[Sca-cooks] Pie dough - the elusive footnote

[Claire Clarke]

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Message: 2
Date: Sat, 13 Feb 2010 14:57:22 -0800
From: David Friedman <ddfr at daviddfriedman.com>
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Pie dough - the elusive footnote
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Looking at the poem (English translation), the relevant part appears to be:

Roll out the dough.
Whereupon you should purchase
A bit of fat bacon, not at all rancid,
That you will carve as dice:
So it will be sprinkled on the dough.

The dough is being rolled out before the bacon enters the recipe, so 
it doesn't look as though it can be cut into the dough. More as 
though it's an ingredient at the bottom of the filling.

When we do Icelandic chicken, the dough wrapping it is straight flour 
and water, but the contents provide both bacon fat and chicken fat 
which soaks into the pastry when it's baked, especially underneath, 
and makes it yummy. This could well be something similar.

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And there are plenty of other French recipes where bacon provides
fat/flavour inside a pasty (well, two immediately spring to mind - paste's
de connis and Lombard pasties - both very tasty). 

But that's my reading of it too, and the translation seems pretty fair.

Angharad