This week, I’ll be taking a look at another medieval Syrian dish - this time, a simple pistachio sauce chicken bake! It’s a sweet and savoury take on a staple of near eastern cuisine at the time - fitting for most people in the medieval period to be able to make!
As with a few other recipes like this, many thanks to Charles Perry’s translations from the original Arabic textbooks!
In any case, let’s now take a look at The World That Was! Follow along with my YouTube video, above! If you like what I make, please consider supporting me over on Patreon!
Ingredients 250g chicken (any cut of meat) 300g pistachios salt pepper ground cumin ground coriander honey
Method 1 - Season Chicken and Bake To begin with, we need to prepare our chicken. Do this by cutting your cuts of meat with a knife, before seasoning your cuts with equal amounts of salt, pepper, ground cumin, and ground coriander. The original recipe doesn’t make note of any spices, but we can infer from elsewhere in the cookbook that cumin and coriander formed the core of medieval Syrian cuisine. So, season this liberally! When this is done, place your chicken onto a lightly greased pan, and then into the centre of an oven preheated to 180C for about 20 minutes. While this is cooking, go prepare your pistachios!
2 - Grind Pistachios, Make Sauce Next, shell 300g worth of pistachios. This will result in a significantly lighter amount of shelled nuts, but this is suitable for about two or three portions of meat.
In any case, when they’re shelled, go crush them into a fine powder in a mortar and pestle. Try and go for a very fine sandy texture.
When these have been ground up, toss them into a pot, along with a tablespoon or two of honey, as well as a small splash of water if everything looks too dry. Put all of this over a medium heat, and let it cook away until the honey softens and bubbles. Keep it stirring, so the honey doesn’t burn onto the bottom of the pot. This should only take about 15 minutes to cook - if the sauce starts looking a little brown, quickly take it off the heat so it doesn’t burn. It’s safer to do this slow and low, rather than fast and high.
3 - Assemble Dish When the chicken and the sauce is done, pour a generous amount of the sauce onto a plate, before arranging your chicken on top. Garnish with a few whole pistachios, and a few sprigs of parsley, and dig in!
The finished dish is a succulent and sweet meal, with a wonderful floral sensation from the spices. The original recipe claims the chicken should be cooked in the sauce itself. This could be done, but you’d probably need more sauce than I’ve made here - it would result in a cut of meat that was tenderly stewed, with the seasoning leeching out into the pistachio and honey sauce. I opted for preparing these separately, as it was more sanitary to do on the day. It’s just as likely that it was prepared like this in the medieval period as well, but was not recorded in the original text.
Today, I’ll be going back to the Hellenistic Period, to the Hasmonean dynasty of Judea. The recipe in question is a simple honeyed-hens, recorded by Seleucid accounts of a feast held by one of the ruling elite. Though the original recipe refers to it plainly as chicken with honey, I’m going to be recreating it today based on our knowledge of contemporary dining habits!
In any case, let’s now take a look at the World That Was! Follow along with my YouTube video above!
1 - Prepare the Chicken To begin with we need to season our chicken. Do this by sprinkling some salt, some freshly ground black pepper, some ground coriander, and some ground cumin on top of your chicken, before rubbing it in with your hands. In antiquity, chicken would have been eaten, along with wildfowl like duck, and even doves or pigeon. Any of these birds would work well here, but chicken would be the easiest meat to deal with today.
Leave your chicken aside while you go make the sauce.
2 - Prepare the Sauce Next, we need to make a sauce to go with this. In antiquity, mustard seeds and vinegar would have been the base of several sauces or condiments. You can easily do this here, but a better solution would be to use pre-made wholegrain mustard, like I’m doing.
In any case, toss about a tablespoon or two of mustard into a bowl, along with a good glug of olive oil. On top of this, add an equal amount of honey, along with a few crushed cloves of garlic. Mix all this together into a fairly thick sauce. If you want, you can thicken this over a medium heat for a few minutes until it’s just about bubbling. I didn’t do this, but it turned out well!
3 - Assemble the Dish Toss your seasoned chicken into a lightly oiled baking dish. Pour over your sauce, and try and spread it around evenly. If you want to, you could place the chicken into a Ziploc bag with the sauce and leave it to marinate overnight in the fridge.
Either way, place your prepared chicken into an oven preheated to 200° C / 400° F, and let it all bake away for 40 minutes, flipping them over halfway through so they cook evenly.
Take the chicken out when they’re browned and cooked through, serve up warm on a bed of edible greens like rocket, and dig in!
The finished dish is super succulent and flavourful. The spices were very floral and nutty, improved by the time spent baking. The mustard and honey mix caramelised at the bottom of the baking dish, which was a delicious bit of sweet heat when serving up!
The meat itself was very tender, with the skin on top crisping up significantly during the cooking process. In antiquity, it’s unknown if birds were divided up into legs, wings, thighs etc, before or after cooking. Though it’s likely that they may have been prepared both as a whole roasted chicken that was then divided up at the table, as well as pre-cut into more easy to manage pieces like I did here. It’s really a matter of personal preference today anyway.
Happy weekend Tumblrs. I made this yummy chicken yesterday. This was sweet, tangy and amazingly delicious. This is a perfect weekend dish. You can make it for dinner today, and have leftovers for sandwiches and tacos tomorrow. That makes life easy.
