[Sca-cooks] mysterious query

Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius adamantius1 at verizon.net
Wed Jan 24 06:31:35 PST 2007


On Jan 24, 2007, at 9:00 AM, Nick Sasso wrote:

>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> Somewhere I had heard that Speculaas was once refered to as Parliament
> Cakes.
>> From http://hunbee.freeweb.hu/history.htm
>  *At the Capital of Province Pannonia of the Roman Empire (western  
> part of
> the present Hungary), what is named Aquincum, the archeologists  
> have found
> shapes for parliament-cake making.
>  *In 1015, the parliament-cake makers (pistardus) were mentioned on  
> the
> papers of Monastery of Pecsvarad. Also some skeps were mentioned on  
> the
> warrant of the Abbey of Tihany.
>
> De  > > > > > >
>
>
> A mixed bag, and very useful.  That gives us the use of an  
> implement to make
> pistardus, which seems to be similar to the parliament cakes.  It  
> does not,
> however give us a date for the useage of the word 'parliament'.
>
> niccolo difrancesco
> (and I don't have any reference materials to help out with today)

And why am I getting hamburger-thread flashbacks from this?  
Presumably because identity of concept (or what makes a hamburger a  
hamburger, or in this case a parliament cake a parliament cake) is  
perhaps being lost in translator's equivocation: we now have people  
believing that pistardum (which from the context I gather are made  
from honey) are parliament cakes (so far every recipe I've seen calls  
for treacle). I'd sooner call them lebkuchen, which might be just  
slightly closer, but it serves as a lesson that it's generally a bad  
idea to equivocate, or  assign what somebody thinks is a familiar  
concept to something unfamiliar for convenience, since the price we  
all pay is often misinformation and ignorance.

All right, that's enough hard words for today. See John run. Run,  
run, run...

Adamantius





"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





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