[Sca-cooks] Prince-Bisket Question

[JIMCHEVAL at aol.com]

A tithe from 1087 in France specifies that the son of the family will give  
a biscuit each year. Clearly this would have been somewhat larger than what 
we  think of as a biscuit now. "Bis cuit" (bis coctam) means no more than 
that it  was twice-cooked, or, by extension, very hard. Hard enough to be 
kept for sea  voyages and broken with a special pestle in monasteries. But it 
tells us nothing  about size.

So it is quite possible that the pans here were pretty big,  but really one 
can't say. The only thing that is virtually certain is that it  would have 
been baked until very hard.
 
jC
 
Jim  Chevallier
_www.chezjim.com_ (http://www.chezjim.com/) 

FRENCH BREAD HISTORY:  Seventeenth century bread
http://leslefts.blogspot.com/2016/02/french-food-history-seventeenth-century
.html









In a message dated 7/23/2016 9:07:38 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,  
ddfr at daviddfriedman.com writes:

The term  actually means "twice 
cooked," although the Hugh Platt recipe I use  doesn't actually say to 
cook it a second time. It does say to "bake it in  coffins, of white 
plate, however, which sounds to me closer to a loaf pan  or pie tin than 
to the 3" biscuits on a cookie sheet that we used to  make.

Any opinions on how one should interpret the final part of the  recipe?