Making the puffs
After years of wanting to, I recently finally joined the Society for Creative Anachronism. I’m still getting my garb together (I have made one houppelande dress – not my best effort, but at least I have found that my clothes sewing skills have not completely disappeared from years ago!) and am slowly working out how it all works, deciding on my period of interest, developing a persona etc.
There’s a lot to take in, but I have finally been to my first event – a tourney, with a “pot luck supper”. As my main areas of interest (apart from a love of history) are Arts & Sciences and Cookery, I have been doing a lot of reading up on medieval foods, customs and recipes, both online (there’s so much out there!) and via books through the library I work at.
I really wasn’t sure what to expect at the tourney, food-wise – I know it’s supposed to be an attempt at something authentic if possible – but on the competition list was “decorated cupcake” – hardly 14th century haha.
I decided to just keep it simple for my first time, and made food that didn’t necessarily need heating up or facilities that might not have been available in the hall. This turned out to be the right decision, as we just put things down on tables and didn’t heat up anything.
I made a loaf of wholemeal bread (bread machine, but still homemade, sort of…..), and these cute Mushroom Puffs from an SCA recipes resource.
I wasn’t sure how many the quantity of filling would make – it didn’t seem like a lot so I made double, and just thawed out 4 sheets of short-crust pastry (I know, I should have made my own but it was 42C here and even in the air conditioning I needed to make things as comfortable as possible). I ended up making 33 puffs, but still had about a third of the filling mixture left, which I’ve frozen for another time (or it would be good folded through scrambled eggs, a crepe or an omelette). I made them slightly bigger than the 2″ circles noted in the recipe, as I used my trusty cheap plastic empanada press, which makes moulding filled pastries and dumplings SO easy. I wish I could buy round empanada wrappers here like I used to in Chile – no cutting out or rolling out the scraps of pastry needed then – but I’ve never seen them here unfortunately. I used to make empanadas all the time with leftovers, to freeze for lunches, but it’s nowhere near as convenient with the sheets of pastry or homemade stuff.
Served in a basket, wrapped up in linen.
Instead of regular salt, I used truffle salt to increase the mushroom-y-ness – but just a pinch, as I didn’t want it to be too salty.
The puffs came out very cute, and tasted good. Definitely a recipe to make again. And I had fun!
Happy Fooding!
