Cooking with peacock

Firstly, peacock sauce. Make chicken broth, or broth of intestines and mutton shanks with salt pork. When the broth is thickened and well cooked, take peeled almonds, one pound for eight bowls, and grind them and make them into milk with the broth and strain it.
Disembowel the chickens and dice the innards, and do the same with rabbit hearts and the chickens. Put them to fry in salt pork grease, and keep the pot where it will fry on a low flame, just enough for the grease to boil a litte, and continue stirring this all the while. After that, take another piece of salt pork, dried and fatty, to go into the mixture. Take this away from the fire often, so that the grease does not burn. And when it is fried, take round slices of onions according to what is said above - which is to say, a quarter of the things said above - and put them in to fry, and it should soon be fried. This done, pour the grease from the pot.
Take verjuse of lemons, oranges, bitter pomegranates, or good vinegar; put in a little bit, according to the amount that will be fried. Put in sugar or honey or some other sweetening. Take spices: nutmeg, grains of paradise, and cloves, with the largest portion of cinnamon, ginger and saffron, and other spices to give it the desired flavour, and put some into the fried mixture. After that, put in the milk described above, and set it to boil a good while; and, when you see that it is wellcooked, flavour it to taste with verjuice, sweetening and spices, balanced so that the spices draw the flvaour of the sauce. This sauce should not be very red, but more like a colour between cinnamon and saffron.
And when the peacocks are done cooking, collect the grease that falls from them and put some in the sauce, and still more of the grease of the chickens in the pot. However, put it in such that the grease does not overflow the sauce, just enough to give some flavour. Furthermore, if you want you can put in a better ground substance: that is, put in well-minced chicken or partridge wings. Serve a little bit of this sauce, to be conveniently thick.
For peacocks, pheasants or capons prepared in this manner: if you want to serve the peacocks with head, neck and tail, bleed the peacocks in the mouth to drain them of blood: and do this in the evening. After that, pluck all of the feathers, except for the neck, tail and head. And then put them on the spit and tie them to it by the feet; after this wrap up the head, neck and tail with bands of linen cloth, in such a way so that one cannot see the feathers. Then put the spit on the fire.
When it is cooled off, take slices of salt pork that are three fingers long, and put them on sticks. On each of the skewers put a cube of orange or lean salt pork.
If you want to decorate the dish, make garlands as you like, and put an orange at the top and another on the bottom, so the garlands can be held there. Take linen thread and tie them to the end of a stick; wet it with cold water and moisten the cloths of the peacock so that they do not burn. And when it is cooked, unwrap the cloths at the plate. Carve it in the same way as a goose.
The capon has another cut of meat above, in teh thigh, and another in the leg, so look for it carefully.
From The Book of Sent Sovi: Medieval recipes from Catalonia, (ed.) Santanach, J. Barcimo/Tamesis: Barcelona, 2008