Bartolomeo Scappi! Crostate with Roasted Kidney

When I first started really learning about historical food, especially during the Renaissance, I heard about this book:  The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi:  The Art and Craft of a Master Cook.

What I could find was mostly pictures of the sketches he had of kitchen equipment of all sorts -- yes, I wanted it!  I could imagine myself playing with all of it.  What a dream!  It was only recently I learned of Terence Scully's translation and obtained a copy.  I think a book is a close as I will get to having the equipment, and today I decided to try one of his recipes.

ISBN 978-1-4426-1148-1

It will amuse you to know that I basically flipped through a few pages of this 780 page book and randomly stopped on one of them,  recipe #229:

To prepare crostate - that is, gourmand bread - with spit-roasted veal kidney.

     Get slices of day-old bread the thickness of the spine of a knife and toast them on a grill.  Get veal kidney, with its fat, roasted on a spit along with the loin.  Cut a little of the tenderloin away from the loin; let it cool a little, then beat it very small with knives, along with mint, sweet marjoram, burnet and fresh fennel - not having any fresh, use the little dried flowers - and add in pepper, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, sugar, egg yolks, orange juice or verjuice, and enough salt.  When the composition is made up, spread it out over the slices of toast.  Put the covered toast into a tourte pan without the slices touching one another.  Apply heat to the top of the lid and hot coals under the tourte pan, leaving it until the bread has absorbed a little of the grease and the mixture has firmed up.  Serve it hot, dressed with orange juice, sugar, and cinnamon.  You can also put fresh butter and melted pork fat into the tourte pan so the bread will be greasier.

     You can also cook it on a grill over a low fire, heating the top with a hot shovel or else with a tourte-pan lid.

I happened to have a kidney in the freezer and a need to use it -- this seemed like a great idea. 

My Redaction

1 loaf French bread, a day or two old

1 veal kidney, about 12 ounces by weight

1 piece pork tenderloin (mine was a little over a pound)

1 tablespoon fresh mint, finely chopped

1 tablespoon fresh marjoram, finely chopped

1/2 teaspoon fennel seed, crushed in a mortar

1/2 teaspoon ground pepper

1/8 teaspoon ground cloves

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1 tablespoon sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 egg yolks

1/4 cup orange juice (slightly under ripe oranges, so sour)

olive oil

Dressing:  1/2 cup orange juice, 2 tablespoons sugar, and 1/4 t cinnamon

My Notes

I sliced the bread into 1/2 to 3/4 inch wide pieces, ignoring the ends.  I had 17 and used 15.

Then they were toasted to golden brown over direct heat on the grill.  Check them often because they can get scorched easily (experience here!)  I put them on a plate and set it aside.

I had a technical failure with my rotisserie, so I could not spit-roast the meat as I had planned.  My solution was to cook it on the grill:  Coat the kidney and the tenderloin with olive oil.  Make a flat-bottomed pan with shallow sides from a piece of foil and place over direct heat on the grill.  Put the kidney on that.  The pork goes onto the grill itself, near the direct heat but not over it.  Close the lid and cook (checking it and turning occasionally) until the kidney changes from red to brown and its juices are barely red or not red at all.  The pork should be cooked to a very light pink interior so it doesn't get dry. (I had to experiment with the process and the timing before I got everything cooked right.  I didn't document all the steps here, just what ended up working.)

Once the pork was cooked, I used about 4 ounces (estimated).  Both the kidney and the pork were cut into chunks then placed in the food processor.  I pulsed it until the meat was in small pieces, but not smooth or pureed.  

Small chunks to...

... small pieces

The meat went into a bowl and I added the spices and herbs.  I did not have burnet and I had no fresh fennel, but Mr. Scully's footnote said that the dried flowers implied using the seed, which I had.  Once that was mixed well, I added two beaten egg yolks.  This seemed moist enough but not be gooey.  Then I mixed in the orange juice, which made the whole mixture moist enough to spread.

I tasted it before spreading it on the bread.  The first taste was mostly of the meat and I didn't feel the spicing was right at all, so I added more to get the amounts listed in the redaction.  Now I could taste the spices and they seemed balanced, with nothing dominating, not even the meat flavor.  The meat was there but it did not overwhelm.

A rubber scraper was a good tool to spread the mixture onto the bread slices.  I wanted it reasonably thick, so it looked generous.

The direction to heat the top with a hot shovel has the modern equivalent of putting it under the broiler, which I decided to do.  Before I turned on the broiler setting, I preheated the oven to 300 degrees F while I was making the mixture, so the food would go into a hot oven for broiling.

Scappi's plate 9 gives us an idea of what he meant by a tourte pan in the first two rows here:

I chose a metal baking pan that I call a cookie sheet.  The bottom was lightly oiled.

