SC - cuskynoles, continued...

[david friedman]

At 9:18 AM -0400 10/30/97, Philip & Susan Troy wrote:
>david friedman wrote:

>> Are you saying that you cut your sheet of dough into 3x6 pieces, leave all
>> the pieces exactly positioned as they were before you cut them, then dot
>> the whole thing with filling (one glob in the middle of each 3x6 piece),
>> then put on the 3x6 pieces from a second sheet of dough, then seal the
>> edges--and through all this process your pieces remain neatly arranged edge
>> to edge, so that when you are done the drawing makes the whole array of 15
>> 3x6 pieces look like one piece with lines on it?
>
>Perhaps not the first time someone tries it. But, in the hands of a cook
>having experience making a couple of hundred of them at a time, yes. If
>the edges do stick together a bit, they can be easily pulled apart, most
>likely without damaging the seals that we actually want.

It could be done that way, but why should it?

Remember, this is practically the only recipe in the corpus (the only one I
can think of) with an illustration. Why in the world would the author go
out of his way to tell you "you are supposed to lay out your cuskynoles in
the pattern illustrated while assembling them?" Even if that way of doing
it isn't harder than the alternative, as I suspect, it doesn't have any
advantage so why specify it?

On the other hand, in my interpretation the figure is actually serving a
useful, perhaps essential, function.

>Which is why I have not suggested that your method is implausible. Only
>unnecessarily complicated, given the additional step of scoring the
>additional rectangles, which is not needed to comply with the diagram.

It is needed to produce the effect that it produces--i.e. we are discussing
methods that produce two quite different dishes. Recipes for bread are
unnecessary too--it's easier to just boil up all your wheat into gruel. The
difference is that if you are making my dish, it makes sense to have the
diagram to show you how. If you are making your dish, it is possible to
assemble it in a way that looks like the diagram, but there is no
particular reason to do so, hence no reason why the diagram should be
there. That is evidence that my dish, not yours, is what the author
intended.

David Friedman
Professor of Law
Santa Clara University
ddfr at best.com
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/


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