SC - 1st try at recipe

[david friedman]

At 11:55 AM +1100 2/6/98, Robyn.Hodgkin at mailhost.dpie.gov.au wrote:
>Here is a recipe and my redaction.  What do you think?
>Kiriel
>
>
>Tartes for St Ursula's Day
>Tak strandes of saffron and soke in water which has been boile. Breke egges
>in bassyn and swyng hem sone.  Do grynde cinamon and mace to blynde with tho
>eggs without lesynge.  Tak honey and small milk and saffron and add thereto.
>
>Take a porcyoun of carot wel grynded and blynde with egg.
>Make rounde coffyns of paast and add carot thereto.  Cooke hem till they be
>wel and serve hem forth.

What do you think of the recipe?

Inappropriate for mixed company--or were you thinking of a different
meaning for "swinge?".  More seriously, my reaction reading it was that if
it was period it was from a source I had never seen, as judged by the
dialect.

In particular:

Do you know of any recipes that "swyng" eggs? The ones I am familiar with
put them through a strainer. We frequently extract saffron with hot water,
but I cannot think of any period recipe that says to do so. Nor do I
remember any period recipe specifying "strandes" of saffron.

Elizabeth suggests "Do to grynde," and "canel" instead of "cinnamon" given
that you are trying to make it sound like an early recipe.

"wel grynded" should perhaps be "wel igrounden."

"Cooke hem till they be  wel"

should perhaps be

"Cooke hem till they be y-now"

>The use of carrots in a
>sweet dish I got from recipes for comfits, which boil carrots and sweet
>potato in syrup.

Not before the late sixteenth century they don't, since sweet potatoes are
New World--and your recipe is presumably supposed to be fourteenth or
fifteenth century by the words. There is a sizable change in English
cuisine roughly between the fifteenth and the sixteenth century--which is
why I refer to the later stuff as nouvelle cuisine.

A carrot pie doesn't sound likely to me for medieval cooking, although I
can't swear that no such thing exists anywhere in the relevant corpus.
Perhaps more likely for the sixteenth century.

David/Cariadoc
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/


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