SC - Another Novice Recipe Challenge

[Terry Nutter]

Hi, Katerine here.  Tibor asks:

>Katerine, you and I went for "saute".  Why didn't we go for frying?  We know
>that some recipes from that corpus (like fritours) were fried.  Why not
>here?
>
>I know that my inclination is to believe that you fry largish chunks of
>stuff, and not tiny minced things.....
>
>But now I am starting to wonder... what if we dried and mashed the boiled
>beans, mixed with boiled garlic and onions that are minced, and fried them
>as balls or fritters?

Medieval recipes don't distinguish between frying and sauteing.  They do,
however, always specify batter for fritters; and when they mean you to
form things into balls, they generally say to (and frequently give some
indication how big a ball).

The recipe doesn't say to fry the onions and garlic *separately*, so the
size wasn't much an issue.  However, it did say to stop boiling the beans
before they burst.  There are recipes for ground beans, and other pottages
that specify boiling dried vegetables until they burst.  Since this said
to stop before, I assumed the beans were intended to be soft but intact.
In that form, they wouldn't make very good  balls.  (There's nothing to
hold the balls together.)  They're also far less saucey than modern 
refried beans.  So I assumed that this was more like stire frying or
sauteing.

Cheers,

- -- Katerine/Terry

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