[Sca-cooks] Torta reform

[Alexander Clark]

On Wed Mar 7 07:31:12 PST 2012, wheezul at canby.com wrote:
>> Henry here is my translation of this recipe from my translation of the
>> anonimo veneziano I did a long time ago. The whole thing is available
>> online at: http://www.medievalcookery.com/helewyse/libro.html
. . .
>> Take a good quantity of almond milk, and take the flour
>> that you have, well mixed with water so that it is thick.  Take a
>> frying pan which is well greased with oil and with this flour make a
>> crust,
>> and powder it with the sugar and the said spices, add the crushed hazel
>> nuts, finely chopped dates, well washed raisins and ground cloves and save
>> a portion of the crust and put it above each part of these things and it
>> is a tart.
>
>> * - another case of missing ingredients.  The recipe calls for
>> a pound of almonds, which is rendered to almond milk, which is mentioned
>> in the context of the flour, but the flour was mixed with water to a dough
>> and the almonds are never mentioned again.  There is no thickening
>> agent, but it may be possible that the almond milk is added to the dried
>> fruit inside the crust.
>
>I wonder if aqua could of had a wider meaning of "liquid" rather than the
>literal meaning of "water"?

I doubt that such an explanation is needed. This recipe never directly
mentions the filling at all. It lists ingredients, and then says what
to make the dough with, which only includes one listed ingredient.
Then it mentions two more of these ingredients for the crust, but
doesn't say how to add them. Then it says to take some of the other
ingredients, seemingly naming them for the purpose of specifying
something about the condition that each one should now be in, but
doesn't say what to do with the ones mentioned at that point. And
finally it says to put crusts over parts ("parte"), but doesn't say
parts of what.

So the part of the recipe that would have specified which ingredients
go into the filling, or if there's any order to put them in, doesn't
even exist. And since there is no such part of the recipe, we can't
very well read anything into the specifics that it didn't mention. If
anything, I would assume that that part isn't in the recipe because
there's nothing to tell--in other words, if an ingredient wasn't all
used for the crusts, then it's there to go into the filling.

So I would assume that since only the flour, some or all of the sugar,
and some (but not all) of the cloves, were used for the crusts,
everything else from the initial ingredients list is mixed into the
filling. That means that both the almonds and the almond milk are in
the filling. And since almonds are also nuts ("noci" in Italian),
though not the default type of nut, they are presumably prepared the
same way as the walnuts ("possa", whatever is meant by that).

BTW, the quotation included above begins near the end of the
ingredients list, with the almond milk, but the original (as published
at http://www.uni-giessen.de/gloning/tx/frati.htm ) has a list of
ingredients that ends with the almond milk, and then separates the
list from the instructions for how to use them with one of the two
commas that are the only punctuation marks that separate words in the
recipe. So the recipe comes in three stages, separated by commas, and
after the first you have the ingredients assembled (including the
almond milk, but not the water and oil), and after the second you have
crust(s), and after the third you have the torta.

HTH,

-- 
Henry/Alex