To Make Jumballs of Chocholett

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This recipe “To Make Jumballs of Chocholett” is from Elisabeth Hawar’s recipe book (now William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, fMS.1975.003). A favorite on the banqueting table or dessert spread, many recipes for “Jumballs” or jumbles are collected in early modern recipe books. These small cookies are made from flour and almonds in varying proportions, sweetened with sugar, and flavored with anise, caraway, and, in this recipe, lemon, rosewater, and chocolate.

I was thrilled to return to the Clark Library last week to speak about my recipe recreation work, take a look at Elisabeth Hawar’s recipe book again (and other manuscripts),  and to share this jumball recipe.

Original Recipe

(31) To Make Jumballs of Chocholett
Take halfe a ll of Jordan Almonds blanch ‘em in
warm water, & as you do ‘em put ‘em in cold water; have
ready some gum Dragon well steeped in water or rose
water, but the best is fair water & Juice of Lemmon
some Lemmon pill tenderly boyled, put your Almonds
into a Mortar, ffirst dry ‘em, beat ‘em to a very fine
paste, beat the Lemon pills with the Almonds, & as you
beat ‘em now & then put into them & a spoonful of
this water & Juice of Lemmon with the gum in it to
keep them from Oyling, when they are beaten very
small to a fine paste take it out of the Mortar & lay
it on a silver plate & set it on a little fire to dry
stirring it oft, then take some of this paste & work
it in fine sugar till it is a stiffe paste then roll
it thin, & cut it in little long pieces as you please &
make little Jumballs of some, & some put Chocholet
in & lay them on papers to dry before the fire,
a little will dry them.
The other part of the Almond paste which
you keep out take to it two spoonfulls of fine
flower & the white of an egge well beaten,
Mingle your flour & egge & Almond paste altogether
into a paste then make it up into little Jumballs as
you please in some of them put Chocholet, lay ‘em on
papers strew flour under them set them in a warm
Oven more than warm after you have drawn you
white bread out.
Let them be in the oven a little more than
a quarter of an hour.

The original recipe for Hawar’s chocolate jumballs is a complex, two-part affair. The first part provides instructions for blanching and grinding almonds in a mortar and a pestle to make an almond paste . Lemon peel and juice, rosewater, sugar, and “gum dragon” — dried, water-soluble plant sap used as a binder — help the freshly cooked and pulverized almonds form a paste. The second part of the recipe provides instructions for shaping jumballs out of this mixture with the addition of an egg white and flour. The pliable dough can be formed into pleasing shapes and gently, carefully baked as the oven cools from an intense period of bread baking.

As always, I’m committed to using ingredients that my readers can buy at their local grocery store (and rosewater). So I started with ground almonds and I did not buy gum dragon (commonly known today as gum tragacanth) to prepare this recipe. Since I’ve made marzipan in the past, I had a sense of what proportions I could use working from the 1 egg white called for in the recipe and felt fairly confident that I could get the mixture to bind. That said, starting with whole almonds and including gum dragon would likely impact the texture of the final jumballs. (If you make them this way, let me know!)

This recipe also insists on the tantalizing possibility of flavoring the jumballs with chocolate, but it does not provide a lot of detail about what that chocolate would be like. Hawar also included a chocolate option, with minimal explanation, in her recipe for puffs (meringue). I’ve worked with seventeenth-century hot chocolate recipes before and they helpfully provided me with some clues. To my mind, cocoa nibs are the least processed form of chocolate that is widely available in supermarkets today. In the half of my jumball dough that I flavored with chocolate, I decided to include both cocoa powder and cocoa nibs for crunch deep, slightly bitter chocolate flavor. Cocoa powder is a modern ingredient and an all-cocoa nib version would be rather different. (If you make a cocoa-nib only batch, let me know how it turns out!)

Updated Recipe

This recipe makes about 30 jumballs – half almond and lemon, half almond and chocolate. If you plan to make a batch of entirely almond and lemon jumballs, simply skip the final steps that describe dividing the dough and adding cocoa powder and cocoa nibs. If you plan to make a batch of entirely chocolate jumballs, add a double amount of the chocolate flavorings to the mix from the start (¼ cup cocoa powder and 2 Tablespoons cocoa nibs).

1 lemon, peel and 1 tablespoon juice
2 ¾ cups ground almonds
1 cup sugar
2 Tablespoons flour
1 egg white
1 Tablespoon rosewater
2 Tablespoons cocoa powder
1 Tablespoon cocoa nibs

Peel a lemon using a vegetable peeler. Place the lemon peel and 1 cup water in a small sauce pan. Bring to a boil and cook for 5 minutes. Drain and set the peels aside to cool. Chop the cooked lemon peel as finely as you can.

Preheat your oven to 350F (180C). Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

Measure the ground almonds, sugar, and flour into a large mixing bowl. Stir to combine. Then stir in the chopped lemon peel and ensure it is evenly distributed throughout the mix. Add the egg white, rosewater, and lemon juice. Stir with a spoon and then with your hands. The mixture should hold together when pressed.

