SC - payn ragoun

[david friedman]

At 6:24 PM +0000 1/30/99, Ian van Tets wrote:

>Black says that 'thriddendele' means the third
>ingredient, and says it must be a secret the cook did not want to
>divulge.  I think this is highly unlikely in any case, and
>breadcrumbs a fairly prosaic ingredient to keep secret.  Now I don't
>have middle English, except for what I have picked up, but I do have
>Middle and New High German.  What I came up with is:  perhaps
>'thriddendele' means 'drittes Teil' - that is, 'of pines a third
>part' meaning a third of the weight/volume of the sugar & honey?

Very good. According to the glossary of _Curye on Englysche_, it means "a
third part. .. probably one third each." It sounds as though Maggie Black
is not a reliable redactor.

>So this afternoon we made a version of this without breadcrumbs, but
>with 2/3 cup pine nuts (yes I know, extravagant, but they were a
>birthday present).  Actually we also used 8 oz sugar rather than the
>honey because we're not happy with the honey's action in the sweet
>either, and wanted to play with something we understood for the main
>body of the thing.  One tsp ginger is not enough, but the whole pine
>nuts ( the original doesn't say to chop them) are really yummy.  I'd
>expected the thing to come out like a brittle, but, in line with all
>my sweet-making, this is an opaque powdery substance.
>
>Is the powder thing a fault of mine, do you think, or an aspect of
>the dish itself?  I boiled the syrup until it hung together, ie.
>until a ball dropped into water retained its shape but was softish.

My guess is that it is a result of using sugar instead of honey, but I
haven't tried it. In making hulwa, if I use sugar I get a brittle candy
(roughly divinity), if I use honey it comes out soft and squishy. I have
never yet succeeded in cooking honey down to a point where that doesn't
happen, and suspect it can't be done.


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


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