The Picnic Luncheon: Meats!

Roast Beef. Chicken Pie. On a field expedient Cutting Board.
(Thanks to the reenactors for loaning me a crate.)

This post was written during the progress of making these dishes, and so the tenses and times of the various recipes and commentary may reflect a sort of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey approach. Please excuse that, and do not let it hamper your appreciation.
 
For the Victorian Day Picnic Luncheon I am making two meat items, chicken pie and roast beef. I've spent most of the afternoon shopping and preparing these two items, mostly the chicken pie.

I've been somewhat closely following a recipe from Buckeye Cookery for the chicken pie:

Cut up two young chickens, place in hot water enough to cover, boil until tender; line a four or five quart pan with a rich baking-powder or soda-biscuit dough quarter of an inch thick, put in part of chicken, season with salt, pepper and butter, lay in a few thin strips or squares of dough, add the rest of chicken and season as before; some add five or six fresh eggs or a few new potatoes in their season; season liquor in which the chickens were boiled with butter, salt, and pepper, add a part of it to the pie, cover with crust a quarter of an inch thick, with a hole in the center the size of a tea-cup. Keep adding the chicken-liquor and hot water if needed, since the fault of most chicken pies is that they are too dry. There can scarcely be too much gravy. Bake one hour in a moderate oven, having the heat turned to the bottom, as great care is necessary to have the bottom crust well baked.

15-Hour Red Wine Brisket

Beef en Filo with Onion-Leek Marmalade and Chive Garnish.

Sometimes, one cooks with almost no time. In a restaurant, for example, the goal is to reduce any given item to about 10 or 15 minutes total of preparation from "hey, we need a ______" to it going out to the diner. This means that some things are partly finished in advance, destined for a sort of reheating (for example, pasta is often cooked just short of al dente, then re-boiled to finish cooking at service.) Other times, you have a couple hours, like cooking a family dinner. Finally, one can periodically cook with all the time in the world—that is the sort of situation that spawned this dish.

This began rather harmlessly as a variant on the Red Wine Braised Short Ribs that I've made before; in this case, I didn't marinate the beef, nor did I include a lot of aromatic herbs with the braising liquid. Instead, I opted for a somewhat simple, rather old-fashioned approach. I simply placed all the ingredients in a large pan, covered it, and braised it in the oven until it was tender.

Mushroom Beef Barley Soup

Shortly before Serving

For New Year's Eve some of my culinarily-inclined friends and I got together and decided to do something ambitious: 7 courses of dinner, 12 bottles of wine, and (ideally) 10 or so people. Well, the 10 people didn't show up (we ended up with 7) and only 2 people made it to the main course. I myself passed out after the champagne toasts and chicken course (which was only the 3rd course.)

Jenny, the mushroomian

We opened with an amuse-bouche of lentils with a bacon vinaigrette, and our poultry course was roast cornish game hens... these were followed by a salad (which we called "Graecia Capta"—"Captured Greece" in Latin—a hybrid of a caesar and a greek salad,) the main course of a roasted pork loin, chocolates, and fruit and cheese. As far as I know nobody made it to the chocolates before heading home or turning in for the night.

The soup for the night, falling between amuse-bouche and poultry, was a Beef Mushroom Barley soup, which I carefully crafted a couple days before. When I was cooking it, I had in mind my very dear friend Jenny, who likes beef, mushrooms, and heat—thus the addition of a dried hot pepper to the fortification of the soup's broth. She thoroughly approved of the soup (as did the assembled masses.) Therefore, I present to you, a recipe.

Maghreb Meatballs and Garlic-Sumac Sauce

I think I've mentioned the Phoenix Café before; it's a local art and gathering space that hosts a monthly steampunk gathering, small but enjoyable, that centers on music controlled by a gentleman called Tommy Toony. He's a DJ with many years of experience, who's somewhat new to the Steampunk scene. Therefore, the music is often a mix of typical steampunk music, strange things from Vaudeville and other historical music sources, and modern dance music that our crowd enjoys. (The Time Warp makes frequent appearances.)

The proprietors of the establishment have been kind enough to let me prepare food for these gatherings, so I take the opportunity to make simple but delicious items. The baozi made their premiere there, and last month (the night after the Irish Feast) I served a very quickly made (but delicious) beef stew. Last Friday, the 15th, we celebrated Tax Day by drinking, carousing, and staying out late... and I made food, of course.

Majadara Kagashi

Auguste Escoffier, master of Classical French Cuisine, had a habit of naming his dishes after people. It's not immediately clear whether these names were chosen because the dishes were inspired by the people named, created for the people named, or merely associated with them by Escoffier to make a splash on his menu: the likely answer is a combination of the three, though during his tenure as head chef at the Savoy, Ritz, and Carlton hotels (as well as nominally overseeing many other kitchens, directly or indirectly,) he most certainly did serve food to many of the people included in his Guide Culinaire.

In the grand tradition established by the king of chefs, I have named this dish in honor of my good friend Miss Kagashi, author of The Steamer's Trunk (Multiculturalism for Steampunk.) She posted the recipe I used for the base of this plate; of it, she writes:

Majadara is a Levantine dish, dating back thousands of years. By its definition, it is a simple pilaf of rice and lentils topped with caramelized onions and was primarily eaten as "poor man's" or "working man's" food. As with most staple Middle Eastern and Mediterranean dishes, there's some squabble over where it actually originated[...], but the recipes differ country to country so it could actually be considered several separate dishes. In some places the rice is switched out for bulgar wheat, in Lebanon pine nuts and garlic yogurt are sometimes companions, and sometimes the recipe alternative between red or green lentils.

