Escargots et Lyemesolles

What, Where, Why

• A pair of dishes united by a visual joke: the first dish is actual snails — escargots, from Le Menagier de Paris (1394). The second is “snails” made of pork chunks cut to the same size and coated in a bread-thickened sauce that gives them the same glossy appearance — from Le Vivendier (1450).
• Served together at Kingdom Arts and Sciences Festival, March 2010, the two are documented here as a pair for the sake of the joke.

The Sources

Le Menagier de Paris (1394) — Escargots:

“Limassons que l’en dit escargols, convient prendre à matin. Prenez les limassons jeunes, petis, et qui ont coquilles noires, des vignes ou des seurs, puis les lavez en tant d’eaue qu’ils ne gettent plus d’escume: puis les lavez une fois en sel et vinaigre et mettez cuire en eaue. Puis il vous convient traire iceulx limassons de la coquerette au bout d’une espingle ou aguille, et puis leur devez oster leur queue, qui est noire, car c’est leur m..de; et puis laver, mettre cuire et boulir en eaue, et puis les traire et mettre en un plat ou escuelle, à mengier au pain. Et aussi dient aucuns qu’ils sont meilleurs fris en huille et oignon ou autre liqueur après ce qu’ils sont ainsi cuis que dit est dessus, et sont mengiés à la pouldre, et sont pour riches gens.”

In translation: “Snails, called escargots, are best if caught in the morning. Take young, small, dark-shelled snails, from vines or elder bushes. Wash them in water until they give off no more slime. Then wash them once in salt and vinegar and cook them in water. Extract the snails from their shells with the end of a pin or needle and then remove their tails, which are black, because that is their excrement. Wash and boil in water, and then set them in a dish or bowl, to be eaten with bread. Some say also that they are better fried in oil and onion or other liquid after they have been cooked as explained above. They are eaten with powdered spices, and are for rich people.”

Le Vivendier (1450) — Lyemesolles:

“Lyemesolles sur tout bon grain, couchon ou aultre: decoppé par lopins et cuit en bon boullon, puis mis essuer sur une belle nape; prenez mie de pain blancq tempré en vergus, et moyeulz d’oes, tout passé parmy l’estamine, saffren, gingembre, clou, graine et poivre long, deffait de vin et de vin aigre; faictez tout bouillir ensamble; et mettez vostre grain en plas, jettez par dessus.”

In translation: “Snails, on any good meat, piglet or other. The meat is cut up into chunks and cooked in good bouillon, then set to dry on a clean cloth. Get white bread crumbs tempered in verjuice, and egg yolks, everything strained, saffron, ginger, cloves, grains of paradise and long pepper, distempered with wine and vinegar. Boil everything together. Set out your meat in platters, pour [the sauce] over top.”

Discussion

The Vivendier recipe is titled “Lyemesolles,” which translates loosely as “snails,” but the dish contains no actual snails — Terence Scully’s edition notes that the name refers to the appearance of the dish rather than to any of its ingredients. The chunks of pork or piglet, glossy with a thick yellow bread-and-egg-yolk sauce, look like snails on the plate.

Joke foods of this kind are common across the medieval corpus — dishes that look like something other than what they are, dishes where two foods are prepared so that each takes the appearance of the other. The Vivendier and Le Menagier are both French sources within sixty years of each other, with substantial overlap in their recipe traditions and shared lineage with Le Viandier de Taillevent. The pairing presented here is mine: a hypothetical period cook handed snail shells (which come, of course, with snails inside) would plausibly cook both the snails and the “fake snails”, and serve them together to extend the joke – plate the pork “snails” alongside actual escargots and the conceit becomes even more visible.

For the escargots, the snails were canned rather than live — live escargot were outside both the budget and the scope of a single competition entry. I assumed the canned snails had been fully cleaned and trimmed and skipped Le Menagier’s initial cleaning and steaming. I chose the variation with oil and onions over the plain boiled version because it reads to a modern palate as more familiar — the fat-plus-allium treatment is essentially what you get with the standard modern garlic-butter escargot preparation, which is itself a descendant of this period one.

For the lyemesolles, the source specifies that the meat is to be cooked in “good bouillon.” I wanted to avoid commercial broth products and adding another meat species (allergy risk at a feast or competition), and I didn’t have enough pork bones for a substantial pork broth, so I braised the pork shoulder in spiced water and let it cook in its own rendered fat and juice. A period cook would simply have used whatever broth was on hand; Le Menagier notes elsewhere that beef cheeks make the best bouillon, but throughout his work he treats broths and water as interchangeable.

Verjuice — the lightly fermented juice of unripe grapes — was a ubiquitous medieval acid, and it is the one ingredient in this dish I couldn’t readily source. Period cooks dealt with the same problem and developed substitutes from sorrel, crabapples, or citrus juice (Scully notes citrus substitution becoming common in the 15th century). I used half white wine and half lemon juice, which tastes similar to verjuice I’ve sampled if a little sharper, and I compensated for the extra acidity by reducing the vinegar added during the final sauce balancing.

The sauce for the lyemesolles sits within the family of yellow pepper sauces that appears throughout Le Viandier and Le Vivendier. The unusual element here is the egg yolk, which thickens the sauce alongside the bread; the resulting texture is smoother and more “lacquered” in appearance than a bread-only thickening, contributing directly to the snail-like glossy appearance. Humorally, the heavy wine, verjuice, and warming spices make this a hot, dry sauce — the right counterbalance for the cold, wet quality of boiled pork.

The spice powder used to finish the escargots is my own blend of Duke’s Spice Powder, after the recipe in Le Viandier: ground white ginger (9 parts), cinnamon (2 parts), lump sugar (2 parts), cloves and grains of paradise (1 part each). A small pinch was sprinkled over the finished escargots to finish.

Bibliography