[Sca-cooks] Re: Cheese and Leaves

[wildecelery at aol.com]

<I'm not thinking something to replace the baking pan, I'm thinking 
something to
make a pretty impression in the crust, which would make a bay leaf 
plausible.

   By the way, which edition of Apicius are you working from?   Contest 
might
help us figure it out.  You mention "the original".   Do you mean a 
latin
version?  IIRC the "original" was lost a few centuries ago.>

I'm meaning a copy of one the latin variations and then an English 
translation of  the latin....

Personally, I've been doing the oiled bay-leaf thing and it works well, 
I was just seeking further knowledge


<"...folia laurea subdito..." or "...place bay leaves beneath..."  
While we
usually use dried bay leaves and they would probably work in this 
recipe, I
suspect that the recipe is calling for fresh bay leaves which would 
provide
flavor while seperating the libum from the hearth.>

My guess is that this is why the one modern redaction that i have 
suggests using oiled bay leaves...to re-create some of the moisture and 
flavoring of fresh
<The modern recipe is using soft cheese to simulate fresh cheese.  When 
the
whey is drained, the cheese forms a soft but solid mass that would need 
to
be broken apart for the recipe.  A mortar can be the heavy stone or 
metal
mortar we are familiar with or it may be a bowl.  The instruction to 
grind
may actually be a direction to break up the cheese rather than to 
pulverize
it.  Unfortunately, the simple Latin dictionary I have available 
doesn't
shed any light on the verb.

We don't know precisely what cheeses the Romans used, but Mark Grant
describes experimenting with cow's milk curdled with fig sap.  He also
points out that Roman preservation techniques were to bottle cheese in 
brine
or vinegar, dip it in salt, smoke it, or pack it with crushed pulses.>

I'm actaully using a "fresh" homemade bag cheese....the modern 
redcation that I was originall given calls for cream cheese and after 
three tries, I decided that the texture was a nightmare and started 
making my own cheese to use.

 -Ardenia