[Sca-cooks] Re:frangipangi

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Stefan li Rous:
>Okay, now I'm a bit confused.
>Mairi's description seems to be separate wafers spread with a layer 
>of marzipan, while I read the recipe that Doc gave as wafers forming 
>the crust of a pie, or tart since it has no top, but with enough 
>filling that the individual wafers are no longer that evident or at 
>least you can't pick the individual wafers up and eat them that way. 
>I envision the marzipan layer on Mairi's recipe to be 1/8 to 1/4 
>inch thick, but the other to be half an inch thick.

Why are you envisioning this? Just wondering; I hadn't given that 
aspect of it much thought. I believe both interpretations are coming 
from the same tradition (I think the actual recipe is in Welserin or 
one of the other German sources). In either case, you're spreading 
marzipan onto a pre-cooked wafer as a means of keeping the marzipan 
from sticking to the oven bottom and burning. Marzipan, between the 
oils, the starches, and the sugar, just loves to burn, and even when 
it browns too quickly it can acquire an over-caramelized, bitter 
flavor. You really do have to be careful with it when you cook it. As 
I recall the German recipe in question says you spread out as many 
wafers as you need to cover an area as large as you want to spread 
your marzipan, overlapping them as necessary to cover the area fully 
without gaps.

It's possible Maire's (?) version used small wafers and made 
single-serving marzipan "tartlets", and Doc's version a larger, 
multi-wafer variant on the same thing. I think the German recipe says 
to make the marzipan as thick as your finger, but I could be wrong 
about that. The impression I get is that you want the stuff to dry to 
a sort of shortbread consistency without burning or even browning too 
much, so having it too thick would be a problem, and having it too 
thin might also encourage burning.

>Am I missing something? Both sound wonderful, though.

I'm not seeing them as hugely different...

>Is torte = tart = topless pie, correct?

You may be expecting too much out of cognate words here. Yeah, the 
word "torte" is basically a pie or cake with a pastry outside 
(generally, but not always), but it's not really exactly like a tart 
in the modern sense, in which it's a single-crust pie. It's more like 
two words whose definitions partially intersect or overlap, even 
though they come from the same roots (as, allegedly, does the word 
"tortoise", also the French crab that looks like a Dungeness but is 
called a torteau, and the torteau that is a cheesecake).

Sometimes there's only reality, and the reality is that logic can 
only take us so far ;-).

Scary, ain't it?

Adamantius


-- 
  "Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
	-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry 
Holt, 07/29/04