Divide the jumball dough in two in the bowl or on a cutting board. Place one half on a cutting board and the other half in the mixing bowl. Add the cocoa powder and cocoa nibs to the jumball dough in the bowl. Mix with a spoon and your hands until the chocolate flavorings are evenly distributed throughout the dough.

Shape the almond lemon and the almond chocolate jumballs on a cutting board and place onto the lined baking sheets. Letters, knots, twists, and other shapes using 1-2 Tablespoons of dough all work well. 1 Tablespoon balls of dough rolled smooth work especially well.

Bake for approximately 10 minutes. The bottoms of the almond and lemon jumballs will be golden brown and the jumballs will be crispy on the outside and soft in the middle.

Set aside to cool on a baking sheet for at least 5 minutes before serving.

The Results

Honestly, these jumballs are just delicious. They reminded me of all sorts of almond-rich, marzipan-like, European-style cookies that I’ve had the pleasure to enjoy near home or while traveling. The lemon peel lifts both the almond and lemon and almond and chocolate jumballs. Friends and family really liked these and I anticipate baking them again sometime soon.

To Make Chocolett Cream (Lady Elizabeth Craven)

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See the end of the post for information about the fourth annual Great Rare Books Bakeoff that is taking place this week (September 30-October 8, 2023)!

 

On a recent visit to State College, I was delighted to see a new addition to our recipe book collection. Lady Elizabeth Craven began to compile this recipe book in 1702 in the early years of her marriage and was still adding recipes to its pages at the time of her death in 1704, at age 25. There is much more to learn about Lady Craven and her manuscript and I was immediately interested in her fashionable recipe for “Chocolett Cream.”

As I’ve written in the past about hot chocolate and chocolate cream recipes, chocolate was a new and trendy ingredient in England that had recently arrived from the Americas in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Recipes for chocolate drinks and creams from this period reveal how Indigenous American knowledge about chocolate and the culinary preferences of Spanish colonizers shaped early uses of chocolate in English cookery. Lady Craven’s recipe typifies this trend as it instructs a user to “mill” chocolate or whisk it using a specialized chocolate whisk.

 

Original Recipe

Image of chocolate cream recipe in original manuscript.

To Make Chocolett Cream
Take a pint of cream, one spoonful of chocolet, & the yolks of 2 Eggs & the
white of one, then sweeten it to your taste, let it boyle up, & then put
it into a Chocolet pot, & mill it, & then serve it up when it is cold

Updated Recipe

1 pint (473ml) heavy cream
1 oz. (25g) baking chocolate
2 eggs
¼ cup sugar (50g)

Chop your chocolate into small pieces that will easily dissolve in hot cream.

Separate one egg and set aside one egg white. Whisk one whole egg and one yolk together in a small bowl.

Pour the cream into a small saucepan. Add the sugar, chopped chocolate, and whisked eggs to the pot. Heat over a medium heat until just simmering – about five minutes. Pay close attention to the pot to avoid overcooking and stir to prevent the eggs from solidifying on the bottom of the pot.

Remove the pot from the stove  and pour the chocolate cream mixture into a sturdy bowl (or the bowl of a standing mixer). Beat with an electric mixer (or in a standing mixer, or by whisking vigorously) for about two minutes. (It will take substantially longer if you are doing this by hand.) The chocolate will fully integrate into the mix, small bubbles will form, and it will begin to look glossy.

Rinse out your saucepan and pour the chocolate cream mix back into the pot. Cook over a low heat for approximately ten minutes, whisking constantly. The cream will thicken and reduce in volume during this step.

Pour the hot chocolate cream mix into a storage container or heat-safe serving dish and allow to cool first at room temperature and then in the refrigerator for at least two hours.

Serve the chocolate cream cold.

The chocolate is rich and luscious. I was surprised that this small amount of baking chocolate created such a deep chocolate flavor. As I eat the remaining chocolate cream in my fridge, I plan to pair it with fresh fruit, or maybe a warm fruit sauce, or simple sugar cookies or biscuits.

Christian Barclay’s Sugar Bisket

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Bake this recipe between September 30 – October 8 to participate in the fourth annual Great Rare Books Bakeoff! (More information at the end of the post.)

Many thanks to my Barclay Project collaborators, (especially Jonah Carver and Christina Riehman-Murphy), Eberly Family Special Collections (especially Clara Drummond), and The Center for Virtual/Material Studies (especially Sarah Rich).

I first saw Christian Barclay Jaffary’s 1697 recipe book in February 2020 when librarians brought materials from Penn State Libraries’ Eberly Family Special Collections to the Abington College campus for a series of special classes. I was immediately intrigued to learn more about this small manuscript brimming with recipes written in a beautiful hand. I was especially curious because the manuscript was held in family papers and because the Barclay family were prominent Scottish Quakers with close ties to William Penn.

