[Sca-cooks] Fun and ignorance - The Response

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Stefan li Rous:
>>OB food Content: I'm increasingly sure that the 'cookies of joy' in the
>>Physica are not actually cookies but troches or pills.
>
>What makes you think this?

I always thought of them as pastilles, sorta like large, herbal
confits. The thing is, Stefan, that the modern recipe, which has
become kind of common in SCA settings, is, as I recall, a lot like a
modern cookie recipe, using techniques and ingredients that are
probably pretty uncharacteristic of medieval cookery techniques. Now
this doesn't preclude the possibility of some kind of accidental
similarity, like the flour-thickened milk-based garlic sauce we did
at EK 12th Night, which turned out to be a lot like milk gravy with
saffron and garlic, for example, but which _was_ a period dish.

But as I recall (and I could be wrong), Hildegarde's herbal lumpy
recipe has been greatly modernized by some editor-type, and has been
nudged in the direction of a modern cookie, and away from its
original form.

Adamantius
--
"No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes
deserves to be called a scholar."
	-DONALD FOSTER