[Sca-cooks] mustard soup, sops and bread

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Nov 13, 2005, at 11:38 PM, Stefan li Rous wrote:

> Molli commented:
>> My first mustard soup was at Meridian Maneuvers over a year ago. I  
>> was
>> honored to be feast helper for the Glorious Mistress Mairih
>> (spelling) and
>> the lovely HL Dinah. Oh yummmm mustard soup. That  
>> was...just...heaven.
>
> Molli, do you know if the soup you had was redacted by Mistress  
> Mairih or whether it was based on the redaction by HE Salaamallah's  
> which has been floating around the SCA for years. Salaamallah's  
> recipe is apparently quite good, but it takes some pretty big  
> liberties with the medieval recipe that it appears to be based  
> upon. this file in the Florilegium FOOD section has more details,  
> as well as the original recipe and his variation:
> mustard-soup-msg  (13K)  4/ 3/02    Mustard soup. HE Salaamallah's  
> version.

Unless I'm mistaken, Baron Salaamallah's recipe is itself taken from  
Esther B. Aresty's "The Delectable Past". It's almost nothing like  
Taillevent's mustard sops, but it is tasty.

>> I love sauces. IMO sauces can make a meal. A less then dazzling  
>> piece of
>> meat can be saved by just the right sauce. I was raised a "sopper".
>> Sopping
>> was an art form in our home. A good sauce, drippings, juices...a  
>> hunk of
>> bread either with fingers or fork...sop. If with a fork, stab some  
>> meat, a
>> bit of bread, dip in gravy, sauce, juice...bite.
>
> Hmmm. I'd gotten the impression that sops were bread put into a  
> bowl with the broth then poured over them, although I don't know if  
> the bread was just dampened or totally immersed such as you usually  
> see in "French Onion Soup". As opposed to the bread being dipped  
> into the soup/sauce/drippings. "Sop" is apparently the root for  
> "soup". Comments anyone?

In reasonably modern usage, and possibly archaic as well, "sop" can  
be a verb, more or less interchangeable with "soak", so you'd use  
bread to sop up the sauce on your plate. Active rather than passive  
sopping, hence with the fingers or a fork manipulating the bread. I  
believe that's the usage you're seeing in this case. Maybe someone  
has the OED handy...?

Adamantius




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la  
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them  
eat cake!"
     -- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  
"Confessions", 1782

"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