[Sca-cooks] Chocolate...

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

I recently got an e-mail asking about the chocolate-msg in the 
Florilegium. So i went back and read it... I was intrigued to find 
references by Bear and Alys Katherine to some apparently period or 
just OOP recipes...

I googled but didn't find them, perhaps i didn't use the right search 
parameters.

Bear referred to
>"Confection of ground nuts and cocoa" as recorded in the Casablanca 
>documents of Chef Le Bruin
which may have been a joke or sarcasm, given the context...

And Alys Katherine wrote:
>...I have three purportedly period recipes using
>chocolate mixed with sugar.  One is chocolate mixed with sugar,
>marzipan, and cinnamon into something like a cookie.  (Delicious!)
>Another is a chocolate and pear tart, if I recall correctly.  The third
>mixes chocolate, sugar, cinnamon and boils it before using it with a
>(cookie?) dough.  These were printed in a modern Italian book on
>Renaissance cooking, and were implied to be from the early 1500s. 
>David Friedman referred to this book in an earlier post.  The source is
>the "Carta (sp?) Bardi II" in the archives in Florence, Italy.  The
>finder of the source is an Australian baroness who was a PhD candidate
>in Italy a few years ago.  While we began a brief correspondence, she
>stopped early on and never answered any information about the dates of
>the Carte Bardi manuscripts.  In the modern book all of the other
>manuscripts have dates except this one. 
>
>I posted two, I believe, of the recipes when a similar thread ran about
>9 months ago.

Which i haven't been able to find...

>I have the material in a "text only" file so I can send
>the marzipan one, at least, to anyone interested.  I also have a file
>for the "Mayan" recipe which should probably read "Aztec."  It works
>out to something like a gingerbread.  Baroness Annejke, the Compleat
>Anachronist editor, gave me a copy of the recipe.  If interested,
>e-mail me and I will send it/them.
>
>I am _really_ interested to see what "justin at dsd.camb.inme" has!

Alas, Justin's website is long gone...

I'm not one of those people who can't live without chocolate for a 
weekend, but i am curious... and all this took place in 1996, several 
years before i joined the SCA.

Can anyone share these recipes or point me to the sources?
-- 
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita