[Sca-cooks] Proportions?

[Elise Fleming]

Greetings! For those of you good at understanding proportions, here's a 
recipe that I wonder about.

For a "tart owte of lente", which doesn't give any proportions, here is 
what an someone has redacted for the online food history course I'm 
taking. US/UK equivalents in brackets.

100 g Cheshire cheese [.22 lb]
150m ml cream  [.634 cup]
1 egg
[No butter was used, although some was specified.]
"Make a spreadable paste."

One of the course participants tried this but it was too runny. She 
wondered if there was too much cream in the recipe.

When I tried the tart in 2008, I used these proportions:
.81 lb Cheshire cheese  [367 g]
1/4 cup cream  [59 ml]
3 eggs
2 Tbsp butter  [30 g]
(I noted that 2 eggs were probably sufficient, but using a bit more cream.)

To me, it seems obvious that I used more cheese to cream and eggs than 
she did. In her recipe, is the proportion of cream too much for the one 
egg to bind the mixture? Am I missing something as to why her version 
would be runny and mine wasn't? I'm not claiming that my proportions are 
the "right ones". I would just like to know what might be a good 
proportion of these ingredients to keep it stiff enough so that a wooden 
spoon can stand up in it. There's a photo on Flickr that shows the 
Hampton Court product: http://tinyurl.com/zecpkt5 . Thanks for any 
elucidation!

Alys K.



-- 
Elise Fleming
alyskatharine at gmail.com
http://damealys.medievalcookery.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8311418@N08/sets/