SC - bread recipes--??

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Phefner at aol.com wrote:
> 
> Does anyone know where I might find some period bread recipes? Also, does
> anyone know what you're supposed to do with rolled oats to make oatcakes?

Somewhere in the "Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books" there is, I
think, a recipe for rastons, which are essentially loaves of bread with
the innards taken out, buttered a bit like a bread-and-butter pudding,
and packed back into the crusts for service. The recipe tells you how to
make the bread, too. There's also a good manchet recipe in Gervase
Markham's "The English Hus-Wife", and a bread recipe in Platina's "De
Honesta Voluptate et Valetudinae".

As for oatcakes, yes, you can make them with rolled oats, but you have
to grind them into proper meal. Maybe not quite as fine as flour, but
much finer than the rolled oats. Actually, this is probably the best
thing you can do with rolled oats, as it is no longer apparent that they
_are_ rolled oats after you grind them. I've done it a cup at a time in
a clean electric coffee grinder. Just whiz the bejeezus out of them (my
aplogies for such technical jargon) until they resemble sand or very
fine breadcrumbs. Most oatcake recipes seem to call for oat meal (as in
oats ground into flour of a not-very-well-defined grade), or pinhead
oats, which are steel-cut oats somewhat finer than we get in the USA,
maybe like fine bulgur in texture, or even finer.

Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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