[Sca-cooks] Pistachio Marzipan

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

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