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

[Galefridus Peregrinus]

Both verjuice and vinegar were common souring agents in the medieval 
Islamic kitchen. I'm at work, so I can't do the whole statistical 
analysis thing, but they loved their sweet and sour dishes, using the 
juice or pulp of lemon, bitter orange, pomegranate, citron, and several 
varieties of vinegar (al-Warraq gives a number of recipes for preparing 
different kinds of vinegar). Verjuice/sour grapes are still part of 
Middle Eastern cookery -- my local Syrian market sells bottled verjuice 
at about 1/6 the cost of the fancy gourmet stuff (about $6 a quart), and 
I've bought fresh sour grapes from them (available late summer/early 
fall) and made my own.


-- Galefridus

> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2014 18:09:32 -0600
> From: Stefan li Rous To: SCA-Cooks maillist SCA-Cooks Subject: 
> [Sca-cooks] Was vinegar or verjuice most used in sauces?
> Message-ID: <2C55673A-D775-4639-BBDF-AC6BF8353BC2 at austin.rr.com>
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>
> 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 
> ****