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lrdgck · 2025-12-23 22:50:41

'ey fellas, I've got something fancy for today: I made a fish from a 17th Century recipe.

So, carp is one of the standard Christmas dinner dishes around here, perhaps "the" standard since basically nobody eats it at any other time and like everyone does at Christmas. Apparently, it's for Reasons; it used to be just one fish among many way back in the past. But as it happens, we do have a surviving cookbook from back then, so for the last vew years, every December I've had this feeling I'm missing an opportunity window, and finally I got around to try it out.

It's called "Moravian-style carp" in that cookbook, but it doesn't say a lot given it's a fish cooked in gingerbread sauce. Also, it called for beer vinegar, which I'm sure can be substituted with some other kind as obtaining the real deal proved more difficult than I imagined.

In ye olden days it was common to use bread crumbs as a thickener for sauces. I guess they figured gingerbread can do that as well, with the spices as an added bonus.

The recipe given there is very simple, so I'm giving approximate amounts of ingredients I used. By which I mean, I measured nothing, but it looked like so much by eye. Hopefully the procedure will clarify the issue of ingredient quantities. Here they are:

* four pieces of carp steak;
* ca. 150 g of gingerbread, ground or crushed into crumbs;
* ca. 50-75 ml of beer vinegar;
* ca. half teaspoon of ground ginger;
* ca. half teaspoon of ground cinnamon;
* ca. 100 ml of cherry syrup (this is my departure from recipe, as it called for cherry juice);
* black pepper;
* sugar.

The gingerbread I bought had some sort of jam inside so I used that in place of sugar, because it was already supposed to have that cherry juice and I figured the tastes won't be all that different for it.

So, I began by soaking the fish overnight in the vinegar and juice, not for any particular reason but I felt like it should work like this. I believe, although I have little more than a hunch to back it up, that the recipe was written with fresh fish in mind though. (As in, hey Johnny, go to the pond and get a fish for the lord's dinner, quick.) Then I laid the fish steaks in a baking tray and poured in the marinade it stayed in for the night, added a bit more juice to be sure, sprinkled with the spices (it covered all the pieces without fully caking them, you know, sprinkled, that's why I estimated half a teaspoon), and covered the entire surface (fishes and the sauce too) with a thick layer of ground gingerbread. Then I put it in the oven at 190 Celsius, covered, for like an hour or hour and a half.

While cooking, the fish smelled a lot of vinegar, and the vinegar note was noticeable in its smell, but it kind of like faded with time. I don't know if this is good (probably not), but I had no courage to taste it right away. But when I finally tasted it like two days later, it tasted... fine.

Like, not bad.

I did not quite know what to expect, but I was working with a recipe I was just only trying to recreate from a laconic description, and a fish I never liked anyway. But it actually kind of worked. The fish brought like the least to the final taste of the dish, which was to be expected with all that gingerbread and stuff, but it gave kind of the same sensation as, say, rice or boiled potatoes do as a filling side to go together with a sauce. As in, you know it has a taste of its own, but you're here for the sauce. The texture of the sauce is also quite decent. I figured it could benefit from salt and a bit more of a sour note, though. I only salted it on the plate, but it seemed like the fish would go well with it, and as for the vinegar I guess it kind of evaporated over time, I dunno if it makes sense.

tl;dr culinary experiment from 17th Century

lrdgck · 2026-02-26 18:36:23

Recently I had an opportunity to cook some okra. From what I can gather it's really common in Africa, India, China perhaps, southern USA and probably a bunch of other places too, but I could only get my hands on any notable amount of it thanks to an Indian grocery that's opened nearby. (I think they might be Bangladeshi or something, but it's close enough.)

I found a recipe for a hearty but light dish here. In case it's deleted or whatever here's the basic recipe:

4 cups water
1 can (28 ounces) diced tomatoes, undrained
1-1/2 cups chopped green peppers
1 large onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
1 teaspoon chili powder
1/2 to 1 teaspoon hot pepper sauce
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 bay leaf
4 cups cooked brown rice
2 cans (16 ounces each) kidney beans, rinsed and drained
3 cans (8 ounces each) tomato sauce
1 package (16 ounces) frozen sliced okra

So, the difference is that I had an unspecified amount of frozen okra, I added no rice or green peppers, and didn't use diced tomatoes. I might have added about two carrots cut into sticks, however. But the procedure remained more or less the same: pour water into a big pot, add vegetables and spices sans tomato puree, beans and okra, boil for a while, and then add the rest and simmer until all vegetables are tender.