Then the cookie sheet went under the broiler for 3 minutes.  This continued to toast the bread and add a little browning to the (already brown) meat mixture.  It seemed that the mixture firmed up.  Mostly it looked like the egg had cooked, which was my main goal.

Once out of the oven, I mixed the dressing and poured some over each piece.  The dressing is thin so it poured over the meat mixture but then soaked into the toast.

The Verdict

I served them hot with a spinach salad and a nice pinot noir.

I'll admit that I was hesitant to make this recipe because I am not typically a fan of organ meats.  To me they smell weird and taste "off."  So I took a bite, expecting to get that organ meat flavor.

I was surprised.  

The crunch of the bread went well with the soft and a little chewy of the meat mixture.  

The flavor was well-balanced -- meat and spice were just right.  Sometimes I got a little "burn" from the spices, and I was not sure if it was from the pepper or the cloves or both.  That made it very interesting to eat.

Different flavors touched the tongue as I was eating it -- little blasts of mint or spice or meat.

The dressing was a stellar idea, too.  It added moisture to the toast and the brightness of the acid from the orange juice.

My guest taster and I agreed that it hit all five of the basic flavors.  Really quite enjoyable.

We had a few where we put some of the spinach leaves on top.  This was good, too!

Even the leftovers, which we warmed up the next day, were tasty.  

I'll make it again soon and really look forward to it.  Success!

A Lemon Cordial Follow Up!

My most amazing, wonderful, awesome daughter read my previous post on the Lemon Cordial, made from an 18^th century recipe, that used milk in the process.  In doing so, she recalled an article from Cook’s Illustrated titled “The Key to Crystal-Clear Cocktails? Milk. (Really.)”  It was written by Camper English and published in December, 2016.

The article focused on an old technique to make a “milk punch”:

The base recipe for milk punch includes citrus juice or another acidic ingredient. Milk (usually hot milk) is added to the mixed cocktail, curdling the milk, and then the punch is strained to remove the curds. The process removes most of the color and cloudiness from the drink, clarifying it, and it preserves the cocktail from spoilage for months or even years if kept cool.

The recipe I followed required sliced lemons to be put in milk then heated until the mixture forms curds and whey.  This is strained, and the resulting liquid is mixed with sugar and brandy to form the cordial.  I expected large curds that were distinct from the whey (the recipe said to boil the milk until the whey was “very clear”) but I never saw that because the curds were all small.

I tried filtering out the curds through cheesecloth, but that didn’t work.  I decided to add the brandy and sugar while hoping the cordial would taste right.  The curds started settling out, and the whole appearance was not appealing.  It was then I decided to filter it using a cloth bag. 

The result was a very clear and delicately flavored cordial that tasted of brandy and lemon with a good mouthfeel from the sugar.  I noticed (but did not mention in the post) that the curds had taken on the color of the brandy, and that the cordial was lighter in color after it was filtered.

Mr. English continues with:

The concept of clarifying cocktails with milk might seem a bit odd today, but in the milk punch heyday—the 1700s through the mid-1800s—spirits would have been far rougher around the edges than those we enjoy today, and in addition to clarifying and preserving the drink, the process also softened the harsh flavor of the booze. The resulting drink is unctuous and silky, clear and only subtly milky, with softer, mellow flavors.

What a surprise!  In doing the wrong thing with the original recipe, I stumbled across an historical technique.

Mr. English also tells us:

The earliest known milk punch recipe, as reported by cocktail historian David Wondrich in his book Punch, dates to 1711, and is attributed to housewife Mary Rockett. That recipe calls for a gallon of brandy, five quarts of water, eight lemons, and two pounds of sugar. To it, two gallons of scalding hot “new milk” are added, and after an hour, it is strained through a flannel bag.

He goes on to report on the variations professional bartenders are exploring today:  heating the milk or not, trying a variety of milks (animal and nut), changing the order of the steps, and more.  We are also treated to the science underlying the process, to help us understand the importance of the curds in stripping out the tannins, for example.

The article is a great read and brought insight to me on the lemon cordial recipe.  I recommend reading it!

Now I wonder why the cordial recipe required straining the curds before adding the brandy.  I can understand adding the sugar after straining – otherwise it makes the liquid very thick and slows down the straining process.  If, as Mr. English notes, the brandy in the 1700s was “rougher around the edges than those we enjoy today”, it seems the cordial would taste better if the brandy also came into contact with the curds. 

But perhaps that wasn’t the goal.  Perhaps the goal was to infuse the whey with the lemon flavor, which happens faster than infusing the alcohol with the lemons.  Once it was mixed with the brandy and sugar, you had a nice beverage.

When I put the sliced lemons – pulp, white, seeds, and peel – into the milk, I wondered if the white would make it taste bitter.  Perhaps the curds removed the bitter, and that was another advantage of using milk. 

To say I was as pleased as punch to read this article is an understatement.