The World That Was - Syrian Chicken in a Blackberry Sauce

Hello and Welcome to The World That Was!

I hope you all had a great New Year, and are keeping safe and well in these trying times. Today, I'll be making some chicken in a blackberry sauce - as recorded in the “Kitab al-Wuslah ila l-Habib” - a collection of Syrian recipes from the 13th century AD! It's a fairly simple tarty sauce that can be made inside a half an hour, and is a delightful addition to any dish!

In any case, let's now take a look at The World That Was! Follow along with my YouTube video above!

Ingredients

250g blackberries - washed

1 tbsp honey

1 tbsp fresh mint (minced)

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1 tsp cloves

Salt (to taste)

Pepper (to taste)

500g chicken (but the cut of meat is up to you)

Method

1 - Cook the chicken

To begin with, we need to cook our chicken. This recipe claims that the sauce is to be added to the chicken when the meat is finished cooking, so they'll need to be prepared separately. Make a couple of cuts into the chicken, to increase the surface area for seasoning. Season all over with salt and pepper, by rubbing it into the meat. Toss your seasoned chicken into an oven preheated to about 200°  C / 400° F for about 30-35 minutes. The meat might have been prepared differently in this period - like being boiled before placing it into the oven.

2 - Prepare the Berries

While the chicken is cooking, we need to make the sauce. Start by taking 250g of freshly washed blackberries and crushing them. Mash this as well as you can. You can leave it fairly lumpy - like I did - but it's just as likely that it was pureed into a very smooth sauce in medieval kitchens. But it’s up to you! When it’s mashed, add your berry mix into a pot.

3 - Make the Sauce

Next, we need to prepare our mint. Take the leaves off some stalks of mint, and mince these finely. Toss this into the pot with your berries, along with your freshly-ground black pepper, your salt, your cloves, and your cinnamon. Cinnamon and cloves would have been accessible in the medieval period by a large part of the Near East - due to the region's ties to the empires of the period - as well as the spice trade.

On top of this, add a good squeeze of honey into the blackberry and spice mix. Depending on your berries, you may need more or less than I used here, so adjust this based on how tart you want the sauce to be. Mix the berry juice and honey together in the pot until it is well combined.

Put the pot onto a medium-low heat for about 15-20 minutes - letting it simmer away uncovered and reduce over time. When you think it's done, drag a silicone spatula along the bottom of the pot, the sauce is done when it leaves a clear trail behind it.

Serve up by spooning some of the sauce over the cooked chicken, and dig in!

The finished dish has very succulent meat, and a deliciously tarty sauce - thanks to the blackberries used. Depending on what season it is, your blackberries might be sweeter or tartier than mine - so you can adjust the amount of honey used here to suit your sauce!

The cut of chicken you use shouldn't really change the recipe too much. It's likely that whole chickens would have been cooked prior to being coated in the sauce. The medieval period gives us a wealth of resources for the kitchens and dining habits of the time, and shows the development of codified recipes that are more in line with modern recipe books. This goes back to the late roman empire (around the 3rd or 4th century AD), but is recorded more clearly in this period.