[Sca-cooks] Re: A redaction all of my own.

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Louise Smithson wrote:

> I guess my mail really was too long, the remainder of the recipe and the method got chopped off.  I guess I'll try again and post just those this time.
> I did form my coffin over a mold, but could not get it to release.  In the end I rolled out the pastry on saran wrap, laid that over the mold.  Shaped the pastry,wrapped the outside with cooking parchment, turned it over,  pulled the mold out, pulled out the saran wrap.  I'm sure my mother doesn't do that (it took me 30 minutes on the phone to get all the details of the method from her) but it worked for me.
> Helewyse de Birkestad

British Food writer Jocasta Inness describes using a two-pound jam jar or other more-or-less cylindrical item as a form; she says when you get the thing high enough and conforming to the shape of your form, you can roll it as if it is on a rolling pin, making the pastry thinner, but therefore with a greater circumference, so it will begin to pull away from the sides of the form. You can then turn it right-side up and twist the form free. I gather that modern (and by modern I include pretty old traditional English professional bakers, the guys that turn out little raised pork pies by the hundreds, use a wooden cylinder turned on a lathe, oh, four or five inches in diameter, maybe three or four inches high, with a handle protruding straight up from the top center. It looks like you sliced the last four or five inches from the end of a large rolling pin, but left the handle attached at one end. This is used as described previously, but there's also a great deal of similarity to
the use of an armorer's raising stake, which explains why the process is called raising a pastry. That, and the fact that the word comes into your mind unbidden when you watch it being done. There are also some good instructions in the Hillary Spurling edition of Elinor Fettiplace's receipts (it's for a rabbit pie, IIRC, and of course the original doesn't describe how the pastry is made), but I wonder if perhaps you're using just a bit too much shortening, or if you're working the stuff just a bit too hot.


Adamantius
--
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com

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