Drumette or chicken disassembled and reassembled to look like a drumette?

One should take chickens and scald them and tear them apart and cut all the meat from the bone and shred it small. Then boil the bones and take off the broth and wind the meat around the bones. Sprinkle some powder of cinnamon on it and then place it in a dough that is made of wheat flour and a beaten egg and then cook it in butter or lard. [1]

Cookbooks are full of dishes, often served between courses, that are meant as entertainments. In French they’re called entremets and evolved to include some form of acted entertainment (an edible ice sculpture accompanied by a short morality play, or a simulated course that is actually – from plates to forks to fowl – made entirely out of sugar paste with a minstrel singing an ode to sweetness). In England they were called subtleties. At large banquets in the Middle Ages, castles were built out of cooked birds with wild boar, deer, goats and rabbits roasted and posed to resemble knights (we cooked a turkey last Thanksgiving – as a main course – in a similar vein) and peacocks were frequently skinned, roasted, and then redressed in their old skin and served (which was pretty entertaining until everyone got salmonella).

All of which reminded me both of entremets and Cruditas’ chief semiotician, Josh Glenn, of hilobrow.com who has cogently discussed “fake authenticity” for years. Unless you were royalty and in the habit of being served peacock, the last thing you needed in 1153 was authenticity – you were probably drowning in the stuff. You’d wake up every morning with the pungent scent of authenticity attacking your nostrils like a 300 pound wild boar after a truffle. No, what you needed was something else – something charming, but, like fake authenticity, de-clawed. You needed fake inauthenticity. Neither chicken, nor something disguised as chicken, it’s chicken disguised as something disguised as chicken; a sort of entremet for the third estate.

A chicken is roasted, its meat pulled from the bones.

The meat stripped from the bones

The long bones are then boiled and cleaned.

Boiled bones

Long bones boiled and cleaned

The meat is then wound back onto the bones and secured with a batter (I used something resembling a fritter batter – the instructions were “wheat flour and a beaten egg”).

A batter - I varied the viscosity as I cooked them, but it made amazingly little difference.

And cooked…

Be careful to rotate while cooking

Don't worry if some of yours look funny - I'm only showing the better ones

Two sauces were prepared, also from An Early XIII Century Northern-European Cookbook by Rudolf Grewe (as it appeared in Proceedings: Current Research in Culinary History: Sources, Topics, and Methods, 1985).

“one should take mustard seeds, add a fourth part of honey and grind it with good vinegar. It is good for forty days.”

Early medieval honey mustard sauce

and “A sauce of minimal value. One should take onions and cut them as small as peas, and the same amount of parsely, and pour it in some broth, and add the fourth part of vinegar. These sauces you can seal up.”

A sauce of minimal value

To be fair, the sauce of minimal value is pretty good.

Once you’ve made this, you’re going to want to serve it for parties, make it for the Super Bowl, bring it to pot-lucks. Your children will clamor for some blomæth høns.

Here is the full variety of shapes we ended up with – from some pretty good approximations of legs and drumettes, to some that are more, um, imaginative.

Legs, drumettes, double legs, parts from radioactive spider chickens, we had it all.

[1]From a group of 13th century manuscripts translated by Rudolf Grew as Libellus De Arte Coquinaria and published in 2001. (this recipe, with the name of the dish which was omitted in the book, was taken from Current Research in Culinary History, Radcliffe, 1985 where he published an initial version of the cookbook)