SC - Nerve Bisquits???

[david friedman]

At 10:17 PM -0600 1/27/99, Lady Di wrote:
>http://www.bahnhof.se/~chimbis/tocb/toc.html
>
>Here is one place to start with 16th and 17th century Swedish recipes.

Thanks--it's a very nicely done site.

But the earliest Swedish cookbook it lists is 1642, so presumably the
Swedish recipes start in the 17th century, not the 16th.

Also, judging by looking at a couple of the pages, the recipes aren't
mostly swedish--it's simply a swedish site on cooking history. The
bibliography it includes is Jaelle's. There appear to be no references to
nerve bisquits--at least, a search for "nerve" found none.

>I believe the
>site that actually referred to 'Nerve biscuits' is in another site which
>gives the history of gingerbread, but it could be this one.  Did you try
>searching for 'pepparkaker'?

That search found me " The History of Gingerbread  By Tarla," which does
not seem to be a very reliable source of information. For example, it says:

"The term may be imprecise because in Medieval England gingerbread meant
simply "preserved ginger" and was a corruption of the Old French gingebras,
derived from the Latin name of the spice, Zingebar. It was only in the
fifteenth century that the term came to be applied to a kind of cake made
with treacle and flavored with ginger."

This is wrong several times over. Gingerbrede, in the form of a mixture of
breadcrumbs, honey, ginger and other spices, appears in the 14th c.
cookbooks. Neither that nor the 15th c. version is a "cake"--the texture is
more like fudge. The sweetening was honey, not treacle. Treacle doesn't get
used in England for culinary (as opposed to medicinal) purposes until
substantially later (see C. Anne Wilson's discussion in her book).

In any case, the site has no reference to nerve bisquits. And it was the
only English language site I found by a search for 'pepparkaker.' Perhaps
your original source wasn't on the web?


David Friedman
Professor of Law
Santa Clara University
ddfr at best.com
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/


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