From: jtn@nutter.cs.vt.edu (Terry Nutter)
Newsgroups: rec.food.historic
Subject: Galingale and galentyne sauce
Date: 13 Sep 92 20:27:18 GMT
Followup-To: rec.food.historic

Hi, everyone.  Pat Churchill quoted a posting of mine (which I'll omit
now, for bandwidth, and anyhow, if you were interested, you'd have
read it then ;^), and wrote,

>In *Exotic Fruits and Vegetables*, authors Jane Grigson and Charlotte
>Knox deal with Galangal (alpinia galanga) and say:
>On account of medieval recipes I would suspect that the words
>galantine and galangal are confused in the inquiring cook's mind.
>Galangal was used to flavour a galantine sauce which consisted of
>bread crusts, a little galangal, cinnamon and ginger, pounded up and
>moistened with an appropriate stock.  This was heated, sharpened with
>a splash of vinegar and strained over fish or meat, a dashing lively
>sauce, a galant sauce:
>  Was never a pike wallowed in galantine
>  As I in love am wallowed and y-wound
>as Chaucer wrote around about AD1384.
>RThe word galangal came via Persia and the Arabic khalanjan from the
>Chinese Ko-liang-kiang, meaning no more than mild ginger from Ko, a
>prefecture in the province of Canton.  Europe seems to have stopped
>using galangal with the development of simpler cooking, or rather
>simpler flavouring, in the Renaissance.  I doubt it appears at all in
>the 17th century cookbooks that set our moder style.

You know, I believed something close to this until last night.  (In
particular, I didn't think it was simpler flavoring -- 15th C sauces
are _more_ complex than 14th, and 16th and 17th in general at least as 
complex as 15th, at least in my experience.  Rather I thought galingale 
lost to a combination of the difficulty of working it and the ease of 
substituting the easier and cheaper alternative, ginger.  Still....)
Then I decided to write a simple article for an amateur outlet on looking
at how recipes varried in the Middle Ages, and thought to use galentyne 
sauce as an example of recipe evolution (bad choice, it turns out at
least for a _simple_ article!) and did some far more systematic digging 
through my books than I had before.  The results are rather startling.

I found 23 English recipes from the 14th and 15th C that use "galentine" 
in the name, or that use that term internally to describe the sauce (and 
there may be more in the latter category).  (I also found a couple of 
French ones, but the English situation is more than complex enough by 
itself!)  Of these, the majority do not call for _either_ galingale _or_ 
ginger.

I'm trying to work out what's going on now.  I haven't finished, but
I can give some generalizations.  Of the recipes I found, 9 came from
three 14th C MS sources, and the remaining 14 come from six 15th C
MS sources.  Some of these have "covert" ingredients (some say things
like "seeth your fish in a good sauce"; a couple say "a galentyne made
of" and list some ingredients that may not be exhaustive; one says to
add "powder"; etc.).  Eliminating these, I find the following trends
(citing from memory; the numbers are all up on another, currently
inaccessible program):

(1)  Only one recipe for Fillets in Galentine (a pork dish; galentine 
seem otherwise to have been used primarily with fish) from either 
century calls for galingale.  Most of these call for no spice in the
modern sense at all except pepper and in one case saunders for color.

(2)  Most of the recipes for galentine other than fillets in the 14th
C call for galingale.  Some of these also call for ginger, and less
than half call for cinnamon.  None calls for cinnamon or ginger or 
both but not galingale.

(3)  Of the 15th C recipes, almost all call for cinnamon (90%).  Only
20% call for galingale.

The one clear trend is that in the 15th C, cinnamon replaces galingale.  
This does _not_ represent a reduction in the amount of total spice in 
the dish, or in the number of spices used; it's a change of which spice 
is used, and an _increase_ in overall spicing.  This may be because with 
larger amounts used, they preferred a cheaper and easier spice; though 
in that case, it isn't clear why they didn't go toward ginger.  (The total 
percent of 15th C recipes that call for either ginger or galingale is
substantially lower than the percent that call for galingale in the 14th.)

I am currently looking at trying to find evidence for the following
hypothesis.  In the 13th C Anglo-Norman cuisine, there were (among
others) two popular sauces: galentine, based on galingale, and cameline,
based on cinnamon (called cannel).  Other than the base spice, the 
difference between the sauces was primarily that cameline was sweet and
bland, where galentine was sour and piquant.

With pork, they preferred a sour and piquant sauce, like the galentine
base (this is true of porc sauces in general, so far as I have been able
to determine -- I'm going to look some more!), so preferred galentine
to cameline, but they didn't like the galingale with the pork.  So by
the 14th C, galentine has divided into two sauces: one with pork and
generally without galingale, and one with fish and generally with 
galingale.

Then in the 15th C, there is a separate move to replace galingale by
cinnamon.

I'm going to try to go through my cookbooks and count recipes that call
for various spices, and see if I can show a shift in the ratios overall
that supports this.  MEANWHILE -- if any of you out there have information
that I am covering old ground, PLEASE let me know!  I'd rather look this
up than do it ;^}.

And I'm going to use cameline instead for the article I was planning.

This is too long.  Will stop now.

Cheers,

Terry Nutter     Blacksburg, VA     jtn@vtopus.cs.vt.edu     (703)552-1598