[Sca-cooks] Pastelli and baked flour

[Terry Decker]

I think you are referring to Partridge's fine cakes recipe.  Bogdon and I 
played with it a number of years ago and our exchange can be found in the 
Florilegium.  Here's the recipe:

To make fine Cakes.

Take a quantity of fine wheate Flower, and put it in anearthen pot. Stop it 
close and set it in an Oven, and bake it as long as you would a Pasty of 
Venison, andwhen it is baked it will be full of clods. Then searce your 
flower through a fine sercer. Then take clouted Creame or sweet butter, but 
Creame is best: then take sugar, cloves, Mace, saffron and yolks of eggs, so 
much as wil seeme to season your flower. Then put these things into the 
Creame, temper all together. Then put thereto your flower. So make your 
cakes. The paste will be very short; therefore  make them very little. Lay 
paper under them.

(From The Widowes Treasury by John Partridge, 1585.)

Bear


My daughter is experimenting with a Platina/Martino recipe for custard
tart. Martino apparently blind baked pie crusts by filling them with
flour, with the result that we now have some excess baked flour. I am
pretty sure I remember a recipe somewhere that told you to bake the
flour before you used it--I'm guessing late period English but I could
easily be wrong. Does anyone here recognize it?

Also, there is a word in Martino, "pastello/pastillo," of whose meaning
Rebecca is not sure. The translator of Platina translates it as "roll,"
which is itself somewhat ambiguous. Does anyone here know what it  means?


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