[Sca-cooks] Help please...

[nickiandme at att.net]

>From Helwyse's translation and web site:  

LVIII Marvelous and good walnut bread
If you want to make a bread of walnuts.

Take walnuts and peel and grind them, and take good herbs, a little grated
suet, sweet and strong spices and a little sugar.  Put these in a mortar
with the walnuts and make a paste.  Then take wheat flour and make a sheet
in the way (that one makes) lasagna, large and wide and thin.  Put this
(nut) paste within and knead all this together in the same way that one
makes bread.  Take the dough, when it has become soft like a cake, and put
it to cook in the oven, and when it is cooked pull it out and let it cool.

I gave this my first shot - 
paste:
  1 cup finely chopped walnuts
  1 /2 cup lard
  2 tablespoons dried Herbs d'Coeur (local blend of herbs - sage, fennel, chives, parsley, oregano, rosemary, thyme, winter and summer savory)
  1 tablespoon - spice mix (local blend - ground ginger, nutmeg, cubebs, cinnamon, mace)
  1 / 4 cup Moscovo sugar  (strong molasses flavor - very dark almost black in color)
dough:
  3 cups flour (I use unbleached flour)
  3 / 4 cup warm water

I kneaded the dough then added the paste and kneaded that in.  It was a very heavy dense dough.  Because there was no yeast - I made a fairly flat round loaf - no more than inch and a half tall in the middle.
I baked it at 350 for an hour.  The middle still wasn't done - but there was a nice tasty crust all around the outside.  The flavor was very nice - a touch sweet but not overwhelming.  Not graham sweet but halfway between a nice rye cracker and graham cracker sweet.

Next time, (tomorrow night actually), I am going to try rolling it out more like a graham cracker crust and bake for 20 - 30 minutes.

In re-reading the recipe and listening to Lyse's opinion - should I instead try rolling the dough out and then spreading the paste on and trying to press it into the dough - so that it is more of a cracker type layer with an embedded upper layer of walnuts?  I had read the knead part to mean mix it all together. 

Opinions please?


Kateryn de Develyn
Residing this day in the Barony of Coeur d'Ennui
Kingdom of Calontir