Hello. Happy New Year! In this issue, I’m going to absolutely ignore what’s going on in the world, and talk about some recent discoveries and new things in my own food experiences, and some of the things I want to try in the reasonably near future. Should you wish to engage with the world as it otherwise, you can go look at Gentle Decline instead.
A smoked brisket, wherein most of the work was done by Finne.
Things Recently Cooked & Eaten
The picture above shows a smoked brisket; Finne decided that she wanted to do one for New Year, and managed to track down a butcher in Dublin who could supply a whole brisket. I have a pizza oven/smoker device in the back yard, and we fired it up for smoking purposes. It’s a simple device - a single chamber, with a grate at the bottom for the fire, and a grate half-way up for the pizza stone, with a chimney at the top. It has two doors; one for the fire, one for the pizza grate. And there’s a thermometer in the top of the chamber, just over the doors. It does excellent pizza, although you have to be pretty skilled with the fire maintenance; it shoots up to way-too-hot as soon as a fire gets going in it, and there’s a relatively short window of good pizza temperatures as it burns down. Actually maintaining a semi-consistent temperature is very difficult, and I can only sort-of manage it.
For hot-smoking, it’s also pretty good, although it can be tough to get the temperature back down to where it needs to be; hot smoking ideally happens between 52C and 80C, and fire that settles to embers still seems to want to be hotter than that. So there’s a tricky balance between venting the heat and keeping the smoke. But we did get really good smoked brisket out of this.
I’m going to be experimenting with other hot-smoked goods over the next while. Pork, salmon, chicken, and maybe just some vegetables are on the list. I have some leftover firewood from last winter - birch logs, which we used for the brisket - and some new stuff, which is ex-whiskey-barrel oak. I would expect the latter to produce some very good smoke, but oak burns quite hot, which makes it less suitable. The conventional wisdom on modern smoking processes is to use charcoal - quite a lot of it! - and then chips or chunks of wood for the actual smoke. There’s also advice to keep a separate fire going to have hot coals to add to the smoker, rather than deal with them heating up and cooling down in the device itself.
As usual, though, I’m not so interested in the modern approaches. Medieval - and indeed, well into the early modern and perhaps into what we’d think of as the actual modern era - processes didn’t have thermometers, for a start. And part of what I’m poking at here is the situation where you have a burning fire in or near the same chamber where you’re cooking. Medieval ovens, where they existed, worked on a basis of thermal mass of the oven itself, made of bricks, stones, and clay. You burnt a hot fire in them for a while, then swept out the ashes and did your cooking in the chamber where the fire was. Roasting pits use hot stones heated elsewhere rather than an active fire, and I’m more than halfway convinced that this is how the Irish fulacht fiadh were used, rather than boiling as is popularly supposed.
But it’s obviously possible to build a cooking chamber with a fire in the bottom, and a shelf - even of stone - part way up, so that what you’re cooking gets indirect heat and smoke, but not the direct heat of roasting. There’s also the possibility of hanging meat - or bread, or anything else that can kept coherent or in net bags - up in chimneys or in the roofs of buildings with fires in them. This was almost certainly a thing in Norse cookery, for instance, since having the fire indoors was absolutely necessary in winter anyway. Ireland does not seem to have gone for indoor cooking fires so much; the vast majority of the evidence to date has them outside, or at the very least in a separate building from where people were living. I do need to dig into the archaeology of Viking Dublin and see how things were there.
Overall, though, I’m going to need to have a look at cooking fires in Irish archaeology. This follows after a chunk of research into cooking vessels - there’s an astonishing dearth of cooking vessel remnants in Ireland from the period I’m most interested in. Eventually, I found some, which are enough to convince me that metal vessels were used, and we don’t have many remnants because they were melted down and the metal reused when they couldn’t be repaired anymore.
Anyway. Another thing I’ve been looking into is bread in early Irish food. We know that some of the monasteries had ovens, and it seems pretty clear that other people generally did not. But bread remains a thing through the literature, and the word for bread is there in Old Irish (arán, just as in modern Irish) from a Proto-Celtic root aragnos, which is in turn from a Proto-Indo-European root h₂erh₃-ǵnh₁-os which I’m told is literally “born of the plough”. I am convinced that porridges of various sorts were the principal use of cereal in early Medieval Ireland, mind, but there definitely was bread.
