Recipe Source: Diversa Cibaria. Published initially by Constance Hieatt and Sharon Butler, eds., Cury on Inglysch EETS 8, London, 1985. This recipe was republished in Constance Hieatt, Brenda Hosington and Sharon Butler's Pleyn Delit:Medieval Cookery for Modern Cooks, Second Edition. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1996. The recipe is from a collection that dates to the fourteenth century AD.
As most of you already know, I recently put on a buffet lunch for 325 people. The luncheon went smoothly. There were some things that I would have probably preferred to do differently, but on the whole I think that things were decent and I was by no means ashamed of how things turned out. One of the difficulties I encountered was the weather. It rained so much that people started making comments about grabbing a pair of each kind of animal and going to find a very large boat somewhere. Our plan was for my husband to cook the meat for the cold chicken in sage sauce on our Big Green Egg while I used the oven for an additional dessert. Needless to say, he was uncomfortable running back and forth to the grill in the mess, and I was uncomfortable with the idea of my trays of carefully roasted chicken getting waterlogged (and yes, it was raining hard and fast enough for this to be a concern.) So the chicken got cooked indoors, the second dessert got scrapped, and the show went on. Unfortunately, this meant that I needed to find something to do with six pounds of thawed frozen strawberries. I remembered having seen this recipe in the same book the chicken came from, and decided that this was the perfect opportunity to give it a try.
Now, naturally, I had to make a few changes. First, there was no way I was going to boil the meat in order to get the broth. That was simply not going to happen, and the original did say that sometimes "probably" the meat was roasted. So I decided to roast the beef. The beef was to be roasted plainly, which was a challenge for me. There is one way to roast beef in my family, and that involves a boatload of garlic. Well, I love garlic as much as, and probably more than, the next person, and I'm tolerably fond of strawberries. The two together? Hmm... no. So what was going to go well with strawberries? Well, I would have to salt the meat anyway, so there was the salt. I've seen recipes for strawberry and black pepper ice cream, so there we are with some black pepper. And garlic, lots of gar - NO! No garlic. I'm sure I've seen a recipe for strawberry and thyme ice cream somewhere too, and even if not I can't think why the two
wouldn't pare well. So I added thyme. I put the garlic back in its little garlic home - again - and added some red wine because that's how beef is roasted. After a couple more wrangles with that pernicious garlic, I managed to roast the beef. This left me needing to find some sort of broth or stock. Fortunately for me, I'd made some duck stock from the carcasses of the most recent duck extravaganza and this is what I used. I made the recipe following the directions until I saw what the sauce looked like. The bits of strawberries looked like... well, they didn't look appetizing, let me leave it at that. The sauce hadn't taken on the strawberry color either. I gave the sauce a whirl in the food processor to get a consistency I was happier with. I ultimately followed the authors' recommendation to add some red food coloring to deal with the color issue; I resisted and tried to add more strawberry liquid, then I gave it up when I remembered that this is what they'd have done in period. It probably wouldn't have come from a little plastic tube, but they would have used some sort of colorant.
Ultimately, the recipe was okay, although I wouldn't say it's enough to make me forego the traditional method for roasting beef. I wasn't as impressed with the sauce as I wanted to be. The flavor of the strawberries and the cinnamon didn't come through very strongly, which was disappointing. I also saved the juice from the roasting pan and served it on a separate platter. This was preferred by me, I think my husband actually liked the strawberry a bit better with the beef but loved using his bread to sop up the original juice. This should also satisfy those of you who have been clamoring for more English ethnic food, and you know who you are. It may be a fourteenth century English dish, but it is still an English dish so enjoy.
Roast Beef in Strawberry Sauce (serves 4 - 6; approx. cost per serving not available)
2 lb roasting beef
4 tablespoons thyme
4 tablespoons kosher salt
4 tablespoons black pepper
1 cup ground almonds
2 cups broth - I used duck, beef would work just as well
1/4 cup rice flour
20 oz frozen strawberries, thawed
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
Equipment:
- Small roasting pan with high sides, like a casserole dish
- Food processor
- Strainer
- One medium saucepan
- One large saucepan
- Mix the thyme, 4 tablespoons kosher salt and black pepper together. Rub into the meat.
- Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Roast the beef in the roasting pan until the internal temperature reaches 140 degrees, about 45 minutes.
- Meanwhile, prepare the sauce. Bring the broth just to a boil in the small saucepan.
- Add the almonds and return to a boil, then remove from heat.
- Strain the broth into the larger saucepan. This is the "almond milk." It is different from the almond milk you buy in the supermarket so don't think of using it, though you may be tempted!
- Mix the rice flour with 1/4 cup water and add to the almond milk. Stir over low heat until slightly thickened.
- Add the strawberries, cinnamon and salt. Keep stirring until thickened.
- If you don't like the way the strawberries look, throw the sauce into the food processor and give it a whirl. Likewise, if the color is unappetizing, add a few drops of red food coloring. It's okay.
- When the meat is done, let it rest for 5 minutes or so. Then, slice it thinly. What I did was slice the roast in half and arrange half the pieces on one platter and half on the other. The first platter got a generous helping of the strawberry sauce in the center; the second platter got a bowl of the roasting juices from the pan. I did this mostly as an emergency measure in case the strawberry sauce didn't work out.
- Serve.