[Sca-cooks] OOP: Frozen sauces

[Tom Vincent]

Well, I think I'll stick to it as a sauce.  It may stand alone as a side 
dish, but I see it more as a sauce...'thick' being a very relative term 
and all.  Make it thick as tomato ketchup and it works as a sauce;  Make 
it thick as a jam and it works as a side dish. 

People are certainly welcome to eat it straight up or pour it over their 
pork or chicken as they see fit.  I never prepared it as a marinade, 
just a sauce.

As a condiment, its resemblance to cranberry relish gives me even more 
confidence about its evolutionary path.

Great to read the ideas and revisit an old favorite, though!  For a 
decade I've had Cindy Renfrow on a pedestal...a little depressing to see 
a possible error on the part of one of the Medieval culinary deities.  
Oh, well, Who Mourns For Adonis, anyway? :)

Duriel




Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius wrote:
> On Jun 3, 2006, at 9:20 AM, Tom Vincent wrote:
>
>   
>> Now, in defense of it as a sauce, if the original category was diverse
>> potages, we're not suggesting that people didn't dip things into their
>> potages, are we? :)
>>     
>
> Nope. I think the greatest source of confusion here is the fact that  
> people didn't necessarily categorize foods in the same way we do,  
> back in the 15th century. I believe I mentioned this in a discussion  
> of soups a few weeks ago... this dish is a pottage, and we should  
> probably resist the urge to rethink that assessment in modern terms  
> and decide that all pottages are soups, except the ones that are  
> puddings or sauces. Rather, we should probably stick pretty much with  
> what we know, which is that a pottage is eaten from a bowl (by  
> necessity) with a spoon.
>
>   
>>   I know, a rather weak argument...but some have
>> interpreted Harleian 279 as a dessert, Curye on Inglysh has it as a
>> sauce for meat, and the discredited Fabulous Feasts has it as a sauce
>> for birds, correct?  Doesn't Pleyn Delit have it listed as a sauce as
>> well?  (No, I know it's not valid to bolster one redaction with  
>> another :) )
>>     
>
> No, it's not. But based on what we know, we've seen some pottages  
> that consist of cooked sauces to which chopped, roast meats are  
> added, and served in a bowl, more or less like chili, say. Some  
> contain no meat, and it might be interpreted that the concept of  
> adding roast or boiled meat before service is implicit, while others  
> probably aren't intended as anything other than what the recipe  
> describes -- what you see is what you get.
>
> My feeling is that if this dish is called a pottage (assuming the  
> recipe we have is not recopied and recategorized by some secondary  
> scribe, of which there's always a chance), and there are specific  
> instructions on how to garnish it, I think we're probably looking at  
> something other than a sauce here. I think this gets prepared, put in  
> bowls suitable for holding a serving for one or, in some cases,  
> possibly two people [a "cover"], garnished and served to diners who  
> will eat it with spoons pretty much as presented.
>
> Of course, there's nothing we can find that would prevent people from  
> dunking stuff in it (although possibly there's something in a  
> contemporary book on table manners that specifically forbids this; I  
> dunno offhand), but that doesn't mean it should be categorized in the  
> same way as, say, sauce vert or cameline.
>
> 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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>   

-- 
***********
Tom Vincent
***********
The new Tom Hanks film is based on a book full of lies, deceit & corruption.  
It's also based on Dan Brown's "The daVinci Code"