Straight to the recipe Tompouce is the Dutch version of mille-feuille. It is popular throughout the year, but on some days, it is almost traditional to eat this pastry. And on those days, the tompouce is not decorated with the customary pink glaze, but with orange glaze to emphasize the connection to our royal family…
dough
Puff pastry
On Coquinaria are several historical recipes for puff pastry. On this page is a modern version. While I was searching online I saw some recipes for puff pastry that are actually just for flaky dough. Puff pastry is a kind of flaky dough, but to make puff pastry it takes something extra. Because just folding…
Spinach Pie
This the third recipe for Good Friday. The other recipes are Pomegranate Salad and Jacobin Sops. If one grows spinach in the kitchen garden, or is from an older generation, one might remember the sharp-edged seeds of some varieties of spinach. Spinach had to be washed very thoroughly to remove all those unpleasant seeds. Nowadays…
Traditional Dutch Banketletter
“Keep it simple: start with an I” The banketletter is one of the few traditional Dutch Christmas bakes, as most Dutch December bakes are actually done for the national children’s feast Sinterklaas on December 5th. Most people just buy it in the stores, and I must admit that it takes some work to make a…
Carême on puff pastry and shortcrust
On this page is a short overview of what the French cook Antonin Carême (1784-1833) had to say about puff pastry and shortcrust in his book Le patissier royal (1815). He bakes his soufflés in a pie crust, that was the reason that I looked into this matter. Puff pastry There is quite a difference in making…
Cheese pie with pears
Straight to the recipe The recipe for this pie with Brie cheese, pear and egg dates from the middle of the sixteenth century. The source is the Nyeuwen Coockboeck (‘New cookbook’) by the Antwerp physician Gheeraert Vorselman. Although the stuffing is prepared with pears and sugar, this is not a sweet pie. In those days, sugar was…
Pastry dough according to Lancelot de Casteau
This one of the rare recipes for dough in old cookery books. Cooks knew how to prepare dough, so it was not considered necessary to provide recipes. In the cookbook from Lancelot de Casteau, dating from 1604, is a recipe for a kind of puff pastry. It is part of the recipe for ‘tourtes de…
Puff Pastry according to Hannah Glasse and John Farley
Straight to the recipe The Apple Pie of Hannah Glasse (The Art of Cookery made Plain & Easy, 1747) is prepared with a puff paste-crust. John Farley (The London Art of Cookery, 1783) has the same recipe as Glasse, but with a difference: Glasse rolls up the dough, Farley folds it. Both writers prescribe rolling out the dough…
Arabian pasties
Straight to the recipe Just like the Arabian meatballs, these pasties were presented at the opening of the exhibition of Sidrac in 2006. The pasties are stuffed with eggplant from the Anonymous Andalusian Cookery book, and spinach from the Kitāb al-Ţabīkh-al-Baghdadī. Both cookbooks date from the thisrteenth century. More on the Andalusian cookbook can be read at the…
Sixteenth-century pasta dough
Straight to the recipe Two recipes from the Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi Let’s all say it once more, loud and clear: “Marco Polo did NOT bring pasta to Italy from China!” Dried pasta was already eaten in Europe before the good man returned from his travels in 1295. According to some, pasta was already known to the…