[Sca-cooks] medieval steaks

[Judith L. Smith Adams]

Leche is "to grease"??  
  Skewers begat grills, grills begat flat griddles, which begat the ridge-bottomed grilling skillet, which has survived to the present??
   
  What might "canelle" be??
   
  Thanks!
  Judith

Terry Decker <t.d.decker at worldnet.att.net> wrote:
    To quote myself from a column I did for Serve It Forth!,

"There is no doubt that steak is a Medieval dish, as the following recipe 
from Harleian Manuscript 279 atests:

To make Steyks of venson or bef. Take Venyson or Bef, & leche & gredyl it up broun... SNIP
  
...straw on pouder Canelle y-now
  SNIP
   
  , that the steyks be al y-helid ther-wyth, and 
but a litel Sawce; & then serue it

forth.

We know that in this instance, steaks were greased, cooked, and served in a 
spiced wine sauce. What we don't

know is what the steaks looked like, precisely how they were cooked, or to 
whom they would be served.

Gredyl is a Middle English word derived from the Old North French, gridel, 
which may have come to England

with the Conquest. Originally, it described a metal lattice work for 
grilling. The gridel became a gridiren

in Middle English and a grill in Modern English. At some point, the griddle 
became a flat metal pan and

the gridiron became a frying pan with ridges in the bottom.

Within these definitions, steak could either be broiled on a grill or pan 
fried. It is very possible that gredyl

describes both techniques and that the cook understood which technique to 
use for the various cuts of meat.



Some Renaissance paintings show both lattice work and solid grilling 
surfaces as part of a raised firebox and cooking surface that substituted 
for a stove. I've built a few of these for field cookery and they work very 
well. The Bayeux Tapestry shows chunks of meat being grilled in the field 
for William's table.

Bear

> That said, grilling and pan-broiling steak are two of the first things I 
> learned to do as a cook, low these many years ago, and pan-broiling 
> remains a favorite strategy for converting raw meat to luscious treat... 
> The technique and ingredients are medieval-esque, if not the real deal, 
> and the results are REALLY YUMMY... Method has the advantage over 
> grilling of preserving juices in pan for deglazing and saucing...
>
> Re whether pan-cooking a steak was practical over hearth-fire: I have 
> *very* limited knowledge on how this WAS done in period, but (author's 
> name??) there's a great book on "traditional" (ie, pre-woodstove, let 
> alone gas or electric burner) methods of cooking with fire that shows a 
> lot of cooking - in pots or on grills - being done over coals pulled onto 
> the hearth... the pan (works for a grill, too) sits above the coals on a 
> tripod or between a couple of bricks. The cook controls the heat by 
> adding or removing coals... Don't know if they DID cook meat this way in 
> period, but they COULD have...
>
>
> mka Judith
> ska undecided


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