The possibilities, then, are that bread was gotten from the monasteries - which is plausible, there were a lot of monasteries - or that bread was produced without ovens. There are a few ways to do this. You can partially bury a vessel - metal or otherwise - in hot coals, and bake in that, as with the early modern and current Dutch Oven. I’ve made bread that way; it works fine. You can also make flatbreads on almost any hot surface - a griddle, a simple sheet of metal over a fire, or even a hot stone over a fire. And given the way yeast doesn’t cooperate well in the Irish climate, I feel like forms of bread that didn’t use it were much more likely to be used. Yes, this is why the traditional Irish bread later on is soda bread; no truck with finicky yeast, and a predictable rise.
I do want to try baking in the smoker, though. Pizza is a flatbread, albeit one that does use yeast, and I’m pretty sure that many of the other forms of flatbread will work in there too. And I want to try out some yeast bakery in it as well, although it’ll have to be something that doesn’t rely on steady temperatures.
I’ve never considered myself as much of a baker. I’ve been able to produce basic forms of bread which were okay, but not up to the standard of what I’d call good bread. Some of this is of course down to practice, and I’m sure that if I put in the time and repetition that I do with cookery, my baked goods would get better. In recent months, though, I’ve been making American biscuits, and of late, the Isles scone, and both of those are going pretty well. Both of those use baking powder for the rise, which was only invented in the 1850s, but they’re giving me enough confidence to start trying out other things. And I have had success in the past with Arabic flatbreads (that’s back in 2020), which use yeast, but have a very short baking time.
Scones; 7 cut, one shaped.
An interesting detail about the scones, incidentally, is that the ones that are cut from the dough with a cookie-cutter rise markedly better than the one shaped from the leftover dough at the end, as you can see in the photo above. I’m going to have to read up on that, too.
Recipe: Scones
Here’s the recipe I’ve been using for scones. I don’t actually recall where I got it; it was one of the top results on a search for “scone recipe” because I was too lazy to go and look in any of the loads of cookery books in the house. Nigella Lawson almost certainly has a recipe too; I should look for that.
350g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
Pinch of salt
85g butter
2 tbsp sugar
175ml milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
squeeze lemon juice
1 beaten egg
Pre-heat your oven to 220C, or 200 for a fan oven. Put the flour, baking powder and salt in a mixing bowl, and stir them together. Add the butter, and use your hands to crush it through the dry goods until the overall mix is like breadcrumbs. Most instructions emphasise the importance of cold butter; I’ve used it anywhere from straight-from-the-fridge to nearly-melting, and it’s been fine. Add the sugar (I’ve been stepping down the amount of sugar bit by bit; the original recipe had more), and stir it in. Now heat the milk gently - it wants to be warmed a bit, not hot - and add the vanilla extract and the lemon juice to it. The lemon juice adds acidity, which helps the baking powder rise. At some point soon I’m going to try buttermilk instead of milk + vinegar. Make a well in the middle of your flour-etc-mix, pour in the warm milk mixture, and stir. It’ll be sticky, and might start to come away from the bowl a bit. Once it’s more or less coherent - probably with quite a few dry bits still in the bowl - tip it out onto a floured surface and use your hands to fold it and recombine the dry bits in. This isn’t really kneading as with bread; you’re not looking to get the long fibres of gluten, but instead leave a more crumbly texture, so don’t overdo this. I tell myself that there’s a tactile point when it turns from a mix of flour-stuff and liquid to dough, but I can’t explain this very well. Once it’s coherent and you’ve folded it a few times, press it out to about 1.5cm thick, and cut a few rounds from it with a medium cookie cutter. Take the leftover bits, press them out, cut again. I end up with seven nicely cut scones, and one blob of leftover dough, as you can see above. Brush the tops with the beaten egg, and bake for about 20 minutes. The original recipe had 10 minutes here, and either something is wrong with their oven or with mine, because that’s not nearly enough. I may settle on something more like 23, but ovens are variable beasts. They should rise, and be golden-brown on top.
Eat with butter and jam, or cream and jam, or yogurt and jam, or Nutella, or whatever pleases you.
