September dinner: Tastes of Anglo-Saxon England, Mary Savelli

October has been very busy, which is why I haven’t updated in a while. The month has included making cider in Maine, attending a conference in New Hampshire, both E and I getting sick at different times, and some difficult faculty meetings. Salem is getting crazy as Halloween approaches. I’m looking forward to November.

So, I’m finally catching up to post on September’s dinner. Our cookbook this month was Tastes of Anglo-Saxon England by Mary Savelli, a little book of recipes based on Anglo-Saxon sources. It made for some interesting dishes.

For a starter I made cucumber soup. It was not bad, but rather odd. I’ve never cooked a cucumber before and though I’ve used them in cold soups, I’ve never imagined using one in a hot soup. The soup had a rich vegetable broth with chopped cucumber and turnip.

Cucumber and turnip soup

For the main course I made fish cakes. The recipe in the book calls for salmon, but I used pollock from our local fish share. To go along with the fish cakes I also made buttered beets flavored with rosemary and mint. We ate the fishcakes with a little sour cream. Both the fishcakes and the beets were pretty good.

Fishcakes and beets, with local fish

Dessert was baked apples stuffed with pear, peach, honey, and bread crumbs and drizzled with cream. The apples were a huge success. On the whole, the dinner just got better as it went along, which I guess is the right way to do it.

Baked local apple

E laid a simple table and gathered some wildflowers from our yard for decoration.

Our dinner table with very local flowers