Food History

Today is the calm before the storm. You know, one of those days when you have things to do and enough of them so you ought to be quietly rather busy for about ten hours, but you know that tomorrow is going to be positively frantic and the day after that improbably long and busy and you just don’t want to push things? Well, today is that day.

What do I do on days like this? I invent recipes, of course, using sound historical principles. I could argue (to make everything look relevant to food history) that this is another example of how recipes change over time and new classics become established, but me being lazy doesn’t create classic recipes.

The other thing I could do is give you an entirely irrelevant foodie link to someone else’s blog, to throw you and make you think that I know what I’m, doing. I suspect that’s a good idea and I’m making sure that the link is more historical than this post.

Mind you, the fact that today my mind is less-than-focussed doesn’t mean that my cooking wasn’t historically inspired. It just made sense to me, when faced with broad beans and leeks and zucchini to ponder upon various cooking techniques and spicing and to try something a bit different. The broad beans were too old to eat without shelling, so the second thing I did was shell them. The first thing I did was slice the leeks thinly and put them on to cook very gently in olive oil. From there I improvised, but using the Medieval Mediterranean as my inspiration.

Gillian’s lazy day dish

1 leek (sliced thinly)
2 kg broadbeans in the pod (then shell)
2 zucchinis (sliced to medium thickness)
c 200 g almond meal
3-4 cups of good beef broth (low salt – mine was made from bones from a Belted Galloway from Mountain Creek Farm, in case you were wondering)
spices to taste (I can’t remember what I used, apart from lots of ginger, 3 small blades of mace and a touch of zedoary)
1-2 tbs extra virgin olive oil

Sweat the leek in the olive oil until it is soft. Add the broadbeans and then the beef broth. After a few minutes, add the zucchini. After a few minutes, add the almond meal (slowly). Stir gently but thoroughly. Spice it to taste (which is why I don’t remember all the spices nor any of the quantities – I would taste and think “Needs more ginger�? or “Needs something a bit nutmeggy.�?)

This is best fresh, and goes very well with a sour dough light rye bread with a touch of caraway.