Peeling and pondering

Sometimes, you have to grab a pile of fruit and a knife and make a pie. But really, you just... just... want to peel something.

More even than wood carving, taking knife to fruit is a supremely meditative act of creative destruction.

Care is needed lest you cut yourself, of course, but even if you mangle the fruit, who cares? It's going into a pie anyway, so make with the blade, kiddo, and let your mind wander.

I've been doing a lot of peeling recently, trying to decide how best to proceed with this project.

2015 has been a tumultuous year. My book was published and I was riding high. Then my mother died suddenly and I was left feeling high and low at the same time.

Knife to peel.
Spiraling.
Lengthening.
Try to get it all in one.
Meditate.
Don't cut yourself.

So here I am at the close of the calendar, trying to decide whether I care much for calendars. It's tempting, oh-so-tempting, to think in these discreet blocks of days, months, years. It tempts you to take up the blade.

Peel away the questionable bits.
Cut around the bruises.
Save the good fruit, dispense with the bad.
It's just a pie, it doesn't have to be pretty.

To think in calendars is seductive. It makes it easier to just pretend you can bin the entire year at will or pick or choose in phases of the moon or turning of the seasons. Hell, this entire project is and always has been dependent on calendars for its framework.

In January, can you really begin again? Boot the old man to the curb and pick up the baby in the tophat?

Time is seductive but false.
You can't time a pie, it's done when it's done.
Density, moisture, relative humidity, too many factors at play.
Keep an eye on it and yank it before it burns.

I am about to pick this project back up again. For those of you who have waited patiently while I run off to be an author and have family tragedies, I thank you for your time. I hope you don't feel I've wasted it.

Going forward, we're going to take a more meditative approach and we're going to ignore the calendar. I was wrong about the artificial frameworks for this. I was wrong to think I could just peel it and pop it in the oven and set a timer and it would be done when it dings.

We're going to carve around the worst bits and bruises and try to use the best of the fruit. And we're going to watch the food and let the pie tell us when it's done and time to move on to another pile, another peeler.

Our knives will be sharp and our pies will sometimes be ugly.

I hope you'll join us.

In the meantime, have a happy Christmas or a happy whatever celebration brings you together with your kith and kin this winter's turn. Draw near to those you love and remember those who are missing. Share food and companionship and warmth and remember that they are the only real light that matters in the winter's darkness.

And volunteer in the kitchen when there's stuff to peel.
It'll be good for you.

- Scott

The Last Last Post

For the record: I'm won't spend quite this many posts for the second last. However, on advice from Francis, I did go back out to the workbench and spent some more time zeroing in on the correct form of my last. He advised that I raise the sole about a 1/4 inch, sloping from the ball of the foot to the heel. This isn't to accommodate a heel so much as to accommodate the shape of the human foot.

This was done mostly with hand tools this time: the pattern maker's rasp and as I neared my final desired measurements, a spokeshave. I will sand it to remove most of the toolmakrs before putting a finish on it and moving on to the next one.

In the meantime, we're going to shift over and visit the Joiner's shop.  Stay tuned!

~ Scott

A bit of heel lift demonstrated by putting the heel on a handy speed square.

The less-flattened sole of the shoe.

 

Kill It With Fire, Part Five: Cleaning the kitchens. . . summary and wrapup

"Cooking is a craft, I like to think, and a good cook is a craftsman -- not an artist. There's nothing wrong with that: the great cathedrals of Europe were built by craftsmen -- though not designed by them. Practicing your craft in expert fashion is noble, honorable and satisfying."

- Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

This blog began with that quote.

No one begins something like this on a whim. And if I'm honest, the quote that started this insanity was just one of many pebbles that contributed to the avalanche. It might have been the first pebble, but I can hardly blame Mssr. Bourdain for all that followed...

I am tired. More tired than I have been in a long, long time. My new regimen of archery practice didn't help, and for my Elizabethan alter-ego, the invention of Advil is 390-odd years in the future.

Thankfully, I live in that future so I'm not reduced to gnawing on the trunk of the nearest willow tree.

