking dry.

Partly toasted and almost ready for more butter

Toasted and ready to leave the pan

Once the bread cubes were toasted, I moved them into a bowl and sprinkled them with the cinnamon-ginger-sugar mixture.  Then I tossed them to make sure the bread cubes were lightly coated with the spices.

Tossing to distribute the spice mixture

My goal was to spice the bread cubes but not over do it.  I kept thinking about the flavor balances in the whole sauce and decided I could always add more spice mix to the final sauce if I felt it needed it.

When the hen was about 10 minutes from being cooked, I reheated the wine mixture, again over very low heat.  I wanted it steaming hot and not really simmering.  Letting it wait while the hen cooked was a good idea:  the raisins and juniper berries were much softer and the flavors had infused the wine.  I turned off the heat before adding the bread cubes.

The second heating

I let the hen rest out of the oven while I combined the two parts of the sauce.  My concern was this:  How much of the bread should be put into the wine mixture?  What was the goal?  I decided to put it all in (but I did it in two batches, just to be sure) because I decided the sauce should not be runny.  I was okay with it being fairly thick, as long as it was moist and flavorful.

As I expected, the bread cubes soaked up the wine mixture.  After some stirring and letting the sauce sit while I carved the hen, there was very little liquid in the sauce.  I felt I had achieved the goal of the recipe.

I chose to use just the breast meat.  Once it was sliced and on the serving dish, I sprinkled it with the cinnamon-ginger spice mixture.



Then I spooned the sauce over the meat and garnished it with currants.



The Verdict

I served it with a tossed green salad and warm bread. 

First off, let me say that it was very, very good.  The sauce was moist and flavorful; I would liken its texture to a bread stuffing that was very wet.   However it was not runny, which made it easy to eat and to spread across the meat as I was eating it.

My guest taster and I agreed that there were layers of flavor that you "tunneled" your way through as you were eating it.  If I focused, I could tasted the saffron, but mostly it was a background flavor.  I liked how the cinnamon and ginger worked together, making the sauce very complex in its flavor range.

I was glad, too, that I sprinkled the meat with as much spice mixture as I did.  I think it increased the flavor levels without making the spice levels of the sauce overwhelming.

Despite the honey and sugar, the sauce wasn't sweet.  I would be fine with it being sweeter, but I knew in advance that my guest taster would not appreciate that, so I held back on the honey.  As it was, he kept thinking I had put apples in the sauce until I told him about the honey.  (Personally, I think sauteed apples would be a good addition.)

The butter in which the bread was fried became part of the sauce, lending a richness and a satisfying mouthfeel that was welcomed.

We differed in opinion only on one aspect of the sauce:  its bitterness level.  It was not so bitter as to put me off -- I had no problem eating it! -- but it was almost that bitter.  I couldn't decide if it was from the dry white wine or the juniper berries.  I decided that if I made this again, I would use fewer berries, maybe 1/2 teaspoon before crushing them.  He actually loved the bitterness and was glad it was there.  This is truly a matter of personal taste.

So success!  We enjoyed the meal and discussing all the flavors in the sauce.  I would make it again and be willing to serve it to guests. 

*One note:  I could have done with less of this spice mixture as I had a lot left over.  I would probably use 1 teaspoon each instead of 1/2 tablespoon.