Roast dish from the Greek supper (reception service in the antique style)
Chicken with Greek sauce from Anacharsis's supper
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A roast chicken then coated in a blond honey and currant sauce, flavored with a dash of vinegar — what the salons of the 18th century imagined a dish of ancient Greece to be.
Why this dish? Vigée Le Brun recounts in her *Memoirs* this improvised supper where, having read a sauce recipe in Abbé Barthélemy's *Voyage du jeune Anacharsis*, she dressed her guests in Greek costume and had dishes served coated in a sweet sauce. The evening became so famous that rumor wildly inflated its cost throughout Paris.
You will hardly believe what a frenzy this supper caused in Paris. Having found in my Anacharsis a sauce of the Ancients, I wanted to regale my friends with it and had them all dress in Greek style; I coated my meats with that honey mixed with small raisins and a splash of vinegar, and I was thought ruined, so much did rumor inflate the expense! In truth, I spent almost nothing — but that evening I painted the prettiest living picture one could see.
Ingredients
- •Free-range chicken — a fine fowl (roast piece)
- •Honey — a few spoonfuls (sweetness of the sauce)
- •Currants (dried) — a good handful (soft fruit of the sauce)
- •Wine vinegar — a dash (touch of acidity)
- •Fine butter — a knob (binding)
- •Salt, pepper — to taste (seasoning)
How it was made : The supper took place around 1788; Vigée Le Brun was inspired by a sauce described in Abbé Barthélemy's *Voyage du jeune Anacharsis* (1788). It is a "learned" and fanciful cuisine: not the real ancient Greek cuisine, but the idea that 18th-century scholars had of it, blending honey, raisins, and vinegar according to the sweet-and-sour taste attributed to the Ancients.
Sources : Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, *Souvenirs* (1835–1837) · Abbé Barthélemy, *Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce* (1788)