SC - Re: sca-cooks V1 #245

[Terry Nutter]

Hi, Katerine here.  Snipping from Aiofe's response to Adamantius:

>For that matter, who says that our cream was the consistency of their cream,

I, for one, am middling certain it wasn't.  Modern cream is homogenized,
which affects consistency.  It is also thinnned down to legally acceptable
levels.  In fact, modern cream isn't much thicker than the stuff that
rose to the top of milk bottles we got in England 35 years ago -- and
that was milk from which much of the cream had already been removed.

I suspect that raw cream carefully extracted from fresh raw milk is *much*
heavier than the heaviest you can buy at the supermarket.  Modern dairies
economize by giving us much weaker stuff.  I also suspect that homogenization
affects the readiness of cream to clot.

>I still need to try the 'clowted' thing (which some folks have confused with
>whipped cream, which is another thing all together. We can prove Clowted
>cream existed in period--but that early?-- and straining until the clowted
>cream will 'bere him-self' can make a sort of sense here, since it must be
>strained from the milk very gently. So that leads us to question what 'gode'
>cream means).
>Shall we clowt it with the parsley incorporated?

I'd try following the directions with raw cream and highly-mushed parsley
first.  But that's me.

>Good point. I had wondered about the other lenten version (from the second
>very similar receipt) , which has us using almond milk, which when thickened
>becomes almond cheese or almond butter. 

Actually, recipes for almond butter call for clotting it and drawing out
the liquid by suspending it in a cloth, and running a ladle across the
bottom.

>My last question was whether this could have been a scribal error (the
>'strayne' part, I mean). It is entirely possible that the scribe mistook
>parts of this receipt for another, similar one. If the receipt ms was
>handwritten, this becomes more likely than if it was printed, but even then
>stuff happens.....

Scribal errors are always possible, but almost never random.  Before I'd
consider this, I'd want a plausible hypothesis of what it was an error
*for* and why and how the substitution occurred.

>Given that we have two seperate receipts for the same dish seperated by
>time, 

I would rest absolutely no weight on this.  A huge number of the recipes in
H4016 reproduce recipes in H279; they are normally considered to be two copies
of the same collection.  Recipes were not necessarily copied selectively.
I'd treat these as the *same* recipe, in two copies.

Cheers,

- -- Katerine/Terry

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