Recipes from the Coronation of Titus Scipio Germanicus and Anna Leigh

Done September 20, AS 49

All recipes are based on recipes found in Opera di M Bartolomeo Scappi, Cuoco Secreto di Papa Pio V., translation by Terence Sculley. Some are closely recreated, most are loosely followed.

Peeled plums served with sugar atop

Book 6, recipe 131

To prepare sops of fresh plums

Get plums that are not too ripe and leave them in boiling water until you see the skin wrinkling; take them out immediately. Put them into cold white wine and carefully skin them. Freestone ones will open in the middle; leave the other ones whole. Take two-thirds of a litre of white wine ready, weighing a pound and a half, with a pound of fine sugar; bring that to a boil with the plums, watching that they do not get too cooked because a brief boiling is enough. If you want to put the in a dish, have thin slices of bread ready that have been braised and sautéed in butter and pour some of the plums cooking broth over them. Then onto the bread put the plums sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. Serve them hot. You could do apricots and same way, and slices of clingstone peaches that are not too ripe.

For each table of 8 (makes 8 servings)

4 large plums

Sweet red wine (I used Lambrusco)

1/3 – ½ cup sugar

Powdered sugar

8 sops

Butter

To prepare the plums

Boil a pot of water, and add the plums 2-4 at a time. Let the water return to boil and boil for 2 or so minutes (until the skin starts to crinkle and split a little). Remove the plums, and plunge them into cold water. Peel the plums (use a vegetable peeler or a paring knife if the skin doesn’t slip away under your fingers), and cut each in half, removing the pits.

Make your sops and have them ready to receive hot plums and sauce.

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Mix wine and sugar and bring to a boil (Adjust the sugar to your taste – it should be fairly sweet, but not cloyingly so). Add as many plums as the wine will cover, return to a boil and boil at a low boil for 3-4 minutes. Remove plums and add any additional plums for the same amount of time. Pour a tablespoon or so of the wine syrup (the boiling liquid) on each sop and place a plum – cut side down – on top. Sprinkle with powdered sugar (it will disappear into the plums) and serve immediately.

To make the sops

Cut baguette style bread into ½ or 5/8 inch slices. Brush with melted butter on one side. Toast lightly in oven or on grill.

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Ham boiled in wine

Book 2, Recipe 114

To cook every sort of pork salami

Large salamis and prosciutto can be cooked in water and wine. Yet prosciutto are often cooked with new hay and water, mostly in May: that is done so they will take on the aroma of the new hay,. However, before they are cooked they need to sit in warm water so they will stay more tender. When cooked, they are left to cool in the broth where they are cooked, then taken out and cleaned of any rank odor they may have about them.

This is more of a process than a recipe:

Ham, sliced. This can be a whole cured ham, or ham steaks.

Water and sweet white wine mixed 50/50

Rosemary (if you want)

Slice the ham (if using a whole ham) or chunk it (if using ham steaks). Place in water/wine mixture (enough to cover). In one of my recipe tests, I had a steak of ham cured with rosemary, which was a lovely addition. If you are doing a whole ham, add two sprigs of rosemary; for a steak, perhaps half a sprig. Bring to a boil, lower the heat, and simmer for 30 minutes (or more if you want). Let the ham cool in the cooking liquid, drain and serve. Remove the rosemary from the cooking liquid and reserve it for later use (I used it in the stewed peas, which recipe comes later)

Tart Cherry sauce

Book 2, Recipe 259

To prepare a sauce of fresh visciola cherries or of other fruit

Get four pounds of fresh Roman cherries that are not too ripe, and cook them in a pot with 2/3 or a litre of verjuice, two ounces of fine mostaccioli, four ounces of breadcrumb, a little salt, a pound of sugar and an ounce of pepper, cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg together. When it is done, put all of it through a strainer and let it cool. Serve it. You can do gooseberries and mulberries the same way.

1 14oz can tart cherries in wate - drained (or 12-14 oz frozen sour cherries)

1/4 cup lemon juice mixed with 1/4 cup red wine vinegar

2 Tbsp each unseasoned bread crumbs, and crumbs made from commercial almond biscotti (without icing)

¼ tsp salt

2 -3 Tbsp sugar (or more, depending on how sweet you like it)

1/4 tsp pepper (or to taste)

1/16 tsp each clove and nutmeg (or to taste)

1/2 tsp cinnamon (or to taste)

Bring cherries to boil in the lemon juice/vinegar mixture (if you use verjuice, use more sugar – verjuice is powerful sour). Add all other ingredients. Simmer for 5-10 minutes. Run mixture through a foodmill. Chill.

Stewed Chicken

To boil all sorts of capon and serve the with various mixtures over them

If you want a capon to be more tasty and its broth better, cook it in a stewing pot in a meat broth with fresh saveloy sausage and half an ounce of ground cinnamon. When it is cooked, take it out and serve it up hot like Lombard sops in layers separated by the sprinkling of grated cheese, sugar, and cinnamon. You can cook tortellini in that broth and cover the capon with them with cheese, sugar and cinnamon on top Besides you can boile the capon with Bolognese cabbage and mortadella and serve it with the cabbage and some cut-up mortadella over it Again you can boil the capon in plain water, stuffed or empty, wrapped in a pig’s or wether’s caul to keep it white. When the caul is removed, you cover it with whitedish or with lemon juice topped with pomegranate seeds and sugar, or with yellowdish topped with sugar and cinnamon.

