[Sca-cooks] OOP: Frozen sauces
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius.magister at verizon.net
Sat Jun 3 08:43:31 PDT 2006
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
"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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