[Sca-cooks] Pistachio Marzipan
James Prescott
prescotj at telusplanet.net
Sun Dec 21 11:31:47 PST 2003
At 09:30 -0500 2003-12-21, Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius wrote:
>>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.
Ouverture gives the following recipes in order:
69. To make Marzipan.
70. To make sugar paste.
71. To make caneline [paste].
72. To make orange paste.
73. To make fougeline [paste].
74. To make pine nut paste.
75. To make pistachio paste.
76. To make royal paste.
I believe that Casteau thinks of all these as derivative of, or
related to, Marzipan.
Thorvald
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