SC - OT - stuffed camel

[lilinah@grin.net]

Cindy Renfrow quotes and responds:

<<Hello!  Thanks for sharing your experiment!

><snip> Trying to make sense of the original receipt, I concluded that a
>"tyne y-makyd of eyroun" was a scribal error for a "cyue y-makyd of eyroun"
>(t and c, and u and n might easily be confused in 15th century secretary
>script).  I read  "cyue" as "civee" (u and v being sometimes interchangable),
>which in other contexts is an onion sauce.  A civee of eggs, it occurred to
>me, might be a sauce of minced onions mixed with egg.  I made such a mixture,
>and spread a layer of this over the strips of fat to form a base.  When the
>receipt called for a cyue to be layered, alternating with grease, I concluded
>this referred to the cyue of eyroun that had just been prepared.  I layered
>butter (in place of grease) and the onion and egg mixture between the colored
>ground-meat layers.  When it baked, the egg and onion layer solidified,
>holding the filling together, and setting off the colored layers, giving a
>pronounced striped effect.
<snip>

I took my interpretation of "tyne" as a "pancake" from the recipe that
immediately follows this in the MS.

#13, also called "Vn Vyaunde furnez san[3] nom de chare", says "Take
flowre, Almaunde milke, & Safroune, & make [th]er-of .iiij. tynes, & frye
[th]i tynez in Oyle..."

Take flour, Almond milk, & Saffron, & make thereof 4 pancakes/crepes/flat
dough-thingies, & fry thy pancakes/crepes/flat dough-thingies in Oil.>>

I saw that, too, and it was part of the overall confusion.  I've never seen a 
pancake/crepe called a "tyne"; Austen glosses it as something like "point" 
(as on a fork), which makes even less sense.  Could we be dealing with the 
work of a copyist who had no idea what he was copying? 

There is also the possibility that tyne is the right word in #12, and the 
scribe misread it as cyue.  So if a tyne is a kind of crepe, a tyne of eyroun 
(as in #12) might be like a thin omelet, which could easily be greased and 
put between the layers of colored meat filling.  That might work, too.  That 
would explain the line: "& ley [th]er-vppe a tyne y-makyd of Eyroun vppe-on 
[th]e tyne", that is, lay an omelet upon an omelet (a double layer at the 
bottom of the pie).

(However, I just looked up "tyne" (and all its variant spellings) in the OED, 
and found nothing that would indicate it meant anything like pancake or 
crepe.  The only cooking or food related Middle English meaning of tyne is a 
large vat or tub, as in brewing.  The compilers of the OED must have missed 
the occurrences of this word in Harleian MS 279, or else they couldn't figure 
out what it meant, either!)  

I wonder how many different interpretations we could come up with? It's a 
good thing there isn't a diagram of this dish (as in that other diagrammed 
dish that shall remain nameless), or we'd never figure it out! :-)

<<#13 is a similarly elaborate recipe that uses fish instead of flesh.
Perhaps the name should read "A baked dish without meat"? ('nom' being
confused for 'non') and #12, being made in similar fashion, shared the same
name??>>

That's an interesting suggestion. "A Baked Dish Without None of the Meat"?  
Whichever way it went, they clearly had the same name because they were 
versions of the same type of pie.

Good discussion!  Does anyone else have any ideas about this dish?

Rudd Rayfield
============================================================================

To be removed from the SCA-Cooks mailing list, please send a message to
Majordomo at Ansteorra.ORG with the message body of "unsubscribe SCA-Cooks".

============================================================================