[Sca-cooks] cuskynoles

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Jul 31, 2010, at 3:19 PM, emilio szabo wrote:

> 
> Many thanks for the input on and off list. Please let me make a few further 
> comments.
> 
> 1. 
> 
> I was told and I am well aware, that there is an ancient controversy between 
> David and Adamantius about the question, how to exactly understand the recipe(s) 
> we have and how to proceed in making cusynoles.
> 
> So, the basic question in _this_ controversy is or was:
> "Basically, the disagreement is on the construction of a cuskynole."
> http://www.florilegium.org/files/FOOD/cuskynoles-msg.html
> 
> "And the giants fought not once, but many times ..."
> 
> At least in the florilegium, I cannot see any discussion of the giants as for 
> the connection of cuskynoles and the arabic tradition. David, in his latest 
> post, said:
> 
> 
> << Khushkananaj in al-Baghdadi. I've been making it for twenty or thirty 
> years. It didn't occur to me that it had any connection with cuskynoles. >>
> 
> 
> So, this (the connection of cuskynoles/kuskenole with the arabic tradition) 
> seems to be a topic, that was not part of the Cariadoc/Adamantius controversy so 
> far. I might be mistaken.

At the earliest stages of the discussion, we had access to a total of one cuskynole recipe -- actually it was one of two that I said I had found a little confusing (the other was for mosserouns yflourys, which appears to be an egg-yolk-gilded, grilled mushroom dish - any Arabic insights on that one???).

The French original (or at least predecessor), which had a different diagram, only turned up somewhat later in the proceedings.

I have to idly wonder if some of these excellent professional medieval manuscript scholars were driven to investigate this fascinating and tempting medieval dish because of the two loons in the Florilegium... I have to admit I got a rather silly thrill from one of those collected (read illegally boosted) historical recipe websites which contains a claim that the site author's husband loves her cuskynoles in his lunchbox to take to work... and it's clearly my adapted recipe from a Crown Tourney feast years ago... yeah... whatever... ;-)

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