This is essentially stewed chicken. Again, more a process than a recipe.

One roasting or stewing chicken

1 whole lemon and another sliced.

1/3 cup lemon juice

Pomegranate seeds (perhaps 1/3 or ½ cup)

Salt and pepper

Sugar (less than a teaspoon)

Remove giblets from the chicken, and shove the whole lemon up its.. um, into the cavity. Cover with salted and peppered water, add the sliced lemons. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to a medium simmer. Simmer for 1.5 hours, turn the chicken over, and simmer for another hour. Remove, sprinkle with lemon juice, shake a little sugar on and toss on pomegranate seeds. Serve

Pasta ala AEthelmearc

Book 2 Recipe 174

Pasta after the Roman fashion

Make up a dough with a pound of flour, four ounces of white breadcrumb which has soaked in warm goat’s milk, four egg yolks and two ounces of sieved sugar. When it is ready and not too moist and has been kneaded on a table for a half an our, make a sheet of it with a rolling pin, leaving that sheet a little thicker than the previous one. Let the sheet dry. With an iron or wooden roller, cut macaroni. When they are made, let them dry out. If you want to cook them in plain water, do that in a large pot with a good lot of water and enough salt but the macaroni in when the water is boiling because put into cold water, they will sink to the bottom. That is a dough for making every sort of drawn pasta. When they have boiled for half an hour, see if they are tender enough; if they are not let them boil until they are thoroughly done. Then done, have at hand a silver, pewter, or earthenware platter broadly sprinkled with grated cheese, sugar and cinnamon and set with slices of fresh provatura. Put some well drained macaroni onto that and on it in turn sprinkle cheese, sugar, and cinnamon, with slices of provatura and lumps of butter. In that way make up three layers. Splash rosewater over it all, cover it with another platter, and let it sit on hot coals or in a moderately hot oven for half an hour. Serve it hot.

This one, I didn’t follow the recipe for the homemade pasta, but did (mostly) follow the layering part.

To make fresh pasta that works well for this:

1 cup semolina flour mixed with 1 cup all purpose flour

3 eggs

3 Tbsp olive oil

Enough Water to make the dough come together (careful not to add too much).

Mix ingredients above until they come together into a smooth ball (if you are doing this with a Kitchen Aid or Cuisinart; if you are doing this by hand, put the dry ingredients on your kneading board, make a well, put in the wet ingredients, pull some flour over; keep mixing in this way until all the flour is damp, then knead lightly until it comes together smoothly. Add a little water as needed). Let dough rest for at least 20 minutes. Roll dough. If you are using a pasta machine, roll to the 3 or 4 setting. We cut the pasta into medallions and embossed them with presses (really cool), but that’s not strictly necessary. You can make the pasta and cook it immediately; this dough also dries and freezes well.

1 cup each mozzarella and parmesan cheese.

¼ lb butter.

Cinnamon

Sugar

To construct the dish, boil the pasta for 9 minutes in salted water and drain. In a lasagna (or other baking pan), rub butter on the bottom of the pan (or put some small pats of butter down. Add a layer of pasta. Cover with 1/3 of your cheese, sprinkle, dot with butter, sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar (not much, this is more salt and pepper than anything else – and it’s going to go on all three layers). Add two more layers like the first (cheese, butter, cinnamon and sugar). Add a final layer of noodles, but just put some pats of butter and cinnamon and sugar there (you might also sprinkle on a little rosewater if you like). Cover with foil, and bake in a 375F oven for 10-15 minutes. Serve hot.

Sugar snap pea salad

Book II. Recipe190,

To stew unshelled peas

Get the tenderest peas, as I said before, and with their stem removed put them into an earthenware or copper pot containing beaten melted pork fat and sauté them slowly, stirring them around from time to time. Then add in a meat broth mixed with pepper, saffron and cinnamon. Boil them in that broth, stirring rapidly. As they finish cooking, throw in a handful of beaten fine herbs. When they are done serve them with their broth over them. Along with these peas you can stew salt pork belly cut up into small pieces or else marbled prosciutto.

If you want to make a salad of them, all they need is to be cooked in the broth and served dry with pepper and vinegar over top. If they are cooked in water put oil on them.

1 1 lb package frozen sugar snap peas (You can do fresh – in fact, I recommend it, but expense and available hands make frozen the way to go for an event)

1-2 Tbsp (or so) bacon fat

1/3 cup ham liquid (see earlier recipe) or other fat meat broth. Use a bit more for fresh peas.

2 Tbsp (or to taste) red wine vinegar

Fresh ground pepper (to taste) and cinnamon (to taste)

If using fresh, clean the peas and remove the ends and strings (frozen this is already done). Heat the bacon fat over medium heat, add the peas and sauté until the peas are shiny. Add the liquid, and bring to a boil, simmer over medium low heat for 3-4 minutes. Drain, toss vinegar, pepper and cinnamon with the peas and serve.

