[Sca-cooks] Egredouce - i.e. Glop

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Jan 28, 2011, at 1:23 AM, Stefan li Rous wrote:

> Gunthar replied to Admantius with:
> <<< I'm getting the aigre part -- vinegar, but where's the douce? I think
> this is the first egredouce I've ever seen that doesn't have a
> sweetening agent... I believe most of the recipes I've seen have been
> for sort of sweet-and-sour dried-fruit chutney sauce over fried fish or
> meat. >>>
> 
> I fully agree and was rather confused about that as well.
> The recipe comes from Two Fifteenth Century Cookbooks p. 31/58
> 
> I keep wondering if this was a simple pottage and mis-titled.
> I'd like to find the real name but I'll keep making it.
> =========
> 
> Thank you. I was trying to categorize exactly what an "egredouce" was, so I could figure out where to place Gunthar's message and recipe in the Florilegium. Most "egredouce" I seem to have in the Florilegium are currently in the sauces-msg file. But Gunthar's dish seemed more like the kind of things I had in the stews-bruits-msg file, so I put it there. Gunthar's seemed to be more like small chunks of meat in a sauce rather than slices of meat with a sauce over it. 

Egre/Aigre = [in various Romance languages, in this case probably French] Sour; Douce = [again, French] Sweet, as in Poudre Douce. Most of the recipes call for a vinegar and sugar mixture or syrup in the sauce, often in a proportion of two parts sugar to one part vinegar ["of vinegar the thriddendele", as I recall, but I could be wrong in remembering this]. Sometimes wine makes up part or all of the sour liquid, and sometimes it's honey instead of sugar. Sometimes dried fruit, such as raisins, maybe shredded figs or dates, is involved.

Apart from the 15th century recipe Gunthar is using, I'd have said most or all egredouce recipes follow that basic pattern. It's especially odd given that the fifteenth century is a period where sugar in recipes is generally more common than in the 14th century (economic and trade dynamic shifts, basically); I wonder if this is a case where the sweet ingredient may have been left out accidentally when transcribing the recipe.

> So, more like a stew or more like slices of meat with a required sweet and sour sauce? The latter doesn't sound like "glop", though.

I'd say there is no set rule for presentation or form. Some meats are finished cooking in the sauce, some not. As I say, the version I seem to recall being most common is the sauce over [uncoated] fried fish. I suspect the brown glop thing is something of a canard.

Again, this is where the Concordance comes in handy: it tries to establish by default the "canonical identity" of a dish by looking at all the known recipes, and figuring out which characteristics are essential to te process and which characteristics of some of the recipes could be considered anomalies. For example, I'd consider the lack of sugar in Gunthar's recipe to be an anomaly, at least until someone came up with several more egredouce recipes without a sweet ingredient.

To me, Gunthar's 15th century variant looks pretty similar to Fylletes in Galentine. Even if it is brown glop.

Adamantius





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