SC - Currant history (Was Currants vs Zante raisins) Long

[Kerri Canepa]

david friedman revs up the CD of Steve Martin and Martin Short singing
"Playing With The Big Boys Now", and writes in his scariest tones:
> 
> At 11:33 PM -0400 6/16/00, Philip & Susan Troy wrote:
> 
> [In his most audacious bluff since the cuskynole heresy began]

Oh, come now, the night is young!

Quoting me: 
> >Actually, we're not. Upon looking at the cuskynole recipe in its French
> >form in the 13th century Anglo-Norman  BL MS ADD 32085, of which BL Add.
> >46919 (He), also known as Diuersa Cibaria, appears to be, in part, a
> >translated copy, I see that the text in French seems a great deal more
> >specific, and much clearer in Hieatt's English translation. Also that
> >the illustration in 46919, presumably copied accurately for Curye On
> >Inglysh, looks suspiciously like the illustration from a completely
> >different recipe in the earlier source... .
> >
> The French text reads:
> 
> "e pus plier ensemble come cel signe est fet:" [followed by a 3x3 grid].
> 
> The English translation reads"
> 
>   "then fold together as this diagram illustrates."

Indeed it does. The entire English translation says, discounting
bracketted material from Hieatt:

"25. Kuskenole [pastries with fruit filling]. Here is a dish which is
called kuskenole. Make pastry with eggs; then take figs, raisins, pears,
and apples, and then dates and almonds; beat together and add good mixed
ground spice and whole spices. In Lent, make your make your pastry with
almonds [i.e. almond butter or cream]. Roll your pastry out on a table
and cut into several pieces, one and a half hands long and three fingers
in width; then grease the pastry on one side; then put the filling in,
dividing it equally among the cakes; then fold together as this diagram
illustrates [presumably folding over the p[astry and pressing or
crimping the edges together, as with ravioli]; then boil in clean water,
then brown on a griddle, etc." 
> 
> The Diuersa Cibaria versions reads:
> 
> & soththen veld togedere othe zeolue manere, ase theos fuguree is
> imad": [followed by a 3x5 grid]--"th" for thorn and "z" for the
> squiggly letter whose name I have forgotten.)
> 
> The only relevant difference is that one author thinks the grid is
> 3x3 and one 3x5.

Bzzzt! I'm sorry, I'm afraid that's incorrect, but we have some lovely
parting gifts for Your Grace, including the Cuskynole Board Game from
Parker Brothers!  The differences are more than that. As you say, one is
3x3, one is 3x5. One (the 3x3) lacks the mysterious dots found in the
other, 3x5 version, which I believe you have interpreted as indicating
the presence of filling. Could be. We don't seem to know. One (the 3x3) is
clearly not in the proportions stated in the recipe, _unless_ it
represents a single unit with the sheet of pastry folded in half over
the filling. The other (the 3x5) does seem to be in proportion to the
hand (or palm) and a half by three fingers, but it also bears more
resemblance to the illustration in the cressee recipe (in 32085) than it
does to
the kuskenole recipe (in 32085). I would not be at all surprised if some
transposition and omission, as described by Rudolf Grewe in connection
with copied manuscripts of the Harpestrang cookbook, has taken place,
and that what we are seeing is
the cressee illustration, or some variant thereof. Even assuming the
illustration is of one
kuskenole, rather than several, which I had theorized as a possibility,
there is no indication of where the filling is, and whether it is in all
nine squares of the 3x3 grid, or simply in the center square. If that's
one kuskenole, it's quite possible that the illustration represents a
filled square made from a roughly two-inch-by-four rectangle, with egg
wash or water brushed on one half of it, the filling added, and the
pastry folded over (reducing the measured rectangle to a square,
roughly) and crimped around the four sides (leaving four pressure
marks/lines from a stick, the edge of a hand, or even the back of a
heavy kitchen knife).    
 
> You are still left defending the position that, when redacting one of
> the two recipes in the corpus (I admit I had missed the other)

Quite a magnaninous admission, considering that you're deliberately
misrepresenting what I've repeatedly said. (For the folks in our studio
audience, please understand that I am a skilled pain in the arse, and
that His Grace is a professional argumentative kvetch, who, I gather,
produces other professional argumentative kvetches for his livelihood,
and that none of the above represents animosity. It is my belief that
His Grace would adhere to more strict formal debate methods, which would
preclude cheating, i.e. deliberately ignoring what I say and putting
words in my mouth to present my POV in the worst possible light, were
this a professional situation. Picture us in a bar, arguing over
[perhaps too much] beer.) Note also that there are now at least three
illustrations in the total corpus, and yes, one appears to be a
duplicate of one of the others. The trouble is that there's a fairly
good chance that it is a duplicate of the wrong one.

