[Sca-cooks] more suet & vinegar

[Kim]

  Hello again,

I have been ask to pass this message along, it contains details of what
actually happened.

Kim,
  Could you forward this to the cooks list.

Greetings,
   Thank you all for your responses.
My appologies for not making this as clear as possible.
I'm specifically looking for vinegar recipes (thank you to Caointiarn
for sending me a detailed description for it) and if there are any
differences in today's suet compared to what was used in period.

I have access to white eggs from range raised chickens. :) I get them
unwashed from the farmer.
I used those eggs in my initial tries with the recipe.
I also spiked the store bought wine vinegar (7%) I was using with some
acetic acid to bring it up to a 9%v/v  content.

Here's what happened.
I tried 3 different suets
1) store lard
2) rendered beef suet from a butcher
3) pork suet from a butcher

All the suets worked about the same.
If the suet was molten it did not protect the egg for 15 minutes, let
alone 8hrs, and I got a completely red acid etched egg.
If the suet was soft and warm and the egg was covered in a thick layer,
then a pin was used to remove the suet, I got indistinct etching from
the acid. The suet did not seem to hold it's shape once it was droped in
the acid.

If you dip the egg in wax then remove the hardened wax with a pin you
can get some distinct shapes.
This of course got me to wondering if the suet mentioned was something
else, maybe tallow? And did the term suet have a broader or different
meaning in period?

With this process you get a slightly depressed design in a
brownish/reddish hue, the colour of the red wine vinegar.
It would probably take more then 12 hours (or a much stronger acid
content) to etch through the shell. I left it in vinegar for 2 days at
one point because I wanted to get all the way through the shell for one
of the designs - no such luck. :)

-Kataryna Tkach (called Dragonweaver)