Garlic Sauce
Recipe to follow
From: The Art of Cooking composed by Maestro Martino of Como (14th/15th century)
Garlic Sauce:
Method:
- Almonds peeled and crushed (I blanched mine, skinned them and ran them through the processor) with some cold water (to prevent oiling, as mentioned in many period cookbooks)
- crush the almonds further with garlic (we are essentially making almond milk with fish broth to be further thickened with bread). I ended up putting in 4 cloves of garlic to approx. 1 1/2 cups sauce and it worked out well, some folk may even wish more.
- Soak white bread in fish broth (used broth from the bay shrimp I cooked to go with it) Note: I like to use grated bread that I grated myself, from hard, stale, bread. One of the reasons for this is that small, dried, crumbs dissolve better and by making it myself, I can be assured that there is no crust in the crumb. I will use crust if called for, but generally, all white bread makes a much smoother sauce. What I did here is added some to a portion of the sauce allowing me to troubleshoot by adding more crumb for a thicker sauce or more liquid for a runnier sauce. I made this sauce somewhat thick.
I used this sauce in a more creative way where I served it on Vermicelli (which it really isn't because I ran out of steam and ended up cutting it way too big!, cooked from a recipe from the same book) and Bay Shrimp (also cooked from instruction from the same). The Bay shrimp was boiled with fennel seed though I only tried a little tossed in vinegar (which is good) and used the rest with the pasta dish.
notes from the dinner: thankfully I made a little more so the boy could have seconds... yes, seconds... though he ended up asking for cheese to put on his noodles as he didn't leave enough shrimp to eat with them.
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