[Sca-cooks] Was vinegar or verjuice most used in sauces?

[Volker Bach]

Most likely by region, too. The sixteenth century medical writer Hieronymus Tragus states that (in Germany), vinegar (essig) is the sauce of the poor, the only seasoning they can afford. Verjuice, by contrast, hardly features at all. Of course earlier German recipes do include it, but I would still venture that in Germany, vinegar was always the more common. The German word essig does not distinguish between wine and malt vinegar, so it presumably means either. Verjuice can't have been easy to come by outside wine-growing areas, but malt vinegar could be made at home, after all. By contrast, making verjuice fresh would have been an option for large parts of the year in wine-growing areas in Southern Europe.

As to interpreting German recipes, it is important to keep in mind essig does not always mean vinegar at all, though. Any sour seasoning could be given that name. I assume in most cases it means vinegar, but I can't be sure, and there are cases where it clearly doesn't. 

YIS

Giano





Richenda du Jardin <richenda.du.jardin at gmail.com> schrieb am 3:41 Donnerstag, 20.Februar 2014:
 
Hmm, this is an interesting question. I'm working on a project that is 
looking at spices and how they were used in recipes - such as which 
types of recipes were more likely to use spices: soups or pies, meat or 
dairy, etc.  (This project then looks at what spices and herbs 
households are using and whether the recipe collections are a good 
reflection of the tastes of the times.)

I'm also cataloging the use of sugar vs. honey in recipes for future 
study. It wouldn't be hard to pull vinegar vs. verjuice for the same.

Richenda

On 2/19/2014 4:09 PM, Stefan li Rous wrote:
> Jim  Chevallier made an off-hand comment of:
> <<< Admittedly this Belgian version does use white wine (which would more
> likely have been verjuice in the period) >>>
>
> Hmmm. This brings up an interesting question. Was it really more common to use verjuice instead of vinegar in period?
>
> Of course, we have the usual problem of what is meant by period.
>
> I don't have access to Johnna's Concordance, but a quick glance through the sauces-msg file in the Florilegium seems to show about as many or more sauces using vinegar as verjuice. And a lot of recipes that call for vinegar or verjuice. Or vinegar and verjuice.
>
> We also have possible translation fuzziness, where verjuice might get replaced with vinegar because the translator didn't know the difference or was using the latter because it was easier to get these days. Which is an example of why I always like to see the original for redactions. :-)
>
> Maybe it varies more by the type of sauce or region or time period?
>
> Opinions?
>
> Stefan
> --------
> THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
>     Mark S. Harris           Austin, Texas          StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
> http://www.linkedin.com/in/marksharris
> **** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****
>
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>
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