[Sca-cooks] Gingerbread was Food for a Demo
Johnna Holloway
johnna at sitka.engin.umich.edu
Thu Apr 3 17:20:46 PDT 2008
I suspect that it was a way to make a sweet confection out of
foods that might be at hand. Grated bread and spices combined with honey.
Plat in *Delights for Ladies *indicates that it's for "festival times."
22 - To make Ginger-bread. Take three stale Manchets, and grate them:
dry them, and sift them thorow a fine sieve: then adde unto them one
ounce of Ginger being beaten, and as much Cinamon, one ounce of
Liquorice and Anniseeds beeing beaten together, and searced, halfe a
pound of sugar; then boil all these together in a posnet, with a quart
of claret wine, till they come to a stiff paste with often stirring of
it; and when it is stiffe, mould it on a table, and so drive it thin,
and put it in your moulds: dust your moulds with Cinamon, Ginger, and
Liquorice, being mixed together in fine powder. This is your
Ginger-bread used at the Court, and in all Gentlemens houses at festival
times. It is otherwise called dry Leach.
Plat's dry gingerbread on the other hand contains almonds.
23 - To make dry Ginger-bread. Take half a pound of Almonds, and as much
grated cake, and a pound of fine sugar, and the yolks of two new laid
egges, the juice of a lemmon, and two grains of musk: beat all these
together til they come to a paste: then print it with your moulds: and
so dry it upon papers in an oven, after your bread is drawn.
Johnnae
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius wrote: I thought it might either be a
joke, or perhaps in keeping with the
> idea (rightly or wrongly) that gingerbread in this form is one of
> those "lost bread" dishes that could be argued (not necessarily
> successfully) to be a use of expensive spices to make unpalatable
> bread palatable. In other words, a use of spices constituting a frugal
> expedient, as has been posited in the rotten-meat-and-spices scenario.
>
> Of course, most or all of the arguments against the rotten meat thing
> would also apply here.
>
> Or maybe I just didn't get the point...
>
> Adamantius
>
>
>
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