Recipes

Leach

Leach
A White Leach
The Good Huswifes Jewell, Thomas Dawson, 1596
Take a quart of newe milk, and three ounces weight of Isinglasse, halfe a pound of beaten suger, and stirre them together, and let it boile half a quarter of an hower till it be thicke, stirring them all the while: then strain it with three spoonfull of Rosewater, then
put it into a platter and let it coole, and cut it in squares. Lay it fair in dishes, and laye golde upon it.

Sylvie’s Redaction:
1 cups milk
1 geletin packets
.25 cup sweetener(sugar or splenda)
Coloring of choice(food coloring, saffron, blackberries, or parsley juice as you prefer) Optional flavoring (orange water, rose water)
Warm milk. Add geletin and sweetener. Stir to dissolve. Skim off foam. Pour into 9×12 pan. Cool.

At the feast, each layer of each leach was 2.5 cup of
milk. Normally I used 3 cups per layer but with 3
colors I didn’t want to overflow the pan.

Leach 1 (red, yellow, green)
Blackberries, saffron, parsley. Made with sugar.

Leach 2 ( blue, white, red)
Food coloring, plain milk. Made with splenda.

The original recipe is for only a white leach. The plain white leach is very tasty (Edith says it reminds her of toasted marshmellows) but my theme for the bardic was “six colors” so I experimented to get
multi-colored leaches.

To make a leach with many colored layers you have to make a layer, have it set completely, then make the next layer and allow the new layer to cool so it doesn’t melt the previous layer.

In the layer with blackberries, the first time I made it, the blackberries curdled the milk. I made it again wih about 3 cups of pureed blackberries, water, sugar and gelatin (no milk)

In the green layer I pureed a bunch of parsley with about 2 cups of water. Then I strained this through a cheese cloth to separate the juice from the greens (I used the green bits in the garlic sauce).

The “natural” leach had a lovely golden layer between the green and the blackberries.. but I added it too soon so it melted the blackberries and caused the red part of the berries to float on top of the gold layer and the blue part to stay at the bottom (still kind of cool). I used saffron to get the gold layer.

The “unnatural” leach was supposed to be red, white and blue. The red came out very pink.. and the blue was smurf color. All-in-all, very unnatural (but tasty).

Elsa, the Bard, is on Atkins and had asked that I try to provide sufficient food for the protein inclined. By making leaches with splenda they (and any one else with sugar issues) could have these lovely sweet jellies without any sugar guilt.

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