[Sca-cooks] Pistachio Marzipan
Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius at verizon.net
Sun Dec 21 06:30:57 PST 2003
Also sprach James Prescott:
>At 18:21 -0800 2003-12-20, lilinah at earthlink.net wrote:
>> Adamantius wrote:
>>>I was looking for pistachio extract there yesterday, but they were
>>>out. Coulda gotten ground, shelled pistachios several blocks east
>>>(think Lexington Avenue), but it's pretty expensive. Someday when I'm
>>>rich I'll experiment with festicade, which is basically a period,
>>>pistachio marzipan...
>>
>> Oh, oh, oh, ah, ah, ah, aaaaaaahhhhh
>>
>> So where's the recipe?
>
>
>Ouverture de Cuisine, 1604, by Lancelot de Casteau, has (my
>translation):
>
>
>75. To make pistachio paste.
>
>Take some pistachios out of the shell and soak them with hot water, so
>that they are green, and cut them into pieces like the pine nuts, and
>dried thus: then mix them with the sugar like the pine nuts, in the
>shape of small breads [loaves], like the pine nuts.
Thank you. What passes for my mind is going. I vaguely remembered a
description or recipe in one of the slightly-more-obscure sources,
but each time I tracked one down in one of the slightly-more-obscure
sources I thought I'd seen it in, it was either not there or turned
out to be a reference to pignole paste. My candidates had been
Opusculum de Saporibus (absent), the Enseignements (absent), a
description of an earlier Milanese wedding feast translated from
Latin into French by Nostradamus (pignolat), and Chiquart's Du Fait
de Cuisine (pignolat -- only a mention of it as an ingredient, as I
recall).
It's kind of interesting to see that this is given as a variation on
the pignolat concept, rather than as a variant of marzipan, even
though the one actual pignolat recipe I can remember offhand _is_
given as a marzipan variant.
Aaah, grandsquires are everywhere...
Adamantius
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