Since that day, Christian’s recipe book has received quite a lot of attention. First, the library’s conservation and digitization teams collaborated to safely create images and make the manuscript available online in 2021 so that more students and scholars could access Christian’s recipes for medicines, cookery, and fabric dying.  Over the past two years, I have worked with students and collaborators who have transcribed the manuscript in its entirety — using the digital images and original manuscript . (We will be publishing that transcription very soon and are excited to share it with you!)

Of course, I’ve also been cooking from this manuscript over the past few years. I always learn something when I take historical recipes into my rowhome kitchen — something about flavor, heat, texture, ingredients, method. Preparing “Sugar Bisket” revealed an interesting set of textures between the whipped eggs and sugar that form the base of the batter and the sugar crystals that coat the top after it has been smoothed — by a feather in the original or a spatula in my kitchen. (My quills are in my office on campus.)

This past summer I also had the pleasure of testing wool-dying recipes from this manuscript at a lively workshop with an eclectic and brilliant group of colleagues in preparation for Sad Purple and Mauve: A History of Dye-Making, a new exhibition that has just opened in Special Collections. Since I normally lead most recipe recreation workshops that I attend, it was a nice change to step back and learn from other experts, to see what experience and know-how they supplied to make Christian’s dyes come to life in the dye-pot. I was also pleased to share my first batch of recreated Sugar Bisket with the group. The verdict? Delicious.

Original Recipe


Sugar Bisket
Take 3 quarters of a pund of
sugar, & 8 eggs wanting four
whites, put in the sugar and
Beat them with a stick one
whole hour, put in 3 spoonfulls
rosewater, one spoonfull of
Carvy seed, beat it a quarter of
ane hour longer, take 3 quarters
of a pund of flower, and stirr
it in them, put them in tren
chers buttered & straw a little
suggar on the biskets, & so strake
them a little with a feather, and
them in the oven not very  hot:

Updated Recipe
Makes approximately 20 cookies

¾ cup (150g) sugar, plus 1 teaspoon sugar to sprinkle on top
4 eggs, 2 whole eggs and 2 egg yolks
4 teaspoons rosewater
1 ½ teaspoons caraway seeds
1 1/3 cups (167g) flour
Butter to grease the baking sheets

Preheat your oven to 325F (162C). Butter two baking sheets.

Put the sugar, two whole eggs, and two egg yolks in a large bowl (or the bowl of a standing mixer). Using a hand mixer (or the whisk on a standing mixer), mix on a high speed for about 10 minutes. Use a spatula to ensure that the sugar is fully integrated. The mixture will turn glossy and slightly bubbly.

Add the rosewater and caraway seeds and mix for 1 minute to integrate both completely.

Gently stir in the flour with a spatula or a large spoon.

Dollop batter onto the baking sheet using a Tablespoon as a guide. Leave room between the cookies as they will spread. Smooth the tops with a spatula. Sprinkle 1 teaspoon of sugar over all the cookies.

Bake for approximately 20 minutes. The bottoms and the edges of the cookies will be lightly browned and the tops will be fully set and crispy with sugar.

Remove the cookies from the baking sheets and let cool.

These sugar biskets have a meringue-like texture and the caraway seeds and sugar topping give them a satisfying crunch. Stored in a container, they traveled well and remained fresh and delectable for days. Enjoy with a cup of tea or coffee.

Today I’m also inviting you to get into your kitchen, bake Sugar Bisket, and participate in a virtual baking competition: the fourth annual The Great Rare Books Bake Off, a friendly contest between the sister libraries of Penn State University and Monash University. There are so many intriguing recipes to try from our library collections and you can learn so much by baking a recipe instead of just reading it! An engraved pie pan trophy will be awarded to the library that receives the most social media posts featuring photos of your baked goods tagged with its hashtag: #BakePennState or #BakeMonash. The competition runs September 30 – October 8, 2023 so you have lots of time to read the recipes, shop for ingredients, and get baking. All the details are on the site linked above.

If these sugar bisket are not inspiring you to participate, there are a lot of other recipes to choose from. In past years I’ve also updated recipes for doughnuts and almond jumballs from Christian Barclay’s manuscript. Finally, I’ve also contributed an early eighteenth-century chocolate cream recipe, a desert that can be prepared on the stovetop, to this year’s recipe line-up. Stay tuned for a chocolate cream recipe coming to the site next week!

to make a codling tarte

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small, unripe apples on a table

I first learned that a “codling” was an unripe apple from the footnotes in a copy of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. When Cesario arrives at Olivia’s gate and refuses to leave, Malvolio turns to ambiguous metaphors to describe the persistent youth to his mistress:

Not yet old enough for a man, nor young
 enough for a boy—as a squash is before ’tis a
 peascod, or a codling when ’tis almost an apple. (1.5.155-157)

A codling is almost an apple, like a boy is almost a man. The Oxford English Dictionary records both the literal and metaphorical definitions of “codling” — “Originally: an immature or unripe apple; a type of hard apple suitable only for cooking” in medieval and Renaissance usage, and, later,  in Shakespeare’s lifetime, “figurative. With implication of immaturity or inexperience: a young man, a youth. Obsolete.”

