[Sca-cooks] Re: rice pudding & marrow

[Pixel, Goddess and Queen]

You also need to grease the funnel, preferably with a hard fat like
vegetable shortening or lard. If you don't, it can be darn near impossible
to get the casing onto the funnel, and it has a nasty habit of sticking
and tearing.

And of course, the greasing of the horn and the act of sliding the casing
onto the horn provide much amusement for the spectators. We finally
learned our lesson and banned the peanut gallery from the kitchen.

Margaret


On Thu, 13 Dec 2001, Philip & Susan Troy wrote:

[snip]>
>
> You can go several ways, ranging from a funnel, or some variant, to an
> industrial sausage stuffer, which is like an enormous hypodermic
> syringe. Period cooks would probably have used a hollow, truncated cow's
> horn, and there's a cool, inexpensive sausage funnel I sometimes see in
> Middle Eastern markets. It's like a funnel with a half-cylinder
> extension to the open edge, kind of like a large scoop with a hollow,
> tubular handle. You rinse the casings inside and out by running water
> through them, thread the casings onto the tube (at the risk of being
> crass, this is a function fairly familiar to most 21st-century men, at
> one point or another in their lives), fill the hopper and push some of
> it into the tube until it just begins to come out the small end. Then
> you tie off the end (this helps prevent air from being trapped in the
> casing), and push the filling into the casing, which will begin to fill
> and slide off the funnel end as it expands and lengthens. Filling it too
> full is a Bad Thing. In some cases this could be a three-or-four-hand
> job. At the very least it's a good idea to work close to the surface of
> a table so the filled lengths of casing don't hang down and run the risk
> of tearing.