14C English meat in a Saracen sauce recipe.
Take venyson: boyle hit, trye hit, do hit yn a pott. Take almond mylke drawyn up with the same brothe; cast theryn onyons, & aley hit up withe floure of rys, & caste yn clovys. Aftyr the boylyng, take hit doun; sesyn hit up with poudyr, wyn, & sygure, & coloure hit with alekenet. – Ordinance of Pottage
My Redaction
The original version used venison. I did not have access to venison so I used beef. The sauce was also colored with alekenet. I substituted red food coloring to get the deep red color the sauce should have.
I cut the beef into bite sized pieces and boiled it until it was just cooked. I reserved a few cups of the water the meat was cooked in and while it was still hot I added ground almonds to it and let it sit for about 15 minutes. I then strained out the almonds and squeezed all of the leftover liquid out of the almonds. This almond milk and the meat were returned to the pot. I sliced onions thinly and added them to the pot as well. Rice flour was added to the pot to thicken the sauce. Ground cloves, red wine, sugar and a spice mix including ginger, cinnamon and grains of paradise were all added to the sauce. It was boiled until thickened and then I added the red coloring.
A Boke of Good Cookery Bruet Sarcenes recipe.
Sources
Hieatt, Constance B. An Ordinance of Pottage. London: Prospect Books Ltd, 1988. Collection of medieval recipes from a fifteenth-century manuscript in Yale University’s Beinecke Library.