SC - Re: Making
ChannonM at aol.com
ChannonM at aol.com
Tue Oct 10 11:48:07 PDT 2000
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
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