I was an art major, which is a roundabout way of saying that I spent a lot of time working in restaurant kitchens. There wasn't much in Bourdain's book that really surprised me. Of all the oddball jobs I took through the 'starving artist years' that are so fondly spoken of by people who've never lived through them, the restaurant jobs were my favorites.

Was it noble, honorable, and satisfying, as he promised? I dunno. I wasn't a chef, the highest I ever got was prep cook. I certainly didn't make it to culinary school; I spent too much time as a dish dog, really. Nevertheless, the exposure to finer foods and the people who prepared them than I could afford on what they were paying me taught me to appreciate, to taste, food differently.

But this isn't a foodie blog any more than it's intended to be Scottie Goes to Ren Faire. I never really meant for the baking demonstrations at the Washington Midsummer's Renaissance Faire to change so drastically how I thought about this project.

I'm still slightly ashamed to admit that it didn't occur to me earlier to set up and attempt one of these trades at anything close to full production level.  How could I ever hope to understand the lives of my craftsmen forebears if I never stepped fully into their shoes?

We'll get to shoes soon, this is about... I almost said it's about bread. It's actually not at all about bread.  Anthony was right about that. It's about craft.

The WMRF demonstrations were always intended to be a sort of safety valve on this project. The faire was scheduled just past the midpoint in the project and I knew that by that time I'd have a fair idea whether or not I thought I'd make it by the end of December. (Though to be honest, I still don't know and you'll see why I've stacked projects as I have in the coming months.)

Like archery, baking was not something I ever thought to enjoy. In my home, I do all the cooking, but The Engineer did all the baking. Baking was too fussy for me, too much like science and not enough like art... or so I thought. It never occured to me that it would be baking that finally put me over to the noble, honorable, and satisfying side of the kitchens.

Those are The Engineer's hands in that photo above. It was also the first time in quite awhile that she and I cooked anything together. Until the recent remodel began, our kitchen was inhospitable to more than one person at a time.

There's finally room for craftsmanship. 

Photo & Digital Manipulation by Dan Hill - © 2013 Used with permission

By God, Tony was right about that. When Dan Hill posted that photo manip above, one of the first comments posted below it (by someone I have never met, mind you) was two words: "Naturally happy."

Bourdain spent the rest of Kitchen Confidential talking about how dog tired he got working the line, how strung out he was on various substances, how much the food business was a scam and how much was genuine, and how arduous the restaurant biz is is, but even now you can see in his shows how much he loved it.

I'm starting to feel that way about bread and baking.

Baking turned out to be more art than science, not as slavishly dedicated to the arcane formulae of moth-eaten texts as I once believed. When my hands were in the dough and our friend Becky had the ovens blazing and Kristin was scooping flour into the bowls while Becky's husband Douglas was working the rope line, charming the tourists with his English accent and well-rehearsed dialogue about the history of English baking... here was an element of jazz. 

And always the crowds lined up at the edge of our area, asking questions and carrying away my card or the address of this blog scribbled on a bit of paper. At one point, we scrawled a diagram and the URL for this project on a chalkboard and folks were taking photos of it with their phones.

I hope you found your way here without any trouble. I hope that you learned something that day at the faire when you stumbled across our mad adventure in the land of yeast and flour. God knows that we certainly did.

That Corgi was an excellent student...

The Oven's End...

The oven at the Washington Midsummer's Renaissance Faire site was never meant to last. Not only did we build it from the cheapest materials, we taxed them to their uttermost extremes. By the end of the last day of the fair, the cracks were no longer superficial. The ceiling and the framing around the door were beginning to deteriorate and I decided to bake a few final pies and call it a day.

We let the oven cool and went our separate ways to enjoy the fun and frivolity that we'd missed the other weekends of the faire due to tending our breads.  When the final cannon sounded the end of the faire, we gathered one last time around our hearth...

The Engineer had the honor of the first whack.

Then Becky and Douglas, who were so eager to leave they were already changed into civilian clothes...

Then it was left to me. It felt a little wrong, like putting down a family pet. It had stood us in good stead, generated far in excess of its capacity and kept going strong. But the heat and desolation of the days standing in front of it got the better of me and I let the hammer swing.

And soon it was all over.  It arrived at the faire site in buckets and would leave by the shovel full, loaded in the bed of my truck...

