[Sca-cooks] pastry

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Also sprach jemoore at firstam.com:
>I am going to enter crispels in an A&S this weekend.  In the forme of cury
>it just says pastry dough and I'm not finding a pastry dough recipe in the
>book.  I'm thinking possibly a puff dough?
>
>Any ideas?

The early sources (as in, early 14th century, English, German, etc.)
seem to have a lot of pastry that could be either pasta or pie dough,
depending on the treatment: frequently flour, egg yolks, saffron, and
sugar, maybe some salt. In the right proportions, this can make an
acceptably tender baked dough, because the egg yolks shorten it and
the sugar tenderizes it; boiled, it is like ravioli dough, and fried,
it puffs up. Very versatile stuff. (As I recall the contemporary
French sources call for fat, more like a modernish lard-y pie dough.)

In Lent or other eggless days, you'd use thick almond milk instead of yolks.

Just out of curiosity, if you're doing crispels from FoC, which is
late 14th century, why do you need to document 12th century pastry
anyway?

[Aside: what the blazes _is_ it about the 12th century anyway??? It's
like a magnet for people seeking difficult documentation for things
that, half the time, aren't 12th century anyway... Is it a Norman
thing???]

Adamantius