[Sca-cooks] RE: Sca-cooks digest, Vol 1 #1340 - 14. candied almonds (Mark.S Harris)

[grasse]

Greetings Stefan and the list,

Actually, yes, sugar coated almonds, filberts, walnuts and pinon nuts, as well
as seeds and spices are listed in Rumpolt.  (For those who don't know him yet,
it is 1581 German that I am still working on transcribing and translating. and
yes, I take requests.)

A translation of that chapter is webbed here:
http://clem.mscd.edu/~grasse/GK_zucker1.htm

and instructions that I have found WORK for making them are here (thanks Dame
Hauviette):
http://clem.mscd.edu/~grasse/GK_ASnovfeast.htm

This does NOT document sugared almonds in the Catalan area, but does let you
have nice sugared almonds if you are doing a late period German feast.

Gwen Cat
(who will write her own review of the wonderful CookCon2 as soon as RL has
slowed down.)


Message: 14
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2002 17:27:44 -0600
From: "Mark.S Harris" <mark.s.harris at motorola.com>
Organization: Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector
To: SCA-Cooks maillist <SCA-Cooks at ansteorra.org>
Subject: [Sca-cooks] candied almonds
Reply-To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org

Thomas Longshanks replied to me with:
> So, Stefan asked:
> > Wow. It sounds wonderful. Do you have recipes or other documentation
> > for these almond confits? I thought confits were just from spices. I'd
> > love to see more information about any candied nuts.
>
> Actually, I was planning on using white (and maybe yellow) Jordan almonds. I
> was using the term "confit" to mean a confection or preserve. I added them
> to the menu because I thought they would taste good and I have always heard
> they were period. I hadn't focused on documenting the almonds, yet, but
> intend to. It's hard to believe that period confectioners could figure out
> about sugar coating fennel seeds and not see sugar coating almonds...

I'm not as confident about this as you are. There's always the old
cliche mentioning the fact that they had ground meat and sliced
meats and they had bread, but no where do we have evidence of
hamburgers or even sandwiches.

I would be much more confident about they having candied almonds
if there was some evidence of any other candied nuts, not necessarily
almonds.

I'm not sure almonds and spices can be see as equivalent in this
example. While this is late in period, and both spices and sugar
have become cheaper, I'm not sure that sugar has completely lost
it's being thought of as the 'perfect food'. Spices, especially
the exotic imported kinds would, I think, be more likely to be
thought of as something appropriate to go along with this still
exotic 'perfect food', as opposed to more common nuts. Even almonds
were common enough to be ground up and used to make almond milk.

I was hoping you had some direct evidence for the candied almonds.
I like candied nuts. It may even be possible that we've discussed
this before and I've forgotten it. Perhaps some of the information
or referances in the comfits-msg file in the Florilegium might
prove fruitful for your research.

Stefan li Rous