How to Milk an Almond Stuff an Egg And Armor a Turnip A ...

Scaled down version:
3 c flour 2 ½ T cream
¾ c sugar 1 egg yolk
2 ½ c currants ¼ t nutmeg
⅜ lb butter 2 t sack
(This assumes that “spoonful” = T)
47
Mix flour, sugar, and currants, then cut
butter into the mixture as one would for
piecrust. Add cream, egg yolk, nutmeg, and
sack (we used sherry). Knead together, warm
it. Bake cakes about 20 minutes at 350°.
Icing: about ⅓ c sugar and enough water
so you can spread it.
To Make an Excellent Cake
Digby p. 219 (Good)
To a peck of fine flour take six pounds of fresh
butter, which must be tenderly melted, ten pounds
of currants, of cloves and mace, ½ an ounce of
each, an ounce of cinnamon, ½ an ounce of
nutmegs, four ounces of sugar, one pint of sack
mixed with a quart at least of thick barm of ale
(as soon as it is settled to have the thick fall to the
bottom, which will be when it is about two days
old), half a pint of rosewater; ½ a quarter of an
ounce of saffron. Then make your paste, strewing
the spices, finely beaten, upon the flour: then put
the melted butter (but even just melted) to it; then
the barm, and other liquours: and put it into the
oven well heated presently. For the better baking
of it, put it in a hoop, and let it stand in the oven
one hour and a half. You ice the cake with the
whites of two eggs, a small quantity of rosewater,
and some sugar.
Scaled down to one sixteenth of the original
2 c flour ¼ c yeast residue from beer
¼ t cloves (or 1 t yeast in 3 T water)
¼ t mace 8 threads saffron
½ t cinnamon 1 T rosewater
¼ t nutmeg 2 T sack (or sherry)
½ T sugar 2 c currants
⅜ lb butter
icing:
⅛ egg white (about 2 t)
¼ t rosewater 2 T sugar
Mix flour, spices, and sugar. Melt butter,
mix up yeast mixture, and crush the saffron in
the rosewater to extract the color. When the
butter is melted, stir it into the flour mixture,
then add sack, yeast mixture, and rosewatersaffron
mixture. Stir this until smooth, then
stir in currants. Bake at 350° in a greased 10"
round pan or a 7"x11" rectangular pan for 40
minutes. Remove from pan and spread with a
thin layer of icing. We usually cut it up into
bar cookies.
Pastry Which They Call Canisiones
Platina p. 144 (book 8)
When you have rolled out your pastry made
of meal with sugar and rosewater and formed it
like a crust, put into it the same mixture as the
one I said in the section on marzapan [Take
almonds that have soaked in fresh water for a
day and night and when you have cleaned them
as carefully as can be, grind them up, sprinkling
them with fresh water so that they do not make
oil. And if you want the best, add as much finest
sugar as almonds. When all this has been well
ground and dissolved in rosewater...]; this time, it
should be formed like rolls and cooked in the oven
as I said before, with a gentle flame.
pastry: filling:
2 c flour ¾ c almonds, soaked
¼ c sugar ½ c sugar
2 t rosewater 1 t rosewater
~10 T water 2 t water
Mix pastry ingredients and knead to a dry
but not stiff dough. Divide in half, roll each
half out to about 12" across. Coarsely grind
the filling together. Spread thinly onto pastry,
leaving ½" margin around the edges, and roll
up like a jelly roll; seal seams tightly to avoid
leakage. Bake 40 minutes at 350°. Slice when
warm; crumbles when cool.
This makes two rolls about 12 inches long.
Best when fresh; they dry out by the next day.
Note the similarity between this recipe and the
Islamic pastry khushkananaj, p. 116.