[Sca-cooks] cold green sauce?

[James Prescott]

At 10:05 -0700 2004-01-15, Kathleen A. Roberts wrote:
>  i am trying to find a COLD green sauce for cold poached chicken... 
> as medieval as possible.   mebbe a garlic/herb emulsion?


If you go to Viandier (c 1395), there are at least three possibilities
suggested for use with chicken or other fowl.  The second (# 155) is
quite like the garlic/herb emulsion you mention.


The first (# 68) is explicitly for cold chicken.  I first cooked this
for a pentathlon competition back in 1990.  I have my redaction which
I can type in if this is the sauce you choose.

68. Cold Sage [Sauce].

Take your chicken, cook it in water, and put it to cool.  Crush 
ginger, cassia flowers, grains of paradise and cloves, without 
sieving.  Crush bread, parsley and sage, with a bit of saffron in the 
greens (if you wish it to be bright green), and strain through 
cheesecloth.  Some sieve into it hard cooked egg yolks steeped in 
vinegar.  Cut your chicken into halves, quarters or limbs, and put 
them on plates with the sauce on top.  If there were hard cooked 
eggs, cut them into bits with a knife and not with the hand.


These two are not specifically for cold chicken:

155. Green Garlic [Sauce].

Crush garlic, bread and greens, and steep together.


216. Green Verjuice [Sauce].

Take sorrel including the stem, steep in some other verjuice, strain 
[through cheesecloth], and add a bread crust so that it does not 
turn.  (A 1490 printed edition quoted by Pichon et al., p. 194.)


Thorvald