A Feast of Ice and Fire: Honey Biscuits

For those of you who haven't heard, A Song of Ice and Fire now has an official cookbook!  Chelsea Monroe-Cassel and Sariann Lehrer have gone through the trouble to put it together, and George R.R. Martin has applauded their Herculean effort (apparently Martin writes about food nearly as much as Brad Pitt eats it) by writing them a forward in which he fesses up to scarfing down a good number of their creations.

Not only is the book great for fans of the series (there's no longer any excuse for Doritos at that Game of Thrones viewing party), it's also a really fun cookbook in its own right. Whether it's a savory stew of cod, crab, and winter vegetables called Sister's Stew, poached pears, wintercakes, or sweet pumpkin soup, cooks are bound to find something new in A Feast of Ice and Fire.

Before each recipe, the authors thoughtfully include a passage in which the dish is mentioned.  I wish they'd also included page numbers, but that's just about the only thing I'd change about this beautiful cookbook, which is artfully formatted and full of gorgeous color photographs.  One of the coolest things about it is that it features two recipes for each dish: one medieval and one modern.  The medieval recipes are prepared with only the ingredients and technologies that are available to cooks in the novels, while the modern recipes take some creative license.

In preparation for Chelsea and Sariann's PSB appearance tomorrow, August 23rd, I thought I'd cook up some of their honey biscuits (pages 114-116):

For the sweet, Lord Caswell's servants brought down trays of pastries from his castle kitchens, cream swans and spun-sugar unicorns, lemon cakes in the shape of roses, spiced honey biscuits and blackberry tarts, apple crisps and wheels of buttery cheese.  --A Clash of Kings

Medieval Honey Biscuits

Makes about 20 biscuits - Prep: 10 minutes - Frying: 20 minutes

Pairs well with any pie, Bean-and-Bacon Soup (page 31), hot beverages

2 cups flour
1 tsp salt
5 Tbsp unsalted butter
Cold water
Olive oil or unsalted butter
1/4 cup honey
1 Tbsp ground cinnamon

Mix together the flour and salt.  Using your fingers, rub the butter into the flour until the dough has the texture of coarse bread crumbs.  Gradually stir in just enough cold water that the dough sticks together.  Be careful not to overwork it or add too much water.
Roll out the pastry to 1/4-inch thickness and cut it into circles about 2 inches across.
Fry the pastry in a pan coated with a little olive oil or butter over medium heat, until lightly brown and crisp, being careful not to burn the pastry.  This should take about 3 minutes.  Drain well on paper towels.  Meanwhile, place the honey in a sauce-pan and slowly bring it to a boil.  Brush the pastries with the hot honey, sprinkle them with cinnamon, and serve hot.
*The authors note that in place of making dough, you can also use the leftovers from any of their pie recipes

Modern Honey Biscuits

Makes 16 biscuits - Prep: 10 minutes - Baking: 15 minutes

Pairs well with Beef and Bacon Pie (page 71), Sister's Stew (page 90), Iced Milk with Honey (page 169)

2 cups flour

1 Tbsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

1 Tbsp pumpkin pie spice or mixed spice

1/2 cup granulated sugar

2 tsp ground ginger

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, chilled and cubed

1/2 cup honey

1 cup raw sugar for decorating

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees F.  Either line two baking sheets with parchment paper or plan to bake in two batches.

In a bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, spices, granulated sugar, and ginger.  Using your fingers, rub the butter into the flour until the mixture resembles fine bread crumbs.  Heat the honey in a small saucepan over medium heat until it is warm and runny (or microwave it for 1 minute).  Add the honey to the flour mixture and work with a wooden spoon or spatula until a soft dough forms.  

Pour the raw sugar into a bowl.  Roll the dough into 2-inch balls and coat them with raw sugar.  Place eight balls onto each prepared baking sheet, without flattening them; leave room around the sides for spreading.  Bake for 12 to 15 minutes, or until the tops of the biscuits are just cracked.  Let them stand on the backing sheets for 10 minutes before transferring them to a wire rack to cool.

Eat the biscuits right away or store them in an airtight container for up to a week.

Recipes reprinted with permission from the authors.

Check out Inn at the Crossroads, for more recipes, events, photos, and the latest from Chelsea and Sariann.
PSB Event: August 23rd, 7pm.

Kim Prosise

Phaidon Cookbooks

A few years ago, Phaidon, a publisher known for their fancy art and architecture books ventured into the world of cookbooks. They published The Silver Spoon, an Italian cookbook purported to be a kind of Italian Joy of Cooking. I made it a staff pick when it came out and it is now my most frequently used cookbook.

After the success of the Silver Spoon, Phaidon continued with a series of "Joy of Cookings" for other European countries; 1080 from Spain, Vefa's Kitchen from Greece, and I Know How to Cook from France. More than just cookbooks, all of these act as snapshots of their respective cultures through their recipes. You learn what animals, what cuts, and what vegetables are important to which countries, as well as what preparations dominate and what flavors are revered. They are an anthropology dissertation waiting to happen.

Along with their tour of Europe, Phaidon also released one of the most interesting cookbooks I've ever seen; A Day at elBulli. elBulli is the restaurant of world renowned Spanish chef Ferran Adria. Adria pioneered entirely new techniques for cooking, employing, among others, a chemist to help develop his recipes. His recipes challenge ideas and expectations about how we eat, what we eat, why we eat, and what it means to eat. Unless you keep agar agar handy, A Day at elBulli really isn't a cookbook you'd get recipes from. Rather it's an exploration of the process of one of the world's most creative people. It is a source of inspiration, rather than ingredients.

Phaidon's cookbook being released for this holiday season is closer in spirit to A Day at elBulli than to The Silver Spoon. In Coco, ten world renowned chefs, including Ferran Adria, Mario Batali, Alain Ducasse, Gordon Ramsay, and Alice Waters are asked to select their ten favorite contemporary chefs. The result is a collection of profiles and recipes from 100 diverse and dynamic chefs from around the world. The organization of the cookbook is oddly intuitive. Each of the ten master chefs is assigned a color, and a colored book mark. The selected chefs are presented alphabetically by their name with a stripe of color on their pages indicating which master chef selected them. It's a brilliant way to organize the important information without preferencing any chef over another through the order in which they appear. The book closes with a recipe from each of the master chefs. Alice Waters gives us Chicories Salad with Brandade Toast, Mario Batali Two-Minute Calamari, Sicilian Lifeguard Style, and Alain Ducasse Provencale Garden Vegetables Simmered with Crushed Black Truffle.

This is the perfect book for foodies looking to stay on the absolute cutting edge of cooking, as well as travelers looking for the best meals around the world. Though it's unlikely I'll be making the sweet potato based espresso recipe or crushing much black truffle in my own kitchen, a cookbook like this provides fuel for my imagination and opens my eyes to the unexpected potential of the cabbage I have to cook before it goes bad.