My initial thought was to make a savory pie, mostly because I love savory pies as a handy dandy meal. Mmmmm... Medieval pot pies.... But, of course, most medieval meat pies have fruits rather that vegetables in them--if there is something other than meat in there at all. While I am certain that I will eventually come up with a tasty pot pie substitute, the work I want to do for same is many layered, and I still have work to do on the other components before I start experimenting with the entire concept.
And so I thought about how I might make the seitan work as a tasty meat like substance on its own.
And I remembered Beef Y-Stewed.
I love modern beef stew, but the above mentioned recipe is really about cooking lesser cuts of beef in an excellent broth. We have served a similar dish at feasts in the past, cheap cuts of beef slowly stewed in red wine, spices, and apricot preserves, a delicious dish based on the redaction work of Michelle Santy/Amytis de Fontaine. However, I have never bothered to redact this myself - as much as I enjoy it, I have preferred ways to prepare inexpensive cuts which do not involve cooking with 1/2 bottles of red wine. Call it a quirk, but I prefer wine and beer as flavor enhancers rather than primary ingredient-I'd simply rather drink the wine. :-)
However, I also remembered the delicious beef prepared according to Amytis' method, and so it seemed to me a good way to explore the second cook session for the seitan. The results?
Mmmm Mmmmm Good. This did not taste like Edouard Halidai's Beef y-Stywyd, of course, but it did not taste like unsweetened cinnamon bread, either. Instead, it tasted like a bit of meat that wasn't quite identifiable, very mild, made better with a long stew in a good broth. Not as powerful as real beef, but certainly acceptable and something I plan to do again and again. And, as an accidental bonus, it's a recipe that relies on bread, especially when considering how the recipe is described in late and just post period versions. You can look at this recipe and say, heck, the only thing we left out was the meat. We subbed big chunks o' super dense bread for the beef.
The period recipe for this:
Beef y-Stywyd. Take fayre beef of þe rybbys of þe fore quarterys, an smyte in fayre pecys, an wasche þe beef in-to a fayre potte; þan take þe water þat þe beef was soþin yn, an strayne it þorw a straynowr, an sethe þe same water and beef in a potte, an let hem boyle to-gederys; þan take canel, clowes, maces, graynys of parise, quibibes, and oynons y-mynced, perceli, an sawge, an caste þer-to, an let hem boyle to-gederys; an þan take a lof of brede, an stepe it with brothe an venegre, an þan draw it þorw a straynoure, and let it be stylle; an whan it is nere y-now, caste þe lycour þer-to, but nowt to moche, an þan let boyle onys, an cast safroun þer-to a quantyte; þan take salt an venegre, and cast þer-to, an loke þat it be poynaunt y-now, & serue forth. --from Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books, and available with transliteration and redaction at Gode Cookery, here.
I did have to spend some time thinking about the base broth that I was going to use. In the end, I decided on a packet of Campbell's dried onion soup. Why?
1. It's the least objectionable of the commercially made, widely available dried onion broths. No soy, no beef. The only food sensitivity that needs to be watched is the dextrose and the yeast extract. You will have corn products in your food, but you're making fake beef. You can look past the trace corn here. There is a comparison of ingredients in commercial onion soup powders here, if you'd like to look for something else. In any event, it's a strong broth that will at least suggest the flavor of beef.
2. The recipe calls for onions--this is a reasonable broth to doctor up, because the source recipe calls for onions at an undetermined amount.
And so, choice made and path firmly before me.... I began.
First, I placed the sliced seitan in the slow cooker and lightly browned it in olive oil, mostly because I was afraid it would fall apart. It did not. I'd not skip that step, though, as there is little fat in the the seitan, and some small additional amount is needed to give this a satisfactory mouth feel. I added the onion soup, enough water to cover the seitan, and let it slow cook.
Given that the seitan had already been seasoned with a number of spices mentioned as part of the cooking broth in the receipt above, I elected not to add them to the broth.
The seitan and broth cooked until such time as I could smell that it was done. You'll know that point. Your kitchen will smell like tasty onion soup. This actually improved the texture of the seitan immensely--before the braising, it was a little too firm, a smidgen too dry, but upon completion, it was just fine.
The broth was pretty significantly reduced by this time, and so I removed the seitan and added 1/4 c. red wine, 3 T apple cider vinegar, chopped fresh sage (about 8 leaves with the stem, likely 2 T when chopped) and a teaspoon of dried parsley. I put the seitan back in, let it simmer until the broth was reduced to a small amount of thick sauce (which did not take long, there was not much left after the braising) and served it as you see above.
I decided to serve it with peas and walnuts because I'm still a fan of the complete protein school of vegetarian meal planning, and an apple to get a fruit food group on the plate.
Further exploration of period and slightly post period beef "stew" recipies are here: I may try to include some of these in the next go round.
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