SCA Recipe of the day: Chardewardon covered in Snowe

Hello again gentle readers! Another installment of SCA Recipe of the Day is here again, I haven't done one of these in a while :)

Excuse me while I go fight with my pears.

Right then. So today is me doing Chardewardon covered in Snowe, two recipe's combined into one to make a yummy delisious dish. First up is my Chardewardon, a pear dish (because pears are in season) from the cook book Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books, T. Austin (ed.) :

Ingredients:

4 pears
1 cup white wine
1/2 cup sugar
4 egg yolks
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. ginger

Steps:

Peel and core the pears. Cut into small pieces and place in a sauce pan along with white wine. Bring to a boil, and simmer until pears are soft - about 15 minutes. Allow to cool and then grind with mortar and pestle (or in food processor). Mix with remaining ingredients in a saucepan. Heat until it boils and becomes very thick - it will resemble oatmeal in texture. Serve warm or cold.

 Pretty simple, right? Careful, pears boil quick!

The next item on my list was Snowe, a pretty simple dish that was used to top many a meal. This recipe for Snowe can be found at A Proper New Booke of Cookery, C.F. Frere (ed.):

Ingredients:

• 1 cup cream
• 1 egg
• 1 Tbsp. sugar
• 1 tsp. rose water

Steps:


Separate egg, discarding yolk. Stir egg white in a large bowl. Add cream, sugar, and rose water. Whisk until mixture will not drip out of whisk. Strain to remove whey if necessary.

So yeah, snowe itself is super easy!


I went ahead and made my snowe first, to allow it time to chill and firm while I made the pears. Because I would be using the yolks for the main pear dish, I went ahead and separated and stored the yolks in a side container while using the egg whites for the snowe. I made the dish and played pass-along, handing the cream around for people to stir and shake until it became snowe. Once down, I put it in the fridge to chill and relax. Simple as pie!

The Chardewardon was a bit more complex, requiring lots of steps. The coring was the trickiest for me, pears do not have as distinct of a core as say apple or peaches so it was a lot of trial and error in de-coring the pears. I went with a simple Chardonnay wine because I enjoy the taste, and the smell of the boiling pears in the wine was divine. Wine burns really well when it splashes out on top of your skin, so take care.

I set aside the pears and let cool for 20 minutes while discussing some politics, then went back to the food processor to blend the pears down. I added the rest of my ingredients into my original pot, stirred till evenly mixed and then boiled. As you can see by my statement above as I started to write, the pears boil up quick and hard and splashed my lappy a few times while I worked :p. It continued to be a wonderful smell while boiling, and turned a wonderful cinnamon brown in color.

I served these into small tumblers and topped with snowe. The taste and color was amazing, and I really loved how this dish came out. When finished and cooked it came out thicker than oatmeal, but not quite custard. It reminded me of pumpkin pie filling in a way, i served it war but I'm sure it would taste just as good cold. I plan on doing my own redaction of this dish, seeing how my own translation will work out for me. I highly recommend this dish, a solid A!