SC - Cressee webbed

[david friedman]

We had a small cooking workshop today, and one of the things I did 
was cressee--the other Anglo-Norman recipe with a picture. I thought 
it was interesting, so took some pictures with my new digital camera. 
You can find the result at

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Medieval/cressee/cressee_recipe.htm

My thanks to Adamantius for pointing out cressee and its picture in a 
recent post.

The instructions say to roll out the pasta dough to the thickness of 
a finger, which I take to be about 3/8".  I'm not assuming that this 
is the same "finger" unit as in the Cuskynoles, which would be 
somewhat more. But even at 3/8, it is pretty thick. It works 
reasonably well that way, but it occurred to me that one interesting 
variant to try would be to roll the whole thing thin after it was 
assembled but before it was boiled.

One problem with the recipe is getting enough contrast in color 
between the plain and the yellow strips. One way is by using a lot of 
saffron--but the result looks better than it tastes, unless you 
really like saffron. Another possibility that Elizabeth suggested but 
that I have not yet tried is to use the egg yolks in what will be the 
yellow dough and the whites in what will be the plain dough.

I also did the mastic soup from _A Soup for the Qan_ which came out 
surprisingly well--perhaps because it gives quantities, and the 
quantity of mastic, for the amount of soup I was making (roughly 40% 
of the original recipe), came out to about 1/40th of a teaspoon.
David/Cariadoc
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/