GLOSSARIUM - B
GLOSSARY

Content mesure: about 1 pint or +/- 0.65 liter.

Laurel-berry.

Sweet Spanish wine.

Sauce Poivrade for meat- and fish dishes prepared with broth or wine, roasted breadcrumb and several herbes and spices (pepper).

Blanc Manger is prepared with almonds milk and fowl (chicken), brought to taste with spices and sugar.

Today blanc manger is mainly a dessert made of white almonds, cream, sugar and gelatine (Italian= Pana Cotta).

After cooling the fat can be blown off or spooned from the fluid.

One only knew Fava Beans (Broad Beans, Horse Beans). 

Favas are good in soups and salads or as a side dish. Must be blanched and seed cover removed. Do no require soaking.The current beans (Phaseolus Vulgaris) were brought to Europe by Columbus and via Spain introduced in the North by the end of the 16th. century.

White sugar, scraped off sugar loafs, the form in which cane sugar was sold.

Sugar was first referred to as "white" in 1430, so purification techniques were in use by then. The sugarcane plant, indigenous to southern Asia, was first used for the production of sugar between the 7th and 4th century B.C. in northern India. Cane cultivation eventually spread westward to the Near East and was introduced to the Mediterranean region by the Arabs from about 1300, giving rise to a cane sugar industry that flourished there until the late 1500's. The sugar industry survived the gradual expulsion of the Moors from the Mediterranean littoral, and was carried on by both Moslems and Christians as a profitable, expanding concern.
Production was centred in Syria, Palestine, the Dodecanese, Egypt, Cyprus, Crete (Chania = Kydonia => Candy), Sicily, North Africa, and Southern Spain. The trade (as opposed to production) was under the dominance of the merchant bankers of Italy, with Venice ultimately controlling distribution throughout the then known world. The first sugar reached England in 1319, Denmark in 1374, and Sweden in 1390.
It was an expensive novelty and useful in medicine, being unsurpassed for making palatable the odious mixtures of therapeutic herbs, entrails, and other substances of the medieval pharmacopoeia.

In 1747 a German chemist discovered that beets contain the same sugar as sugarcane. This made Europe independant of foreign sugar.

Bruet (brewet) is a thick sauce; broth or meat or other food cooked in broth. When white it is a kind of blanc manger.

Broete (Catalan), brodo (Italian).

Harbour Porpoise.