[Sca-cooks] Seeking leaves and crust

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Jan 11, 2006, at 7:43 PM, Terry Decker wrote:

> 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 seem to recall Pliny the Elder talking a bit about cheeses in the  
Roman world, Cato giving one or two recipes, and Columella (author of  
De Re Agricultura, not to be confused with Cato's De Agricultura)  
giving us a pretty fair amount of information. I vaguely recall  
something about sage leaves being crushed for their juice, used as a  
vegetable rennet substitute. Somewhere I have a smudgy little  
photocopy of some sections from Columella, but at the moment not even  
a prayer of getting at it.

Adamantius

>
>> 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?
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Sca-cooks mailing list
> Sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
> http://www.ansteorra.org/mailman/listinfo/sca-cooks





"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