[Sca-cooks] Leche Lumbard was Gingerbread Playhouse

[Claire Clarke]

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Message: 4
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2010 07:22:05 -0400
From: Johnna Holloway <johnnae at mac.com>
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Gingerbread Playhouse
Message-ID: <8E923598-29BC-4E1B-8874-07C01B162220 at mac.com>
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Google would have quickly pointed you to
http://www.medievalcookery.com/recipes/lechelumbarde.html

There are English versions. Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books, T.  
Austin (ed.) and the FoC feature versions.

Johnnae

On Oct 22, 2010, at 1:30 AM, Stefan li Rous asked about :
> ----
> Is this a medieval dish? Do you have some references or period  
> recipes? Do these references talk about it being molded in period,  
> or is this just something that can be done, but wasn't necessarily  
> done in period?  For some reason the name sounds French to me, but  
> the use of the dates sounds Middle Eastern. Or were dates readily  
> available in France?

Exactly. There are a few different versions in the Two fifteenth century
cookbooks. I've not seen any French version (or an equivalent in any other
cuisine I'm familiar with) so I think it is just an English dish called
'lumbard' to make it sound exotic ('lombard' and similar being an adjective
associated with Lombardy, which is why you think it sounds French). There is
no suggestion in the recipes that it was moulded. The recipes only say to
make it very stiff and slice it. It's then usually served with a syrup made
of spiced wine.

It is actually not really sticky at all (not the way gingerbread is in that
super tacky way)  - once you have mixed the dry ingredients in. The dates
boiled in wine are pretty gloopy and sticky. I ended up with brown goo
splashed all over my kitchen the one time I made it, and it's really hard to
get off if you let it dry.

Angharad