Eating Medieval Art: Gourdes in Potage

I picked this for my second recipe from Pleyn Delit because it looked fairly simple and looked like it would reheat well - that's one of my major criteria for normal recipes since I don't have time to cook every night. I was also curious about it because I couldn't imagine what texture it was going to have. Pleyn Delit doesn't include any photographs of the prepared food so it's hard to imagine in advance was the finished dishes are going to look like.

The original is given as "Take yong gowrdes; par hem and kerve hem on pecys. Cast hem in gode broth, and do therto a gode pertye of oynouns mynced. Take pork soden; grynde it and alye it therwith and with yokes of ayren. Do therto safroun and salt, and messe it forth with powdor douce." "Gourds" here means squash and I chose to use butternut, since its a squash I'm used to working with. The squash is boiled in broth along with some onions and then that is mashed together: I used my potato masher and kept a fairly rough texture because that somehow seemed more appropriate, more "medieval," to me.

Then cooked ground pork is added along with an egg or egg yolk and some spices. I assume the egg is meant to thicken and bind the whole, although I don't know if it was really necessary. On the first night the dish was rather bland, despite the spices. So when I reheated it later in the week (and it does reheat well) I added additional spices, including some pepper even though that isn't mentioned in the original.

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Mostly Medieval:Images and Reflections

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