[Sca-cooks] food on St Val's day

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Betsy Marshall:
>We used to break them open, then peel down along the spirals- this might
>be a regional thing...Betsy

There may also be different regional variations as to the typical 
regional shape and definition of "whip" in this usage. I figure 
Cosman, growing up in Brooklyn and writing in, I think, Manhattan or 
New Jersey (IOW, the same region as me, roughly, and therefore with 
similar semantic expectations), may be referring to the pseudo-cherry 
red shoestrings, which may be three or four feet long (or more, IIRC) 
sort of bundled up, but round in cross-section and only maybe 1/8 
inch or less in diameter.

Let's see. Obviously 99% of this stuff is extruded. I remember short, 
thickish cylinders, either sliced clean off or snipped while warm to 
flatten ends. These were "nibs". Later versions of nibs had several 
holes running along their length. There were ribbons, just flat 
ribbon-shapes, rolled up, usually. There were also ribbons made up of 
individual spaghetti-like strands laid out side-by-side. These could 
also be either rolled, bundled, or flat.

Then, of course, there were Twizzlers, kind of a red or black 
licorice, seven-inch, penne rigati. I think they made 
chocolate-flavored ones at one point, and somebody else is making 
fruit candy, like all those fake fruit-leather snacks you see in the 
supermarket, in a bazillion fruit flavors, but none of those are 
cherry "licorice". These came in maybe 12 or 16 to a package, stuck 
together so you had to peel them apart. Still commonly found in movie 
theater concession stands, at least around here. It seems as if many 
people who wouldn't be caught dead walking around in public with a 
pack of Twizzlers _must_ have them for movie-theater use, and for 
movie-theater use only. Maybe because it's dark and no one will see 
them? I used to like to bite chunks out of them, and bite the ends 
off, to make whistles and flutes out of them.

My grandmother was  a partisan of the little, individually-wrapped, 
black licorice tablets, which were sinfully hard and quite powerful. 
There was, AFAIK, only one brand for these, something 
Germanic-or-Scandinavian-sounding. Maybe Lindt? Distinctive little 
red, white, and black paper wrappers, twisted at the ends. These, of 
course, only existed in the pungent black form (IOW, real licorice), 
and you had to suck on them; they were too hard and tenacious to 
chew, although strictly speaking they weren't hard-crack candy. Maybe 
some kind of carbon-steel alloy mixed with horse-glue; I think 
dentists owned stock in the company since the hard-licorice and 
dental-repair industries seem to have linked fortunes. We were sort 
of ambivalent about these as kids, but after all, what's a little 
suffering in the name of the ancient institution of grandma pressing 
free sugar on a child?

Adamantius



>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: sca-cooks-bounces at ansteorra.org
>[mailto:sca-cooks-bounces at ansteorra.org] On Behalf Of Phil Troy / G.
>Tacitus Adamantius
>Sent: Monday, February 16, 2004 9:12 AM
>To: mooncat at in-tch.com; Cooks within the SCA
>Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] food on St Val's day
>
>Also sprach Sue Clemenger:
>>Julienne them, maybe?
>>--maire
>>
>>jenne at fiedlerfamily.net wrote:
>>
>>>>shredded red licorice whip candy
>>>
>>>
>>>How in Hestia's name do you shred licorice whips?
>
>A thin, very... oblique, nearly-but-not-parallel... bias-cut? Or,
>just cut them into appropriate lengths?
>
>Adamantius
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