[Sca-cooks] Pistachio Marzipan

[James Prescott]

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