[Sca-cooks] Darioles recipe

[Alex Clark]

At 12:35 AM 11/15/2003 -0600, Stefan wrote:
>However, rather than almond milk I'm wondering if this really does mean 
>almond cream as we discussed recently. . . .

That's a good question. I've just now gone over a bunch of recipes and 
found each of the following types of filling:
  1. wine, broth, cream, and egg yolks (2FCCB p. 47, p. 53, p. 75)
  2. pike, almond milk, cheese, and eggs (or maybe thick almond milk 
etc.??) (2FCCB p. 47)
  3. milk, fat from broth, and eggs (2FCCB pp. 55-6)
  4. fresh curds with the whey wrung out, and egg yolks (2FCCB p. 56)
  5. almond milk made with wine, minced fish, currants, and minced bread 
(Noble Book off Cookry p. 56)
  6. cream of cow milk or of almonds, and eggs (Forme of Cury in _Curye on 
Inglysch_, p. 141)
  7. cream of almonds or of cow milk, and eggs (Ancient Cookery, p. 443)
  8. fat cheese and eggs (ibid.)

2FCCB: Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books, at
http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/c/cme/cme-idx?type=HTML&rgn=TEI.2&byte=3356093 .

I had assumed some years ago that the Forme of Cury recipe could reasonably 
be interpreted as meaning almond milk, the word cream having been chosen to 
refer to cow milk and used only loosely with reference to the almonds. But 
it looks a bit different when compared with the Ancient Cookery recipe, 
which is the most similar one that I've found. The latter links the words 
cream and almonds more closely to each other and then says that fat cheese 
can also be used.

All of these recipes call for one or more out of cream, milk with added 
fat, almond milk, or cheese/curds. So both almond milk and cream of almonds 
would give results similar to at least one of the other ingredients. In the 
Forme of Cury it's not so obvious that cream of almonds is intended, 
because it is called for as an alternative to cream of cow milk, which is a 
runny liquid rather than a curd. Since the almond ingredient in Ancient 
Cookery takes the place of either cream or fat cheese, it is less 
surprising that it is called for as cream of almonds.

To get back to saffron, the recipe types listed above that call for saffron 
are 1, 3, 5 & 6 (and optionally, implied by the list of possible colors, 8 
and probably also 7).

Henry of Maldon/Alex Clark