Since there's little to spoil, it kept for a pretty long while with no change to taste or quality, too.

Now, talking about okra. It seems the way to get around the slime is to make sure it's as dry as it could. For example, you need to make sure you're not chopping freshly washed and still wet sprouts. I did actually bake them a bit in an oven before chopping and it seems to have prevented them from sliming. When all else fails to protect your cooking from slime, it helps to dilute the dish with water; you're gonna make it more watery, like a soup, but at least it won't look like a slug fell into it. Anyways, this is what I learned about okra.

lrdgck · 2026-03-21 21:13:41

You know, this time I got something I kind of invented myself. (As in, got what was left over in the fridge and dumped it together).

PASTA DELLI SAMURAI

(I have no idea if this is proper Italian. I very much doubt it is.)

So, what I had left was leftover sauce I prepared for eating with French fries (chips in British), some pecorino romano cheese, and that's basically that since I initially wanted to make a kind of pasta that is prepared with pecorino romano and black pepper and that would have been it, but as the pasta was cooking I have noticed I still got some of the sauce left.

For what it's worth, I made it out of mustard flavored with chilli (an extra hot flavorful one), diet mayonnaise, and just a bit of ketchup. I called it samurai sauce since it was basically a home-made ersatz of the real samurai sauce.

So, the natural course of action was to add the samurai sauce to dish, but then I figured I have a bit of milk from the breakfast and some dry bun. So I ground a bit of that dry bun to serve as breadcrumbs, and instead of just frying the pepper as the Italians intended, I added the breadcrumbs to the pepper and after a while added the milk to produce a sort of a cheap roux.

I had my pasta water ready, which normally I would add in small amounts to ground cheese to turn it into a sort of, uh, paste to be added to the pasta (pecorino does not melt well so it needs to be prepared in this roundabout way), but instead I mixed the cheese with the sauce and added the pasta water to that. Only then, I added the mix to the ersatz-roux. I dumped the pasta into the pot, and sprinkled with what was left of the ground cheese.

Altogether, I feel it was easier to do than the original Italian-approved pasta, because mixing the cheese with something helped me avoid ruining the cheese; that stuff about adding the hot water in small doses requires some experience to be pulled off properly. And in the end, it tasted no worse than the original recipe I tried out some time ago.

Stormtroper · 2026-03-22 03:33:00

I think I'll try coming up with an alternative samurai sauce too, if I can find a replacement for the spicy condiment.

lrdgck · 2026-03-22 14:17:54

You mean like there's a problem with mustard or something like that? I mean, yeah, what I made did taste like mustard. I guess adding ground chili (or smoked chili, like chipotle or something) to mayonnaise or mayonnaise and cream mix would produce a decent one, though.

Stormtroper · 2026-03-22 16:32:04

I guess I could keep using regular yellow mustard, I was thinking more about making something like what I'd normally use except spicier.

glennmagusharvey · 2026-03-26 03:00:28

TIL: samurai sauce has nothing to do with samurai

lrdgck · 2026-03-26 09:53:57

I'm imagining somewhere, at some point, there was a very disappointed cannibal.

I just recalled what was the name of that minimalistic pasta: cacio e pepe. It's basically only pecorino romano and pepper, the rest is just water you boiled the pasta in. Add it carefully in small drizzles to ground cheese, so that you can mix it into a paste rather than just plain melt it, because pecorino melts poorly and dumping it into the pasta would just result in unappetizingly looking curdles. The way you're supposed to do it is fry some ground black pepper in dry pot until you can smell it, then add a few spoonfuls of pasta water, then some more, so that it becomes like an ersatz sauce, then once it's off the heat add the pasta and the cheese paste. I like these minimal Italian dishes, but it's easy to ruin and hard to pull off properly, and tastes better on the next day anyway.

If you want a pasta dish that's both minimalistic and easy to do, try aglio e olio or al burro. Especially the last one, it's just water out, butter in, parmesan in.

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