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!