SC - White Leach Recipe?

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Sue Clemenger wrote:
> 
> I'm not her, but would like it anyway, as it sounds very interesting, esp. for
> Spring Feast subtleties.  Would you consider sending me a copy privately, or
> posting it?
> --Maire

Shoo-ah!

>From Gervase Markham's "The English Housewife", 1615. I've got the
Michael Best edition...

"152		TO MAKE LEACH
	To make the best leach, take isinglass and lay it two hours in water,
and shift it and boil it in fair water and let it cool: then take
almonds  and lay them in cold water till they blanch: and then stamp
them and put to new milk, and strain them and put in whole mace and
ginger sliced, and boil them till it taste well of the spice; then put
in your isinglass and sugar, and a little rosewater: and then let them
all run through a strainer."

The editor of the roll of "Ancient Cookery" in Cariadoc's Collection of
Medieval and Renaissance Cookbooks has a note concerning leches and
various permutations of the word. In this note he mentions an author
named Rand. Holme who defines "leach" as having been as described above.
There's really nothing (at least among the evidence I have) to place the
white leach made with isinglass, etc., as being late-fourteenth-century,
but as I say, I looked in several sources and this is where I found it:
square in the beginning of the seventeenth. YMMV.

Oh, well.

Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com