SC - boiled garlic

[Mary_HallSheahan at ademco.com]

Hi--I'm so new to the list I haven't had a chance to introduce myself, but
I'll do that later.  I had to get my two cents in on this boiling
discussion because it's something I've thought about quite a bit.  When you
boiled the garlic did you use fresh water?  Did the recipe specify fresh
water?

I pretty much assume that unless it says draw new water to boil something
in, they were just using the ongoing boiling "water" which really is stock
by that time.  It takes a long time to draw water--the well at Windsor
Castle's kitchen goes down to the level of the Thames.  It takes a long
time & a lot of wood to bring cold water up to a boil.  Plus there are many
seives & slotted spoons in medieval & renaissance woodcuts --I wonder if
this could be because they got a lot of use pulling things back out of the
water/broth.

On a food-quality note, some veggie dishes I tried which were pretty bland
when boiled in water were much improved by using a strong vegetable
stock--sort of the "stone soup" concept I suppose.  For Master Gidianus,
who may have been at a late-winter feast I cooked a few years ago, that was
one of the reasons the leek & mushroom dish tasted so great.  Of course, it
also had something to do with the three shopping bags full of leeks--that
dish earned a nickname for one of my fellow cooks--she is now known as "our
lady of the leek"  <LOL> (it wasn't as huge a serving as it sounds--it
served 80 people)

And now back to my sponsor (I'm at work),
Emme

PS About the Pennsic water?  We had someone decide to bleach a cooler who
added a few spoons of bleach to local water & let it sit overnight.
Something that looked like rust flakes precipitated out of the water and
floated at the bottom.  I brought my Brita the next year.

(20th century: Mary Hall Sheahan, CT-based tech writer)
(14th century:  Lady Emme Attewater, "born the year we captured the French
king at Poitiers", ...a brewer who believes that the use of hops is a
German abomination that should be outlawed in good English ales)




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