SC - Pleyn Delit et al-vinegar

[Darice Moore]

> << Possibly it was because I was choosing cold dishes that
>  the ones I selected were all vinegary! >>
> 
> Were the recipes you used initially cooked? Was there information which
> specified when the vinegar was to be added? For instance, there is a goat
> recipe in al-Baghdadi that specifies that the vinegar be added at the
> beginning of the cooking process. By the time the meat is tender, the vinegar
> has mellowed and becomes a delicious part of the sauce.

Lord Ras,

I agree that cooked vinegar is a much different animal than cold
vinegar!

(and I do like the flavor of vinegar - lots of different types of
vinegar - yum!)

The particular recipe that I tried was the chicken in cold sage sauce
(in which vinegar, sage and hard-boiled egg yolks are blended together
to pour over chicken).  It was rather harsh.  I also tried the pevre
gresse and didn't agree with Hieatt's judgement that it should be sour -
it tasted much better as a sweet-spicy thing (or maybe it was just that
I was following her instructions about lemon juice and grape juice when
the original would have been sour grape juice).  

But the kicker (not a vinegar issue) was the gingerbrede recipe, in
which she had some phenomenal amount of bread being stirred into a
relatively small amount of honey.

After those three screwups, I began double-checking Hieatt's redactions
against other sources.  (something I probably should have done from the
start... live and learn.)  Sometimes they agreed with her, sometimes
they didn't.  I just went back to the main recipes and made decisions
based on "cooking by instinct."

And I'm enjoying debating it on this list!

- - Clotild