SC - Crustade Lombard revisited

[Philip & Susan Troy]

> Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 22:49:29 EST
> From: LrdRas <LrdRas at aol.com>
> Subject: Re: SC - Crustade Lombard revisited
> 
> In a message dated 98-01-09 17:18:12 EST, you write:
> 
> << 15 each pitted prunes and dates, cut into small pieces
>  2 tablespoons raw bone marrow, crumbled* >>
> 
> If the recipe these lines come from is, in fact, a close rendition of the
> Crustade Lombard recipe and if the author feels that it is a forerunner of the
> mincemeat group then I would question the small amount of marrow she
> indicates.
> 
> IIRC, On rereading the extant mincemeat and mincemeat-like recipes that I have
> in my collection, 
> I am not firmly convinced that her redaction represents a viable period-like
> solution to this recipe. It does sound tasty though. :-)
> 
> Ras

Agreed, al-Sayyid Ras. Note that I agree, but am not saying "me, too!".
Consider marrow as a fat source, and that if the dish is to be like
mince-meat, then the rules for proportions would be similar to those for
sausage, which usually ranges about 15-30 percent fat. Now, for a
custard, I have no idea, except to suggest if you take enough
mincemeat-type filling  and enough custard, each to fill one pie,
combine them and make two pies out of the resultant filling, you'd
probably get something about right. 

So, working with extremely rough numbers here, it would probably be
something like, lessee now: three eggs _or_ six yolks, twelve ounces of
milk, light cream, almond milk, or whatever, plus five ounces each of
prunes, dates, and marrow, you'd get just over a quart of filling, which
is about right for a nine or ten inch deep-dish pie shell. You want to
do this in a shell with straight sides, I suspect, to avoid uneven
cooking. Oh, and don't crumble the marrow too finely: enjoying a bit of
recognizable marrow texture in your custard is more or less the whole
point, so you don't want to obliterate it.

The best word I can think of to describe the flavor and texture of
marrow is, well, luscious. I don't just mean tasty, or good, or anything
like that. I mean literally luscious, with all that implies as to
richness, moistness, smoothness of texture, etc. A tart made with marrow
is going to be extremely rich, so the one described above would probably
feed ten or twelve SCAdian types under feast conditions. That's assuming
they don't say "Ewwww, marrow, gross!", of course.

Adamantius
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