SC - Fondue

[Nick Sasso]

Stefan li Rous wrote:
> 
> > This is basically, as conceived by Hieatt et al, the medieval
> > equivalent of one of those French or German meat salads, with the meat
> > possibly shredded or chunked and tossed with other chopped stuff and a
> > dressing.

<snip>

> Is there some general name for these "French or German meat salads"?
> While I have a salads-msg file in the Florilegium, so far, these are
> green salads with mostly plant stuff. This really doesn't seem to fit
> in there. But I want to put it where folks would look for such an item.

I'd suggest Cold Meat Dishes, because while there are a lot of them in
the medieval European corpus of recipes, they're not really what many of
us would think of as a salad (remember our various discussions on
lettuce?). Some of these dishes are specified as being for summer, and
some not, but there's a broad range of such dishes from the very first
"redaction challenge" posted on this list (To Boil A Perch) through the
various Cold Sage dishes like this one, generally involving garnishes of
vinegar and/or verjuice and parsley, or a green sauce as in the recipe
Lady Phillipa is working with.

The modern recipes for salads with meat include, as you say, tuna and
chicken salads, but some of the more obscure ones (to Americans) include
Salade Nicoise (lettuce with various stuff such as boiled potato,
garlic, tuna, anchovies, black olives, tomato), Salade Parisienne
(basically the same thing but with shredded or sliced cooked beef
tenderloin insead of the fishies, in a mustard dressing), and then there
are the various German entries coming under the heading, IIRC, of
Mettsalats, made pretty much like a basic chicken or tuna salad, but
from shreds of things like ham, tongue, various sausages or roast beef,
with mayonnaise and the other Usual Suspects. Yeah, it may sound a bit
strange, but it's a great way to use the ends of the various hunks of
meat where the slices get too small to be viable for sandwiches and
such, and certainly as viable as chicken or tuna salad if you're going
to eat such meats in sandwiches anyway. And then, of course, you have
things like Italian Vitello Tonnato, Veal in Tuna Sauce, which is cold
(usually roast) veal in a sauce either made _from_ or _for_ tuna,
depending on who you talk to and where you are in Italy.

My point is that not all of these dishes contain enough vegetable
content to justify calling them salads in a modern sense. Perhaps you
could have a combined section of Cold Meat & Fish Dishes and Salads with
Meat & Fish, to include dishes like the Cold Sage and things like the
various late-period compound salads with chicken, fish, etc., and the
stuff we all know is post-period but work with anyway: the salads in
works by Gervase Markham, Kenelm Digby, Robert May, and John Evelyn.    
    

Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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