[Sca-cooks] puff pastry

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Irmgart:
>OK... I have no idea even where to start with finding the answer to
>this, so i thought I'd ask all of you educated cook type peoples ^_~
>
>Is puff pastry or a technique similar to puff pastry period?
>
>My gut instinct is "no." It has the feel of frou frou 19th c. French
>cooking to me, but I haven't done any deep research into it (I've
>googled but only spent about 20 min looking)
>
>Thanks!

There's a more-or-less-recognizable puff pastry recipe under that 
name in Sir Hugh Plat's Delightes for Ladies, IIRC, which would put 
it no later than the late-16th-early-17th centuries. There may also 
be similar recipes in The Usual Suspects for the time period, Markham 
and Digby. It's almost certainly at least as old in France, and may 
have Arabic or Andalusian antecedents that are considerably older.

HTH,

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