[Sca-cooks] Torta reform

[Claire Clarke]

Message: 2
Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2012 11:22:14 -0500
From: Alexander Clark <alexbclark at pennswoods.net>
To: sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org
Subject: [Sca-cooks] Torta reform
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*snip*

The pan is a "padella", and the only sense I've found for this is "frying
pan". If it's used as a frying pan, then the crusts have to be cooked in the
oil without the filling. I would guess that the result should resemble
either a tortilla, or a medieval English cruste rolle (cro?te roul?). Then
you can stack up the cooked crusts, mix the filling, and layer the filling
with the crusts with a crust at the bottom and at the top. And whatever the
translation in The Medieval Kitchen implies, the original never says
anything about a sequence for putting in the different filling ingredients.
It says nothing about whether or not the filling is mixed. In fact, after
the part about how to have the filling ingredients prepared it only refers
to the filling once, briefly and elliptically, to imply that it goes between
the crusts. So by default I infer that the same mixed filling is put in
between any number of crusts.

*snip*

Henry of Maldon/Alex Clark
------------------------------
A padella kind of was a frying pan, but it was more generally a wide,
shallow pan (the padelle depicted by Scappi don't even have long handles
like frying pans do, but that was a century later), and was very commonly
used for cooking tarts. Padelle usually came with a lid and when cooking
tarts one would put them into the coals and pile coals on the lid too. The
instructions here are not very different from those given for other tarts
(which are often along the lines of 'make a crust in a padella'), and these
often include instructions for oiling or greasing the padella first, so I
don't see any reason to interpret this as more like a pancake than a fairly
standard tart crust.  

Angharad