SC - Re: sca-cooks V1 #2561

[Martina Grasse]

At 11:50 AM +0200 9/3/00, Cindy M. Renfrow wrote:

>To make fine Cakes. Take a quantity of fine wheate Flower, and put it in an
>earthen pot. Stop it close and set it in an Oven, and bake it as long as
>you would a Pasty of Venison, and when it is baked it will be full of
>clods. Then searce your flower through a fine sercer. Then take clouted
>Creame or sweet butter, but Creame is best: then take sugar, cloves, Mace,
>saffron and yolks of eggs, so much as wil seeme to season your flower.

...

>  Here is a worked out recipe for you:
>
>        To every 3 cups of sifted baked flour, take the following:
>        1 1/2 cups butter
>        1 cup sugar
>        1/4 teaspoon clove powder
>        1/2 teaspoon mace powder
>        1/2 pinch saffron, crumbled
>        3 egg yolks

Compare the description of sugar in the original--listed along with 
cloves, mace, saffron, ...--with its role in your worked out recipe, 
where it is one of the main ingredients. I have no way of being sure, 
but my suspicion is that your quantities reflect the fact that you 
already know how shortbread is made, and are interpreting this recipe 
as something similar. Have you tried doing it with a tablespoon or so 
of sugar and seeing how it comes out?

Incidentally, I was wrong to say in an earlier post that the recipe 
being discussed then had no sugar--checking back, I see that it too 
includes the sugar along with spices etc.

I'm not very familiar with the 16th century sources--does anyone know 
of a recipe in this same family that has enough information about 
quantities to tellus whether Cindy's guess or mine is right about the 
quantity of sugar? My view may in part be biased by the fact that I 
am more familiar with the earlier period cuisine--at which point 
sugar was expensive and treated more like a spice than a staple.
- -- 
David Friedman
Professor of Law
Santa Clara University
ddfr at best.com
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/