A few weeks ago, I had a bowl of freshly picked codlings in my kitchen. My spouse Joseph planted apple trees in our back garden back in 2021 and this year they have fruited for the first time. The codlings were in the kitchen because he had carefully thinned the fruit clusters to allow the largest fruits on each tree to grow larger.

Seventeenth-century recipes that call for codlings were likely crafted to turn this early harvest of unripe fruit into a delicacy. The codling tarts that I prepared from Jane Parker’s 1651 recipe book, now Wellcome, MS.3769, are a tasty product of preservation and thrift.

Original Recipe

to make a codling tarte
codle the appells, pill and cut the pape from the cores, and
put as much of that pape into some cream as
will make it thicke, put in a litell genger sinamon
and suger and rosewater, then bake it (18r)

After gently cooking the unripe apples, the recipe instructs you to peel and core them, to mash them to a pulp, and stir them into a tart filling fortified with cream and seasoned with ginger, cinnamon, sugar, and rosewater. The recipe implies that you already have pastry to hand to pair with the tart filling.

Parker’s recipe also reveals the confusing linguistic overlap between “codling,” an unripe apple, and the verb “to coddle,” a method of gentle cooking. The codlings must be coddled before they can be consumed.

Updated Recipe

A pint container of codlings yielded 1 cup of codling pulp after cooking, peeling, coring, and mashing.
Use your preferred pastry. I used just shy of half of Mark Bittman’s classic pie crust recipe to make two small tarts baked in 5-inch tart pans. 

2 cups codlings
water for boiling
1 batch pastry
butter or cooking spray to grease your tart pans
2 Tablespoons heavy cream
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 cup sugar
1 Tablespoon rosewater

Put the codlings in a pot and cover them with water. Bring them to a boil and reduce to a simmer. Cook for about 12 minutes. The apples should be tender when poked with a fork.

Pour off the water. Set the cooked codlings aside and allow them to cool. Remove the skin off with a peeler and your fingers. Quarter the codlings and remove the cores. Put them into a bowl. Mash the codlings into a a rough pulp using a potato masher and a fork. (Some larger pieces remained in my mixture and I did not mind them.)

Prepare your pastry. Butter your tart pans and line them with pastry.

Preheat your oven to 350F.

Add the cream, ginger, cinnamon, sugar, and rosewater to the codling pulp. Stir until combined.

Fill the tart shells with the codling filling. Place them on a baking sheet.

Bake for 30 minutes. The filling should be caramelized and set, but still jiggle slightly in the middle.

Allow to cool for at least 10 minutes before serving.

The tarts were tart and well-spiced. Codlings are far more sour  than ripe apples. This recipe is designed so that the sweetness of the sugar, the seasoning from the spices and rosewater, and the fat from the cream and buttery pastry balance out the inherent sharpness of the codlings.

Although I liked the shape of these tarts, I wondered if the codling filling might also be used to fill free-form galettes or even baked without a pastry crust.

If you find yourself with codlings this season, this recipe is a great way to use them.

To Make Seed-Cake

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This recreation of a Seed Cake recipe was both inspired and informed by my participation in conversations about Robert Forbes’s manuscript The Lyon in Mourning in Edinburgh in 2022 and beyond. Learn more about the project here: https://dhil.lib.sfu.ca/lyoninmourning/

slice of seed cake on plate in foreground, cake in background with flowers

Charles Edward Stuart eats oat porridge, bread and butter, and cake in various episodes documented in Robert Forbes’s encyclopedic and commemorative manuscript, The Lyon in Mourning. But Forbes did not only describe scenes of eating. He also collected and transcribed the documents relating to provisioning the household: “Copy (exact & faithful) of the Accompts of James Gib, who served the Prince in Station of Master-houshold & Provisor for the Prince’s own Table.”

Gib’s detailed accounts are valuable to food historians as they provide insight into eighteenth-century food culture as well as the practical constraints of maintaining an elite household on the move. Moreover, Forbes’s choice to include these quotidian accounts of household management in his manuscript alongside poems, songs, conversations, and letters speaks to the comprehensive nature of his project: Food, the stuff of everyday life, was just as important to document as any other detail of the final Jacobite rising.

