[Sca-cooks] Waste not, want not

[David Friedman]

This afternoon, I made some preserved quinces. Al-Warraq's recipe has 
you first briefly boil the quinces in a honey/water solution, then drain 
them, then simmer them in straight honey for an hour or so. When I was 
finished I had about five cups of honey/water solution, some from the 
initial boiling and some from what didn't go into the jars with the 
quince, all of it quince flavored.

At which point it occurred to me that the Manuscrito Anonimo sekanjabin 
recipe gives both sugar and honey versions and that I saw somewhere a 
reference to period quince sekanjabin. I did a rough estimate of how 
much honey was in the water in order to figure out how much vinegar I 
needed, boiled the honey water down, added vinegar, boiled it more until 
it got to about the thickness of sekanjabin syrup. Mixed up some with 
ice water--tasted pretty good. The rest is now in a small bottle.

And in the process I noticed that the Manuscrito Anonimo recipe has a 
substantially higher ratio of vinegar to sugar than the modern recipe I 
got from Claudia Roden's cookbook.

-- 
David/Cariadoc
www.daviddfriedman.com
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/