[Medieval People by Eileen Edna Power]@TWC D-Link bookMedieval People CHAPTER V 24/32
Some of them sound delicious, others would be ruin to our degenerate digestions today.
Pungent sauces of vinegar, verjuice, and wine were very much favoured, and cloves, cinnamon, galingale, pepper, and ginger appear unexpectedly in meat dishes. Almonds were a favourite ingredient in all sorts of dishes, as they still are in China and other parts of the East, and they might well be used more lavishly than they are in modern European cookery.
True to his race, the Menagier includes recipes for cooking frogs and snails.[20] To the modern cook some of his directions may appear somewhat vague, as when he bids his cook to boil something for as long as it takes to say a paternoster or a _miserere_; yet for clockless kitchens in a pious age what clearer indication could a man give? And, after all, it is no worse than 'cook in a hot oven', which still finds a place in many modern cookery books which should know better.
Other instructions are detailed enough.
In one valuable passage he gives a list of all the meat markets of Paris, together with the number of butchers to be found in each and the number of sheep, oxen, pigs, and calves sold there every week, adding also for interest the amount of meat and poultry consumed weekly in the households of the King, the Queen and the royal children, the Dukes of Orleans, Berry, Burgundy, and Bourbon.
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