I will be giving a public lecture and cooking demonstration about this project (and this recipe for Knotts) at 1:30 EST on Saturday February 12th as part of a Ohio State University’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies conference — Popular Culture and the Deep Past 2022 – The Experimental Archaeology of Medieval and Renaissance Food.
All are welcome (there are also many interesting sessions being held at the conference in Columbus, Ohio).
A collection of philosopher John Locke‘s papers at the Bodleian Library includes letters, accounts, poetry, notes on medicine and books, and recipes. When David Armitage posted this recipe for pancakes in the Bodleian collection on Twitter, I knew that I wanted to try it. These rich, nutmeg-scented pancakes are absolutely delicious. (Many thanks to Rhae Lynn Barnes and the other readers who immediately sent this recipe my way.)
Want to know “the right way” to make pancakes? John Locke’s got you covered (Bodleian MS Locke c. 25, f. 85). pic.twitter.com/f7FvCaDstg
In Philip Long’s catalog of the collection at the Bodleian, he notes that this recipe, and a few others, were written by Locke: “A collection of twelve recipes dated 1675-94, of which three (fols. 85, 89, 91) are in Locke’s hand” (2). The next time I visit Oxford for research, I will be excited to see this recipe as well as the eleven others in this set of miscellaneous papers.
Original Recipe
Oxford, Bodleian Libraries MSS. Locke c. 25, fol. 85. (Photo from David Armitage)
pancakes
Take sweet cream 3/4 + pint. Flower a
quarter of a pound. Eggs four 7 leave out two 4 of
the whites. Beat the Eggs very well. Then put in
the flower, beat it a quarter of an hower. Then
put in six spoonfulls of the Cream, beat it a litle
Take new sweet butter half a pound. Melt it to oyle, &
take off the skum, power in all the clear by degrees
beating it all the time. Then put in the rest of
your cream. beat it well. Half a grated nutmeg
& litle orangeflower water. Frie it without butter.
This is the right way
From the start, I was intrigued by the cross-outs and other notes in the recipe. It appears that it was first drafted (or prepared) using significantly fewer eggs. The modifier “new” was added before “sweet butter” at some point. Locke may have written the final note “This is the right way” as part of the initial draft or after the recipe was prepared. Locke was attentive to the details of separating and whisking eggs as well as adding just the right amount of orange blossom water (“litle”) and nutmeg (“Half a grated nutmeg”) – an exceptional, expensive amount.
Like the other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pancakes that I’ve tried, these fall somewhere between crêpes and American pancakes: They’re a bit fluffier and fattier than a classic French crêpe and have far less rise than my favorite American breakfast version. My spouse, Joseph, described Locke’s pancakes as somewhere between a classic English pancake and a Scotch pancake (or Scottish pancake).
Many of the commenters on Twitter balked at the instruction to beat the eggs and flour for a “quarter of an hower.” These extended mixing times, however, are common in early modern recipes. While I did prepare my version using a hand-held mixer to ensure thorough beating, I did reduce the mixing time to avoid over-mixing which can lead to a chewy pancake. From what I know about historical and contemporary flour milling, this would not have been a concern for Locke or his cook.
Updated Recipe
Makes approximately 10 8-inch pancakes
1 cup butter (2 sticks, 1/2 lb, 226g)
3 whole eggs plus 4 additional egg yolks
1 cup flour (1/4 lb, 113g)
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
1 Tablespoon orange blossom water
half a nutmeg, grated
First, melt the butter. Set it aside.
Put the whole eggs and egg yolks in a large bowl. Beat with a whisk or hand-held mixer until well combined.
Add the flour and beat until smooth and completely combined. Add 6 Tablespoons of the cream to the egg flour mixture and mix until combined. While stirring or beating, pour in the melted butter. Add the remaining cream and orange blossom water and stir to combine. Grate 1/2 a nutmeg and stir into batter.
Heat a frying pan or skillet on a high heat until a drop of water skitters across the surface. Lower the heat to medium.
Pour approximately half a cup of batter into the center of the pan and spread by swirling the pan to create an 8-inch pancake. Cook for 1 minute or until the edges of the pancake lift and appear lacy and the middle looks mostly set. Flip the pancake and cook for an additional 30 seconds.
