A Late Sunday Dinner Wherein I Accidentally Make Ur-Sauerbraten

Sunday I returned to cooking medieval with a couple very simple recipes. Eating would be The Dulcinea and her eldest son, D., who, at the tender age of 12, has forsaken meat and gone vegetarian. However, his mom inveigled him into retreating, if only briefly, back into the realm of the omnivores.

The centerpiece of the meal was A Good Roast. The recipe was an old German one and apparently wasn't given a fancy name by Sabina Welserin, from whose cookbook the recipe came. Es kommt aus Das Kuchbuch der Sabina Welserin and was redacted by Kristen Sullivan. The translation goes like this:

To make a good roast. Take veal or a sirloin of beef, lay it overnight in wine, afterwards stick it on a spit. Put it then in a pot. Put good broth therein, onions, wine, spices, pepper, ginger and cloves and let it cook therein. Do not over salt it.

One marinates one's roast in red wine overnight. When you're ready to cook, slap that baby in a pot with beef broth, more red wines, onion, and spices. The recipe calls for lots of pepper and, sadly enough, we were out.



And thusly an emergency pepper run was made. Whew! In addition to pepper, cloves and ginger are added. Boil until meat is done.



I had elected to make some cameline sauce to go with it but I don't think the combination was necessarily meant to be as I got the recipes from different sources with the sauce being an English one:

Sauce gamelyne. Take faire brede, and kutte it, and take vinegre and wyne, & stepe þe brede therein, and drawe hit thorgh a streynour with powder of canel, and drawe hit twies or thries til hit be smoth; and þen take pouder of ginger, Sugur, and pouder of cloues, and cast þerto a litul saffron and let hit be thik ynogh, and thenne serue hit forthe.

…adapted by Daniel Myers. This was apparently the ketchup of its day as Myers notes that the stuff was to be had pre-made on the streets of 14th century Paris.

You begin by ripping a few pieces of white bread apart and then soaking them with red wine and vinegar. While the recipe calls for red wine vinegar, I poured from my stash of cubeb vinegar.



Once the liquid soaks in and you have mush, strain it. Cook the liquid after having seasoned with cinnamon, ginger, cloves, saffron, sugar, and salt. The liquid will absorb some starch from the bread and thicken on its own into a nice burgundy sauce.



The D made some green beans which were sautéed with shallots and I threw in some mashed potatoes for good measure. Here is a plate in media dinner:



Here we have The D and D who, having broken his vegetarian vows in the cause of going retro, asked that his identity be hidden.



During dinner I wondered aloud as to when it was that Western cuisine generally stopped seasoning meat with ginger and cloves. Or is it purely an American thing? I'd wager that most Yanks associated those seasonings (and cinnamon) with pumpkin pie and sweet things generally. Yet the medieval meat recipes I've seen use them very commonly. My inquiry prompted D to note that the roast with the sauce reminded him of sauerbraten. Indeed, it was sauerbraten – more or less. You've got the requisite red wine and vinegar; just add some bay and you're basically there, seasoning-wise.

Unfortunately, we ran out of time for me to make dessert – tortelli – which are essentially fried ravioli stuffed with a sweetened nut mixture which were, I gather, a Lenten snack. Hopefully I can makes amends soon.