OT: Evil Spawn, was, Re: [Sca-cooks] Oops, I forgot...
Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius at verizon.net
Sat Dec 20 21:25:33 PST 2003
Also sprach AEllin Olafs dotter:
>That sounds like an excellent idea! Subtle carrot, without that
>poisonous "I know you could do better if you only tried" speech...
>because sometimes you can, and sometimes you can't, and when you
>already are trying it's just discouraging... but a reason to try
>helps. Especially if it doesn't feel like a lecture... Good luck.
>Because you're right - it is important...
Unfortunately, my lectures all pretty much boil down to, "Sometimes
it sucks to be from Krypton, Clark. People can't help having high
expectations of you."
>Seems to me someone I know told me about a pistachio marzipan cake
>in a modern cake cookbook. Cake Bible or some such, maybe?
Maybe. I'm a Paula Peck's Art of Fine Baking and Gisslen's
Professional Baking man myself. I've been a pastry chef, but normally
I don't have the patience for that type of precision. My most
breath-taking stuff has always been interesting not for its
complexity or elaborateness, but something that, while an everyday
dessert in a two-square-mile area in southern France, seems hugely
exotic to the inexperienced diner, and comfort food to the more
experienced traveller. ;-) As a result I find some of the stuff in
The Cake Bible a bit... not exactly intimidating, but more a
challenge I haven't found it necessary to face...
So, for example, while fooling around in the kitchen in La Colombe
d'Or on a slow day, I sent out a comped dessert that I prepared on
the spur of the moment. The waiter came in and said the customer said
they were the best crepes he had ever eaten; he wanted to know what
this dish was called. "Pancakes," I said. "Pancakes??? What kind of
pancakes?" "Irish pancakes," I said. "Irish pancakes? What the &*%$#@
does that mean?" "It means they're pancakes of a type eaten in
Ireland. Specifically, they're Shrove Tuesday Teatime Pancakes, if
that clarifies anything for you..."
And this is just one of the 57 reasons I prefer the saute station to pastry.
But pistachio marzipan in the modern sense seems to come in two
types: almond marzipan flavored and colored to look like pistachio
goo, and marzipan actually made from pistachios. The medieval stuff
would be the latter.
Adamantius
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