Among payments for butter, eggs, poultry, wine, ale, brandy, lemons, spices, salt, oat bread, fruit, and fish, “seed cake” is listed twice in Gib’s accounts – December 22, 1745 and January 25, 1746. It is the only kind of cake listed in the accounts and it was likely purchased from local bakers. Seed cake was immediately familiar to me and I’ve enjoyed preparing seed cakes in the past. Prepared at  the harvest and flavored with locally grown caraway seeds, seed cake is a precursor to the modern British cakes that are typically served at teatime.

spices and seasonings on plate: caraway seeds, sliced almonds, candied citron and orange peel

Although we now associate caraway seeds with savory dishes, caraway was cultivated widely in northern Europe and caraway seeds were widely used in sweets in British cookery in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. A simple seed cake recipe might call for flour, butter, eggs, and the crucial caraway seeds. The cake would be leavened with either vigorously whisked eggs or ale barm – fresh yeast scooped from the top of a vat of beer.

The recipe that I have recreated below is from an eighteenth-century cookery manuscript that, like the Lyon in Mourning, is held at the National Library of Scotland: MS24775 “Pastry Book Elgin 20th August 1734.” It is leavened with whipped eggs and is slightly fancier than the typical seed cake. This recipe calls for the addition of candied citrus peel – candied orange or candied citron – as well as sliced almonds. Whereas caraway seeds were grown locally, citrus and almonds were imported to the British isles from southern Europe. This cake has a chewy, meringue-like texture as a result of the fluffy eggs that give it its rise. The vegetal flavor of the caraway seeds is nicely balanced by the tangy sweetness of citrus from the candied peel and the rich nutty crunch of almond slivers.

seed cake batter in spring form pan

Original Recipe 

31.
To Make Seed-Cake
Take a pound of sugar being beat &
searched & nine Eggs keeping back Two of
the Yolks Cast them with Sugar till they
be white – Then Steer in a pound of flour
four Ounces of Citron  & Orange peel four
ounces of Cutt almonds & two ounces of seeds.
being mixed altogether put your Cake in
a frame & bake it – You may do a plumb
Cake after the same manner only
only adding Two pounds of Curranes
& to Each pound of sugar six ounce
Of beat Butter & four drop of Cloves

Updated Recipe

1 ¾ cups flour (225g)
¾ cup candied citrus peel – orange, citron, or a combination of the two (55g)
½ cup sliced almonds (55g)
2 Tablespoons and 2 teaspoons caraway seeds
5 eggs (3 whole, 2 whites)
1 cup sugar (225g)

Preheat your oven to 350°F. Grease a 9-inch springform pan and line with parchment.

Stir together flour, candied citrus peel, sliced almonds, and caraway seeds. The citrus pieces should be nicely coated with flour. Set aside.

Separate two eggs and put the two whites in a large bowl. Add the additional three whole eggs. Using a mixer, whisk the eggs for approximately 2 minutes until they become very fluffy. Add the sugar. Whisk on a high speed for approximately 5 minutes until the mixture is glossy and visible bubbles have formed.

Fold the flour mixture into the egg mixture using a spatula. Stir and fold gently until there are no visible clumps of flour.

Pour the batter into your prepared pan. Place it on a baking sheet in the middle of the oven.

Bake for 40 minutes until golden and set in the middle. A cake tester will come out clean when it is completely cooked.

Allow the seed cake to cool for at least 10 minutes before removing it from the springform pan.

To make Sage Pudding

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Earthy sage flavors this tender, savory pudding. Last weekend I had the pleasure of cooking it in the bake oven at Pottsgrove Manor with the help of Ann Mumenthaler and in dialogue with a wonderful group of guests at our collaborative cooking event.

As always, the recipe that I’ve written below is ready to use in your home kitchen. That said, I’m still mulling over what I learned from preparing this recipe (and Locke’s pancakes) using historical techniques and equipment.

The Original Recipe

Take your sage & put em to boyle on the fire with watter, & when it has
Colloured the watter, or the sage is almost Enough, then take the sage
and boyle em in milk, & lay a litle flower to boyle in the milk, then when
it is boyled Enough, set it to coole, & when it is coole Enough, Mix Eggs
and Milk as you would for a Custard Pudding, & then put in your sage
and be sure to butter the bottome of your Dish, & sett butter up & Downe
the top of your Pudding, and then put it in the oven, and take care you
doe not over bake it, a spoonful of sack will make the Pudding very
good, or plague watter, soe as you Doe not put to much, it will be very
pretty, & you may put Lemon or Orange in it,

The recipe intrigued Ann and I for a number of reasons. First, it’s from Merryell Williams’s recipe book that was used and compiled in the seventeenth century and is now held at the National Library of Wales, Peniarth MS 513D. This is a very interesting, fully-digitized recipe book that I’m planning to spend more time with in the coming months. Second, we were curious about whether sage pudding would be more savory or sweet. The recipe does not call for any sugar, but the added flavorings of sack (fortified wine like sherry), plague water, and lemon or orange could take it in an array of directions (especially if the lemon or orange were candied peel sprinkled on top). Finally, we were curious about the use of plague water as an optional flavoring. I’ve written about plague recipes here before (and also in this co-written article). While plague water was a shelf-stable tonic made from alcohol and herbs, usually rosemary, and would have been readily to hand in elite households in this period, I have never seen it mentioned in a culinary recipe before. We wondered if the plague water, like the sage, was intended to convey medicinal benefits as well as flavor to the finished dish.

