[Sca-cooks] Eastern Medicinal Sweet

[Sydney Walker Freedman]

Greetings!

     I found this recipe in An Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook of the
Thirteenth Century.  Has anyone experimented with it?  (I'm currently
collecting medicinal foods from the 12th-14th centuries.)

This is given to feverish people as a food and takes the place of
medicine. Take sweet, peeled almonds and pound them fine. Then extract
their milk with a sieve or clean cloth, until it becomes like milk. Add
pomegranate and tart apple juice, pear juice, juice of quince and of
roasted gourd, whatever may be available of these. Prepare them like the
juice squeezed from the almonds and like the mixture of white sugar. Put
in a glazed earthenware tinjir and light a gentle fire under it. After
boiling, add some dissolved starch paste and when it thickens, put
together rose oil and fresh oil and light under it a gentle fire until it
thickens. Then take off the fire and take it out. If the stomach is weak,
add rosewater mixed with camphor.

Pax Christi,
Lady Cecilia de Cambrige