[Sca-cooks] "Custard" Crust?

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Jessica Tiffin:
>At 05:20 AM 4/15/05, Christianna wrote:
>>I just saw a factoid on "Good Eats" that said before 1600, the word
>>"custard" refered to the crust and not the filling.  I've never seen this,
>>does anybody recognize this referenc?
>This is an interesting point. I've just done a research paper on 
>custards, and actually none of the recipes I looked at call 
>themselves "custards" until the late 16th century - they're egg 
>flans, darioles, doucetes, flathonys, whatever. However, when the 
>word "custard" does turn up, at least in the recipes I surveyed, 
>it's applied to a _crustless_ egg/milk mixture, not to a tart.  Both 
>Good Huswifes Jewell (1596) and Elinor Fettiplace (1604) quite 
>straightforwardly assume a custard to be a crustless creature. 
>There's quite an interesting gap in the etymology, if it does indeed 
>derive from "crustade": we have a Missing Link, i.e. a crusted 
>custard actually called a _custard_.  The Elizabethan "custard" as a 
>crustless dish seems to arrive out of thin blue air.

Well, it seems fairly possible that at some point, presumably around 
1600, the standard filling for crustades, which almost always seems 
to involve, in part, a liquid thickened with eggs or egg yolks, 
became the main identifying characteristic of the dish, whereas 
before, it might be said to be a pastry whose filling usually 
contained eggs.

Let's see if we can think of others. Blankmanger as a rice dish 
(although technically the main essential was that it be white -- 
unless you added saffron ;-)) that could contain almond milk and/or 
egg yolks, but which later became an almond or an egg yolk dish which 
might or might not contain a little rice flour (and we haven't even 
touched the presence of meat, usually capon, in blankmanger), finally 
to morph into, essentially, vanilla pudding.

Probably a better example of the kind of shift I'm thinking of is 
bechamel sauce, which, once upon a time, was a thickened sauce made 
from white veal stock, enriched with cream, but later became first a 
thickened white sauce made from milk and cream, enriched by simmering 
veal bones in the sauce for hours, and finally to the meatless, 
thickened milk-based white sauce (cream optional at the end, but 
technically this is then cream sauce), most of us know and not 
necessarily love.

So maybe the concept of identity shift isn't as rare and surprising 
as we might at first think...

Adamantius
-- 




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them 
eat cake!"
	-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", 1782

"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