The final tally for our little wood-fired bakery: 220 loaves, eight pies, nine scones, two loaves of soda bread, and 1 apple tart, utilizing 1/2 bushel of apples, 80+ lbs of flour, and several gallons of ale. 

Thanks to my partners in floury crime: Kristin Perkins, Kelsey Fahy, and Becky & Douglas Norton. Thank you to Pat, Tracy, and Amy of the Washington Renaissance Arts & Entertainment Society (WRAES) and all the cast and crew of the Washington Midsummer Renaissance Faire.  I hope you enjoyed the bread we dispersed to your tables each day from our bakery.  Thank you to all the photographers that documented the events and kindly sent me their photographs and videos.

There is, as always a sense of melancholy as we end one thing, and a sense of hope as we embark on the next.

Stay tuned to this channel. I doubt this is the last time we will see the fruit of an oven such as this. I still have the one in my back yard, after all...

~ Scott

Historical Homebrew, Part Three: I have no words...

Historical Homebrewing Part Two: Sickness Demons and Yeast

Today was supposed to be a work day for our kitchen remodel, but then the back gremlins showed up and now I stand at the new kitchen counter typing this because I cannot really sit. Probably twinged something when I moved the anvil off the kitchen counter so The Engineer could do some tiling next to the stove.

Yes really. Why, where do you keep your anvil?

Since I can't really undertake anything new, let's rejoin the Brewery of the Bearded Alewives, already in progress...

Part Two: Exorcising Our Sickness Demons

The Elizabethans were not as dirty as advertised. They bathed more often than frontier Americans (who I wager were also cleaner than reputed) and even brushed their teeth. Okay, they chewed on a sort of bushy stick, but it sort of amounted to the same thing. The Waterpik hadn't been invented yet. Unfortunately, any benefit of this brushing was somewhat undercut by their affection for raw sugar. I've read that black teeth were a status symbol and most records of her majesty recount her black teeth.

Which honestly must've hurt like holy heck.

They even had sewers... open ones for the most part, but they did have them, and we'll get more into the transit of muck from city to sea when we discuss the Worshipful Company of Plumbers (yea verily). If you want to get ahead of the class, Google "Gong Farmer" some time. Or you could just click that link.

Hint: Gong farmers don't maintain fields of east Asian percussion instruments.

All that being said, they had no idea how sickness happened, how it spread, or what caused it. As the author of my ale book said: "Alewives... would've taken your word for it if you told them that invisible sickness demons lived in the water and could only be killed by being boiled alive." Cleanliness may well have been next to Godliness, but the definition of cleanliness was as flexible and multi-defined in our time period as was the concept of Godliness.

I noted in a previous post that the idea of "They drank ale because water was unsafe" is a popular notion, put forward once more by Dr Cookson in the book I'm using. But it's a concept that is currently, finally, under fire. The easiest counter-argument is that the claim is flawed at its core for the exact reason she just mentioned: avoiding water and supplanting it with beer would imply more knowledge of disease vectors than the early modern person actually possessed.

Also, the duration and amount of boiling in ale-making is insufficient to actually kill some popular water-borne "sickness demons".

This article by medievalist Tim O'Neill will do a better job of presenting the counter-argument than What Was the Drink of Choice in Medieval Europe?  He makes a good case for water being the go-to for most Europeans... and yet, in his first sentence implies that the problem is with misinformation on the internet. I've been reading the factoid that ale was safer than water and preferred for that reason in history books, including textbooks, since I was a small child. This isn't a new idea or one of those bits of net-lore that get argued about in the fora of Straight Dope and Snopes.

Anyway, it's a great article and I'd love to talk to him about it sometime... maybe over a pint.

For whatever reason, it's indisputable that people drank enormous amounts of ale and beer. Several liters a day by many counts. We're impressed by these statistics because we think in terms of modern beers, but they got away with it because alcohol levels were so very low in early beers and carbohydrates were incredibly high by modern standards. The recipe I've been brewing has a pound and a half of oats in it, for heaven's sake.

Calorically, it's a meal in itself.

