[Sca-cooks] Darioles recipe

[Pixel, Goddess and Queen]

On Sat, 15 Nov 2003, Alex Clark wrote:

> 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.

Have you ever dealt with milk production first-hand? By this I mean 
milking the cow (who is not a modern Holstein-Frisian), letting the cream 
rise, skimming off the cream, etc. Real cream, the stuff that you get when 
you skim milk that's been let rest after milking (it comes out of the cow 
freshly homogenized), is less a runny liquid and more of a somewhat fluid 
solid. If you let it sit long enough, it's more like the consistency of 
sour cream than the stuff you get in cartons at the grocery store. It's 
not a curd, but it's awfully thick.

My aunt and uncle had Jerseys, which are a lot closer to what they had in 
period than modern Holstein-Frisians (the black and white factory cows who 
produce tens of gallons a day). A Jersey will usually produce (IIRC) 5-7 
gallons of milk which is a lot higher in fat content, both milk and 
butter fat, than commercial milk. The cream that we skimmed off the top 
was very very thick.

Period cows produced richer milk and cream than what we get in the store. 
Less of it, but richer. Modern dairy herds have been "improved" to produce 
higher yields of milk with a lower fat content for financial reasons.

> 
> 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 

Margaret, full of random trivia about cows today