Search This Blog

Thursday 5 January 2017

Pastry

The Ancient Greeks developed the first true pastry and the Ancient Romans brought pies to Britain.

Roman soldiers sometimes ate their meat in pies. The pastry made from flour, oil and water was wrapped round the meat keeping it warm on long marches.

In England recipes for pastry began to appear in the mid 16th century. Previously a coarse, tough pastry was used principally to seal in the juice and flavor of the meat during cooking and protect it against contamination. It wasn't meant to be eaten but by the 1550s, people had begun to snack on the tasty meat juice flavoured pastry fragments.


In later Elizabethan times the English started to eat over Christmas "minced" or "shred" pies, which were a huge covered tart filled with sueted chicken and ox tongue, eggs, lemon peel, dried fruits and sugar. Cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg were traditionally added, representing the three gifts given to Jesus by the Wise Men. The mixture was baked in an oblong pastry case to represent Jesus' crib and a little pastry baby often decorated the lid. Over the twelve days of Christmas a pie was eaten in a different house in order to bring good fortune to the household and the eater for the next year.

The ice cream cone was popularized one hot day at the 1904 St. Louis World Fair. Ernest M. Hamwi, a pastry baker of Syrian origin, rolled up some of his Zalabia pastry and sold the cones to an ice cream concessionaire in an adjoining booth, who was running out of paper cups.

Although today known world-wide as "Danishes" Danish pastries did not originate in Denmark, but were brought to the Scandinavian country by Austrian bakers.

Danish pastry

Pastry chef Carine Goren was the most googled person in Israel in 2015.

Source Food For Thought by Ed Pearce

No comments:

Post a Comment