SC - Okra

[Ronda Del Boccio]

Valoise Armstrong wrote:
> 
> There is also the problem of the recipe for a sauce thickened with a roux
> that appears in Sabina's book. Not a distinctly German idea, but definitely
> a modern and not medieval method.

Hmmm. I dunno about that. Obviously there aren't a lot of known medieval
sources for the technique, but it seems a bit like circular logic. This
method is not medieval because it doesn't appear in medieval sources,
but it appears in a medieval source, which is actually modern by dint of
the modern technique appearing therein...I'm certainly prepared to admit
it indicates a sort of cusp between medieval and modern, and certainly
not the only one, either.

There's a fascinating article in one of the recent PPC's (either 59 or
60) about English versus French thickening liaisons. It discusses how
French cookbook authors of the seventeenth century considered themselves
so much more modern and sophisticated because they used flour thickeners
and breadcrumbs while many English recipes used this weird emulsion of
butter. Obviously a barbarism! A hundred years later, when the French
were "inventing" beurre blanc (when a reading of Digby might have saved
them the trouble), and the English were using a lot of flour-thickened
sauces, it was deemed as proof of the backward barbarism of the English.
    
Adamantius
Østgardr, East
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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