Brouet Vergay is aptly titled. The translation is “Gaudy-Green Broth”. It is a brightly colored sauce for the meat of our choosing. The sauce gets it’s color from it’s main ingredient, parsley, as well as egg yolks and saffron.
This is the original French:
Pour faire brouet vergay. Cuisiez tel grain que vouldrez en vin et en esue ou bon boullon de beuf et du lard pour donner goust ; prenez pain passé deffait dudit boullon, parsin, sauge et moyeulx d’oes, fin fromage qui voelt et vergus, gingembre et saffren un poy pour faire vergay ; faictez tout boullir ensamble et jettez par dessus vostre grain, mais qu’il soit bien suffrit.
The English translation from Scully:
To make Gaudy-Green Broth. Cook whatever meat you like in wine and water or good beef bouillon, with some lard for flavour. Get sieved bread distembered with bouillon, parsley, sage, egg yolks, fine cheese if you wish, verjuice, ginger and s little saffron to make it a bright green; boil everything together. Pour it over your meat after this has been well sauteed.
My version of the dish:
In reading through this recipe I decided to use the wine and water cooking for the meat rather than the beef bouillon as I planned to use chicken bouillon for the sauce and did not want to use both types. My meat of choice was pork.
I gathered the rest of the ingredients listed in the recipe. I chose white wine as I like it more than red for cooking pork. I used ground sage because there was no fresh sage at the store. My choice of fine cheese was grated parmesan.
Once I got all of my ingredients together I cut up the meat and set it to boil in the wine and water. While it boiled tore the bread into pieces and added to bouillon to it. Then I chopped the parsley as small as I could make it and put it in with the bouillon soaked bread. I added to this the sage, egg yolks, cheese, verjuice, ginger, and saffron.
I mixed all of these ingredients together and pressed it through a sieve. I was not able to get all of the parsley through the sieve so I chose to put it into a food processor and make it as small as possibly. I added the parsley back into the sauce and set it to boil.
While the sauce came to a boil I removed the pork from the cooking liquid and sauteed it with a little lard. Once the meat was done and the sauce boiled it was ready to plate.
The finished dish is served by the sauce being poured over the meat.
The Verdict…
The color is bright and appealing. The sauce was savory but didn’t overwhelm the pork. If I make it again I will use a bit more verjuice and fresh sage to give it more flavor.