SC - icelandic chicken redaction.

[david friedman]

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.

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.

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.

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


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

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".

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