SC - [Fwd: Feast of the Lamb]

[Tollhase1@aol.com]

david friedman wrote:
> 
> At 1:29 AM -0700 8/28/99, Laura C. Minnick wrote:
> 
> So I
> >cheat- and use folded puff pastry from the freezer case. It works, looks
> >good, is edible, and even tasty! Since I don't know what the 'dough' is,
> >I also don't know what the dough _isn't_.
> 
> That doesn't follow. Even if we don't know what the dough is, we know it
> isn't made from cornflour, since maize is New World and the recipe is from
> long before Columbus.So we know some things it isn't.

Sigh. Forgive me for being flip, but I would have thought you'd grant me
the intelligence to know _that much_.

What I meant was more like- It says 'dough'. But it does not specifiy if
the dough is leavened or unleavened, or has fat or no fat. Is it a gooey
dough, like drop biscuits, or a firmer dough that is rolled out. Thick,
or thin?

I've played with it a couple of different ways. Tried the plain flour
and water paste. yes, it does tend to act like a clay baker. But I don't
see anything in that recipe (or in others in same time/place
cooking-wise) to indicate that this is what they were after. Wouldn't
they have said something? Also, the sage and bacon tend to stick to the
dough, but nobody in my test case liked the dough and would eat it. Are
we to toss it? try to peel the sage out? Hmm.

I have done piecrust as the dough. That works a little better, though it
tends to get rather greasy. I have tried bread dough, rolled out thin.
That didn't work out as well- though it absorbed the juices nicely it
got much too big in my camp oven and stuck on the top. And it occurred
to me that the recipe likely would have specified 'bread' as opposed to
just dough.

> More immediately relevant, we can be pretty sure it isn't puff pastry,
> since there are not (so far as I know) any recipes at all for puff pastry
> nearly that early. The closest thing I know of is an Islamic recipe which
> produces a pastry with many fine layers--but not made like puff pastry.

Like phyllo dough? Hmm. I'd though that there was something like puff
pastry in the Scandanavian corpus, but I suppose I am mistaken.
 
> I think one can get some reasonable conclusions about medieval dough from
> the available sources, although not with as much certainty as we would
> like. In the English corpus, at least, you have specific references to
> short pastes--doughs with shortening. It looks to me as if the default
> "paste" is basically a flour./water dough, and the addition of shortening
> is considered a variation worth noting. I agree that one can't be sure, but
> since doing Icelandic chicken works well that way it seems to me that it is
> the most plausible interpretation.

Hmm. By that rationale, perhaps going back to piecrust is the best
solution? My considerations are: will the kids eat it? And how can I
make it in camp with a minimum of fuss and mess (important when
15-year-olds are cooking)...
 
My tiara is pinching...

'Lainie
AKA Queen Carmen Slugana
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