[Sca-cooks] Tardpolane (was: Yoicks!)

[Philip & Susan Troy]

david friedman wrote:

 > About a month ago, Adamantius wrote:
 >
 >> Hey, you forgot tardpolane. (For the linguists out there, could
 >> this be a Polish tart in Anglo-Norman French? It's in one of the
 >> Anglo-Norman Culinary Manuscripts.) This is a custardy/cheesy
 >> cheesecake with a nifty almond-milk pastry and the Usual
 >> Cuskynole Filling Suspects (figsdatesapplespearsalmondsetc.)
 >> mixed into a fairly standard cheese, egg, liquid filling. What
 >> intrigues me is the fact that the pastry suggests a fish day
 >> dish, while the filling is clearly fulla eggs and dairy. Could it
 >>  simply be that it tastes yummers this way?
 >
 >
 > and I can't find anyone responding to that point.
 >
 > I think you are confusing ordinary fish days and fish days in Lent. Egg
 >  and dairy would be legal for the former, not for the latter. I don't
 >  know  whole lot about what would have gone into a meat-day
pastry--"coffins
 >  of fair paste" or the like doesn't tell you much, and you don't
 > usully get more detail than that--but lard or meat broth would, of
 > course, not be legal for either kind of fish day.

I understand. I think. But perhaps I haven't explained myself properly.
If you look at, say, the cuskynole, or the cresterole recipe in the same
source, they say to make the pastry with eggs or, if it is lent, with
almond milk. Now while it is true that almond milk recipes _do_ occur
out of lent, using almond milk in lieu of eggs for pastry (never mind
that modern shortcrust generally doesn't call for eggs; period pastry,
it seems to have been suggested, often did, as per Ein Buoch Von Guter
Spise, for example), using almond milk for pastry is a technique
mentioned with sufficient frequency to suggest it is a pretty common
lenten solution as a substitute for the eggs in pastry, _and also_ for
the eggs and dairy used for custards on fast days.

Therefore, I'm surprised to find it used in conjunction with eggs and
dairy; it's kind of like making the infamous tofurkey and stuffing it
with a nice pork sausage stuffing. Does it serve any purpose, or address
any need, other than tasting good? Tardpolane is the only example I can
think of that uses almond milk for a pastry where egg/dairy avoidance
clearly is not the issue, since it avoids neither...

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