Academic arguments aside, whether it was because the local water supply was suspect or because it was the early modern equivalent of a protein shake, we can all agree that ale was the lynch pin of the early modern diet.  And whether or not the average medieval schmoe was as dirty as popular imagination would have them be (they weren't) the sanitation of the modern kitchen is vastly greater than the sanitation of the Alewife's kitchen.

Did I say "vastly"?  I meant "somewhat".  As far as you know, I decided to forego sterility for reasons of historical accuracy. Yeah... that's it.

Part III: My Yeast Can Beat Up Your Yeast

Mistake #3: Sanitation is such a Thing in modern brewing because we have a much better understanding not only of disease vectors, but also we have a much greater knowledge of what yeast is and how it works. Pathogens that cause food poisoning are one thing (and of greater concern in bottling than brewing) there are also pathogens that will just show up to eat your yeast. Also, wild yeast, which exists naturally on almost every surface, can get in the way of or inhibit the operation of cultured yeast, leading to problems, or at least unpredictability, with your brew.

Honestly, can you really sanitize a broom? Or even a wooden spoon (which is what we were using)? The God's honest truth is this: I forewent sterility in this project because sterility was an unreachable goal. Note that JoNell, quite accurately, said "sanitize" rather than "sterilize". That's because outside of a clean room in a science lab, it's all but impossible to really sterilize anything even in a modern kitchen. 

When Janet Winter commented on my Facebook wall that her husband's foray into homebrewing seemed to be more an exercise in washing dishes than it was in making beer, she put a lovely point on things. I won't define Godliness for you, but I can tell you that cleanliness looks like soap suds because I am, at the core of my being, a modern man. 

Besides, even if you do get something sterile, that stops the moment it makes contact with the air because the air itself is rife with things like wild yeast.

But we're making beer! Yeast is a Good Thing, though, right?

Yes and no.

Modern ale yeast, "Saccharomyces cerevisiae" is top-fermenting and operates best in warmer temperatures, as opposed to Lager yeast, "saccharomyces pastorianus" which is a "bottom fermenting" yeast which operates over longer periods at cooler temperatures. Top and bottom fermenting is a bit of a misnomer, frankly, and has to do with where the foam shows up as opposed to where the real action is. Both types of yeast are free-ranging, hunting down every scrap of sugar they can get their yeasty teeth into and chomping it down to turn into alcohol and carbon dioxide.



The foam that forms atop a top-fermenting beer is the stuff I was talking about in the baking post, called "barm" and though I was looking too early when JoNell posted that the next day, I knew I was in trouble when I messaged Patrick a few days later and he told me he still didn't see any barm forming at the top of my ale batch.

My yeast were failing me.

Still, I would have to wait a week for confirmation of my failure.

Special thanks once again to Patrick and JoNell Franz for not only generously offering their kitchen to host the brewing of this oatmeal-soup-which-we-will-agree-to-call-ale-in-order-to-humor-Scott, but also their generosity of spirit and wonderful good humor along the way. Would not have been the same without JoNell's play-by-play documentation.

Today's Unsolicited Endorsement: Patrick is a professional Robin Hood (yes, really) as well as the founder and president of Presenters of Living History. JoNell and Patrick bring hands-on history demonstrations into schools and organizations, giving kids a chance to make a tactile connection to history by participating in demonstrations and crafts from the renaissance through the American civil war. Aside from being two of my favorite people on the planet, they do Good Work showing kids that history is NOT BORING. You can find out more about their work at PatFranz.com.

Next: We drink!

- Scott

Historical Homebrewing Part One: Alewives like us...

Sometimes, I run out of resources and the chronicles are silent, so I end up doing things by the seat of my pants on this project. Beer-brewing was not supposed to be one of them.

After, all I had a book!

What could possibly go wrong?

I read the instructions in my book. Over and over again. I visited the local home brew store. I talked to the very knowledgeable guy who was there. When I told him what I was up to, he didn't bat an eye. Told me what to expect, gave me some advice, told me I didn't need to buy any extra gear, and sent me on my way with ingredients in hand. I read three books on the history of beer and brewing.

Then I re-read the instructions and read two books about modern home brewing and made notes on a bunch of things I didn't actually need to know, but wanted to know just in case I was wrong about what I'd need to know.

