[Sca-cooks] pottage?

[Bill Fisher]

>From what I have seen Bruets are usually a sauce for another 
food item, usually a meat.

Cadoc


On Thu, 23 Sep 2004 07:15:05 -0400, Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
<adamantius.magister at verizon.net> wrote:
> 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?"
>         -- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry
> Holt, 07/29/04
> 
> 
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