SC - Cheesemaking question
rcmann4 at earthlink.net
rcmann4 at earthlink.net
Mon Mar 5 16:15:40 PST 2001
And it came to pass on 5 Mar 01, , that Philip & Susan Troy wrote:
> > I know they used cheese presses to shape and firm the
> > cheese, but did they cook the curds? Or is that a modern
> > innovation?
>
> From what I've been able to determine, it's modern. Admittedly, what I'm
> saying is, "I don't know that the cooking of curds was done in period,"
> rather than, "I know that it was not done in period."
Thank you. I found one web page in which someone redacted
Platina's cheesemaking instructions. His recipe included cooking
the curds, even though Platina says nothing about it -- only to
smoke the cheese after it is pressed and dried. So I wondered if
he was basing his actions on modern practice, or on other period
texts that I have not read.
> What I do know is
> that of the actual cheese recipes I've seen in Dowe, Markham, Plat, and
> Digby (the last three all early post-period),
I can see I have some book-buying to do I have Digby, but not the
other three. And I've never heard of Dowe. I also want to ILL the
relevant section of Columella. Herrera quotes him, so I gather he
was still considered An Authority in the 16th centruy.
> along with various
> curd-based dishes in the medieval corpus and various net-based cheese
> process descriptions of things like gruyere (allegedly period) appear to
> be uncooked. This might be coincidence, and I may simply have missed all
> the cooked curd recipes, but I suspect not.
>
> Adamantius
Thank you. Since it seems like I will be at home tomorrow, I feel
another experiment coming on. I have also discovered, to my
delight, that my local health food store sells non-homogenized goat
milk. Now, if I could only figure out why it's impossible to find
savory in the herb section of the supermarket...
Lady Brighid ni Chiarain
Settmour Swamp, East (NJ)
mka Robin Carroll-Mann
now at a new address: rcmann4 at earthlink.net
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