SC - Lemonade in Sent Sovi??

[harper at idt.net]

And it came to pass on 12 Nov 00, , that Eden Rain wrote:

> While doing some web surfing I came across the following webpage which
> claims all it's recipes are from Sent Sovi (14th c. Catalan cookbook)
> http://www.sofisstitches.com/recipies.htm
> 
> given her interpretation of Pomada as an apple drink I find the following
> highly suspect, (in fact I assume that it's a lemon sauce for chicken as in
> Limonaia from the Italian corpus) 

Bullseye!  Give the lady a stuffed plush salamander!

> but if someone else who actually has sent
> sovi (and can read the spanish) can provide any info either way I'd be very
> interested.

I have Sent Sovi, and can make out the Catalan well enough.  
Incidently, I see that the web page is a bit misleading about the 
source material.  It says, "The name of the manuscript is Sent Sovi 
and it is written in medieval Spanish, which is very close to Latin."

Sent Sovi is written in Catalan.  Neither 15th century Catalan nor 
15th century Spanish are all that close to Latin (not more so than 
any other Romance Language).  Here is the first sentence of the 
recipe:
"Si vols ffer limoneha ab let de melles, se fa en aquesta manera..."
"If you want to make limonada with milk of almonds, it is made in 
this way..."

The recipe is, as you say, a lemon sauce for boiled or 
roast chicken.  Grewe, the editor, mentions in a footnote that there 
are parallel recipes in the Neapolitan collection and in Nola.

I won't try a translation, but the essence of it is as follows:
Make almond milk with chicken broth.  Cook it in a pot with saffron, 
a lot of ginger, lemon juice, and sugar.  The flavor should be sweet-
sour, and it should be deeply colored.

I do not see raisins mentioned in Sent Sovi, nor are they called for 
in the Neapolitan recipe.  Nola's version calls for raisins, and omits 
saffron, but it is also made with chicken broth.  None of these 
recipes are anything like modern lemonade, nor like the redaction 
you quoted.

The rest of the page varies from reasonably accurate (the spice 
powders and the Broete de Madama) to wildly out of period (tomato 
and green pepper salsa???).  The recipe for "Manjar Blanco De 
Gallina" baffled me.  It's translated as (and redacted as) "Goat and 
Gravy", but the title means "Blancmange of Hen".  Nor have I ever 
seen a blancmange recipe for goat or kid.  Blancmange of hen, 
fish, lobster, gourd... but not goat.

The secondary source that she used was probably "La cocina 
medieval" by Josep Lladonosa i Giró.  I don't know the book, or the 
author, but apparently he's written several food books.  According 
to some websites I found, he's a chef who specializes in Catalan 
cuisine.  I don't know if he has any credibility as a food historian.  
Some of the errors may be his; perhaps he tried to modernize the 
recipes.  The "goat and gravy" is probably a translation mistake by 
the lady who rendered the modern Spanish into English.  (And I 
don't want to know where the chips and tomato salsa came from.)

The website owner is a garb merchant, who says her gowns are 
painstakingly researched from period paintings, and are never 
made from man-made fibers.  I'm inclined to think that she cares 
about authenticity, but was misled by a bad secondary source.



Lady Brighid ni Chiarain
Settmour Swamp, East (NJ)
mka Robin Carroll-Mann
harper at idt.net