SC - ESTURGON CONTREFAIT DE VEEL From Le Menagier de Paris, p. 200

[margali]

>                         ESTURGON CONTREFAIT DE VEEL pour six escuelles
>
>                  CUNTEFIT STURGEON OF VEEL??? (VEAL?) for six plates
> (???fake sturgeon???)

a warner of veal to resemble a filet of salmon

>  take 6 veal ??(veel) heads
> without skining???  and in hot water, like a pig, take the
> feathers off  cook
> them in wine and add a pint of vinegar and salt in it, boil till it is
>
> al roten in copper
> then let the heads cool donw and take the bones out. Then take a
> quarter
> of heavy cavas, put  it all in as much as you can , then sew it with
> tough treads like a sqware pillow, then put it between 2 "ais"  and
> press hard and leave it (in press?) for
> the night in the basement (cool?); then cut it in "lesches" (thin
> layers), "la couenne (couenne is a pork skin) dehors comme venoison
> (game)" )leaving the skin around on the outside like games), add
> parsley
> and vinegar and pour 2 pieces on each dish (plates).
> Option: if you do not find enough heads, you (peut faire) can use???
> (make???) a "vele entrpelé"???  ( sorry I do not know what could this
> be, a guess  would be the "abbats" (gutting? (liver, heart, kidney) or
>
> the "lost" part (left overs or "soup" parts, basically lower quality
> parts).                In service,
>
>
>                         Lord Robert de QuelQuepart
>
> P.S.: I did not forget I commited myself for some translations uf Le
> Ménagier

ok, my take on it is similar, from a slightly different point of view.

*yes, take 6 veal heads, scorch off the hair like doing a roasted pig.
since they want the skin on for a visible/textural difference this would
be neeedful.
*feathers are in horses and goats referring to the long silky hairs on
the lower legs, so it is not a long streach to take feathers for the
hair as the definition may have changed in the intervening time.
*many cooking pots were made of copper, and to this day the large kettle
used in rendering fat for soap, and for boiling large quantities of
soups/stocks are called coppers. This may be due to the malleability of
the metal allowing large vessels to be made of it without resoursing to
a softer solder. cast iron and alloy 'a' bronze would be prohibitively
heavy and inordinately expensive for many smaller holdings  to afford.
Copper has the luck to be relatively inexpensive and was widely traded
in ingot form. It beats into shape well, and repairs well. cast iron and
bronze can shatter easily, and the metal can have spongy areas in larger
castings.
*if you were to take off thin sheets of the meat, lay them in layers
with careful arranging, and then press over night in a cool area, the
meat will form itself into a relatively solid mass, held together with
the coagulated proteins sort of like the infamous head cheese/scrapple
on the list a while back. if the cook were careful about where in the
mass he placed each piece, so the skin formed a surface similar to the
skin on a salmon fillet, all the better for the look of the done dish.
* parsley and vinegar were a common sauce for fish-sort of like the
green goo that you can still get in britain today. all the better for
the appearance of the dish.
*i suppose that if you poured enough sauce over the filet, and had the
top piece of the better looking filet the illusion would be ok at first
until they got down in the dish and found the masquerade...

margali

[am a machinist of many years experience, as well as a cook and research
buff...]

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