[Sca-cooks] online glossary

[Decker, Terry D.]

You're so kind.

Try Scappi's Opera (1570).  One of the odd little tools shown is an
accordion pleated tube and nozzle for shaping fritters.  The same source has
tart pans which could be used as baking sheets, but I would go with the
parchment on the floor of the oven.

This does not place such utensils in the 14th Century and I know of no
contemporary source which does, so the question of appropriate tools is
still open.

As for the pastry bags, I think you're probably right that they are modern.
For example, "The Pastry Cook," a 17th Century engraving by Abraham Bosse,
very intricate, modern-looking pastries being prepared.  There are very
modern cake pans of different shapes shown, a rolling pin, etc., but nary a
pastry bag in sight.  I don't remember seeing them in any art of a similar
age.

Bear


> Now that I think of it, do we have any mention of baking sheets _or_ of
> pastry bags in Taillevent's period? There are contemporary English
> accounts of extruding stuff through horns, presumably a hollow cow's
> horn whose point has been cut off, through which you force the stuff (in
> the case I remember, ground raw salmon), and such horns are still used
> today by the traditional-minded in France for jobs like stuffing sausage
> and force-feeding geese. So, the question is, at what point would a
> pastry bag have come into use anyway?
>
> As for baking sheets, since there are recipes for later in period that
> call for things that would otherwise be baked directly on the floor of
> the oven, to be protected by using pieces of parchment or paper,
> wouldn't that suggest that baking sheets weren't in common use in 1379
> France?
>
> Tag, Bear, you're it.
>
> Adamantius
>