[Sca-cooks] Re: Marchpane base...

[Elise Fleming]

_Dining with William Shakespeare_ has a dough base for her version of marchpane which isn't particularly period but very tasty.  Adamantius mentioned wafer bases and I saw somewhere that larger marchpanes used several wafers to make the base.  I would guess that those might have been square rather than the round ones we are used to.  Several marchpane recipes say to turn up an edge on the wafer which one can't do if using pre-baked wafers.  The edge would provide a side for the marzipan on top.

How do you define a "thin" layer?  Anyone else have a measurement?  I would use half an inch minimum.

Side note: Many of the marchpanes call for an icing layer!  In the English corpus, I think this is the first use of an "icing".  If you have access to some of the Dutch paintings, there is at least one of a marchpane with its edged base and a decorated rosemary branch stuck in the middle.

Alys Katharine, at work, no heat in the classroom and it is 38 degrees in here!