I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world.	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he's experimenting with federated platforms. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance, and can found on t he PlusPora diaspora pod. He hates cell-phones.

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Some Sauces For last six months or so, I've been cooking with shire children at our local Flintmoot (aka Monthly Super Shire Meeting), and this month I decided to do sauces. I brought in a set of eight recipes, three from the Forme of Cury and five from Le Vivendier.1 From FoC, using the Curye on Inglysch numbering: Verde sawse. Take persel, mynt, garlek, a litul serpell and sawge; a litul canel, gynger, piper, wyne, brede, vyneger & salt ; grynde it small with safroun, & mess it forth. (#14) Sawse blanche for capouns ysode. Take almaundes blaunched and grynde hem all to doust; temper hit vp with verious and powdour of gyngyuer, and messe it forth. (#140) FOC 140 Gaunceli for gees. Take garlec and grinde it smalle; safroun and flour þerewith & salt, temper it vp with cowe mylke and seeþ it wel and serue it forth.(#146) And from the Vivendier, using Scully's translations: Unboiled cameline. Cinnamon, ginger, cloves, grains of paradise, darkly toasted bread sieved, disempered with verjuice, wine and vinegar.(#36) Cameline garlic sauce is similarly made, but it needs garlic buds cutting through the vinegar. (#37) White garlic sauce is well ground along with crustless white bread, distempered with verjuice. (#38) Hot black pepper sauce. Burnt toast distempered with vinegar and strained. Boil this with black pepper. (#40) ...then get onions and fry them well in butter, then drain them. Get unburnt toast, temper it in verjuice, with a little vinegar, and strain this with the onions. then boil everything togther a little. (#63) The kids cut loose and between them made some version of almost every sauce at least once. By the end of the day, one of my cooks had dropped out after stubbing his toe, and each of three remaining kids had each come up with a quite good, and credible version of one of the sauces. Zeva of Flintheath had made the Sawse blanche, adding just a little milk to the given recipe. Leif Ranulfson's Verde sawse omitted the bread, and I didn't provide saffron. James of Flintheath made the Gaunceli, again with no saffron. All were very good. I want to talk a bit more about the Gaunceli that James made. It's a flour thickened sauce, which is very unusual in medieval cookery. Far more common are bread thickened sauces. In fact, all of the other recipes are bread thickened, except for the Sawse blanche, which uses ground almonds. The recipe looks almost like a modern béchamel. For that you melt butter and mix in your flour, then add milk and your desired flavourings, then heat to thicken. For the Gaunceli, there is no added lipid, which made me wonder how well it would thicken and if it would clump. We crushed the garlic quite thoroughly, added some flour and mashed that all together into a paste. Milk was added and the sauce was gently heated to a simmer. It was like magic. The result was smooth, not lumpy, and it was delicious. It was bit more faff than making a roux based sauce, since with a roux, the flour is easy to incorporate in the lipid before you add the liquid, but the result was very much the same. The name, 'Gaunceli,' is by way of the French. Jance is a type of sauce; there are recipes for various sauces called 'jance.' In Scully's edition of The Viandier of Taillevant,2 he has an entry in the glossary for jance as 'a boiled sauce of ginger and almonds.' Earlier in the text, he notes that one of the three Viandier manuscripts does not call the jance recipes 'jance,' but just 'sauce,' suggesting that even at the time the exact meaning of jance was uncertain. There are several variations of jance in The Viandier, including one 'de lait de vache.' When you add the garlic, 'ail' in modern French, or 'ailé' for garlicy, the etymology becomes clear.i 'Jance ailé' drifts easily into an English pronunciation which can be written as Gaunceli, which a soft 'g'. (Thanks to the Middle English Dictionary for starting me down that rabbit hole.) All of which means that Gaunceli really means 'garlic sauce,' which is pretty accurate. I have some thoughts about why flour thickened sauces are so rare in medieval cookery, but that will have to wait for another time. 1.Heiatt, Constance B.; and Sharon Butler, "Curye on Inglisch," 1985. (Contains Forme of Cury). Scully, Terence, "The Vivendier," 1997. 2. Suclly, Terence, "The Viandier of Taillevent," 1988.

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