ROAST TURKEY WITH SWEET-AND-SOUR LEMON SAUCE
Both of Altamiras’s turkey dishes are memorable. One involves larding and roasting a whole bird stuffed with cardoon and lettuce, which are then braised in the pan-juices just before the bird is carved and served. The second recipe is for a spit or oven-roast turkey served with a sweet-sour lemony sauce, unusual today, but popular in aristocratic eating in the centuries before Altamiras.
It is hardly surprising the friars had luxurious lemons to hand; they were grown in friary patios for medicinal use and at Monasterio de Santo Espíritu a retoño survives from one of the Valencian kingdom’s earliest lemon trees.
Altamiras’s turkey sauce can be seen evolving from one given in Llibre de Sent Soví, an anonymous 14th-century Catalan manuscript in which spiced almond milk, broth, lemon juice and sugar were boiled till thick for “Llimonea”, to be served with the bird. In printed cookbooks that followed, however, it was simply called “salsa de pavo” to which roasted bird’s livers, bread and beaten eggs might be added. By 1611 Montiño had removed the sugar, in line with the new French divide between sweet and savoury. He associated the dish with December banquet menus although Catalan friary accounts reveal Franciscans buying it at market for their biggest annual feast on San Francisco’s day or Epiphany, perhaps because spring lamb and veal were not available.
Altamiras spun the sauce around, adding back in the sugar but removing other ingredients, including the almonds, to give a soursweet citric glaze, which remained unchanged in all editions of his book until 1905.
Today his eighteenth-century recipe remains as good as ever, served either the Spanish way, following a vegetable first course, or with roots and greens garnishing the bird.
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❖ Turkey with Sweet-and-Sour Lemon Sauce
Rub soft seasoned lard over a whole clove-studded turkey, crown or leg for roasting till juicy inside a crispy skin: carve and serve with a soursweet olive oil, cinnamon and citric glaze.
For roast turkey Juan Altamiras simplified medieval Llimonea sauce to become a soursweet citric glaze so popular that it remained in his book until 1905.”