SC - Questions re Redaction {long}

[Ann & Les Shelton]

A couple of people asked good questions regarding the redaction I posted
for the Marzapan pie from Platina.  I'll respond as best I can:

1)  Ras asked why I didn't soak the almonds a day and night ahead of
time as called for.    The truth is, it was a spur-of-the-moment
decision to try a redaction of the recipe.  As noted, I needed something
to take over to my parent's house the next afternoon and decided to
subject my brother's family to something medieval {they're cynical about
the whole SCA experience, so it was a personal need I was meeting.  It
turned out to be slightly too "rosewatery" for their palates, so it
wasn't a total success}.  I had the ingredients on-hand, but didn't have
enough time to totally follow the recipe.  This was a quick-and-dirty
first attempt, to see if it merited further exploration.

2)  Cariadoc caught a mistake.  I neglected to state that I did sprinkle
a little water in with the almonds when I ground them, as called for. 
He also asked whether I had tried pounding the almonds in a mortar, as
he feels this would be closer to what Platina would have done.  Again, I
can only plead that this was a first attempt and subsequent refinements
will be made.  

He also asked why I didn't continually sprinkle it with sugar/rosewater.
This requires a little bit of explanation.  I was working from the
Milham translation, which states that the almonds and sugar should be
"soaked" in rosewater.  I checked this against the Mallinckrodt version,
which translates the sentence as "dissolved" in rosewater.  The question
became "how wet do I want this mixture to get?"  My concern was that if
the mixture was too "soupy" it wouldn't get baked properly before the
crust started burning.

That's why I opted to get the dry ingredients moistened but not
saturated with rosewater.  When I baked it, it appeared that it was
firming up, but it didn't appear to be drying out "too much."  I wasn't
sure what the impact of adding additional  moistened sugar would be, so
I left it out.  On the post-mortem, the top crusted nice and chewy but
there was a thin layer about the consistency of honey between the top
and the pie crust.  The original recipe calls for the additional sugar
mixed with rose water to keep the pie from drying out too much.  It
appears that some additional sugar may have helped thicken the mixture,
but if it was moistened with rose water it may have made it "mushier."  
The other concern was keeping the oven temperature stable. I want other
people to be able to replicate this redaction and improve upon it.  Not
knowing what the final product was going to come out looking like, I
wasn't sure what the impact would be of opening the oven every few
minutes, pulling out the pie to sprinkle sugar on it, pushing it back in
and closing the oven again {repeating "x" number of times}.  My oven is
balky and by the time it got back to the desired temperature, it would
be time to start the process all over again.  So, in the interest of
having a control pie to start from, I chose not to follow this step.

Thank you all for your assistance.  If you have any further comments or
questions, I'll be glad to try to respond.

John le Burguillun
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