sca-cooks Re: Children (Silly) -Reply

[Sean Ellwood]

Mark Harris wrote:

> Ok. Now I'm not sure what a "jance" is, but I like Garlic.

A jance is any of a variety of French ginger based sauces, usually, but
not, I think, always made with milk. They are similar to a modern white
sauce except for a thickening of bread and/or egg yolks instead of
flour, and always contain plenty of ginger. A yellow jance contains some
saffron, a green jance parsley, and garlic jance, well, use your
imagination. You find recipes for them in the Viandier de Taillevent,
and probably also in Le Menagier de Paris.
> 
> So, was garlic used in medieval cooking? How? As a seasoning
> cooked into foods? Squeezed on top of foods? Today roasted
> garlic seems to be a fad in some areas. Is there any evidence
> of roasted garlic then? Was it grown all over or just around
> the Mediterranean?

Garlic was grown all over Europe. It doesn't seem to figure especially
heavily in court cookery, but it may have been used extensively in
lower-class households. Recipes survive for Aquapatys, a dish of
semi-pureed, boiled garlic, served on toast sops, and for Sawse Madame,
which is a stuffing of fruit (i.e.grapes) and garlic cloves, roasted
inside poultry and made into a sauce with the drippings. This last is a
favorite of mine. Plain roasted garlic sounds vaguely Provencale to me;
I haven't heard of any evidence of its periodicity, but that means
nothing.
> 
> These are questions that just occured to me. I have not tried
> to research any of this.
> 
> Thanks.
>    Stefan li Rous
>    markh at risc.sps.mot.com
> 
> The man of a thousand questions. :-)

Adamantius, man of thirty or forty answers, some of them correct...