[Sca-cooks] mustard soup, sops and bread
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius.magister at verizon.net
Sun Nov 13 21:55:59 PST 2005
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
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