CUISINES BY REGION
medium, such as an oven or a frying pan without any liquid. Ovens
were expensive and only found in upper-class kitchens. The middle
and lower classes primarily used communal ovens or bought baked
goods ready-made. In the south, however, portable ovens called trapa
were used, in which pies and tourtes were cooked. Made of pottery or
metal, these portable ovens were filled with the dish or dishes to be
cooked, and then buried in coals. Interestingly, the records of the
popes who resided in Avignon also list a trapa as part of the kitchen
equipment.93
Among the recipes included in the little Occitan cookbook, the
Modus, there are a handful that are even today still regarded as typical
of the region and prepared in more or less the same way. One of them
is escabèche, or Scabeg as the dish is called in the manuscript. The word
is derived from Arabic-Persian sikbag, which in medieval Arabic de-
scribed a dish made with vinegar. Similar to a galantine, or fish jelly,
the escabèche is a sauce made from ginger, pepper, cloves, and cinna-
mon, ground and diluted in wine, to which boiled saffron is added, as
well as ground bread diluted in vinegar, and fried onions, ground and
diluted in wine. It is served together with fish fried in oil.94 Another
sauce typical of the south is the aillade, a garlic sauce made with wal-
nuts. The white garlic sauce found in so many other European cook-
books of the time is normally made with almonds.
Other sauces in the Modus that are not generally found in northern
French cookbooks are the eruga, or rocket sauce, which contains
rocket (arugula) seeds ground and diluted in wine, and the salsa de
cerpol, or serpolet sauce, which contains serpolet (wild thyme), mint,
sorrel, costmary, sweet basil, and marjoram.95 The Arab influence is es-
pecially strong in Mediterranean recipe collections when it comes to
meat dishes. Two of them, romania and limonia, which can be found
in several Catalan and Italian cookbooks, are also included in the
Modus. The dish name romania, or raymonia as the Occitan scribe
spelled it, is derived from the Arabic word for pomegranate, rumm¯an,
which in the form of pomegranate verjuice is one of the principal in-
gredients. As Garnade, the second part of the word “pomegranate,”
the dish even appears in England, in the aristocratic cookbook The
Forme of Cury.96 The Occitan version of the dish is as follows:
Raymonia [Pomegranate Dish]
If you want to make a raymonia, take hens and cook them with salted meat.
And take unblanched almonds, and wash them in lukewarm water, and grind
them very strongly, and dilute with hen’s broth, and strain. Afterwards, take
113
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