Then there was the matter of deciding how to prepare this recipe at home and in the bake oven. I took the instruction “as you would for a Custard Pudding” as my guide and I consulted Karen Hess’s work to review some contemporaneous custard recipes. Hess suggests baking custard puddings like this one in a bain-marie to preserve the tender texture and avoid overbaking. This method worked well both in my home oven and in the bake oven at Pottsgrove Manor. However, we also tested some small puddings in the bake oven without using a bain-marie and found that they were also delicious and had an interesting contrast between the crust and the interior. In my updated recipe below, I provide directions for the bain-marie method, but I believe that this sage pudding could also be baked on its own. The cook will simply have to watch for that distinctive jiggle that demonstrates that the custard is set, but not overdone.

Updated Recipe

2 cups water (plus more for the bain-marie)
½ cup of sage
2 cups milk
½ cup flour
2 eggs
1 tablespoon sherry
2 tablespoons butter

Put the sage and water in a pot and bring to a boil for approximately 5 minutes. When the water is a pale green color, remove the pot from the heat and pour off the water. Keep the sage in the pot and add the milk.

Bring the milk and sage to a low boil. Remove from the heat and stir in the flour. Whisk the mixture until there are no clumps. Set aside to cool.

While the infused milk is cooling, preheat your oven to 350F. Fill a kettle with water and bring it to a boil. Butter a glass or ceramic baking dish in which you plan to cook your pudding. Identify a larger, second baking dish that can hold the pudding dish and a few inches of water.

Stir the eggs and sack into the infused milk and flour mixture. Pour this mixture into the prepared baking dish. Add pieces of butter to the top of the pudding.

Place the pudding dish in the larger baking dish to set up your bain-marie. Fill the area around the pudding dish with warm water. Ideally the water will be a similar height to the custard itself, but not spill over into the pudding dish.

Bake for 40 minutes. A tester should come out clean, but the pudding should still jiggle in the middle.

Serve warm.

The Results

The sage pudding has a gorgeous, yielding texture. I can imagine eating it alongside roast lamb. I can also imagine a sweet version of this pudding either sprinkled with candied citrus peel or with sugar stirred in before cooking. If you try this recipe with plague water or citrus or even sugar, or if you bake it without a bain-marie, please let me know!

Cornish Cakes

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This recipe for “Cornish Cakes” caught my eye a few weeks ago when I was sitting in the reading room at the Huntington Library looking at  mssHM 84007, a recipe book that was compiled in the last decade of the seventeenth century and the early decades of the eighteenth century. I was intrigued to see a recipe for a cake that began with claret, an imported Bordeaux wine, and called for mace, a spice made from the husk of a nutmeg,  as its primary seasoning. The Cornish cakes that I prepared this weekend are sweet, purple-hued spice cookies.

Original Recipe

image of Cornish Cakes recipe in original manuscript

Cornish Cakes

Take Clarret, and the yolks of Eggs, mace and
sugar and salt and mingle altogether in flower
knead them altogether then put in a Good
Quantity of Butter and knead it Stiff together
again.

[Huntington Library  mssHM 84007, 85v]

I was initially curious to learn if Cornish Cakes were similar to any traditional Cornish recipes. Although my searches turned up many recipes for Hevva Cake (which I’m now eager to try),  I did not find any traditional cakes that look like these  — readers if you have any insights, please share!

I did, however, find a similar recipe for “To make Cornish Cakes” in Hannah Woolley’s The Queen-like Closet or Rich Cabinet: Stored with all manner of Rare Receipts For Preserving, Candying and Cookery. Very Pleasant and Beneficial to all Ingenious Persons of the Female Sex (1670), G1v:

CXCII. To make Cornish Cakes.
Take Claret Wine, the Yolks of Eggs, and Mace beaten fine, and some Sugar and Salt, mingle all these with Flower and a little Yeast, knead it as stiff as you can, then put in Butter, and knead it stiff again, and then shape them and bake them.

Given the similarity in wording, it seems very likely to me that the compiler of mssHM 84007 copied their receipt for “Cornish Cakes” from Woolley’s printed cookbook sometime between the 1690s and the 1720s. The order of ingredients is the same and the verbs “mingle” and “knead” instruct the user to prepare the stiff dough. There are, however, some distinct differences. Woolley’s recipe calls for yeast and instructs the cook to shape and bake the cakes. The manuscript omits these details. (Learn more about Woolley’s cookbooks in this post and see other recipes I’ve adapted from her work here.)

