Autre Vele en Bokenade: Veal in Spiced Almond Pottage from Harleian MS 279 (c. 1430)

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Autre Vele en Bokenade: Veal in Spiced Almond Pottage from Harleian MS 279

Autre Vele en Bokenade — veal in a saffron-colored spiced almond pottage. Original 2017 kitchen photograph.

There are old reconstructions that make me wince because I no longer agree with them, and there are old reconstructions that make me smile because I can see exactly what I was learning. Autre Vele en Bokenade belongs firmly in the second group.

I first cooked this dish in February 2017 on a gray, rainy day when I wanted medieval comfort food. Veal was expensive, so I used beef, put the meat directly into an almond-and-broth mixture with the spices and onions, and let everything cook together until tender. The result was delicious. The taste testers loved the warm ginger, galingale, cinnamon, mace, cubeb, saffron, onion, and currant combination, and I immediately put it on the list of dishes I wanted to serve again.

Nearly ten years later, the flavor judgment still stands. The method, however, needs correcting. Harleian MS 279 does not tell us to stew raw veal in the finished almond sauce. It tells us to cut the veal into gobbets and seethe it first. Then the cook makes a separate sauce from rich broth and ground almonds, thickens it with rice flour, seasons it with spices, onion, currants, and saffron, and only then returns the cooked veal to the pottage.

That changes the dish in an important way. This is not simply beef stew made creamy with almonds. It is cooked veal served in a carefully constructed, lightly thickened, aromatic almond-and-broth pottage.

Why You Will Love This Recipe

• The flavor is wonderfully warm without being sharply acidic.
• Veal, almond-enriched broth, onion, and currants create a savory-sweet base.
• Ginger, galingale, cinnamon, mace, cubebs, and saffron give the dish a distinctly fifteenth-century profile.
• The manuscript gives us a clear two-stage method: cook the veal first, then build the sauce.
• It is substantial enough for a main dish but elegant enough for a first-course pottage.

Jump to the Recipe

Historical Integrity: Harleian MS 279 explicitly requires veal, rich broth, ground almonds, rice flour, ginger, galingale, cinnamon, mace, cubebs, minced onions, currants, and saffron. It also gives a clear sequence: the veal is cut into gobbets and cooked first; the almond-and-broth pottage is then prepared and thickened; the cooked veal is returned at the end. The manuscript does not provide quantities, exact cooking times, sauce thickness, or a specific broth recipe. The 2026 reconstruction below follows the manuscript sequence but necessarily supplies modern proportions.