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An original medieval recipe…

Recipe for broth of daintiers(*) deer and cervoissons

First, you have to perfectly boil and wash in boiling water the deer daintiers. Cook them perfectly and let them cool. Then, cut them into square pieces, neither too big nor too small. Fry them in "healthy bacon" and add beef broth as well as parsley leaves and fine powder in suitable quantity so that they are not too spicy. For the sauce, use a little camelina or take a liver or two of poultry, a little white bread, pass them through cheesecloth. Put the mixture in a pot instead of camelina, add a little vinegar, dilute the spices with wine and verjuice (two parts verjuice and a third of wine) or, instead of verjuice, gooseberries and salt the preparation appropriately.

(*) The daintiers are the testicles of the deer

We see that the sauce is what gives substance and taste to the dish and moves from the order of nature to that of culture by inventing a flavor. but, there is no art of preparing sauces without a true art of cooking, including the art of broth and more generally of soup (any preparation made in a pot).

It is with a wealth of precautions that the anonymous author of the great culinary text of the Middle Ages, Le Ménagier de Paris (composed around 1393), explains how to proceed so that the soups do not burn:

-Before your soup sours, and so that it does not sour, stir it often in the bottom of the pot and rest your spoon on the bottom, so that the soup does not sink there, and note that if soon you You will see that your soup will sour if you don't stir it, but take it off the heat and put it in another pot.

Text taken from "Fêtes de Table" by Michel Faucheux. Editions Philippe Lebaud