[Sca-cooks] Timbale was: Disturbing item from the CIA

[E. Rain]

good morning from Eden, who needs an excuse to stop translating for a
while...


Gunthar wrote re the CIA comment that Timbales have been around for a
millennium:

> Very pretty and tasty looking. But once the
> chef had presented the dish he made the statement
> "A dish exactly like was served over 1000 years
> ago." Um....excuse me? Not only was the tomato
> sauce a major giveaway but I haven't seen anything
> like a timbale in any corpus. And how old is ziti?
>

Well the word "exactly" was certainly out of line, and the time frame was
stretched past the data I have available, but timbale like dishes do appear
in the medieval Italian corpus:

Torta de Lasagne, from the 14th c. Neapolitan "Liber De Coquina"  is a dish
lined with lasagne then filled with raviolis, eggs, cheese etc in layers.
It's then decorated with a dough sculpture, but the basic dish is there.

The Torta Parmesana present in at least 3 different 14th c. Italian texts
lines a pot with "paste" and then fills it with layers of pastas, meat, eggs
etc.  See PPCs 59 & 61 for a discussion of this dish and it's development
into modern timbales  (though I don't care for the article's claim that the
dish goes back to Babylonian times)

I'm told timbales are heavily present in Scappi, but I haven't worked with
it much yet to confirm this myself. (so many books so little time!)

As for Ziti, if you look at the Martino corpus (Italian 15th c.) you find
"To make a devised meat after the Romane manner." which is pasta which you
form by wrapping it around a stick to make hollow straws i.e. ziti or penne.

Eden - Italian girl
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raghead at liripipe.com