[Sca-cooks] OOP: Frozen sauces

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Jun 3, 2006, at 10:26 AM, Daniel Myers wrote:

> Curye on Inglysh gives the equivalent recipe as follows:
> Freseys.  Streberyen igrounden wyth milke of alemauns, flour of rys
> othur amydon, gret vlehs, poudre of kanele & sucre; the colur red, &
> streberien istreyed abouen.
> [I've substituted "th" for thorn in the above to make it easier on
> email clients]
>
> Nothing in Curye on Inglysh suggests this is a sauce.

Well, it depends on what you mean by sauce. I think the 14th century  
version calls for cooked meat to be added -- "gret vlehs" is believed  
by most authorities to be the equivalent of the "gross char" you  
often see on menus: a big hunk of boiled, or perhaps roast, pork,  
mutton, or possibly beef, cut into slices or bite-sized pieces for  
service (probably the latter size for this purpose).

I think freseye recipe #13 from the Herebert MS in CoI is for a  
pottage that is, itself, meat in sauce, but not a sauce in the sense  
of a condiment, an end user-controlled means of adjusting the flavor  
of the food, and certainly not a dip.

What's interesting is that if you go further along to #37 in the   
same manuscript, you find yourself in the middle of a section that is  
clearly an English translation of at least part of B.L. Ms Add.  
32085, or what I like to call Cuskynole Country. Recipe #37 is  
another freseye recipe (this time spelled fresse), clearly another  
seasoned, thickened strawberry puree, but this one with no reference  
to meat as an ingredient or as a substrate, and generally pretty  
similar in substance to the 15th-century version.

It gets even more interesting if you look at that Speculum article  
with Constance Hieatt's translation of B.L. Add 32085 and Royal Some- 
number-or-other-I-can't-be-bothered-to-look-up-right-now. That  
freseye recipe, the one with the grosse char, is in there, too, but  
apparently the manuscript excerpts are in the opposite order (I think  
-- this is very confusing when you're trying to kick caffeine again).

If only there were some sort of recipe index to help keep track of  
all these similar recipes... Oh, wait! There is! It's actually  
sitting on my desk! (Hi, Johnnae!)

But in the end, although there are versions of this recipe that  
include meat as an ingredient, none of them refer to it as a sauce,  
per se. Most of the English sources have a section of sauces, or at  
least obvious sauce recipes (i.e. cameline, sauce vert, etc.) grouped  
together, and freseye/strawberye always seems to appear elsewhere.  
The French manuscripts call it a viaunde, translated as meat in the  
broadest sense, as "food" or "a dish", or simply give the ingredients  
without categorizing it, but still don't group it with the sauces.

Phew!

Adamantius




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