When I got home to my kitchen and began to update this recipe, there were many variables to consider: what amounts of ingredients would create a “stiff” mixture?  how much mace would create a pleasing spicy flavor? Mace is a lovely warming spice made from the membrane that surrounds the nutmeg kernel, but it can be quite intense. It is sold dried in fragrant blades and also sold ground. I also pondered: how much sugar should I add? how much sweetness would come from the wine versus the sugar (in 1690 , 1720, now)? The modern Merlot that I used in my recipe test is much drier than eighteenth-century claret. (I discuss claret and wine imports in more detail in this post.) Starting with a single egg yolk as my guiding proportion from the original recipe, I stirred together a rosy pink dough and tasted for spiciness and sweetness as I went.

Updated Recipe

This recipe made 12 spice cookies. Double or triple to make a larger batch.

1/4 cup (57.5 grams) red wine (such as Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, or a Bordeaux blend)
1 egg yolk
1/4 teaspoon mace
2 tablespoons sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (68 grams) flour
2 tablespoons (28.4 grams) butter

Take your butter out to come to room temperature. It should be soft and spreadable before you integrate it into your dough.

Preheat your oven to 350F (180C). Line baking sheets with baking parchment (or thoroughly grease).

Whisk together the wine, egg yolk, mace, sugar, and salt. Stir in the flour with a spoon. The dough will be a pink paste.

Add the butter. First stir with a spoon and then knead with your hands until well combined.

Shape small cookies (approximately 2 teaspoons of dough each) and place on the prepared baking sheets.

Bake for 15 minutes. The bottoms should be golden brown and the tops will still be light.

Allow to cool before eating.

As the cookies baked, the reddish pink color faded to a light purple — violet, light magenta as the light shifted. The fragrance of mace and wine wafted off them as they cooled. Like a mulled red wine, these Cornish Cakes are a sweet and spicy treat.

To Make Ginger Bread (Bridget Parker)

/ Marissa Nicosia / 2 Comments

I’ve baked a number of spicy and surprising gingerbread recipes as I’ve worked on this site over the past eight years. When I saw this one in Bridget Parker’s 1663 recipe book at the Wellcome Collection reading room in London this past June, I was intrigued by the fact that this gingerbread contains no ginger. What is gingerbread without ginger?

gingerbread on plate

This gingerbread is sweet and spicy. The cookies are fragrant with clove, mace, and cinnamon, and crunch with floral coriander seeds. Even without the ginger, they have the classic warming taste of other gingerbread cookies. Since ginger was certainly available to Bridget Parker in 1660s England, the choice to call this recipe “ginger bread” might speak to a slipperiness in naming, a metonymy wherein “ginger” stands in as a catch-all term for other spices.

Original Recipe

Image of recipe in original manuscript

To Make Ginger Bread
Take 2 pound of surop one pound of but
ter half a pound of suger a spoonfull
of beaten cloues a litle sinomon & mace
corander or caraway seeds mix these all
togather on a chafindish of coals till it
be scalding hott then lett it be cold againe
then put as much fine flower into it as
will make it into a past make it into forme
of which fashon you please & bake them

This recipe also has a curious method in which the butter and spices are heated together in a sugar syrup. I had initially wondered if there would be enough spice in the batch when I quartered the original recipe. My fears were misplaced. As a result of the warm infusion method, the flavors of the spices were beautifully dispersed through a very large batch of gingerbread.

At the recipe’s invitation, I decided to use coriander seeds instead of caraway seeds. I also had to think through the syrup and sugar used to sweeten the gingerbread in the original recipe. I decided to make a “rich” simple syrup with a two-to-one ratio of cane sugar to water (instead of a classic one-to-one ratio).

gingerbread on baking sheet

Updated Recipe

Quartered from the original.
This recipe makes about 5 dozen cookies.

2 cups sugar (402g)
1 cup water (240g)
1/2 cup butter (1 stick, 113 g)
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon ground mace
1/2 teaspoon coriander seeds
4 cups flour (480g)

First, prepare the syrup. Put the water and the sugar in a small saucepan. Heat until the sugar dissolves, stirring frequently. Add the butter. Stir until the butter is melted. Reduce heat as necessary so that the mixture does not boil over. Stir in the spices. Remove from heat and allow to cool.

Preheat your oven to 350F (180C). Line baking sheets with baking parchment (or thoroughly grease).

When the syrup is cool, pour it into a mixing bowl. Add flour one cup at a time, stirring until each is fully combined before adding the next one.

Shape cookies of about 1 tablespoon of dough and place on the prepared baking sheets.

Bake for 15 minutes. The bottoms should be golden brown and the tops will still be light.

Allow to cool before eating.

The Results

Spicy, sweet, and unexpectedly chewy, this gingerbread was a big hit when I shared it with friends.

I’d be curious to taste a version with caraway, rather than coriander seeds. Given the preparation method with the infused syrup, it was not easy to make a half coriander and half caraway batch. I also found the dough very sticky and difficult to work with despite the recipe’s suggestion to “forme” it into shapes and the widespread use of gingerbread molds in contemporary recipes. Next time I might try to pipe it into more appealing shapes. For readers based in the UK, I’d be curious to hear how this recipe works with golden syrup and additional cane sugar.

