SC - payn ragoun

[Ian van Tets]

Hello!  

Just wanted to share with you a redaction that we did today.  I had 
been puzzling about Maggie Black's version of payn ragoun for some 
time:

Take hony and sugur cipre and clarifie it togydre, and boile it with 
esy fyre, and kepe it wel fro brennyng.  And whan it hath yboiled a 
while, take up a drope therof with thy fyngur [ho ho - CJvT] and do 
it in a litel water, and loke if it hang togydre, and take it fro the 
fyre and do therto pynes the thriddendele & powdour gyngeuer, and 
stere it togyder til it bigynne to thik, and cast it on a wete table; 
 lesh it and serue it forth with fryed mete, on flessh dayes or on 
fisshe dayes.  (Forme of curye 68)

Now Maggie Black suggests 7 oz sugar, 2 tbs honey and 1/2 cup water 
cooked until the thermometer reads 110C, then beating hard and adding 
1 tsp chopped pine nuts, 3 1/2 oz soft breadcrumbs and a tsp ginger, 
then leaving to set before cutting into pieces.

I was never happy with the idea of breadcrumbs, and had been puzzling 
over this.  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?  

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.

I'll make this one again in any case.

Cairistiona
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