And then this happened.

Yes, it was going to be that sort of night.

My partner in crime Patrick has a partner in crime of his own, his wife JoNell. She was there to document the procedure for the edification and amusement of her friends on Facebook (and with her permission, you as well! Remember to thank her in comments.) 

It was supposed to be simple (according to the instructions, which I really did read) for Patrick and I to put together a basic, low-alcohol, late medieval ale. It would "be like liquid bread," the author assured us.

Deviations from Period Procedures: 

• Sanitation. (More on that later.)
• I make a very masculine alewife. In fact, both of us are a bit hairy about the jowls for a proper alewife.  In fact, if the ghost of particularly annoyed alewives of yore were haunting us and cursed the proceedings, I would not be at all surprised.
• Period alewives used a twig-broom known as a bessom or the branch of a broom plant (known hereabouts as 'Scotchbroom' to which I am fiercely allergic) to stir the mash. We used a wooden spoon.
• No huge copper tuns or kettles or oaken barrels were sullied in the manufacture of this small ale. My efforts were barely worth the plastic buckets and coolers that we did use.

Incidentally, when you're around theater people, mention the idea of dressing in drag very carefully or you'll end up in a dress before you can say "Milton Berle".

Welcome to the Brewery of the Bearded Alewives.

Part the First: Angus MacGyver, Patron Saint of Brewers

Mistake #1: As previously noted, I forgot to bring the kitchen scale with us and the Franzes didn't have one. As it turns out, you can weigh ingredients the way you weigh a cat: Weigh the person, weigh the person holding the cat/oats, subtract the difference. 

In all honesty, this probably had minimal impact on our results. The malt was pre-weighed by the home brew store, who also ground it for us.  We also tested our scale scheme with known-weight items like the bag of malt to be sure we could get into the correct ballpark for our weights and measures.

The oats were mostly present for flavor, so a slight deviation in weight probably didn't affect the brew much anyway.

Why yes, I did watch a lot of MacGyver as a young and impressionable child, why do you ask?  Look, if you want to read about brewing being done right and done well, there are places to find that sort of thing. Sadly, this is not going to be one of them.

The recipe was simple:

4.5 lbs of Malt

1.5 lbs of Oats

4 gallons of water

2 packets Ale yeast

2 five-gallon food-grade buckets

End of list.  How could someone as experienced at cooking pretty much every cuisine as I am screw up a recipe that simple?  

The careful observer will note that I even got to wear my own clothes! And a snazzy black Guinness apron.

And so the evening began. 

There was a bit of tumult early on as we encountered cracked and broken buckets. Patrick has tried home brewing before, but it was quite awhile ago and some of his equipment has moved all over the country to sit unused in various ports of call. Not all of it fared well.

Eventually, we discounted the idea of using the floor cleaner bucket and settled on a 5-gallon water cooler and the one food-grade bucket that had survived the moves. 

Mistake #2: This one might've been worse. The bucket substitution wouldn't have been such a big deal, but the broken one was the only bucket with graduations marked on the side for gallons. We used a pitcher that was almost a half-gallon to measure out our universal solvent.

The whole procedure takes several hours, long stretches of time are called out in the recipe as each step requires the mash (which is the term referring to the mixture that is allegedly going to magically become beer at some point) be left alone to saturate, meld, boil, sit undisturbed, settle, etcetera.  All with the aim of extracting the sugars locked in the barley, which will feed the yeast, which will make alcohol with them.

Not to blame my tools but if I had one criticism for Dr. Cookson (Author of Drinkable History) it would be to better list out the steps in the process. As it is, the recipe/procedure is shot through with jokey asides while you scour the instructions for some indication of how much water should be boiling and when it should be added can get a bit lost in the silliness.

Rather like trying to cook from one of my blog posts, come to think of it.

Through the clever use of an array of kitchen timers, we were able to keep on-track with our boiling and stirring and pouring routine...

Well... mostly.

Did I mention that my TV is only tenuously hooked to the rest of the world? It's been ages since I cut the cord, so any current television is a bit of a siren song. Honestly, between the television and the ghosts of alewives past, we probably never had a chance.

