[Sca-cooks] Le Menagier's chicken in orange sauce

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Kirrily Robert:
>Greetings,
>
>I've got some exciting news.  I've been asked to write the cooking
>column for Medieval Cooking Magazine
>(http://medievalhistorymagazine.com/)!
>
>The only slight complication is that their period is 550-1550AD and I've
>been concentrating on Elizabethan lately, so I'm having to break out
>some of my less commonly used resources.
>
>This month I'm planning to do "L'orenge de pouchins, ou de perdris ou de
>pigons" from Le Menagier de Paris, as found in Pleyn Delit (recipe 93).
>
>     Take the oranges and slice them in white verjuice and white wine,
>     and put them to boil, and put in ginger; and put your poultry to
>     cook in this.
>
>The authors of Pleyn Delit note that this is from a series of recipes
>for sauces to finish roasted birds and rabbits.
>
>So, a couple of questions for those who are more familiar with Le
>Menagier:
>
>1. Anything I should know about the translation or the modern version
>given in Pleyn Delit?  Are they reasonably trustworthy?  Their
>interpretaion looks pretty reasonable to me but I'd appreciate knowing
>if it's not!

I don't have PD or Le Menagier in front of me, but from an 
organizational standpoint it would seem to make sense. And this looks 
like a pretty simple recipe: basically you're reheating roast poultry 
(probably quartered) in a sourish sauce. Note that the recipe is for 
pouchins (spring chickens) or partridges or pigeons, all smaller than 
your typical modern roast chicken.

>2. Since I have to take photos of what I cook, does anyone have
>suggestions on how to serve this dish or simple side dishes which would
>fill out the picture?  I'm thinking of serving it on a wooden plate
>with a cut loaf of bread and a tankard in view, with a linen tablecloth
>underneath.  If I can find bitter oranges, which I believe have a
>different colour flesh, I might cut one in half and have it in the
>picture too.

In connection with using smaller birds [see above], probably 
quartering them neatly, when not-quite-totally-done, with a set of 
sharp poultry shears would look nice, maybe arranged in a sort of 
pyramid on a flat bed of laid-out orange slices, surrounded by the 
slightly syrupy sauce? If you really want to pad out a photo, there's 
always the neat pile of raw sauce ingredients: bottles of wine and 
verjuice, some oranges and a race of ginger. If you can find the 
nice, dried whole peeled ginger you sometimes see in Latino markets 
(being both peeled and dried, it's white, smaller than a fresh root, 
and rock-hard, of course, but otherwise looks like a ginger root), 
that'd be a nice, unusual touch.

You might look for a copy of "Fetes gourmandes au moyen age", the big 
coffee-table book of medieval cookery done by Jean-Louis Flandrin and 
Carole Lambert. Yes, it's in French, but the recipes are great and it 
has, bar none, the finest photography of medieval food I've ever seen.

>3. Since I'm intending to write about 1000 words, I will be filling out
>the article with some background info about citrus fruits in period.  I
>have a couple of probably useful books (the Oxford companion to food,
>and The Origins of Fruits and Vegetables) but any other thoughts on the
>matter would be welcome.

Harold McGee, "On Food And Cooking". If anyone waves a copy of 
Waverly Root's "Food" at you, run. Don't stop and look back, just run.

Adamantius