Anyway, what I have, in fact, said with tiresome frequency is not that
the illustration should be ignored, but that it does not, could not,
depict the recipe (originally we were talking about the early
14th-century English version) as written, without a moderately complex
set of added instructions helpfully manufactured by His Grace out of
thin air. (See? Now I'm doing it.) We are instructed, in His Grace's
adapted recipe, to spread the filling onto the dough, either folding it
over or adding a second layer, sealing the edges, and then pressing a
grid of
additional sutures onto the upper surface with the back of a heavy knife
(presumably and sensibly so as not to cut the pastry) to subdivide our
pop-tart-like structure into something resembling a Cadbury fruit bar, a
large rectangle divided into several smaller cells. The fact that this
is somewhat chancy in a bulk cookery setting (in boiling, the internal
seals would have a powerful tendency to burst open, turning the cake
back into a single cell), added to the fact that no such instructions
are given in either recipe, make me suspect that there is perhaps a
better interpretation. Note that I'm not saying that the above is not
how the dish was made, I'm saying that it _may_ have been made that way,
and that it _may_ have been made another way. His Grace, ever resembling
Saint Jerome in these matters, politely suggests I am full of poop.

Originally, having seen only the later English recipe with the 3x5 grid,
I had envisioned the possibility that the illustration depicted several
cuskynoles grouped as in the sheet they are cut from. The problem with
this is that that would indicate that the instructions aren't followed
in sequence (instructions are to roll out dough, cut into pieces, fill
and fold/seal). However, since there are other examples in the
recipe corpus that show instructions clearly given out of sequence
(thicken the sauce with eggs, sprinkle with good spices, serve, don't
let the sauce come to a boil, and in Lent you can use almond milk --
that sort of thing), I'm prepared to accept a calculated risk, which is
exactly what His Grace has done in postulating the whole "back of a
heavy knife"
thing.       

 that
> has a picture of how to make it, we should ignore the picture and
> make ravioli instead.

See above. With respect, bulldinky. It is true that my finished version
does resemble square ravioli in shape, but what you're missing (or
rather seeing and pretending not to) is that I have not set out to prove
that cuskynoles are ravioli (although you appear to have dedicated a
chunk of your life to proving they're not) but rather that there is some
inherent confusion, some loose ends, in the total picture of
recipe-plus-illustration, and in trying to tie up the loose ends, we are
logically led to more than one interpretation. One of which is the
possibility that the dish looks like a squarish ravioli. Rather than
ignoring the illustration, something I have never done, I simply ask how
the instructions as written could produce something that looks like the
illustration. You've supplied an extra set of instructions to make it
work, I posited the theory that the instructions may be out of order and
that the later illustration may not be a single, finished cuskynole.
(I'm not alone in this; see Hieatt in both published sources...) As it
happens, the earlier illustration, despite spurious claims from those
who should know better, could not possibly represent the dimensions as
stated in the recipe, unless folded (or cut) in half, which is how you
would get a near-square from the rectangle described. So, in either
case, the "back of the heavy knife" thing is an unnecessary
complication. That doesn't mean it's not how it was done. But then
Darwinism is not period.

Bottom line is that I have failed to convince you (Are you shocked? I
am shocked!) that the recipe plus illustration _could_ represent
_either_ a
Cadbury Fruit Bar or something shaped like a ravioli. My leaning towards
the ravioli interpretation is based on years of experience filling large
quantities of pasta sheets and boiling them (question: how many times
have you actually cooked this dish?), combined with a fair amount of
experience with the ways in which medieval recipes can be incomplete
or confusing, and why, along with the most telling argument, that the
simplest explanation that can be made to fit a given set of
circumstances is, more often than not, the correct one. You have not
logically proven
this idea wrong, in spite of the fact that I'm perfectly prepared to
admit your interpretation is possibly correct, and have never seriously
criticized it (well, perhaps not until now) except to say it is not the
only viable explanation. Hey,
I'm doing some of your work here! 

Now, an additional piece to ponder is the fact that the illustration has
changed between the 13th and 14th-century sources. The newer one is more
or less in keeping with the proportions given in the recipe, but it has
changed from the earlier version. The earlier one is not in keeping with
the stated proportions, but does look like what would happen if you took
the measured piece of dough, brushed some sticky stuff on it, added
filling, folded it over and sealed it. The later one is conceivably
based on an unknown version earlier than either manuscript, and could
conceivably be the "correct", canonical version, but we have no real
evidence of that, and when combined with the fact that it looks rather
like the drawing for the earlier cressee recipe, it seems quite possible
it is an error. 

> I eagerly await your redaction of
> cressee--lasagna perhaps?

Now that, of course, would be far beneath Your Grace's dignity if you
weren't joking, but if you'd like to discuss cressee I'm happy to. For
example, the recipe says, IIRC, to roll and cut the paste to a finger's
thickness, or some such. Is that just a reference to width and not
thickness, or does the combination of softer wheats and longer cooking
times make this gnocchi-ish pasta a little more of a real possibility?
Pehaps this is why some later pasta recipes speak of boiling it for an
hour... .

Adamantius, who admits to simply not knowing for sure, but who also is
not pathologically terrified that the dish might in some way resemble a
modern food 
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com