Medieval cookery glossary: caudle

Here’s the third of my excerpts from my forthcoming comprehensive glossary of ingredients, equipment and culinary terms in Richard II’s Fourme of Cury, c.1390:

caudle caudel. A hot, thickened drink, sometimes incorporating wine or ale. Also, a type of sauce. ‘Caudel ferree’ (recipe 41, chapter 9) is a very sweet and, for the time, a most luxurious drink: using ‘good wine’ as a basis and thickened with the finest flour (pandemain) and tempered with egg yolks, it is also sweetened ‘with a great quantity’ of Cyprus sugar, or honey, before saffron is added and more sugar and ginger powder is layered on top. More broadly, caudel is used to describe thickened broth in dishes of chicken and salmon (see recipe 33, chapter 2; and recipe 109, chapter 4), or indeed refers directly to a sauce, for example, in the dish ‘Caudel for gees’, for which a recipe is provided for a milk, garlic and saffron sauce, thickened with flour, for roasted goose (recipe 140, chapter 5). ‘Tredure’ (recipe 15, chapter 5) is made up ‘as a caudle’ and is in essence a kind of restorative soup of ‘good broth’ blended with raw eggs, which is then spiced and given some piquancy with the addition of verjuice.

Take a look at my experiment with making a spiced caudel ferree.

Previous: bullaces

Next: dittany

If you would like to support my independent research and creative work, please head over to the Buy me a coffee tab.