[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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