SC - Ave Maria runtime and sugar - long

[Phil & Susan Troy]

LrdRas at aol.com wrote:
> 
> In a message dated 9/24/98 12:22:13 AM Eastern Daylight Time, troy at asan.com
> writes:
> 
> << By the time we get
>  to our Ave Maria stage, our cooked sugar mass is pretty close to being
>  anhydrous, so I can't imagine why cooking it for 30 minutes more would have
>  any desired effect.
> 
>  Adamantius >>
> 
> Put that way , it makes perfect sense. I had, personally assumed that the
> author of the original recipe left out the addition of water as something
> 'every woman' knows. Silly me. Thanks for clarifying this. When viewed in the
> manner you propose the ;Ave; time instruction would most certainly fall within
> the range of under half a minute.

Yeah, this is tough because it's hard to think of a rather vague period candy
recipe without also considering all the stuff we know, or think we know, about
modern practices. Now, I'm not certain no water is added, but the fact is the
recipe doesn't mention it, and you and I both know the rule about redacting:
when in doubt, just do what the recipe says, until more informaton comes
along. Except, of course, in the case of cusk -- ahem...well, you know ;  ) .
(I guess I'm in trouble now, huh?) [The preceding bit of silliness was what we
in the trade call an in-joke.]
 
> Now the question is whether anyone had actually tried this recipe so they can
> report the results of hands on experimentation. ;-) My own candy making skills
> are atrocious.

I haven't tried it. What I _have_ done is the anise in confit recipe from the
same manuscript source, and it also calls for an initial cooking of the sugar,
the addition of seeds, which cools the mass down and pretty well solidifies
it, and then another, very brief cooking to separate the seeds, followed
ultimately by additional stirring off the heat to keep the coated seeds
separate as they cool and dry off. When I've done this, I've found that second
cooking time, the one in which the sugar becomes gooey again, so you can stir
it to separate the seeds from each other, to be very brief. In fact, it
amounts to around fifteen or twenty seconds.

One could argue that the behavior of a pound of sugar versus an ounce would be
different as regards heat transfer, and that's probably true, but we also have
to consider that in the anise confit recipe we are adding warm seeds to an
approximately equal mass of  hot sugar. That's going to cool it down rapidly,
causing crystallization and a near solidifying of the mass. It does, though,
reheat and become seeds in syrupy goo quite rapidly. In the case of the pound
of sugar in the plate recipe, it's been stirred, but doesn't have anything
added to it (in the standard recipe): no added near-room-temperature mass to
cool it down as radically. So, I think we'd have a thick mass something like
blackstrap molasses in texture, or maybe cooling fondant might be a better
analogy -- definitely something difficult to pour, but still quite hot, and
not needing much more than a tweak of heat to make it runny again. 


Adamantius
Østgardr, East
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
============================================================================

To be removed from the SCA-Cooks mailing list, please send a message to
Majordomo at Ansteorra.ORG with the message body of "unsubscribe SCA-Cooks".

============================================================================