[Sca-cooks] definitions was Surviving medieval sauces?

[Johnna Holloway]

Sauce in OED 3rd is defined as: 

"Any preparation, usually liquid or soft, and often consisting of several ingredients, intended to be eaten as an appetizing accompaniment to some article of food. Formerly occas. applied to a condiment of any kind.
Often with qualifying word denoting the predominant ingredient, as bread sauce, egg sauce, mint sauce, parsley sauce, or with qualifying adj., as black sauce, brown sauce, hard sauce, white sauce. Also (15th c.) in many adopted French terms, as sauce cameline, sauce galantine, sauce gansell, etc.: see Two Cookery-bks. 77 (c1450–110) and 108 (c1430). 

Quotations go back to at least 1375.
Medieval forms being ME sawse, Sc. salss, ME–17 sawce, sause, ME saus, sace

Condiment goes back to 1420. 
Anything of pronounced flavour used to season or give relish to food, or to stimulate the appetite.
(Some medical writers class tea, coffee, alcoholic drinks, as condiments; but they are not ordinarily so called.)

c1420 Pallad. on Husb.   xi. 503   This condyment is esy and jocounde.
 ibid.      xii. 351   This moone is made olyve in condiment.

Rarely  condiment was also 
trans. To season or flavour with a condiment; to spice. And the source there for the quotation  is c1420 Pallad. on Husb.  

xi. 525   Use this ferment For musty brede, whom this wol condiment.


The MED or Middle English Dictionary just muddles the waters and declares the following:
sauce (n.) Also saus(e, salse, (?errors) sauche, sauu3; pl. sauces, etc. & (error) sawes. [OF sausse, sause, sauce, salse & ML salsa, AL salsea.]
(a) A condiment for meat, fish, fowl, etc., a sauce; also, a pickling liquid, brine; (b) fig. of (a); (c) a curative or preventive preparation; a medicinal sauce; (d) cook. in combs.: ~ blaunk (gamelin, ma-dame, neiger, noir, sarasin, sauge), blaunk (sobre) ~; for other varieties see camelin adj., galauntine n., gingivere n.(c), grene adj.1.(d), verge adj., etc.; (e) in cpds.:~ al-one, common alliaria (Alliaria officinalis), garlic mustard; ~ makere, a maker of condiments; also, mistransl. of OF sansüe [quot.: c1440]; also as surname; ~ makere-craft, guild of condiment makers.

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED38564

Johnnae


On Feb 17, 2014, at 2:01 PM, David Walddon <david at vastrepast.com> asked about definitions...