[Sca-cooks] Pastry cases - baking blind?

[Jessica Tiffin]

At 10:10 PM 4/14/04 -0500, Doc wrote:
>Another quick note - I found these recipes in "A Book of Cookrye",  by
>A. W., London, 1591.
>[ http://jducoeur.org/Cookbook/Cookrye.html ]
>
>To make a Tarte of Prunes.  Take Prunes and wash them, then boile them
>with faire water, cut in halfe a penny loaf of white bread, and take
>them out and straine them with Claret wine, season it with sinamon,
>Ginger and Sugar, and a little Rosewater, make the paste as fine as you
>can, and dry it, and fill it, and let it drie in the oven, take it out
>and cast on it Biskets and Carawaies.
>
>To make a Tart of Cream.  Take Creame and Egs and stir them, togither,
>and put them into a strainer till the whay be come out, then strain it
>that it may be thick, season it with Ginger, Sugar, and a little
>Saffron, and then make your paste with flower, and dry your paste in
>the Oven, and then fill it, and set it into the Oven to dry, and then
>take it out, and cast Sugar on it, and so serve it forth.

Interesting, thank you! - but I'd interpret this as filling the shells with 
the actual _filling_, rather than blind baking with something else 
inside.  There are hundreds of recipes where you are instructed to harden 
or dry the tart shell in the oven before adding and cooking the filling, 
but I'm actually trying to establish if the concept of baking blind - where 
we'd use rice or beans to weigh the shell - existed at all.

Margaret wrote:
>Yes, there is one somewhere. I've just been through my library looking for
>examples for the class I'm teaching on Saturday, and I do remember one
>where the pastry is filled with flour prior to baking, presumably to hold
>its shape.
>I think it's the English corpus, which narrows it slightly. ;-)
>Further, I think it might be in Curye on Inglysch.
Yes, I did have a vague sense that it was an English recipe - thank you, I 
thought I was going mad!  Back to Curye on Inglysh...

thanks, all,
JdH

-- 
Jehanne de Huguenin (Jessica Tiffin) * Drachenwald Kingdom Chronicler
Shire of Adamastor, Cape Town, South Africa
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