SC - Protectorate Feast 5 (no recipes)

[ChannonM@aol.com]

In a message dated 10/6/00 3:13:34 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Adamantius 
writes:

> So mine ended up looking a bit like ground-up concrete pellets, a bit
>  like Post Grape-Nuts cereal. They tasted like Good-N-Plenty candies.
>  People enjoyed them; I'm just not sure how close to the genuine article
>  they were.
>  

At the Cook's Symposium this weekend, Dame Alys brought some period paintings 
(pictures) and in one is a very clear picture of comfits, what appear to be 
coriander (round) and either anise or fennel ( ovalish).

I just so happened to have some samples of the comfits I had made for war in 
my basket. I took one out and it was identical  - white, round, lumpy (ragged 
would be the term found in the period works), about the size of a small pea- 
I was thrilled as I had never seen an interpretation of a comfet from period 
before, although I've worked with Plat's recipe  a number of times.

I have also tried using strictly sugar as the base, but found that it 
carmelized.
I found that keeping the sugar hot, but not carmelized was the key to 
creating comfets where the sugar didn't fall off. I was able to get up to 
about 12 coats before it started to give me trouble. At that point though, 
IIRC,  the sugar may have begun to re-crystalize and was pretty useless. I 
believe there is a short document on comfets at the MK Cooks Collegium 
website that I wrote, it has a few other recipes as well. I dont' want to 
take up too much bandwidth when it can be found there.

Lots of fun.

Hauviette