[Sca-cooks] Timbales/Tortas

[E. Rain]

Adamantius wrote:
> >> but timbale like dishes do appear
> >> in the medieval Italian corpus:
> >
> I can't and won't say they don't, but it should be noted that
> at least modern timbale are more or less the containers they're cooked in,
> with a huge variety of ingredients and varying cooking methods. Some have
> a lining pastry, many don't, some are essentially schtuff mixed with
> custard and baked in a bain-marie. and most of them are fairly small,
along the
> lines of a double shot glass. Which is not to say they could not share a
> common ancestry with Italian torta of various types, but then a lot of
Italian
> tortas from period have survived, in largely unchanged form, to the
present day.

Hmm, sounds like you're mostly seeing Timballini (single serving timbale) I
usually think of timbale on the grand scale myself.

Here's the modern definition from Fant & Isaac's Dictionary of Italian
Cuisine:
"Timballo - Timbale; traditionally, a pie or varied ingredients molded and
baked; sometimes, =Bomba; sometimes a filled pastry.  Today, even lasagna is
sometimes classed as a kind of timballo.  A timballetto or timballino is an
individual, unmolded serving."

Very open to interpretation :->

FYI the term comes from Timpano, an Italian word for drum, and does not seem
to have been used in a culinary context pre 1600 (Florio doesn't include it
& I haven't come across it looking at various earlier cookbooks) the first
definite citation I can find right now is 1778, per the PPC 61 article, If
anyone has the full text of scappi & wants to skim for timbale I'd love to
have that link confirmed, it's not among the excepts included in Faccioli.
14th & 15th c recipes seem to use only variants of the word torta...


Vincente asked:
> This sounds a lot like the "timpano" served in "The Big
> Night".

that's because Timbales & Timpanos are the same yummy creature

> Eden, do you have the texts/translations?  These sound
> absolutely fantastic.

I've only done a partial redaction so far, but yeah, it's shaping up pretty
amazingly.

PPC 59 has the 14th c. Neapolitan text for Torta Parmesana I think
translated into English.
If you can read 14th c. Venetian ;-> it's also on Thomas' website:
http://staff-www.uni-marburg.de/~gloning/frati.htm  recipe#112  more Italian
versions can be found in Faccioli's "L'arte della cucina in Italia"
Failing that, the proceedings of this years Oxford Symposium on Food &
Cookery should include my translation of the 14th c. Tuscan version :->



And thanks Adamantius for sending me upstairs to look for a reference & thus
saving my blueberry pie from overcooking ;->

Eden




______________________________________________________________________
warning dates on the calendar may be closer than they appear!

raghead at liripipe.com

> --__--__--
>
> Message: 14
> From: "Vincent Cuenca" <bootkiller at hotmail.com>
> To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
> Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2001 18:02:25 +0000
> Subject: [Sca-cooks] Re: timbales
> Reply-To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
>
> >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)
> the comedy section of the video store, but it wasn't all that
> funny.  Good,
> but not funny.  The dish is basically a pot lined with pasta
> dough and then
> filled with cheese, meatballs, hand-rolled ziti, and sauce
> and baked.  It
> was round, golden-brown, and caused death threats on the chef. (Direct
> quote: "That was so good I should kill you!")  I saw that
> thing turned out
> of the pot and I started drooling.
>

> Vicente
>
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