[Sca-cooks] OOP: 18th c. chocolate (was Weight of candied orange peel?)

[Ron Carnegie]

At 11:40 PM 9/18/02 -0400, you wrote:

>>    Don't expect your usual modern effect from chocalate in 18th
>>    century
>> cooking, it is used different.  It has far more in common with
>> chocalate's use in Spain and Mexico.
>
>I'm not quite sure what you mean by "modern effect".  This is an
>18th century Spanish recipe for a bizcocho -- an egg-leavened
>cookie.  It contains eggs, flour, sugar, and chocolate.  Everything
>except the eggs is supposed to be ground and sifted.
>
>I used unsweetened Mexican table chocolate, which I ground in a
>mini food processor.  In retrospect, it was a bit coarse, and I
>probably should have ground it in the blender with some of the
>sugar to get a finer texture.  The grains of chocolate did not
>completely melt and blend, and they gave the cookies a speckled
>appearance (like old-fashioned linoleum), and a mild chocolate
>flavor.

    What I meant, is that the "insipid" result very well might be correct.
I suspect so even more now that you described the result more fully.  This
has far more in common with what I would expect from an 18th century receipt
using chocolate.  I suspected from your apparent disappointment, that you
might have been expecting something more akin to a modern chocalate cookie.
On the other hand you may be right.  The chocalate should have been ground
not chopped.  Traditionally this is done on a stone mortar called a Metate
(spelling is no doubt wrong as it is a mexican indian word).  They show one
in the movie Chocalat, and we have one large one at work.

    I know this is OOP, but my knowledge of 18th century cooking far
surpasses my knowledge of SCA period cooking as I worked in an 18th century
kitchen for three years, one of those years as the lead cook (wife still does).

I remain,
Ranald de Balinhard,
Ron Carnegie
r.carnegie at verizon.net
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	"The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that
	 once on this earth, on this familiar spot of ground walked
	 other men and women as actual as we are today, thinking
	 their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions but now
	 all gone, vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we
	 ourselves shall be gone like ghosts at cockcrow."
				G.M. Trevelyan
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