[Sca-cooks] Pastry cases - baking blind?

[Jessica Tiffin]

At 10:49 AM 4/15/04 -0500, Bear wrote:
>IIRC, Master Martino uses a covered pie shell filled with flour as the first
>step in preparing live blackbirds in a pie.  The bottom is cut out, the
>flour removed, the blackbirds inserted and then the pie shell is placed over
>a second pie.  You get the effect of the birds flying out of the pie and
>still are able to serve from the shell.

Wheee!  This is the one, thank you!  <happy dance>.  A web search has 
turned up the very recipe, providentially quoted on the page for the new 
edition of Martino coming out in January 2005 (University of California 
Press).  Details below, for anyone interested...

_The Eminent Maestro Martino of Como_, California Studies in Food and 
Culture, 14. Edited and with an Introduction by Luigi Ballerini, Translated 
and Annotated by Jeremy Parzen, and with Fifty Modernized Recipes by 
Stefania Barzini
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9423.html

thanks, Bear!
JdH

-- 
Jehanne de Huguenin (Jessica Tiffin) * Drachenwald Kingdom Chronicler
Shire of Adamastor, Cape Town, South Africa
melisant at iafrica.com ***  http://users.iafrica.com/m/me/melisant
We are modern people with egalitarian instincts deliberately creating a 
society that combines feel-good communalism with hierarchical, exclusionary 
elitism. It should not be surprising that it leads to the occasional 
cognitive dissonance. (Tangwystl verch Morgan Glasvryn, Silverwing's Laws 90).