[Sca-cooks] Hartshorn Re: Reasons why period cakes aren't modern cakes

Terry Decker t.d.decker at att.net
Fri Oct 4 09:24:37 PDT 2013


There is a recipe for "Water of harteshorne" in Heironymus Brunschwig's The
vertuose boke of distyllacyon of the waters of all maner of herbes, 1527.  I
suspect this is an English translation of his Liber de arte distillandi
simplicia et composita (Little book of distillation) published in 1500.  The
recipe is one of simple distillation of broken horn in water.

English sources, just out of period and beyond, use the antler as a source
of gelatine.  As far as I can determine this is produced by the simple
process of breaking up the antler and boiling it to extract the gelatine
rather than true distillation.

Oil of hartshorn is produced by destructive distillation, where antler is
sealed in a container and then heated to break down the antler into
constituent molecules.  It is pyrolitic process similar to coking or
cracking.  Salt of hartshorn, a mix of sal ammoniac and ammonium carbonate,
is the extract of the condensate from distilling oil of hartshorn without
additional liquid (dry distillation).  Salt of hartshorn is the original
chemical leaven.  Also, there is the question of dating the use of these
processes to produce hartshorn in period.  Modernly, ammonium carbonate,
baker's ammonia, is produced by mixing ammonia and carbon dioxide.

I have a translation of a German recipe that purports to be from 1590 which
uses hartshorn as a leaven.  I have yet to locate the source of the recipe,
so it is of questionable provenance.  Other than that, I have no particular
evidence of hartshorn being used as a leaven in period.

Baking with hartshorn produces ammonia and a strong odor of ammonia which
limits its use to thin bake goods which allow the trapped ammonia to
disipate.  Because of this, the recipes which use it are likely to be small
cakes.  I would expect to find it in a recipe for Springerle, a cookie which
uses hartshorn modernly and whose origin dates back to 14th or 15th Century
Scwabia.  Unfortunately, the earliest Springerle recipe I have located is
Austrian from 1686 and does not list hartshorn.

Bear




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