Recipes

Bourblier of boar

Bourblier of boar
43. Bourblier of fresh boar.
Taillevent, p. 22
Put it into boiling water, remove it very soon, roast it, and baste it with a sauce made of spices (to wit, ginger, cassia, cloves, grains of paradise and some grilled bread soaked with wine, verjuice and vinegar). When it is cooked, [cut it into bits and boil] everything together. It should be clearish and black.

Goodman of Paris
Bourbelier of WILD PIG. First you must put it in boiling water and take it out quickly and stick with cloves; put it on to roast, and baste with a sauce made of spices, that is ginger, cinnamon, clove, grain, long pepper and nutmegs, mixed with verjuice, wine and vinegar, and without boiling use it to baste; and when it is roasted it should be boiled up together, And this sauce is called boar’s tail, and you will find it later (and there it is thickened with bread: and here, not).

A BOAR’S TAIL SAUCE. Take pork numbles, rabbits and river-birds, and put them on the spit, with a dripping-pan beneath, with good wine and some vinegar. And take grain, ginger, clove, nutmeg and long pepper and cinnamon, and grind and remove from the mortar: then grind up toasted bread soaked in good wine, and pass it through the sieve; and then pour everything which is in the dripping-pan and the spices and bread into an iron pan or a pot with liquid from the meat, and add the roast you made it with, having already stuck it with cloves.
Thus you may make a sauce for breast of wild boar.
Note that nutmegs, mace, and galingale cause headaches.

Sylvie’s Redaction:
Whole cloves
1/4 tsp Ginger
1/2 tsp Cinnamon
1/4 tsp Grains of paradise
1/8 t nutmeg
1 cup Wine
1 cup Vinegar
Quickly parboil pork roast. Stud with whole cloves. Roast in 450 degree oven for 1 hr 45 mins for 3 lb roast(until meat thermometer reads greater than 170). baste with sauce. At feast, warm covered in foil, slice and serve.

In the taste testing we found that the strength of the apple cider vinegar completely overwhelmed the verjuice. It was decided that since you couldn’t taste the verjuice, and verjuice is very expensive, that instead we’d use just apple cider vinegar. In retrospect I think I should have used 1/2 apple cider vinegar and 1/2 water (or more wine). The vinegar in this dish was very strong. Everytime I opened the oven I got a lung full of vinegar steam (not the most pleasant sensation).

Despite this the roasts turned out lovely and were very tasty.

When making this dish, be sure to get pork roasts that haven’t been enhanced with a saline solution. In our taste test we found that the enhanced pork was WAY too salty and bordered on unpleasant.

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