Here’s how I made this: Chop tarragon, rosemary, cilantro, parsley, thyme, and 4 large garlic cloves. Mix with Meyer lemon zest, softened butter, a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper and the juice from the lemon. Rub it all over chicken, add more salt and pepper. Put the lemon halves inside along with a cut up onion and herb stems. Add a little white wine or water to the bottom of the roasting pan, ¾ cup or so. Roast at 350 for 1.5 to 2 hours until cooked to 165 degrees in thickest part of the thigh.
The herbs and citrus I used for this dish were from our back yard. The heirloom onions are growing in the front yard. The Meyer lemons are so good this year, and they’re all over our neighborhood. I love citrus season. Vegetable gardening in the winter is easy and delicious. I need to get out there and plant some more seeds while it’s still cold out. Peas, favas, and more greens and shallots are some of the things lacking in my garden just about now. But we do have massive amounts of arugula, rosemary, strawberries, lots of Meyer lemons and leeks and onions. The blueberry plants are starting to flower, I might plant a couple more of those. I also cut back my thornless blackberry and am hoping for a good harvest this spring. Our apple tree still has apples and they are delicious.
Yesterday was chill, but today is a proper Spring day, warm with an expense of blue sky and heaps of sunshine. It’s a day to enjoy lunch in the garden, amidst the fragrant blossoms and the pop of colours blooming flowers paint on the grass, enjoying the light and observing the birds or reading a good book. This simple, hearty and bright Springtime Chicken Pasta Salad makes this even easier, turning Sunday’s leftovers into a generous and flavourful quick meal! Happy Tuesday!
Ingredients (serves 1):
½ cup frozen broad beans
1 ¾ cup cold, cooked whole-wheat pasta (such as penne, farfalle or fusilli)
Bring a small pot of salted water to the boil. Once boiling, add broad beans, and cook, about 5 minutes. Drain broad beans, and immediately plunge in a bowl of ice water to stop cooking and cool. Set aside.
Spooncold penne into a medium bowl. Add leftoverRosemary Cougette slices (about half a large courgette).
Peelbroad beans.
RemoveRosemary Roasted Chicken meatfrom the bones, and cut into small chunks. Addcold Chicken chunks to the bowl. Add reserved broad beans, and drizzle generously withLemon Dressing. Toss gently to combine and coat in Dressing. Garnish with freshly picked chervil, if desired.
ChillSpringtime Chicken Pasta Salad, at least half an hour in the refrigerator, before enjoying, with a glass of chilled white wine, like ChardonnayorSauvignon Blanc.
Yesterday was chill, but today is a proper Spring day, warm with an expense of blue sky and heaps of sunshine. It’s a day to enjoy lunch in the garden, amidst the fragrant blossoms and the pop of colours blooming flowers paint on the grass, enjoying the light and observing the birds or reading a good book. This simple, hearty and bright Springtime Chicken Pasta Salad makes this even easier, turning Sunday’s leftovers into a generous and flavourful quick meal! Happy Tuesday!
Ingredients (serves 1):
½ cup frozen broad beans
1 ¾ cup cold, cooked whole-wheat pasta (such as penne, farfalle or fusilli)
Bring a small pot of salted water to the boil. Once boiling, add broad beans, and cook, about 5 minutes. Drain broad beans, and immediately plunge in a bowl of ice water to stop cooking and cool. Set aside.
Spooncold penne into a medium bowl. Add leftoverRosemary Cougette slices (about half a large courgette).
Peelbroad beans.
RemoveRosemary Roasted Chicken meatfrom the bones, and cut into small chunks. Addcold Chicken chunks to the bowl. Add reserved broad beans, and drizzle generously withLemon Dressing. Toss gently to combine and coat in Dressing. Garnish with freshly picked chervil, if desired.
ChillSpringtime Chicken Pasta Salad, at least half an hour in the refrigerator, before enjoying, with a glass of chilled white wine, like ChardonnayorSauvignon Blanc.
This simple and tasty Rosemary Roasted Chicken and Courgettes makes a lighter, vibrant and flavourful Sunday Lunch on a sunny Spring day! Happy Sunday!
Ingredients (serves 2)
1 fluffy sprig fresh rosemary
½ onion
1 large courgette, rinsed
¼ teaspoon fleur de sel or sea salt flakes
¼ teaspoon freshly cracked black pepper
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 chicken thighs
¼ teaspoon fleur de sel or sea salt flakes
¼ teaspoon freshly cracked black pepper
1 tablespoon olive oil
½ cup water
Preheat oven 200°C/395°F.
Removerosemary leaves from the stalk and finely chop them; set aside.
Peel and slice onion. Cut courgetteinto slices.
In a roasting tin, combinecourgetteandonion slices. Add half of the chopped rosemary, along with the fleur de sel andblack pepper. Drizzle with olive oil, and toss, with clean hands, to coat in oil,herbandseasoning.
Season chicken thighs on both sides with fleur de sel,black pepper and remaining rosemary. Rub gently into the flesh. Sit chicken thighs onto the courgetteandonion slices, and drizzle with olive oil. Pour waterat the bottom of the tin.
Place tin in the middle of the hot oven, and roast, at 200°C/395°F, 35 to 40 minutes.
ServeRosemary Roasted Chicken and Courgettes hot, with a side of fluffy brown rice. It pairs well either with a chilled light white Bordeaux, or a fruity red like a good Saint-Chinian.
