SC - BOUNCBlanc Desire???

[Michael F. Gunter]

Gryphon's Moon wrote:
> 
> ....Talking about the dish known as "blanc desire":
> >I think the dishes are more inspired by Middle Eastern ingredients than
> >by actual Middle Eastern dishes of the period because there sometimes
> >seems to be no direct counterpart to some of the Anglo-Norman
> >rice/almond dishes in the Arabic cookery sources. I could be wrong about
> >this, though.
> >
> >Adamantius
> 
> In the glossary/index of Curye on Inglysch, Hieatt and Butler say: "The
> various spellings may suggest the dish was thought to be Syrian; no doubt
> it was Arabic in origin." That's all it says about the origin of the dish.
> Frankly, I'm not sure I follow their reasoning. The various spellings they
> refer to are:
>         Blanc desire
>         blank de surry
>         blank desure
>         blank de syry
>         Blank dessorre
>         blank desire
> 
> I could possibly see "blank de syry" being interpreted as "white of Syria",
> but the other spellings seem closer to "desire", as in "something white
> that's desirable". Am I off track here?

That's hard to say. We're only speculating here, and yours is as good as
mine, and as good as Hieatt's, Scully's, or whomever's.

Probably a fairly good way to determine the validity of the idea that
the word is in fact "desire", in its current usage, is to see how it is
used elsewhere in 14th-century English writings, or see what the OED has
to say on that subject. Not that the OED is never caught with its
figurative pants down, of course.

I'm not sure what reasoning Hieatt and Butler used to reach their
conclusions about the dish being Arabic and the name being a reference
to Syria: they don't clearly say, but then they're the professional
medievalists, not me! ;  )

As for the question of where almonds came from in period, they came from
many places, including what we now call Jordan, which was then part of
Palestine, I assume, and, I believe, Damascus, which was and is part of Syria.
 
Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com

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