[Sca-cooks] Another Pastry Question
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius1 at verizon.net
Sat Dec 27 06:25:29 PST 2008
On Dec 27, 2008, at 8:59 AM, Georgia Foster wrote:
> has anyone out there ever made "Fly's Graveyard"? It is a rather
> pie-like dessert made of currents and prepared in a 8 x 8 square
> cake pan.
The Google consensus seems to be that a fly's graveyard is a
simplified variation on the general theme of the Garibaldi biscuit,
which would, ideally, be made with a currant filing between two layers
of pastry. It occurs to me to wonder if there's any connection between
the layering, Garibaldi, Neapolitan supremacy and/or Italian
unification (I was looking at the suspiciously Neapolitan color scheme
of layered Italian "rainbow cookies" (a particularly virulent vice of
the Evil Spawn's) the other night, and got to wondering about this,
and serendipity in real life being what it is, I thought I'd ask.
Apparently not, though, as Garibaldi spent much of his professional
life outside of Italy, and largely predates unification.
Is it just me, or do Americans have an unhealthy fixation on flies
when they should be thinking of enjoyable desserts? I know window
screens are a fairly recent development in the scheme of things, and
when you watch old Hal Roach (no pun intended) movies from the early
1930's, which are all filmed in Southern California, all the Our Gang
kids and Laurel and Hardy seem to be crawling with flies half the
time... sometimes they're worked into the storyline, and sometimes
it's just maddeningly fascinating to wonder how long a person can
ignore a fly crawling across one's own face without brushing it off...
it's like watching Buñuel's "Un chien andalou" or something...
Or is this just a matter of a rectangular "plot" with little black
lumps that look like flies if you're fanciful and/or slightly
nearsighted? ;-)
Adamantius
"Most men worry about their own bellies, and other people's souls,
when we all ought to worry about our own souls, and other people's
bellies."
-- Rabbi Israel Salanter
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