[Sca-cooks] Goetta....was RE: have you heard of this food item?
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius1 at verizon.net
Wed Sep 9 11:55:31 PDT 2009
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
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