SC - Grains of paradise
Martin G. Diehl
mdiehl at nac.net
Sun Jun 22 06:15:22 PDT 1997
Hi, Katerine here. Cariadoc responds to Magritte:
>>>From _The Complete Book of Gingerbread_, by Valerie Barrett, pp 16-17:
>> "The medieval version of gingerbread would be unrecognizable today.
>>Bread crumbs tossed with honey and spices were dried out or baked into
>>hard, crumbly, flat cakes.
>
>That passage doesn't give me much confidence in the secondary source. I
>can't prove that what she describes wasn't made, but the standard recipe in
>the English 14th and 15th c. sources doesn't fit either of her
>descriptions--it wasn't "dried out," it wasn't "tossed with," and it wasn't
>baked.
>
>>"while white gingerbread was actually
>>ginger-flavored marzipan."
>
>Has anyone found any medieval recipes that fit this description--as opposed
>to 16th or 17th century ones?
I agree with Cariadoc's comment on bread-crumb gingerbreads, and I have not
seen a 13th to 15th C recipe for almond-based. However, there *are* two
kinds of gingerbread in the 14th-15th C corpus. One is the stuff Cariadoc
describes. The other, while it is not almond based, is pretty clearly a
candy in our terms rather than a cake-like stuff. I'm in the process of
moving, and all my sources are packed. I should be able to give details
in a month or so.
Cheers,
- -- Katerine/Terry
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