Repeat until your batter is gone. Serve the pancakes immediately.
The Results
Between the rich dairy and the fragrant nutmeg, these pancakes made for a decadent breakfast. When Locke wrote down, and perhaps prepared this recipe, the eggs, cream, butter, and flour would all have been ingredients ready to hand in many households. The addition of so much nutmeg and a dash of orange blossom water elevates this specific pancake recipe to a special treat.
I certainly enjoyed sitting down with a plate of pancakes drizzled with a little bit of honey, a cup of coffee, and an old, heavily annotated copy of Locke that I read for a class that I took more than a decade ago. If you make these pancakes on a future winter morning or as part of your holiday vacation, be sure to let me know.
Since I love cooking with quinces at this time of year, I was eager to prepare this recipe “To Make Quince Cream” as part of my ongoing exploration of Christian Barclay‘s recipe book. In this post about a recipe to preserve quinces that I tried a few years ago, I wax poetic about the floral, fragrant quince as well as early modern and contemporary preserving practices. Instead of focusing on the fruit here, I’m going to consider the “cream.”
This recipe instructs a cook to stir cooled, cinnamon-infused cream into cooked, mashed, and sweetened quinces. It clearly explains the cooking method, but the recipe is short on measurements. A cook could add as much or as little cream as they preferred depending on their taste and the number of quinces that they were working with. They could also use this recipe to make a cream flavored with pears or wardens (a pear cultivar). In any case, sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century English and Scottish cooks would have had access to an ample supply of dairy products to prepare creams.
Stephen Schmidt argues that creams specifically united rural and elite celebratory traditions in his post “What, Exactly, Was the Tudor and Stuart Banquet?” He writes that “Fresh fruits, cream, and local iterations of butter-rich cakes were typical treats of outdoor country festivals like May Day, which Robert Herrick frames as an idyll of ‘Cakes and Creame’ in his famed poem ‘Corinna’s Gone a Maying.’ The elite, meanwhile, enjoyed sophisticated dishes called creams in the lighter, sweeter, generally more delicate second course of dinner, which intermixed savory morsels like roasted songbirds, sauced lobster meat, and prime seasonal vegetables with creams and other sweets like gelatin jellies and fruit tarts.” Due to widespread dairy production, creams might accompany humble or decadent celebrations – with or without spices, fruit, or accompanying cakes. As Ken Albala writes, in The Banquet, “by the mid sixteenth century, cheese and dairy products had become a major item on banquet menus” and English cookbooks regularly included recipes for “dairy-based desserts” such as “trifles, fools, creams, and flummeries” (49). Creams fit into the Concordia discors of the banqueting table by offering a soft, rich, cooling (and, in this case, fruity) contrast to an array of spiced, sweetened, and savory dishes laid out at the same time. (I explore this concept further in my post on “Portugal Eggs.”) There are a number of recipes for “creams” that I’ve tested for this site that encapsulate this trend. Quince cream is a fitting recipe for a celebratory seasonal gathering in late autumn or early winter when the fruit is at its best.
Original Recipe
To Make Quince Cream
Take & boyll them in fair water
but first let the water boyll, then
[p]ut them in, & being tender boylled
[t]ake them up & peele them, strain
[t]hem & mingle it with fine sugar
[t]hen take some very good & sweet
[c]ream mix all together & make it
of a fit thicknes, or boyll the cream
with a stick of Cinamon, & Let it
stand till it be cold before you put
[i]t to the quince, thus you do wardens
[o]r pears
Updated Recipe
2 small quinces (390g, 13.8oz)
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup cream
1 cinnamon stick
Put the whole quinces in a pot. Cover with water. Bring to a boil, then simmer for about 30 minutes or until the quinces are tender when poked with a fork.
While the quinces are cooking, put the cream and cinnamon stick in a pot. Bring to a simmer and then set aside and let cool.
Peel and core the cooked quinces. Mash them in a bowl. Stir in the sugar. Then stir in the cooled, cinnamon-infused cream.
