Filo/phyllo-- was [Re: SC - duck and bread]

[Susan Fox-Davis]

> At 7:38 PM -0400 8/30/00, margali wrote:
> >I got to thinking, soy beans were common, kept dried and soy flour is a good
> >substitute for flour in non-gluten applications. If we sort of wing it and
> >retranslate bean paste as ground beans, I will have to play around
> >to see if it
> >works but you might get a fairly respectable noodle from soy flour,
> >egg whites and
> >cream.

It sounds very consistant with the Atkins diet... but the honey and sugar in it
certainly do not!  Oh well.  Soy pancakes can made good eats... when I was on the
Atkins diet last, I made 'soy blini' and served them with caviar and sour cream
at tourney.  [Okay, I know, modern caviar is not period, but nobody complained.]

david friedman wrote:

> In modern oriental cooking, at least, bean paste is not soy
> flour--it's a paste texture material made (I think) from fermented
> beans, although I could easily be wrong.

I'm thinking more like /an/ red adzuki bean paste, used in modern Asian sweets,
than /miso/ fermented soy bean paste, which most people encounter first as the
cloudy but nutritious element in clear Japanese soup.  I think that /an/ would
hold up to handling better, since it has to be made into a pancake and fried.

> I think it would be worth
> first trying to find out what the translator thinks the term means--I
> gather some people here are in contact with someone involved in the
> project. My first guess is that if he translated it as "bean paste"
> he thinks it means bean paste. You also might check in "A Soup for
> the Qan," since it is largely about Muslim/Chinese cuisine. Otherwise
> you may end up inventing something clearly inconsistent with the
> recipe.

That's why my question to Paul via Kiri included all those speculations.  It is
clearly a Muslim recipe after all, and does list "Muslim oil" [butter] as an
ingredient;  perhaps the bean was unfamiliar as well.  Shrug.  I don't know,
that's why I asked.

Also:  if this source documents the use of WHITE sugar, it could be a boon to SCA
cooks for years to come.  Goodness!  Only the Qan could probably afford it, but
then again, we all imagine ourselves to be rich nobles don't we?

> The idea that this recipe is something like Baklava is pure
> conjecture at this stage--and revising the recipe to make it fit the
> conjecture is a good way of not finding out whether the conjecture is
> true.

At this point, whether or not it's Baklava is irrelevant.  It still looks like an
interesting recipe that I'd care to try at least once.

Sweets for the sweet, and nuts to me,
Selene
selene at earthlink.net