I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world. Mastodon Verification Link	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he migrated to the Fediverse. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance. He hates cell-phones.

The annual Early Music retreat, previously mentioned on this site (Bruce and Roast Pig's Head) was rescheduled after Mother Nature, perhaps annoyed at the damage we've done to her climate, hit us with two bouts of severe weather in close succession. So rather than in November, it took place in January. One of the dishes we made was based on this recipe, from the invaluable Curye on Inglysch, p. 108, #54.

Cormarye. Take colyaundre, caraway smale grounden, powdour of peper and garlec ygrounde, in rede wyne; medle alle þise togyder and salt it. Take loynes of pork rawe and fle of the skyn, and pryk it wel with a knyf and lay it in the sawse. Roost it whan þou wilt, & kepe þat þat fallith þerfro in the rostyng and seeþ it in a possynet with faire broth, & serue it forth witþ þe roost anoon.

The head cook was aiming for a braise or stewed version, but as with so many things, the plan did not survive contact with the enemy. Time was running a bit short, so we pulled the meat from the liquid, cut it into smaller pieces and finished it in the oven. It worked out just fine.

Although that was not the plan, upon reflection it is probably closer to the original intent than a braise would be. The original calls for the meat to be roasted, quite possibly spit roasted. The instructions clearly imply that there will be drippings and that they should be saved, added to broth to make into a sauce. This suggests that what we are really looking at is something resembling a marinade, and drippings which are then reduced with broth to make a sauce. I'll give something like that a shot next time, I think.

Given all that, what follows is not really Cormarye. This version is braised, and I also skipped the caraway, mostly since I didn't have any to hand. The main advantage of this version is that it is a bit simpler and a bit quicker, since it doesn't require any sort of marinade.

• 3-4 cloves of garlic
• 3 lbs boned pork, the recipe calls for loin, I used shoulder
• 1/2 bottle of red wine
• salt, pepper and ground coriander - a good solid dusting of each

At this point, the meat is cooked, so you could eat it as-is. However, what I did was move the meat to a smaller dish, in this case a cast iron skillet, heat the oven to 375F and cook it for another 15 minutes, just to brown it up a bit. Meanwhile, I kept the sauce in the original casserole and reduced it down quite a lot.

I served it over rice with steamed greens, and it was, if not 100% medieval, pretty darn tasty.