[Sca-cooks] Re: Coffyns

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Micheal:
>I working away in my kitchen one day when a thought hit me.  It hurt 
>( before anyone else gets it)You know they had pots and pans made by 
>hand. Why wouldn`t they have used such for a shaping mold.  Flip the 
>pot  bottom side up. Take the pastry throw it on top of your 
>cleanest pot of appropiate size. Shape drop it on the counter fill 
>it  cap it oven it. Much faster operation for simple day to day . 
>Much faster then all the hands on methods I have been reading. May 
>also explain why there are no molds to be seen or to be questioned 
>about. I realy have a hard time believing they liked to work any 
>harder then we do. Another project to look at maybe.
>Da

They probably did have the pastrycook's equivalent of raising stakes, 
and the process of wrapping dough over and around one probably very 
much like raising a knee cop. Modern instructions for working with 
hot-water pie doughs often include using something like a large glass 
jar as a form, but I believe I have an old (semi-old, probably 1940's 
or so) English professional baking manual/textbook which mentions 
using a wooden form, presumably a cylindrical block with smoothed 
edges, on a stick, to form the pastry cases for small pork pies.

But I was always struck by the period instructions to "raise a 
coffin", and always had a feeling the verb use was functionally 
identical to the verb usage wherein an armorer raises a cup-shaped 
piece. [Note that the recipes don't say to "dish a coffyn in a trap"; 
they say to "raise" it... ;-)  ]

Speculation, yes, but interesting nonetheless.

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

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