Moorish Chicken

Moorish Chicken on Bread

Categories:	15th century   Pie   Meat   Portugal
Original Source:
Secondary Source:
Cook:	Ailis inghean Muirgen
Meeting Date:	2014-05-18

Moorish Chicken

Take a raw chicken and cut it into pieces. Then prepare a saute with 2 spoons of butter and a small slice of or bacon. Add the chicken and let brown. Cover the chicken with enough water to cook it, for you will not add more during the cooking. When the chicken is almost cooked, take green onion, parsley, cilantro and mint. Mince them all well and add to the pot, with a little lemon juice. Continue cooking until well done. Then take slices of bread and line the bottom of a clay pot with them and pour the chicken over them. Cover with coddled yolks and sprinkle with with cinnamon.

Another recipe for Moorish chicken

Cut a very fat chicken into pieces, and cook it over low heat, with two soupspoons of fat, a few slices of bacon, lots of cilantro, a bit of parsley, a few mint leaves, salt and a very large onion. Cover it (? abafar means to stiffle, smother, etc) and let it brown, stirring once in a while. Next cover that chicken in water, and as soon as it reaches a boil finish seasoning it with salt, vinegar, cloves, saffron, black pepper and ginger. When the chicken is cooked, add 4 beaten egg yolks. Take a deep serving tray, lined with bread slices and put the chicken over top.

Steps

1. Take a few slices of bacon, and rendering them for frying fat, reserving the bacon.
2. Then, chicken thighs, dicing them, and browning them in bacon fat.
3. Add green onion, parsley, cilantro, and mint, with a bit of lemon juice and water, and stir to combine over heat and wilt the herbs.
4. The chicken should be done by that point. Mix with beaten eggs, and put into a pastry shell, dust with cinnamon, and bake until set.

Note

We’ll start by ignoring the questions raised by the inclusion of bacon in recipes purporting to be Moorish. There’s also the fact that these aren’t really pie recipes. Cooking meat and herbs, mixing with eggs, and pouring over a crust (in this case, of bread) is suggestive of quiche, which seems like it would be more portable than the bread form. The same cookbook contains pastry dough recipes and even mentions baking chicken in pastry (though that recipe lacks the appeal of the flavours suggested by these ingredients). I’m therefor invoking the C in SCA, and planing to make a quiche inspired by Moorish chicken.

Half the filling was put in a pie crust, the other half was put on sippets and briefly microwaved to heat the egg for safety.

The bread version had more herb flavor and would be better for feasts. The crust version would be more portable and better for camping events,