I went a little crazy cooking this meal yesterday getting ready for watching the season premiere again for Season 7 of GOT.  I wanted to make the “Pike in galantine” and “Haddock in tasty sauce” recipes from The Medieval Cookbook.  But we do not have Northern Pike nor Haddock in our local grocery store.  So I googled around trying to find substitutes.  In my googling, cod in a reasonable substitute for Haddock and Atlantic Salmon is a reasonable substitute for Pike.  Not sure how accurate this is, but these were the fish I could get easily.

So I poached the front end of an Atlantic salmon in salt water with parsley, wine and vinegar.  Here is it poaching.

This recipe requires brown bread so I had started some “Barley bread” from the same cookbook.  After the salmon poached and sat in the hot water off the heat to cook more, I poached the cod.  Here it is:

As a side dish, I made “Leeks and sops in wine” from the cookbook.  I sliced all the leeks up beforehand to be ready when they needed to cook.  I added the olive oil, salt and a bottle of white wine so it would all be ready.

I forgot to take a photo of the barley bread before I started hacking it up.  I needed three slices to go into the pike/salmon recipe.  Two of these recipes called for brown ale.  So I had purchased Moose Drowl brown ale and got to drink the leftovers while I cooked.

I made the tasty sauce that goes with the haddock/cod.  I fried a diced onion in lard.  Half went to the salmon recipes and the other half went into the tasty sauce with white pepper, white breadcrumbs and brown ale.  This was put in the blender and then back in the pan for more warming.  Here is the sauce and it actually was tasty!

The pike/salmon recipe had a blended mixture of wetted brown bread, onions, cinnamon and white paper added to it.  I did not use the optional gelatine.  So here in my meal all assembled.  The cooked leek mixture is served over toasted bread.  The salmon dish is more of a soup but it was surprisingly tasty.  I have the barley bread and some leftover brown ale to drink.

And here is Tom’s dinner.  He has the leeks, the barley bread and the poached and then broiled cod with the taste sauce.  He had hard cider with his dinner.

And with this we rewatched the first two episodes of Season 7 (I had wanted to only watch one, but it is hard to stop at one).  I thought my salmon soup was quite good, better than I thought.  The leeks were OK, nothing amazing.  I thought the barley bread was a little dense and moist but Tom liked it.  Tom is not a fan of fish so he was not thrilled with the cod, thought it was boring despite the tasty sauce.  But he thought the leeks added some pizzazz to the meal.  The episodes were amazing, of course.  It is amazing how much you can forget in a year and a half.

I have decided to revive my Feast of Ice and Fire blog.  I have added some recent medieval cooking and plan on adding more frequently as we finish rewatch Season 7 and especially have some intense and weird cooking planned for Season 8 starting in April.  So go over there and follow along, if you wish.