SC - Cheesecake and Lent

[david friedman]

At 1:01 PM -0600 2/22/98, Decker, Terry D. wrote:

(quoting me)

>> One reservation--do we have good reason to believe that the "coffyn of
>> faire paast" would be pastry in the modern sense (with butter or something
>> similar) rather than paste in the sense of a flour/water dough? We
>> generally do such recipes as pastry, but I am not at all sure we should.
>>
>> David/Cariadoc
>> http://www.best.com/~ddfr/
>>
>	If you are willing to accept Karen Hess' scholarship that Martha
>Washington's Booke of Cookery dates to the Elizabethean period, there is a
>cheesecake recipe (108) using a curded custard filling of a style common to
>medieval cooking (the recipe is very similar to the one noted above), but
>uncommon in 17th century cookbooks, which says:
>
>	"...yn take a quart of fine flowre, & put ye rest of ye butter to it
>in little bits, with 4 or 5 spoonfulls of faire water, make ye paste of it &
>when it is well mingled beat it on a table & soe roule it out ..."

I am not sure I see the relevance. At the earliest, the recipe you are
citing is considerably more than a century after the recipe we are
discussing, on the other side of a fairly major shift in culinary style.
Even if the filling is similar, there is no reason to suppose that the
crust is.

And I thought Karen Hess' claim was only that the earliest recipes in the
book were Elizabethan--although I haven't checked.

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


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