SC - Feast Themes/gingerbread

[Terry Nutter]

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