Vegetable Pottages

Pottages made of various mixtures of green herbs were very popular. Their ingredients included avens, beet-tops, betony, borage, briar (blackberry leaves), clary, town cress and water cress, coles (spring greens or cabbages stripped from their stalks), red cabbage, fennel, langue-deboeuf, lettuce, mallow, red nettles, orach, parsley, patience-dock (Rumex patientia, or passion dock, Polygonum bistorta), primrose, savory, thyme and violet.⁷⁹ Blending these to produce the most appealing flavours must have been a matter of skill and experience, but the recipes give no indication of how they were expected to taste. However, their universal method of preparation by being parboiled, drained, chopped and then simmered in various fresh liquids, shows that the cooks were deliberately removing the strongest flavours, in order to obtain more delicate results.