Take:
Head of one sheep and 8 feet
6 oz laban strained in a sack for 45 minutes
2 tbs salt
5 cloves garlic
1 1/2 oz butter
1 lb toasted Arab bread
1 1/2 oz pine nuts (snobar)
dried mint and red pepper for garnishing
Prepare and cook head and feet.
Mash garlic with salt and mix it with the laban and add dry mint. Ten minutes before it is time to serve, remove meat from the head and feet. Crumble the toasted bread and spread it in a deep, wide platter or tray and sprinkle it with some of the broth in which head was cooked. Cover it with the meat from the head and feet. Pour the laban mixture over it and sprinkle more dry mint and red pepper. Pine nuts which had been roasted in melted butter may be added as the last touch.
Take about 44 lbs of veal, cut from the leg of a young beef which was butchered 2 days earlier.
Slice meat into round, thin slices about 7 inches in diameter and about 1 inch thick. Cut pieces of fat the same size and thickness as the lean meat.
Marinate the meat in mixture of the following ingredients:
1 tbs cardomom seed
1 tbs mastic
1 1/2 tbs cinnamon
1 tbs nutmeg
1 tbs white pepper
1/2 tbs black pepper
1 lb red onions
5 bay leaves
2 oz garlic
1 qt lemon
1 pt olive oil
2 pts vinegar, good quality
1 tbs cloves
1 1/2 lbs salt
Soak cardamom seed for 6 hours, then grind it fine with its skin. Add 1 tbs salt to the mastic and pound together until very fine. Chop onions fine.
Take part of the spices, salt and pepper and rub into the meat and fat. Place meat in a glass or earthenware container and marinate in a mixture of the above ingredients with onions. Soak for 24 hours keeping it in a refrigerator the temperature of which is 5 degrees centigrade, above zero. Stir the meat from time to time.
As the end of 24 hours, take out of refrigerator and keep at room temperature for 2 hours. All ingredients must warm up to room temperature.
Stick the meat on long skewers or place on a revolving rotisserie. If out skewers, they must be the kind that turns automatically and constantly while the meat is broiling. In sticking the meat on skewers, put one piece of fat between four pieces of lean meat. The skewer must be perpendicular to the fire and very near to it. This could be a hot charcoal fire or strong electric or gas fire. Place it so that the meat is facing the fire.
Have a sharp knife ready and cut the edges of the meat as it broils. Serve it unwrapped in loaves of Arab bread on plates. Sprinkle over it some of its drippings which has gathered in the tray in which the revolving skewer is anchored.
5 brains of lamb or
2 brains of beef
1 1/2 tbs salt
1/2 tsp white pepper
3 tbs flour
11 oz butter
6 eggs
Boil brains. Cool and cut into rounded pieces and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Break eggs and separate white from yellows. Put egg whites in a deep bowl and beat till it forms thick foam. Add to it the beaten egg yellow. Beat again after adding salt and pepper. Add flour and turn lightly with a spoon. Melt butter in skillet. Dip pieces of brains into the beaten eggs and lift the pieces with a spoon taking some of the eggs with it and drop this into the hot butter. Keep the fried brains warm in a container near the heat until ready to serve. Serve with it vegetables or potatoes.
Ingredients
1 small lamb about 17 - 18 lbs killed and prepared a day in advance
Melt butter designated for the stuffing in a skillet and fry onions, chopped meat and nuts. When it is fried remove to a pot and add salt, pepper, saffron, rice and water. Boil about 5 minutes over high heat, then reduce heat to moderate and cook until done.
Salt the lamb inside out and rub in with pepper. Stuff with the above stuffing and sew and truss or have it kneeling on its foreleg in a baking pan. Pour melted butter over it and put in moderately hot oven and bake until done. Baste it often with melted butter and some of its own juice. Cover all the top part of it with foil. Turn lamb from time to time.
When lamb is done remove baking pan and keep hot in another container. Drain out all but a very little of the butter and sauce in the pan in which the lamb was baked. Place pan on top of stove and add flour and stir until it turns brown. Pour over it the liquid that was drained out and saved and let it boil till it begins to thicken. Pour it into a strainer. Return the stained sauce to boil a little longer over low heat and keep hot until ready to serve. If much butter appears on top of sauce, skim it off the top. Service lamb on large tray or platter and sauce in a separate container.
I love Piccalilli and was very disappointed when Garners stopped producing theirs because I thought it was the best. I am convinced that people who say they hate piccalilli can only have tried one of the inferior insipid and acidic versions that masquerade as this fine pickle.
So I decided to make my own and started my quest for the perfect recipe, I have scoured my cookery books and trawled the internet and then I remembered Mrs Beeton's book of Household Management and there I found a recipe for Indian Pickle, maybe this is where Piccalilli originates from? I don't think I'll be following it, no doubt mine will be an amalgam of many but this one is a curiosity.
Indian Pickle (very superior)
The ingredients are:
To each gallon of vinegar allow 6 cloves of garlic, 12 shalots, 2 sticks of sliced horseradish, 1/4 lb of bruised ginger, 2 oz of whole black pepper, 1 oz of long pepper, 1 oz of allspice, 12 cloves, 1/4 oz of cayenne, 2 oz of mustard seed, 1/4 lb of mustard, 1 oz of turmeric, a white cabbage, cauliflowers, radish-pods, French beans, gherkins, small round pickling onions, nasturtiums, capsicums, chilies, &c.
Another curiosity I found whilst browsing Mrs B is a rhyming recipe for a salad, I love the way sauce has been rhymed with toss!
"Two large potatoes, pass'd through kitchen sieve,
Smoothness and softness to the salad give,
Of mordent mustard add a single spoon,
Distrust the condiment that bites too soon;
But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault,
To add a double quantity of salt;
Four times the spoon with oil of Lucca crown,
And twice with vinegar procured from 'town';
True flavour needs it, and your poet begs,
The pounded yellow of two well boiled eggs,
Let onion's atoms lurk within the bowl,
And, scarce suspected, animate the whole;
And, lastly, in the flavour'd compound toss
A magic spoonful of anchovy sauce.
Oh! great and glorious, and herbaceous treat,
'Twould tempt the dying anchorite to eat,
Back to the world he'd turn his weary soul,
And plunge his fingers in the salad-bowl."
