SC - Re: Lombardy Custard

[Terry Nutter]

Hi, Katerine here.  I'd like to inject a contrary opinion here.

Straining is a very common step in medieval English cuisine.  In the
overwhelming majority of cases, neither eggs nor cream are involved.
A huge number of sauce recipes call for straining bread or toast 
steeped in broth, wine, or vinegar.  You are told to strain herbs or
spices in liquid.  You are told to strain almond milk.  And so on.

In the overwhelming majority of cases, straining serves one of two 
purposes: either to achieve a smooth homogeneous result, or (far
less frequently, and often using a cloth) to eliminate clear liquid
from something you are getting to clot.  In the latter case, the
recipe often specifies running a ladle under the cloth to wick 
out the liquid, and tells you how solid the result should be.

We have here a recipe that calls for straining a bunch of combined
ingredients.  The recipe is quite clear, actually, about combining them
first; it later refers to the combined semi-liquid result when it tells
you to pour the licour over the baked crust and fruits.

I am *very* suspicious of interpretations that take this as meaning to
whip one of the ingredients in isolation first (whether the eggs or the
cream) and then combine.  Especially when the only reference to eggs
says *explicitly* to take both whites and yolks, I would resist any
initial interpretation that required separating them and treating them
differently.  When recipes meant you to do this, they said so.
What this one says, is to strain a combination until it is thick.
Absent a *compelling* reason to read it otherwise, I would interpret
it as meaning to do exactly that.

Long before I would interpret this as calling for any of whipping
the cream alone, beating the whites alone, or beating the yolks alone,
I would try following the directions *as they are written*: that is,
combining the ingredients and straining (probably using cheesecloth,
maybe in several layers, lining a strainer), and see whether the fat
in the cream aggregates through the whole to get a thick, semisolid 
liquid after repeated straining, or whether using a fair number of eggs 
has a similar effect.  And I'd try it with a number of different balances
of ingredients before I concluded that the recipe meant to do something
else.

Modern baked custards sometimes call for whipping an ingredient, but
by no means always do.  I don't think that the fact that this is a
custard is a compelling reason to disbelieve the directions as 
written.  And the directions only indicate that the filling
is to be thick.  That, by itself, isn't a reason to believe that
they are screwed up, either.

The fact that we can think of several techniques that might make 
this dish appealing to us does not mean that any of them were
intended by the author of the recipe.

Indeed, I'm suspicious of the claim that medieval English cooks 
whippped/beat egg whites, yolks, or cream by straining them at all.
I don't doubt that it can be done; never having tried it, I bow
freely to the experience of those who have.  But that something
*can* be done does not, by itself, imply that it *was*.  In this
case, were it done, I would expect evidence of it in the corpus
of a kind that doesn't seem to be there.

In particular: yolks, whites, and cream can be beaten to different
stages, and which one you beat them to affects the final dish.  The
English medieval corpus is *full* of directions that tell you to
pursue a technique until some effect is achieved (boil meat until
it is half done; chop it until it is like brains; slice it to the
length of a finger; cut something like lozenges; etc.).  If they
were using strainers to whip whites, yolks, or cream, I would expect
to find recipes that told you to take one of those ingredients 
(perhaps with sugar, but *not* with anything that would interfere
with the process) and strain it "until" -- something that could
reasonably be read as distinguishing between foamy, soft peaks,
hard peaks, and so on.

If there is such a recipe in the medieval English corpus, I haven't 
seen it.

That says something to me.

Cheers,

- -- Katerine/Terry

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