[Sca-cooks] pottage?

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Stefan li Rous:

>So, what is a good definition of a "pottage"? What are the dividing 
>lines between a pottage, a stew, a bruit, a porridge and a soup?

Oy! Always he wants the straight, simple answers to complicated 
kvest... I mean questions.

The short answer is there are no dividing lines between those dishes 
so named, or rather, the names have denoted increasingly broadened 
sets over time, to the point where there's been considerable blurring 
of the "lines" and overlapping of the categories.

Mostly what we can fall back on is the original, dictionary 
definition of each word, as determined when the dictionary entries 
were written and/or back-determined, if you know what I mean.

So. A pottage, depending on who you talk to, is either a dish cooked 
in a pot, or a dish sufficiently liquid to drink (as in potable). You 
eat it with a spoon. The Larousse Gastronomique defines a potee as 
anything cooked in an earthenware pot, and I was taught that to the 
French, a potage (with one "t") is a soup with a phase of thin to 
semi-thick liquid with solids in it, anything from, say, minestrone 
to New England Clam Chowder. In Middle English I'd say a pottage is 
anything you eat with a spoon or drink, as opposed to something you 
eat with a knife -- IOW, there is a clear distinction between 
lechemeats and pottages, but just to make sure Stefan is confused, 
roasts can be cut up and sauced or recooked to make pottages ;-).

A stew is pretty straightforward. With a surprisingly small number of 
exceptions (i.e. bouillabaisse), stews are denoted by slow, gentle 
cooking, usually of tough meats and wintry vegetables. Similar to 
braising. The name appears to refer to a cooking method and, perhaps, 
a related piece of equipment, the use of a fire whose temperature can 
be kept low and burn slowly and long, later using a firebox called a 
stove. Estouffade and etouffee are essentially stews, both in concept 
and etymology.

A brewet? It's brewed, I guess. I'm not sure if the medieval 
distinction between it and other slow-cooked liquid foods is any more 
clear, but maybe it's a tradition derived from saying the same thing 
in two different languages, which is something you run across a lot 
in medieval England. Hieatt and Butler aren't much help; their 
glossary in Curye On Inglysch says a brewet or a bruet is a broth, or 
something cooked in it. OTOH, since broths are made by cooking things 
in water, it has a dual nature as both a foundation and a by-product, 
which makes the definition just a bit circular.

A porridge today denotes a grain-based dish, usually a moderately 
thin gruelly stuff, at least when hot, but the name appears to 
ultimately come down to leeks, from something like poree or poire in 
French. In simpler terms, porrey is a leek soup, and by extension, 
any of several soupy green vegetable dishes (I believe le Menagier 
identifies spinach specifically as "a kind of porrey"). I suspect 
that grains got added to porreys as a thickener, and over time became 
the dominant ingredient.

Soups are dishes of liquidy stuff poured over sops of bread, usually, 
but not always, toasted. Mostly they were (back in the days when sops 
were involved) relatively thin, but as always, the exception 
sometimes proves the rule.

So, as I said earlier in my rant on the blurred lines, all of the 
above are pottages (but not necessarily potages ;-) ), and some are 
soups, in addition to whatever else they may be.

Adamantius

-- 
  "Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
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Holt, 07/29/04