SC - Nerve Bisquits???

[Lady Di]

Here is another site 'Kitchen Lost' which credits 'Nerve Biscuits' to
the Physica and provides the recipe.  While the website does have many
European countries represented, I've found the Swedish section very good.
Variations of these recipes have been passed down through my family and
altered somewhat.

While I haven't found any other documentation, I suggest trying the recipe
and eat some during stressful times at work ;)

- -----Original Message-----
From: david friedman <ddfr at best.com>
To: sca-cooks at Ansteorra.ORG <sca-cooks at Ansteorra.ORG>
Date: Thursday, January 28, 1999 1:32 PM
Subject: Re: SC - Nerve Bisquits???


>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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