Considering what you use and the final yield, this is a fantastically cheap recipe that can be dressed up a couple of ways in good times or just eaten as is in less than fortunate ones.

As good as majadara is on its own, I chose to combine it with a few other dishes from the Mediterranean region, to create a dish delightful in its own right, and more along the lines of my typical presentation than a simple pilaf.

Red Wine Braised Short Ribs of Beef

Food is cyclical. In the Victorian era, most every cut of beef was used by someone, whether poor or rich, delicious or disgusting. Just as the brisket was often used by poor Jewish people as a food source, short ribs have also long been used as a cheap but delicious piece of meat. For a time, they fell out of style; now, there is a trend of using the underused parts—shanks, brisket, short ribs, cheeks, oxtail. These cuts had once been popular as cheap alternatives to the more expensive steaks and roasts, and now they have found a place in high-end restaurants as gourmet pieces.

They are first marinated in red wine, spices, and aromatics, then slow-cooked in brown sauce, aromatics, red wine, and the leftover marinade. Rosemary is the primary flavoring in this particular version, but the concept is a very wide-ranging one that can be used in many circumstances

Steamed Dumplings-Mantı

Mantı are a popular dish in Central Asia and the Middle East. Depending on where you find them, their exact shape and size vary, but in many respects they are similar in fashion to Baozi. The main difference is that while Baozi are made with a yeast dough, Mantı are made with something much closer to a pasta dough. Both dishes are steamed, however, making them quite similar in function and in creation, if not in form.

Mantı are typically filled with a beef or lamb mixture, similar to the boreks from earlier, and steamed until the dough wrapper and the ground meat inside are cooked. Many regional varieties exist, as the dish spread across its geographic area with nomadic tribes. Most are served with a yogurt-garlic sauce, sometimes with sumac, hot red pepper powder, or dried mint, sometimes with other sauces and spices.

Döner Kebab-Döner Kebap

Döner Kebap Porsiyon—A main dish serving

Our guide to Turkey, Oz, says, "The complexities and scale involved in making this dish generally drive the home cook away. I was first exposed to it in a restaurant in Izmit, Turkey, outside of Istanbul. A gyro-like combination of Ground lamb, beef, and sirloin is cooked on a vertical spit and shaved as needed."

Döner Kebap, literally meaning "Rotating Roast," is a common dish found across much of the Middle East, now popular in Europe—sold by street vendors as Döner Kebab and in Middle Eastern restaurants—, and is best known in the United States as Shawarma or Gyros. All of these preparations come from the same origin; to quote Wikipedia:

In his...family Biography, İskender Efendi from...19^th century Bursa claims that "he and his grandfather had the idea of roasting the lamb vertically rather than horizontally, and invented for that purpose a vertical mangal". With time, the meat took a different marinade, got leaner, and eventually took its modern shape.

Traditionally, the concoction is usually made from many solid pieces of meat, pounded thin, marinated, and placed in layers on a skewer; often, a mixture of ground trimmings from the meat, spices, and an egg (to act as a binder) is spread between the layers; the stack then is topped with fat, and sometimes an onion or tomato to add more flavor. The skewer is then placed vertically in a rotisserie and cooked until it's done, with portions shaved off as needed with a knife (or sometimes some kind of electric trimmer device.)

Turkish Beef and Cheese Böreks

We've encountered Böreks before, though by a different name. As was discussed then, they are found across the Middle East, and for the State Dinner at the Dolmabahçe, Oz decided to serve a Turkish style of Böreks, known as Sigara böreği, literally translating to "Cigarette Böreks." It's a descriptive name, coming from their construction: unlike the Israeli style seen at the Hanukkah Dinner,  these böreks are made with phyllo dough (or, traditionally, yufka) and rolled up like a cigarette, then fried—we chose to shallow-fry them in vegetable oil.

Oz says, "Phyllo dough is not ideal for this recipe—you should probably use yufka instead, or make kofte." Kofte is the meat mixture, lightly sautéed in olive oil and served. "It wouldn't be unheard-of to add an egg to the mixture, either," he adds.

For our dinner, we made two versions of these böreks, a cheese- and a meat-filled version, and we served them with zchug, as with the bourekas.

Braised Brisket with Caramelized Onions

Brisket is a cut of meat that crops up often in Jewish cooking. There's many reasons for this, both economic and cultural.

 
Brisket is cut from the foresaddle of beef—meaning that it comes from the front half of the cow. It's typically a rather tough cut, because of being the cow's well-used pectoral muscles—this also, however, gives the meat more flavor than, say, the tenderloin, which is minimally worked, and therefore very tender and flavorless. In Kosher law, all sciatic nerve tissue must be removed from meat to make it Kosher. Because the sciatic nerve is very difficult to remove, meat from the hindsaddle (back half of the cow) was often not used by kosher households, to stay on the safe side of Kashrus. The "low quality" of the brisket and its kosher status (being from the foresaddle) made it a very common choice in the poor Eastern European Jewish households that developed what we today consider "Jewish Food."

Because it is so tough, brisket is usually subjected to some form of long cooking, whether braising as a pot roast or simmering as a corned beef/pastrami, or Barbecuing in the American tradition—which I highly recommend and will likely discuss at a later date. In many Jewish households, the idea of slow, long cooking was particularly suitable for Sabbath meals, where you could begin cooking something on Friday before sundown, and without adjusting or tweaking, allow it to cook all day Saturday until sundown, when the prohibition on work (which includes many cooking procedures) expired. A good hot meal on Saturday was the goal of most Jewish mothers, and so Brisket became prominent as a dish for Shabbes, and from there for other holidays where large groups would be fed, like Passover or Rosh Hashanah.