SC - Adventures with wafers - part the third (long)

[Kerri Canepa]

Since I haven't seen _Food and Drink in Medieval Poland_ myself yet, I decided
to try to get a little more information about the saffron wafers recipe which
Stefan so kindly quoted for me.

I tracked down the editor of the Middle Ages series for the University of
Pennsylvania Press (UPenn Press published _Food and Drink_) to ask a few
questions. What follows is our conversation.
- -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>I don't know if this book, recently published by UPenn Press, is considered 
>part of the Middle Ages series but it seemed a good place to try.
>
>The book is _Food and Drink in Medieval Poland_, the author is Maria Dembinska
>and it was published in 1999. Is there anyway to contact Ms. Dembinska via email? 
>I'm an amateur food historian and I have some questions concerning one of the 
>recipes (for Saffron Wafers). In particular, I'd like to see the original Polish recipe 
>(with a date) and her English translation of it. What's in the book is a modern 
>adaptation of the original recipe and I'm interested in a translation.
>
>If she is not available through email but has a physical address, I would appreciate 
>receiving it.
>
>Thanks for your help,
>
>Kerri Canepa
- -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Dear Ms. Canepa:
>
>Maria Dembinska is deceased, but I will forward your message to the book's
>editor and adaptor, William Woys Weaver; I'm sure he will be able to answer
>your queries.
>
>With best regards,
>
>Jerry Singerman
- -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Dear Ms. Canepa:
>
>Below, the response from Will Weaver to your query.  The original recipe no
>longer survives as such; what he and Dembinska strove to do was to recreate
>the recipes as accurately as possible.  
>
>"You might respond to the inquiry this way: The royal accounts 
>mention saffron wafers often and purchase orders note the basic ingredients 
>only when the wafers were made "in house."  Sometimes they were purchased 
>from outside the royal castle (probably from a nunnery or a professional 
>wafer baker).  Our only task was to figure out the proportions.  Maria 
>interviewed some elderly nuns from a nunnery at Stary Sacz (I believe) to see 
>how they made them.  There is a Czech medieval mss that shows either a king 
>or saint holding a wafer iron (11th century I believe--it is depicted in the 
>wafer book cited in the bibliography). So we had ingredients, we had oral 
>material, and we had a visual source.  We then looked at late medieval and 
>early renaissance cookery mss to see what the proportions were like.  Nearly 
>all of the recipes were the same, I imagine because there is a very narrow 
>band one must stay within in order to make the wafer recipe work.  Maria was 
>even convinced many of the recipes copied one another, which is doubtless 
>true.  I do not know what happened to her notes or personal files, but I 
>suppose I could retrieve an old recipe from an Italian or French source, if 
>that is what the food historian is looking for."  W3
>
>I hope this helps.
>
>Jerry Singerman
>
>
>Jerome E. Singerman
>Humanities Editor
>University of Pennsylvania Press
>4200 Pine Street
>Philadelphia, PA 19104-4011
>
>tel:  215 898-1681
>fax:  215 898-0404
- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So, as you can see, the saffron wafer recipe as given is an interpretation. I'll
post my results of this recipe when I next play with it.

Kerri
Cedrin Etainnighean, OL

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