SC - Fine Cakes?
Jessica Tiffin
melisant at iafrica.com
Mon Mar 22 02:03:37 PST 1999
Greetings, the list.
Several weeks back, someone posted the original recipe for Fine Cakes from
John Partridge [The widowes Treasure], as reproduced in Lorna J. Sass's "To
the Queen's Taste" (I've appended it below); they also posted a discussion
of their experience redacting this recipe. In a moment of mental abberation
I failed to save this discussion. Could someone possibly re-post it or send
it to me privately? I experimented with this recipe this weekend, and would
very much like to compare the proportions I used with someone else's version.
>To make fine cakes Take a quantity of fine wheate Flower, and put it
>in an earthen pot. Stop it close and set it in an Oven, and bake it
>as long as you would a pasty of Venison, and when it baked it will be
>full of clods. Then searce your flower through a fine sercer. Then
>take clouted Creame or sweet butter, but Creame is best: then take
>sugar, cloves, mace, saffron and yolks of eggs, so much as wil seeme
>to season your flower. Then put these things into the Creame, temper
>all together. Then put thereto your flower. So make your cakes.
>The paste will be very short; therefore make them very little. Lay
>paper under them.
( I used a basic shortbread guideline - flour: sugar: fat at 3:1:2, which
worked very nicely with the butter (light, crumbly spicy shortbread), and
not so well with the cream (too dense and tough). The pre-baked flour gives
a wonderful, slightly nutty flavour. I suspect the cream problem was
partially the fact that the electricity went out for half an hour half way
through that batch, and they cooked too slowly. A great pity, since the
recipe suggests the cream version is better, and my experience was exactly
the opposite.)
any comments very welcome,
Melisant
Melisant de Huguenin * Jessica Tiffin * melisant at iafrica.com *
users.iafrica.com/m/me/melisant
Seneschal, Shire of Adamastor, Drachenwald (Cape Town, South Africa)
Sable, three owls rising argent, each maintaining a willow slip vert.
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