SC - Raviolis, tortellini and fritters

[david friedman]

At 9:38 AM -0500 3/13/98, Christi Redeker wrote:
>Hello all,
>
>Upon reading The Original Mediterranean Cuisine last night and redacting the
>Ham Fritters recipe I came across something that struck me as strange.  (My
>Mistress is trying to get me to question anything and ask questions, so here
>I go!)  The original recipe has a title of ravioli or tortellini, but in my
>limited knowledge of Italian (derived from being able to read and dechiper a
>little bit of Spanish) I don't see anywhere in the original for wrapping in
>pasta.  In the author's notes, she says that ravioli, tortelini and fritters
>were used interchangeably until the custom of wrapping a filling in pasta
>became wide spread and known as ravioli and tortelini.  Could this be a
>mistake in the translation.  Could it have been assumed that you would put
>this in pasta?  It is a fried dish, and pasta isn't often fried before being
>boiled.
>
I can't answer for Italian.  In England, ravieles (in this or another
spelling) turn up in the late 13th-c. Anglo-Norman (which someone has
already quoted) and Form of Cury (14th c.)  meaning boiled cheese ravioli;
the latter recipe says to make your filling, make your dough, and "close
hem therin as turteletes".  Tartlettes out of the same cookbook are boiled
ravioli with a pork, eggs, currents, and spices filling. There are also
"Tourteletes in Fryture", which are fig filling closed in dough and fried.
The word tartlettes also gets used to mean small tarts.  You also find
14th/15th recipes for things similar to tarts--chewettes or risshews,
filling enclosed in dough--either baked or fried.  It looks rather as if
once you have enclosed something in dough, baked, boiled, and fried
versions may be thought of as different version of the same basic idea
rather than completely separate things.

Fritters seems always to mean something fried--apples dipped in batter,
some filling wrapped in dough, a mush of cheese and eggs...

Hieatt and Butler say in their notes in _Curye on Inglysch_ that there are
recipes for "ravioli" in _Il Libro della Cucina_ which are not modern
ravioli but instead fritters of various sorts; this may be where your
recipe originally comes from.

Elizabeth (about a week and a half behind on the list)


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