Grilled Lamb with Garlic

Book 2,Recipe 4

To roast a shoulder of wether on a spit or on a grill

Should you wish to roast a shoulder of wether, it has to be somewhat tenderized, especially if the wether is old. It needs to be put on a spit without blanching rubbing it with beaten cloves of garlic and salt, so it will take on their flavor. Before mounting it on a spit you can also stuff with beaten pork fat, garlic, common herbs, grated cheese, eggs and common spices. Cook it on the spit over a low fire. When done it needs to be served hot.

4-6 lb boneless leg of lamb (or shoulder if you prefer).

4-5 cloves of garlic, crushed

Salt.

Remove the strings from the lamb, and rub it all over with a generous amount of garlic and salt. Do NOT trim the fat. Cook over gas (around 375F) or charcoal on a grill until the center is done the way you like it (medium is 140-150 F). Let rest for 10 – 15 minutes, carve and serve.

Fried Eggplant with sauce

Book 3 Recipe 231

To fry eggplant in Lent

Peel the eggplants, slice them and parboil them in water; let them drain on a table. Flour them and fry them in good olive oil. When they are done, serve them dressed with pepper, salt, and orange juice, or else with a sauce made of verjuice, basil and garlic. They can be dressed also with a garlic sauce made using walnuts, or with green sauce or with some other garnish.

1 eggplant

Flour dredge (1 cup flour, 1 Tbsp pepper, and between a tsp and Tbsp salt according to your taste)

Olive oil

fresh ground pepper

Salt

Orange juice (not much, it’s a dressing not a marinade)

Cut the ends off the eggplants, and peel them.

Slice eggplants in rounds about 5/8 inch or so thick.

Bring a pot of salted water to boil and parboil the eggplant slices.

When they start to appear greenish, or change color in the middle they should be removed (don’t let them get too soft or you can’t fry them).

Drain the eggplant well, then place the rounds in a single layer on a cookie sheet to drain some more.

In large flat-bottomed pan, heat 1/4 “ olive oil over medium-high heat. Test by sprinkling water in the oil; if the droplets dance, it’s ready.. DO NOT OVERHEAT OIL –IF IT SMOKES, IT’S TOO HOT!!!!! Dredge each slice of eggplant in the flour mixture and add to the pan. Fry until brown on both sides (flip each slice at least once)

Remove fried eggplant from the pan and placeon paper towels to drain.

Sprinkle with orange juice, salt, and pepper.

Pear tarts

Book 5 V. Recipe 114

To prepare a tourte of various sorts of big pears.

Peel bergamot pears, ricardo pears, floentine pears, caravella pears or some other sort of pear that is quite excellent. Cut them up into small pieces. Cook them in butter or else in wine and sugar. When they are done, grind them in a mortar, putting with them the whole mixture of those ingredients that are put with the melon, however less egg is put in. The season for those pears is from September to the end of March And instead of cooking them in wine, you can do them in a broth.

Book V. Recipe 112

To prepare a melon tourte – Get a melon with its rind and seeds removed, slightly unripe rather than ripe, and cut it up into small pieces. Saute them gently in butter, stirring them continuously with a spoon. Take them out, let them cool and cut them through a colander. For every two pounds of sauted melon, add in six ounces of parmesan cheese, six ounces of fresh, well ground ricotta or provature, two ounces of a creamy cheese, two ounces of crumbled Neapolitan musk-flavoured mostaccioli, an ounce of cinnamon, half an ounce of pepper, six ounces of sugar, and ten fresh egg yolks or else six eggs with their whites. Have a tourte pan greased with butter and with a rather thick sheet of pastry dough – make of fine flour, rosewater, egg yolks, butter and salt – and with the flaky-pastry twist around it. Put the filling into it and cover it with another sheet of dough made like shutter louvres. Bake it in an oven or braise it with melted butter over its top. When it is almost done, make its glazing of sugar and cinnamon. When it is done, serve it hot as you wish. You can do a tourte of unripe peach, apricot and plum the same way.

To prepare pear mush:

Cut three to four pears into chunks (quarter the pears, then cut each quarter into 8 or so pieces). Do not peel or core. Put in a pot with a couple of tablespoons of water and a tablespoon of butter. Stew over medium low heat until mushy. Strain through a food mill or ricer.

Preheat ovens to 375F

Filling for each pie:

1 cup pear mush

1 cup ricotta cheese

4 eggs

½ cup grated parmesan cheese

1/3 – ½ cup almond biscotti crumbs (you can make your own biscotti, or purchase Stella Dora or other packaged brand. Crumble in a blender or food processor, or beat with a rolling pin)

½ cup sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

½ tsp pepper

Mix dry ingredients. Mix pear mush, ricotta, eggs in a mixer and add dry ingredients. Mix until all ingredients are incorporated. Adjust the sugar and spices to your taste.

Fill 9” pie shells with mixture, cover, vent cover and bake 45 -50 minutes. Cool before serving.