I ended up with a series of successive timers set to go off at specific intervals so that one would signal me to begin heating the water that I'd need to be boiling for the next step. I don't know how alewives did this, but for me, it was all about timers.

Sometimes, it was difficult to figure out what was going on and I think I re-read the entire book several times, trying to suss out the instructions from the asides.

Then, he asked me if I'd sanitized the spoon... crap.

Should've used a broom.

Coming tomorrow in Part Two: We tangle with the Sickness Demons

- Scott

A Yeast Affection: Say hello to my little friends...

This is Figaro.

He's not a special historical breed of cat or anything. He's pretty cool and I've had him a long time, but he's not really sure what to make of my strange hobbies. I suppose after 14 years he's seen me do stranger things than learning renaissance crafting, though if you pressed, I think he'd admit he's a bit giddy that there are now two knitters in the house.

Why am I bringing up my grumpy old cat on a story about yeast?

Because I've spent the last decade and a half trying to keep the furry little weirdo away from the stuff. Fig will move heaven and earth to get to anything yeasty. He's been known to try to drink the water we bloom the yeast in for bread dough. Beer, bread, pizza dough... he'll climb you like a tree to get at it.

You would think it was tuna the way he chases it.

Which is one of the many reasons that I was so happy when my friends Patrick and JoNell offered his kitchen and gear for my foray into beer making. They don't have a weirdo yeast-obsessed cat to contend with and brewing is all about sanitation.

Brewing beer at my place would require straining tuxedo cats out of the mash.

Since most of the ale that the Elizabethans drank was made at home, a little cat fur and a couple of miscreant children in the mix might make it more period, but I think people would object. So we're brewing a cat-less batch first time out.

Beer brewing was a fully-fledged industry by the time Elizabeth came to power, but according to Martyn Cornwell's "Beer: The Story of the Pint" (Headline Publishing, 2003) even as late as 1585, over half of the brewers in London were registered aliens.

Why?

Because hops, that's why.  Traditional English brewing happened without hops, and it happened in the home. The histories tell us that immigrants, mostly protestant refugees from the religious wars on the continent first brought hops brewing to England and it was they that drank most of the production of the breweries they set up once they got to London.

Not to be xenophobic, but we're going to take this opportunity to look into the homelives of the artisans, to step out of the workshops and saunter down the street a bit or up the stairs to enter the world of the Alewife.

The bakery and the brewery is going to overlap for us and these projects will take place simultaneously because the line between bread and brew was a fine one in the early modern world. Both were a calorically-dense cornerstone of the English diet and the ale we're attempting will be, in every sense, liquid bread.

Early modern humans consumed mind-boggling quantities of brew, with estimates ranging from two liters per person, per day, to four for a male and one for a child. Reasons given are still dominated by the "Water was unsafe" school, though that is teetering a bit.

Whatever the case, once you understand the rates of consumption, you begin to wonder if people were loaded day and night. The answer is a low-alcohol, calorie-dense, liquid bread.

In search of a beer you can drink all day without turning into a complete sot (an artisan has to earn a living, you know) led me to this book.

My first foray into this very simple method of brewing will be paved by a book by a fast-rising star of fermented history, Cassandra Cookson and her book "Drinkable History". The book is written in a light-hearted and far too short, but it enforces in the reader a desire to hear Professor Cookson give a lecture on pretty much anything.

Her English ale recipe is simplicity itself: Malted Barley, Oats, water, yeast.  She even outlines how to harvest your own yeast and malt your own barley, though we're going to let that project wait for another show.

My high school teachers taught me that fermentation was mankind's oldest trick, the first chemical reaction that humans learned to control.  Control, but not understand.  The brewers and bakers of the ancient world developed some very strange theories about what was going on in their brews and their bread, but it was mostly written off as supernatural until the 18th century and not really understood until the 19th century.

Yet they figured out that bread and beer were working from essentially the same process, and that the foam atop a vat of brewing beer could leaven bread as well as the funk that occurred naturally on the skins of apples.

Which is the latest example in my new presentation, tentatively titled, Our Ancestors Were More Observant than Us.  And so is my cat.

Later, we brew. In the meantime, like the artisans of old, I need to head off to work.

- Scott