[Sca-cooks] menu planning for dietary restrictions

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Aug 13, 2006, at 3:07 PM, Tom Vincent wrote:

> No breadcrumbs were used.  The chicken cutlets were just dredged in
> flour and grilled, then put in baking pans with the wine-and-oil  
> sauteed
> onions.
>
> Duriel


My mistake. I remembered someone asking about frozen, pre-breaded  
chicken somewhere along the line.

Still, even though it sounds like a lot of oil was used (especially  
in conjunction with cheese), I'm not seeing where this is in any way  
endemic in medieval cooking. It just sounds like an unfortunate  
decision on the part of the cook.

A.

>
> Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius wrote:
>> I haven't gone poring over the texts at my disposal with a magnifying
>> glass, but I don't recall a single instance in the medieval corpus of
>> breadcrumbs being used in that way. The most common references I've
>> seen to any coating of anything before frying have involved beaten
>> egg wash/glaze, sheets of dough wrapped around a filling, and the
>> occasional admonition that such-and-such is eaten fried without a
>> coating of flour, which suggests it was probably done on occasion.
>> There may be exceptions to this, but I can't think of any off the top
>> of my head.
>>
>> Even if we think of fritters (which are, in the common medieval
>> usage, generally made with a sticky, semi-liquid dough/batter,
>> leavened with yeast), the dough seems most often to be the main
>> substance of the dish, even if it's the substrate for another
>> ingredient. You do start to run across apple or parsnip fritters that
>> are more recognizable in the modern sense in the 16th and 17th
>> centuries, but we're still probably not talking about big ol' hunks
>> of chicken.
>>
>> I agree with the idea that this may be inspired by the modern variant
>> of Chicken Parmigiana, but rather than come up with reasons why it
>> may not be period (since we're not, in fact, pursuing research with a
>> known result in mind), the simplest thing may be to ask the cook for
>> a source.
>>
>> Adamantius
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>>
>
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> ***********
> Tom Vincent
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"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