sauce
Blomæth Høns – Chicken Dressed As Chicken
Neither chicken, nor something disguised as chicken, it’s chicken disguised as something disguised as chicken; a sort of entremet for the third estate.
Rolled, Grilled, Polish Steaks with Sauce Espagnole
Filets de Boeuf grillés à la Polonoise.
Vous Prenez un filet de Boeuf motifié, vous le parez, le coupez en deux & en levez plusieurs feuilles, que vous étendez, en les battant; vous avez une farce de foyes gras que vous mettez dessus, & les roulez feuille par feuille, & les mettez griller en les arrosant [...]
Golden Apples, Crimson Stew
1534: A Spanish trader is returning to his ship in Seville after another unsuccessful attempt to sell his carefully tended hull full of tomato plants. The actual tomatoes that he’d brought had long ago rotted en route, and he’d had a hell of a time explaining to his customers what, precisely, the tomatoes were for. [...]
Chevreaux Nouveaux
The Viandier of Taillevent (see bibliography for details) is a collection of manuscript cookbooks spanning the 13th to 15th centuries grouped by convention under the banner of Tirel de Taillevent, a 14th century cook to Charles V. It’s a classic of medieval cookery, less famous but more cookable than The Forme of Cury.
Chevreaux, metez [...]
A [Very] Short History of Sauce Allemande
Marie Antonin Carême (author of the encyclopedic, L’Art de la Cuisine Française, 1834) categorized all sauces as belonging to one of the five “Mother Sauces“, Sauce Allemande is from velouté sauce, a blond sauce of veal (or chicken) stock thickened with a roux of butter and flour. Later on, Escoffier (A Complete Guide to [...]
Poulet à L’Allemand – German Chicken from Le Cuisiner Gascon, 1747
Le Cuisinier Gascon, Amsterdam (probably a false imprint for Paris), 1740 is famous for its important early treatment of foie gras, and for the outlandish names of many of its recipes. My copy of Gascon is the 1747 Nouvelle edition with the added letter to an English Pastry chef. This recipe isn’t outlandish [...]
Emulsifying with Pliny – Allioli, Aïoli
Book 19 of Pliny’s Natural History (Naturalis Historia, ca. 77), an immense 37 volume encyclopedia of everything that everyone had every known, contains the first mention of the garlic/oil emulsion now called allioli in Catalan (aïoli in Provençal). When garlic is “beaten up in oil and vinegar it swells up in foam to a [...]
Thanksgiving: Wherein a chicken rides a turkey to dinner and a pumpkin pie is filled with cheese
I have a very understanding family:
To make various mixtures with which to stuff every sort of commonly eaten animal, quadraped and fowl. Get four pounds of pork fat that is not rancid and with knives beat it finely together with two pounds of liver of a goat kid…adding in beaten mint, sweet marjoran, burnet [...]
Roux, Making Sauce Saucy Since 1651
Before the roux – now a flour butter`mixture, originally a pork fat and flour mixture – sauces were thickened by the addition of bread crumbs, bread, or, famously (and regrettably) macaroons. In 1651 La Varenne gave us the first recipe for a roux, and sauce has never been the same.
Roux tips: [...]
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