SC - autumn feast report (long)

[david friedman]

At 5:55 AM +0000 5/4/98, Kornelis Sietsma wrote:

>The next dish was fresh Pasta with Cheese.  I had some foolish volunteers
>who offered to make pasta, so they spent several hours during the day
>mixing dough and drying strips of pasta on clothes-horses.

One of the virtues of dried pasta is that you can make it and dry it days
in advance--which is what we have done for Pennsic.

>The final dish for the evening was a special of our college, and may not be
>popular with all - it was Chocolate and Pear Tart.  The recipe comes from a
>manuscript dated 1615, that a past member of our college found in the
>archives in Milan while researching her PhD.

How sure are you that that account is true? I (and others) tried to follow
up on the story that someone in Australia had found early chocolate recipes
in Italy a few years back, and so far as I could tell it was based on a
published Italian secondary source (_Cucina Fiorentina fra Medioevo e
Rinascimento_ by Clotilde Vesco, 1984) which did not seem to be
reliable--at least, unless I misunderstood it, it was dating a chocolate
recipe to the 15th century! It looked to me as though the sources were
undated manuscripts, and the modern Italian author was either misdating
them or mistranslating something else as chocolate.

What sort of evidence beyond word of mouth do you have? In particular, have
you seen a photocopy of the manuscript?

Other than that, it sounds like a fine feast.

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


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