[Sca-cooks] Seeking leaves and crust

[Terry Decker]

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?