[Sca-cooks] Seeking leaves and crust
Terry Decker
t.d.decker at worldnet.att.net
Wed Jan 11 16:43:36 PST 2006
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.
It is an interesting question, which I may pursue later.
Bear
>I do not understand, how can you grind ricotta or soft cheese?
> This sounds like a hard cheese.
>
> Lyse
> the confused
>
> -----Original Message-----
> Make a libum thus: Thoroughly grind 2 librae of cheese in a mortar,
> [Snip}
> 1 1/2 lb. ricotta or other soft cheese
> [snip]
> Simon Hondy
> Bread, did some one say bread?
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