[Smashy the Hammer] [An Aspiring Luddite]
I carry no phone
An aspiring Luddite
In a wired world.
 Mastodon Verification Link 		[Jeff Berry]
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.

Lenten Chili and Serving Options
27 February 2021 [Chili with Cornbread]

For several decades now, our household has observed something vaguely resembling a medieval Lenten diet as an exercise in medieval foodways and modern willpower. Essentially, we eschew meat, dairy, and eggs for the duration of Lent, although we give ourselves one 'feast day' each week with no restrictions. Recently I mentioned this to a friend, who commented that it must be made more difficult since, during most of the medieval period everyone in the nominally Christian parts of the world would be operating under the same restrictions, which is patently not the case today.

It is an interesting point, and while there is some truth to it there are a few things which make it much less onerous to keep to such a diet in the modern world. (Ironically, during the time of Covid, even the downside of watching others who are not observing Lent is not as pronounced, since we are not eating with others outside our house - to a first approximation, everyone around us, all two of us, is observing the same Lenten fast.) Modern advances in food preservation and transportation help add variety to a modern Lenten diet. The medieval Lenten diet was very heavy on salt fish, and the further one lived from the sea, the more reliance was placed on salt fish - a lot of it herring. Eleanor of Montfort's household, for example, required 400 herrings from her stock (presumably salted, therefore) and purchased 4s 2d worth of other fish on 26 February of 1265. Compare this to Thursday 9 April, outside of Lent, where instead the household used half an ox and two sheep. Friday was a fish day throughout the year, and on 10 April the household used 500 herring from the stock.(All that data is from The Household Roll of Eleanor de Montfort, edited and translated by Louise J Wilkinson, for the Pipe Roll Society. Good fun that book.) We have fresh frozen seafood year-round, as well as fruit and vegetable options, that simply weren't available in thirteenth-century England.

The other thing which reduces the burden of the Lenten observance is the wider variety of food which is now available. Food from the Americas can relieve the monotony of the diet. Chiles, for example, can go a long way toward spicing up a dish. Recently, I made a large batch of vegetarian chili and we built three separate meals around it: over roast sweet potatoes, as part of a 'taco salad,' and plain with Lenten appropriate corn bread.

The recipes which are coming are very loose, since the levels of spicing are very much a matter of personal taste.

Chili

For chili, I use dried beans, usually red beans or kidney beans - perhaps 200-300 grams dry weight. Soak them overnight, then drain them, and put them in a slow cooker. We like onions and garlic, so we use several onions and quite a bit of garlic. Dice the onions, mince the garlic and chuck it in. I use canned tomatoes and use whatever size can I have to hand - usually that's 500 or 700 grams, or close to that. A teaspoon of salt or so, the same or more of cumin.

Now, on to the question of chilis. Ideally, you'll have a selection to choose from and an idea of how much you like. I used a couple of dried guajillo chilis, a couple of dried chipotles, and a good sprinkle of both ground molido chili and a general Indian hot chili powder.

Top the slow cooker off with water, and let it go on slow for six hours or more.

For the first meal, we roasted sweet potatoes; wash, toss lightly with oil, toss on a pinch of salt, and roast at 160C or so, for an hour or until they are cooked to your preference. We like them pretty soft. Slice or squish open the sweet potatoes, top with pickled jalapeños and eat. Outside of Lent, we usually add some cheese and yogurt on top as well.

For the taco salad, wash and cut or tear some lettuce. Dice some more fresh onion, if you are so inclined, and mix those together. Reheat some of the chili, or use it cold as you like, mix it in. Then either serve with tortilla chips on the side, put tortilla chips in a bowl and put the salad on top, or lightly crush the tortilla chips and mix them in. Pickled jalapeños are also nice in this.

The cornbread I made was good, and very dense and chewy, so if you must have fluffy cornbread, just move along, there's nothing to see here.

Lenten Cornbread

Mix equal parts of flour and cornmeal with a little salt, a little baking powder, and a little more sugar than either of those. If you want to add a bit of chili powder, feel free - I usually do. Then add water slowly and mix, keep adding and mixing until you have a fairly loose batter. Heat some oil in an oven-safe skillet, pour the batter in, then pop the whole thing into a 165C oven for half an hour or so until it tests clean. Let it cool a little bit, then slice and serve.
© 2021 Jeff Berry
The Aspiring Luddite