[Sca-cooks] Re: Trifle (?OOP) was victoria

[Philip & Susan Troy]

grizly at mindspring.com wrote:
>
> sca-cooks at ansteorra.org wrote:
> > Druighad at aol.com wrote:
> > A good basic but I am used to using 8 yolks, 1 cup sugar, 4 oz. cornstarch, as a stabilizer.
>
> <<<<<<We don't gotta use no stabilizers. We don' neeed no stabilizers. We are Classically trained French cooks. We don't need no steenkeeng stabilizers!!!
> Adamantius of the Sierra Madre  >>>>>>>
>
> I gotta go with this.  A well tended and gently heated custard is plenty stable for hours/a couple of days sans the starch.  The egg stabilzes with the sugar molecules.  Starch just means your target zone grows to a size you could hit with a gatlin gun.
>
> niccolo difrqancesco
> "Fistful of Egg Yolks"

I agree, more or less (or I wouldn't have said what I did) but it might
help to understand, and this is not necessarily aimed at the good Fra
Niccolo, why one might choose to use a starch thickener/stabilizer in a custard.

One is to prevent them from curdling if heated improperly. Of course, if
you want that to work, you also have to heat it "improperly", usually.
Most pastry cream recipes call for one good, honest bloop or walm of a
boil to cook the starch that wouldn't be necessary if you didn't boi...
well, you get the idea. Yes, pastry cream really does go bloop.
Sometimes blort.

Another aspect is that it may increase shelf life, as Niccolo suggests.
A related factor is that as custard (well, baked custards, and perhaps
it's true of stirred ones) sits on a shelf, even in the fridge, it loses
moisture as the protein molecules shrink and squeeze it out. In pastry
applications this makes for a rather short shelf life for the pastry the
custard is sitting in. Nothing worse than a soggy Napolean [misspelling
deliberate to designate apparent true origin of the term].

None of these are bad reasons to use a starch in a custard; I just
didn't see it as either necessary or especially improving in the case of
a home-made trifle. The main advantage for home use would seem to be to
protect a careless cook from curdling the thing. I've run across a lot
of those in restaurants, but Elysant??? The IDEA!!!

And then again, both applemoy and one of my all-time favorites, rampaunt
perry, can be seen, for practical purposes, as period custardy dishes
that are thickened with both egg yolks and starch. Or, if you wanna lok
at it that way, they're thickened with starch and enriched with eggs.
These medieval cooks never tell me anything.

Niccolo, regarding your zabaglione reference, I would still suspect that
the primary reason for serving it immediately would be the activity of
the wine fumes, rather than as a stability consideration. After all,
zabaglione is often served cold in restaurants; it's just not as buff
and kewl.

Stefan, do you have that zabaglione reference from the Scully
translation of the Cuoco Napoletano? I know it's been posted here
already at least once. If not, I'll retype it if necessary.


Adamantius
--
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com

"It was so blatant that Roger threw at him.  Clemens gets away with
things that get other people thrown out of games.  As long as they
let him get away with it, it's going  to continue." -- Joe Torre, 9/98