Christian Barclay’s Almond Jumballs

/ Marissa Nicosia / 2 Comments

See the end of the post for information about the third annual Great Rare Books Bakeoff!

almond jumballs on a plate

There are so many recipes for jumballs in seventeenth-century recipe books. Even though I’ve been baking jumballs since I started this project in 2014, I’m still surprised by the major differences in flavor, texture, and method between recipes. As Stephen Schmidt explains in this helpful glossary entry, “When jumbles first came to England from Italy, in the sixteenth century, they were sugary, anise-flavored cookies formed by tying ropes of dough in elaborate two-sided knots, such as a figure-eight or a pretzel knot.” By the last decade of the seventeenth-century, when Christian Barclay wrote this recipe “To make Almond Jumballs” in her recipe book, they could either be sugary confections or buttery dough shaped in elaborate forms.

ingredients – egg, sugar, ground almonds, orange blossom water
ingredients – sugar, ground almonds

When I came across this recipe while looking at the manuscript with colleagues and undergraduate students working on my “What’s in a Recipe?”  project, I immediately knew I wanted to try it. Barclay’s jumballs are like macaroons. They only contain ground almonds, orange blossom water, sugar, water, and egg white. The method of preparation draws on confectionary practices as well as baking techniques. I spooned some of the thin jumball batter into rounds and piped the rest into letters and knot forms.

Original Recipe 

almond jumballs recipe

To make Almond Jumballs
Take half a pound of Almonds, blanch
them in cold water, & beat them very
fine, put in a spoonfull or 2 of
orange flower water to keep them
from oylling, when they are beaten
small, boyll half a pund of double
Refined sugar to a Candy not too high
when it is cold work into it 2 ounces
of fine searcht sugar, & a litle of the
froth of ane egg & squirt into a
paper, bake them in ane oven not too
hot.

The recipe uses a sugar syrup to bind the almonds and capture the fleeting scent of orange blossom water. A “frothed” egg white adds body and lift during baking. These almond jumballs are sweet, fragrant, and have a pleasing crunch on the outside and a slight chew in the center.

ground almonds and orange blossom water
frothed egg white
sugar syrup
batter
1T jumballs
shaped jumballs
shaped jumballs

Updated Recipe

Makes approximately 24 jumballs.

This recipe requires a candy thermometer, a mixer, and baking parchment.

1 cup ground almonds (110 grams)
1 tablespoon orange blossom water
1 cup sugar (201 grams)
¼ cup water
1 egg white

Preheat your oven to 320F (160C).

Line two baking sheets with parchment.

Stir together the ground almonds and orange blossom water in a metal or ceramic mixing bowl.

Separate the egg and put the egg white in the bowl of a stand mixer. (You can also use a handheld mixer for this.) Whip the egg white until it is frothy, white, and full of small bubbles. It does not have to achieve stiff peaks to work in this recipe.

Put the sugar and water in a small saucepan. Affix a candy thermometer to the side. Bring the mixture to a boil and a syrup will form. Heat the syrup to 238F (114C). This is often called the “soft ball” stage.

Pour the sugar syrup into the ground almonds immediately. Stir until there are no almond clumps. Fold in the egg white. A thin batter will form.

Shape the jumballs on the prepared, parchment-lined baking sheets. (I used a tablespoon to measure out twelve even cookies. I pipped the rest of the batter into shapes, but they expanded substantially during baking and did not retain precise details.)

Bake for 10-12 minutes. (This will vary depending on the size and shape of your jumballs.) They are finished when they are golden at the edges and still pale in the center.

Allow the jumballs to cool completely on the baking sheet.

baked jumballs
C jumball in hand
jumball on plate

The Results

Crisp, floral, and sweet, Christian Barclay’s almond jumballs are a delicious treat. If I make them again, I may try to create more elaborate shapes now that I’ve seen how the batter expands when baked.

This recipe is naturally gluten free. I’d be curious to hear how an egg substitute would work if any of my readers prepare a vegan version.

Today I’m also inviting you to a virtual baking competition: the third annual The Great Rare Books Bake Off, a friendly contest between the sister libraries of Penn State University and Monash University. There are fourteen intriguing recipes to try from library collections. An engraved pie pan trophy will be awarded to the library that receives the most social media posts featuring photos of your baked goods tagged with its hashtag: #BakePennState or #BakeMonash. The competition runs 1-9 October 2022 so you have lots of time to read the recipes, shop for ingredients, and get baking. All the details are on the site linked above.

If these jumballs are not inspiring you to get baking, there are a lot of other recipes to choose from. In past years I’ve updated recipes for a lemon tart and for doughnuts. I’ve also enjoyed baking Suffrage Angel Cake, Cinnamon Buns,  Lamington Cake, and Pavlova in past years.