[Sca-cooks] Candied horseradish

[Stefan li Rous]

Brighid replied to me with:
> > A little bit different in wording and perhaps thus affecting the
> > interpretation. I took "chop it all finely" to mean finely diced,
> > about 1/16 inch cubes.
>
> Subtleties of wording are difficult.

Yes, as noticed in the recent thread arguing about the accuracy of 
various interpretations of Apicius.

> We're accustomed, in modern
> cookbooks, to very precise directions, and we know there is a 
> difference
> between chopping, and dicing, and mincing, etc.  The verb in the
> original Catalan is "telar", which means "to cut".  In the 1520 Catalan
> edition of de Nola's Libre de Coch, "tallar" is used to refer to
> carving, cutting meat into walnut-sized pieces, and cutting chicken 
> into
> serving pieces.  By itself, "tallar" tells us nothing.  The crucial 
> part
> is "menut tot", which I translated as "very small" and Vincente 
> rendered
> as "finely".

Thanks for the elaboration on this.

> I honestly don't know what would be the right degree of
> smallness.  My cubes were all 1/2 inch or smaller, which was small
> enough to cook through, and to let the honey thoroughly penetrate the
> horseradish.

I would have thought that the honey might not penetrate to the middle 
of horseradish chunks that big, which is a reason I made my pieces 
smaller. However, you are indicating that it did, so that makes that 
concern go away. I think the larger pieces are going to affect the 
honey to horseradish ratio, since much of the honey is probably on the 
surface of the pieces and the larger pieces will have a smaller ratio 
of surface area to internal area, compared to the smaller pieces.

> Most of the other candied fruits and vegetables in the same cookbook 
> are
> preserved whole, or in slices (the gourds are to be cut in thick
> slices).  So, I don't get the feeling that mincing is called for -- 
> just
> small enough to cook through.

Interesting. This reinforces the argument that the pieces were bigger 
than diced pieces. I was not aware of this other information. Part of 
the disadvantage of working from a single recipe rather than a family 
of them.

Is there any indication of how the gourds are sliced? One way, in 
parallel stripes across the "equator" of the gourd would give rings, 
while cutting them in the pole to pole direction would most likely be 
done in strips. Gourds are hollow, right? Or at least the part we are 
candying here?

Horseradish, as well as ginger, can be a bit "stringy". This likely 
gets worse the bigger the pieces of the root are. I wonder if the seven 
(nine?) days of soaking are also to soften some of these strands as 
well as the leach out some of the horseradish taste. I'm sure there is 
at least some leaching of the horseradish taste wanted, other wise they 
wouldn't have you change out the water so much. Just put the 
horseradish in the water and let it sit.

> IMO.  As I said, I haven't studied
> Catalan, and I may be missing something.

Possible. But I doubt it.

Stefan
--------
THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
    Mark S. Harris           Austin, Texas          
StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
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