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

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach <jenne at fiedlerfamily.net>:
>  > >     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.
>>
>>  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.
>
>Hm, I was thinking you were supposed to cook the poultry in the wine,
>rather than roasting it first and re-heating it. Master A., what makes you
>think it would be a reheating dish?

Only the fact that it is (allegedly) in a section of recipes for 
sauces for roast poultry, and the fact that I seem to recall roast 
birds are moderately warm and dry foods (medically speaking), and a 
quick bath in a hot sour sauce would adjust the humoral balance to 
something more beneficial to the diner and have them steaming on the 
table. Thinking in terms of removing them from the spit, and the 
tendency of smallish birds to cool off somewhat by the time they get 
to the table.

I didn't really mean it in the sense of reheating leftovers or 
anything; more a two-part cooking process (think of this as a linear 
inversion of the parboiled, larded, and then roast meats). Sure, you 
could simply cook the birds in the sauce, but that would provide less 
of a medical imperative to do so... so you could either do it because 
it's necessary, or do it because... it's not. While not a perfect 
argument, doesn't it make some sense?

Yes, I _am_ speculating. ;-)

A.