[Sca-cooks] A Guess Confirmed

[David Friedman]

At the culinary symposium last weekend, I taught a class on Islamic flat 
breads, frying pan pastries, and some related dishes. One of the 
recipes, the bread of Abu Hamza, tells you to prick the dough, which is 
in pieces a couple of an inch on a side, with a feather before baking 
it. Charles Perry told me some years back that, at least in the modern 
cuisine, what you used was a wooden device with a lot of wires in it to 
prick a bunch of holes at once and gave me one. I later made another, 
designed to produce the encampment badge.

One of the students attending the class asked the reason for the 
pricking, and I didn't know. So we left a few of the pieces of dough 
unpricked, and observed that when baked they rose considerably higher in 
the middle than the pricked ones. The student suggested that perhaps 
that was the purpose, to keep the piece from swelling up in the center, 
perhaps leaving the dough in the middle inadequately baked.

Today I found in the mailbox /Scents and Flavors/, Perry's brand new 
translation of a big 13th century Arabic cookbook, which the he had 
kindly sent me. Looking through the contents, I noticed a recipe for 
Khushkananaj, which I made a few days ago from al Baghdadi's recipe, so 
out of curiosity I took a look at it. The title was "Khushkananaj and 
basandud." The final paragraph starts:

Basandud is khushkanana dough made into flat cakes. Prick them so that 
they won't puff up and bake in the oven, then ...


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