[Northkeep] Missing Practice.

[Hugh & Belinda Niewoehner]

Hmmm....so far I've found a Digby's recipe for cheese cake 
[http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/cariadoc/desserts.html#10] and a recipe for 
K'ak (biscotti) from a 13th century Andalusian book. Of course, in 
al-Andalus we had so many sweet choices, one of my favorites being 
sharbat (sweetened fruit drinks over snow). Candied fruits, ginger and 
even squash were common. Unfortunately, baklava is a creation of the 
Ottomans though many similar foods existed such as: gullac-an early 
Turkish phyllo dough recipe in which layers are put in warmed milk and 
sugar served with walnuts and pomegranate and the Byzantine gastris--an 
ancient Greek recipe which had a nut and honey filling, but the outer 
shell was ground sesame and honey, more closely resembling halva.

In reference to His Excellency's mention of marzipan, a 13th century 
Andalusian cookbook has a couple of recipes for it:

http://daviddfriedman.com/Medieval/Cookbooks/Andalusian/andalusian9.htm#Heading428

Also, when my husband was doing research for his wine making he found 
sources showing that sugar had been present in the South of France 
(probably traded with Spain) much earlier than originally believed.

OF course,/in my opinion/, even today, most Europeans do not seem to 
like their sweets as sweet as we Americans generally do. French 
pastries, German cakes, etc. for the most part are less sweet than their 
American counterparts.

Ismet

On 1/30/2014 4:25 PM, Jerry Herring wrote:
> I don't want to start a food fight but I attended a class not that long ago
> at a Winterkingdom on period recipes of modern dishes and it had examples
> of the same foods made from period recipes and modern ones. Surprisingly
> moulded pans and shaped dishes for baking cakes were a pretty big deal for
> feasts, especially for some holidays. Cakes could be sweet but you are
> right they may not have been the sickeningly sweet treats we have today but
> still were sweet. And Pies...(don't get me started) could be sweet or
> savory, whether they were fruit and berry or meats. Mincemeat pies were
> fairly common as were many other dessert pies some were more like tarts
> than what we in the USA consider a pie today. Some pies were custards and
> some were sweetened by honey, molasses, or the natural sweetness of the
> fruit, and yes even sugar which was in Europe in the 16th century,
> Marshmallows date back to the 15th century and marzipan to the 16th not the
> same stuff we have today either but still sweet goodness to the period
> pallet.
>