SC - RE: Piperfarces - a query

[Jessica Tiffin]

Greetings, all.

>My Dear;
>Are you familiar with the term, 'spoon tease'?  :)I don't have Pleyn
>Delit yet, and I'll bet some others don't, sooooooooo.... Recipe,
>please? ;P
>Angelique

my apologies;  this recipe has been mentioned several times on the list
before, so I assumed it was fairly well-known.  (Mentioned in context of
camp cookery, usually - I assume because they're easy to cook over a fire
rather than because they travel well - ours were fairly soggy anything more
than 5 or 10 mins after they came out of the frying pan).

As I said, my copy of Pleyn Delit has been borrowed at the moment - the
original recipe from the Goodman of Paris is as follows (from Cariadoc's
Miscellany):

Take the yolks of eggs and flour and salt and a little wine and beat them
well together and cheese cut into strips and then roll the strips of cheese
in the paste and fry them in an iron pan with fat therein.  One does
likewise with beef marrow.

Taillevent apparently suggests that the cheese strips should be the length
of a finger.  We used about 3 T flour to 2 egg yolks and enough wine to make
it into a thick batter.  (If you make it too thin the cheese runs out of the
batter and you end up with very messy piperfarces and an even messier pan.)
We used cheddar; I think a softer cheese will end up too runny when you fry
it, and will probably try to escape.

Cariadoc's version uses 8 egg yolks to 2T flour, 1 1/2 T wine and 1/2 pound
cheese.

I'll post the Pleyn Delit version when my wandering copy returns.

Cariadoc said:

>That I did it that way many years ago and liked how it came out. I don't
>think I had any special inside information, and doubt that the authors of
>_Pleyn Delit_ did.
>
>As a general rule, I think you should assume that other people's worked out
>versions are based on their guess at how to interpre the original, not on
>any special information. Connie Hieatt might be an exception--certainly she
>knows more about medieval cooking than I do--but I wouldn't assume so.

OK, I just wondered - it seemed a rather excessive proportion of yolk for
what seemed to me a fairly straightforward batter.  I liked the effect of
the high yolk content when I made them that way, but it added additional and
possibly excessive richness to an already rich dish (fried cheese!)

I found Adamantius's suggestion interesting in this context, though.

Adamantius said:

>IIRC, Taillevent says the surface of the fried pipefarces should be hard
>(i.e. crisp) and yellow, which might indicate a somewhat higher yolk
>content than would be strictly necessary for shortening / leavening.

Surely a higher proportion of flour would tend to make the batter crisper?
Ours weren't even faintly yellow, anyway, we only had red wine to hand and
they turned out a slightly nauseating pink colour...:)

Anyway, thanks everyone for the comments.  Illuminating!

In service, 

Melisant

**********
Jessica Tiffin
melesine at ilink.nis.za  *  jessica at beattie.uct.ac.za
***********
Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease.  It made
you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.
(Terry Pratchett, Hogfather).

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