FOOD IN MEDIEVAL TIMES
sections on “Thick Potages,” and “Thick Meatless Potages” underline
their importance and great variety. What is meant by “meatless”
potages is not vegetable dishes, however, but potages made from fish,
dishes that were suitable for fast days. Potages and brouets, or broths,
were a favorite first course, judging from the French menus of the
time. These dishes would have followed a starter, often in the form of
seasonal fruit whose function it was to “open” the mouth of the stom-
ach and prepare it for the main dishes that were thought to take longer
to “cook,” that is, to digest. The Viandier’s white capon broth is a
typical example of this genre of dish. To prepare this Blanc brouet de
chappons, the capons are cooked in wine and water, broken into pieces,
and fried in bacon grease. The dark capon meat, chicken livers, and al-
monds are ground up, steeped in the broth, and boiled with the other
meat. Then a mixture of ground ginger, cinnamon, cloves, galingale,
long pepper, and grains of paradise is added, followed by well-beaten
and strained egg yolks.77
When these potages contained the spice cumin they were called com-
minee. For the fish comminee that opens the section “Thick Meatless
Potages,” the fish is cooked in water or fried in oil, and then boiled in
almond milk to which ground ginger and cumin infused in wine and
verjuice are added.78 The recipe concludes with the remark that sugar
is required if this comminee is served as a dish for the ailing. In a bour-
geois household such as that of the Menagier, the broth might have
been followed by a porée, a soup of leafy greens. Porée blanche was pre-
pared from leeks and onions that were fried and cooked in cow’s milk
or almond milk, depending on whether it was a meat day or fast day.79
The Menagier may have continued his meal with a civet of hare. To
prepare it the hare was first roasted on a spit, then cut in pieces, fried in
grease with chopped onions, and subsequently boiled in a dark broth
made from toasted bread infused in wine and beef broth or pea puree.
Ground ginger, cinnamon, cloves, grains of paradise, and saffron are
the spices Taillevent lists in his civet recipes.80
At an aristocratic banquet the first course, le premier mets, contain-
ing the broths would have been followed by a variety of roasted meats
accompanied with the appropriate sauces as the second course. In the
Viandier, the sauce most often mentioned in the section on roasts is
sauce cameline. Sometimes the meat is simply eaten with fine salt or
verjuice. For his list of roast meats Taillevent starts with pork, veal,
calf’s tripe, mutton, kid, and lamb. He continues with the domestic
fowl geese and goslings, pullets, chicks, capons, hens, and cockerels.
From hare, rabbit, and wild boar he moves on to wildfowl, such as
108
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