SC - walnuts

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Stefan li Rous wrote:
> 
> Adamantius commented:

> >opening a case of alleged shelled, blanched, and chopped
> >almonds...and discovering that they
> >were in fact shelled walnuts. We used most of them anyway, but not for
> >milk.
> 
> So, for my knowledge and my file on feast disasters and recoveries, how
> did you handle this problem? Did you send somebody out for lots of more
> almonds? Or not make almond milk? What did you do with the shelled walnuts
> considering this was a spur-or-the-moment thing?

We sugared them in skillets containing an appropriate amount (hard to
describe in better detail) of hard-crack sugar syrup (just as it was
_beginning_ to caramelize, since we had no candy thermometer; thank
heaven for shiny saute pans), sprinkled on a tiny bit of salt as they
cooled, and served them in little bowls at the beginning of the first
course, just as Chiquart recommends. They are supposed to open the
stomach and chest, according to the prevailing medical theory of the
time. Sugar is considered a very mild expectorant, so that's probably
the idea behind it. The sugared nuts also had the advantage of being
more or less undisguised, so those who couldn't eat walnuts had  a hard
time mistaking them for anything else. A couple of extra pounds of
almonds may have mysteriously disappeared in various 

As for our almond milk situation, we were just extremely careful to
extract everything worth extracting from the almonds we did have, and
made do with slightly less. We served smaller bowls of the porrey
chapeleyn and added slightly less almond milk to the blancmanger, and
omitted the fried almond garnish, and used something else, I forget
what.

Adamantius
- -- 
______________________________________
Phil & Susan Troy
troy at asan.com
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