I saw a post from exactly a year ago where I was working on my Romulan uniform and baking sourdough to keep it all together in the pandemic isolation. And I realized that, here I am, still making sourdough and Romulan uniforms one year later.
Once I finish a uniform I am, of course, happy that I get to wear it around all the time. But at the same time I always get a bit sad because I don’t have something to consume my time and focus anymore. So I end up starting a new one. We’ll see, I might end up cranking out 4 or 5 different uniforms before this is all “over.”
When you have a sourdough starter that needs to be fed periodically, you begin to think of different things you can make with it (instead of just bread and pancakes all the time). Today I tried making some breakfast rolls, sourdough rolls with ham, egg, and cheese. The largest baking cups we could find were still too small to accommodate the roll + egg, so there was some spillage, but they still tasted good.
Doc knows how obsessed I am with all things medieval, and he was so kind as to buy some tickets to a Medieval Feast event! I got so excited, I made a double hennin and everything.
But, like, of course I had to first make cheese curds! Because the recipe explicitly says the first step is the strain the whey from the curds.
Cutting the curds. And as you can see, I decided to stir some saffron threads into the milk before adding the rennet and letting it set. For a moar medieval flavor!!!
“Wryng out þe wheyze and drawe hem þurgh a straynour”
The saffron curds actually tasted really, really good. I’m now thinking that a saffron panna cotta would be amazing.
Tah-daaaah! Medieval cheesecake!
I would recommend serving it with some caudell drizzled on top.
Note that, I didn’t care about improving the recipe or adding new-fangled things to better suit a modern palate. All I cared about was that I would eat a thing that was literally what a medieval person ate at least once. Because that’s who I am.
This led me into some trouble trying to interpret the recipe. The recipe appears to say to strain the whey from the curds and put them into the pie shell. THEN, add the egg whites and elderflowers and rose water. But the “modern translation” says to mix everything together until smooth, and pour the whole thing into the pie shell. So, which is it? Is this dish more like a cheesey crust with a meringue on top? Or is it more like a modern version of a cheesecake, with one layer of a smooth cheesey homogeneous mix?
Ultimately, I decided to go with what the “modern translation” said, figuring that medieval authors generally didn’t have the same level of explicit instruction that we do today, and that maybe the translators know better than I do what the intent was. But sometimes I wonder!
