[Sca-cooks] Goetta....was RE: have you heard of this food item?

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Sep 9, 2009, at 1:55 PM, Anne-Marie Rousseau wrote:

> hmm....period antecedants of skirly....
>
> do we know of any dishes (especially from the english corpus) in a  
> period manuscript that involve cooking oats
> specificially? or was it too much peasant food, and so like pea or  
> chestnut flour, wasnt in the cookbooks we
> have record of?

There are at least some medieval English recipes for pottages which  
include oats (mostly joutes -- think of "pot likker" thickened with  
oats -- and gruels, some of which are basic oatmeal porridge, others  
more elaborate preparations with meat).

I believe there are enough references in recipes to "don't put oatmeal  
in this" to suggest using oats as a thickener and enricher of things  
like meat, fish or vegetable broth was a reasonably common practice.

On the charcuterie end of things, I'm pretty sure there are oats in  
malaches (think of a black pudding base baked in a pie shell).

> then there's the method....grain dishes in particular, in the extant  
> corpus IIRC are limited to porriagey
> things, and with wheat or rice? I'm thinking of frumenty, or rys of  
> flesche, or the gruels for the sick...

Lots of oats in 17th century stuff: white puddings, ising puddings,  
flummeries, you name it, we gots oatmeal. And it's in Markham's Boiled  
Meats Ordinary, as I recall.

I'd say the Highland version of haggis, skirlie, and goetta are all  
basic white pudding variants, or co-evolved with it.

> -_Anne-Marie, working off the top of her head, so you can take that  
> for what its worth ;)

I'm sure the top of your head is more level than... um... you know  
what I mean... that didn't come out sounding quite the way I intended...

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