[Sca-cooks] Re: mac & cheese

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Diamond Randall:
>Recipe from about 1390 for court feast of Richard II:
>Macrows.  Take and make a thin foil of dough, and carve
>it into pieces, and cast them on boiling water and seeth it
>well. Take cheese and grate it and butter cast beneath and
>above ... and serve forth.
>
>Unfortunately, it does not mention what kind of dough or what
>cheese to use.  I doubt very much that the dough was made of
>classic pasta semolina flour, nor does it say anything about drying
>the thin dough.  Would such a thin piece of regular (biscuit/ bread)
>dough not result in a thin dumpling instead?

Other recipes from not much later than this one suggests a wheat
flour dough made with water or almond milk, generally not eggs,
rolled out paper-thin. Other English-adopted pasta recipes include
one for papdele, probably a cognate of pappardelle pasta, "pieces of
paper". The English version of the recipe calls for a thin,
lasagna-like sheet, or, lacking that, you can use wafers as the basis
for the ragout that is the literal "meat" of the dish. Other, similar
recipes do say to let the dough dry a bit before cutting and cooking,
IIRC.

>   The instruction to
>grate the cheese indicates it is a hard cheese (I doubt if it was anything
>like Italian parmesian either).  What specific hard cheeses were
>available during the reign of Richard II?  I don't see this coming
>out in any fashion similar to fettucine Alfredo though.

Butter and [Parmigiano-Reggiano] cheese (plus a little of the hot
cooking water) are the primary "sauce" ingredients in real fettucine
Alfredo, as found in Alfredo's restaurant in Rome. No cream, no eggs,
no double boiler, no starch. In fact, no separate "sauce" prepared
anywhere but in the serving bowl. It sounds pretty similar to me. The
major difference would be the fact that the melted butter-cheese
amalgam is emulsified into a creamy liquid in Alfredo, and probably
separate in Macrows/Makrouns.

>Anyone got any ideas on the kind of cheese?

More-or-less contemporary recipes call for a cheese ruayn, which may
well be a reference to la fromage Rouennaise, a semi-hard, mild,
white cheese marketed from Rouen in Normandy. Just as Cheddar today
doesn't necessarily denote the town of Cheddar (in Somersetshire?),
it may be a style imitated by the English. You can still get a cheese
Rouennaise today; whether it bears a close resemblance to period
ruayn I don't know. Other sources suggest it's a cheese made after
the autumn "second growth" of grass, presumably after the main haying
season; this grass is apparently known as "rewen" or "rowen"; known
in French as fromage de gaing, Pichon, in his edition of the
Viandier, identifies Pont-l'Eveque as an example.

Adamantius