The Results
The quince cream was sweet and floral with a hint of cinnamon. I found it quite rich, but pleasantly flavored. Although I ate it on its own, if I made it again I would serve it with a crunchy “cake” or cookie. My recipes for knotts, jumballs, or little cakes immediately come to mind. Let me know if you try this quince cream with an accompaniment or as part of a banqueting spread. (Let me know if you try it with pears (or wardens) instead of quinces, too!)
I would like to thank Clara Drummond, Heather Froehlich, Christina Riehman-Murphy, and my PSU Abington students for conversations about this manuscript that, in part, lead to me preparing this recipe.
Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time (online) with Christian Barclay Jaffary’s manuscript recipe book. Now that the manuscript is fully digitized and available online from Penn State Libraries – Eberly Family Special Collections, I’m transcribing and researching the manuscript with undergraduate students and library colleagues. Naturally, I’ve started a running list of recipes that I’m excited to try. First up, a medicinal “Cinamon Watter” that serves as a delectable, autumnal cocktail ingredient.
Christian Barclay Jaffary was the daughter of Scottish Quaker leader Robert Barclay and Christian (née Millison). She started to compile this recipe book — as she sub-titled it “the fruits of a young wo- / man’s spare hours” — in 1697 and she married Alexander Jaffary in 1700. The recipe book is part of a larger collection of Barclay family papers at Penn State that includes letters between Robert Barclay and William Penn, information about land holdings in Pennsylvania, and genealogical studies of the Barclays of Ury.
The Recipe
(28)
Cinamon Watter
Take of clooes Ginger Cardamus Galanga[l]
pulvirised of each half a dram of choise
cinamon bruised in pices three ounces stee[p]
these in a Scotts pint of the best Brandy and
a mutskin of fragrant reed Rose watter f[or]
[the] Space of 7 hours in a clos stoped glass
veshell then filtre them and ad one pound
ane half of refined sugar mor or less as
you wold hav the sweetnes the powdar will
serv the 2d or 3d time to new brandy which
will equall any of yower 8 pound cinamon watt[er]
The recipe nicely reflects its composition, and perhaps use, at the family estate in Ury, Scotland. It calls for “a Scotts pint of the best Brandy” which is a volume of 1696 ml (3 imperial pints or approximately 3 1/2 US pints). The recipe also uses the measurement of “a mutskin” or “mutchkin” (1/4 of a Scots pint) for rosewater.
Although the cover of the manuscript includes the inscription “Manuscript / to make Medicine,” Barclay’s receipt book features extensive sections on medicine, cookery, and fabric dying. “Cinamon Watter” is in the medicinal section of the manuscript and is likely intended to soothe the body with Brandy and warming spices – cloves, ginger, cardamom, and the ginger variety galangal. The instructions also include an element of thrift since the final lines note that the spices might be infused a second and a third time to prepare additional batches of the tonic.
Updated Recipe
This makes 1/3 the original recipe.
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves 1/4 teaspoon ground cardamon 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger 4 large cinnamon sticks 2 1/2 cups brandy (565 ml) 1/2 cup rosewater (141 ml) 1 cup plus 2 Tablespoons sugar
Combine spices, rosewater, and brandy in a large jar or carafe. Cover and let infuse for 7 hours.
Strain out spices using a metal strainer. Stir in sugar until it dissolves.
The Results & Serving Suggestions
I tasted the infused brandy before I stirred in the sugar and it was certainly spicy, but harshly medicinal. The sugar smooths the whole blend out. In the final “Watter,” the cinnamon, cardamon, cloves, and ginger all come through with an after-note of rose. That said, I might add a bit less sugar next time as I found myself adding lots of mixers when I was testing drinks simply to cut down on the sweetness.
Sparkling “Cinamon Watter”: 1 shot of the mixture with a few ice cubes and a generous pour of sparkling water made for a refreshing spiced tall drink.
Spiced Cider with “Cinamon Watter”: 1 shot of the mixture to about a half a cup of apple cider for an instantly boozy and spiced cider drink.
This Halloween weekend, I might stir some into an old fashioned or use it to add spice to a sour. If you experiment with this drink, please let me know.
I would like to thank Clara Drummond, Heather Froehlich, Christina Riehman-Murphy, and my PSU Abington students for conversations about this manuscript and collective work on transcribing this particular recipe. I would also like to thank Rhae Lynn Barnes, Kate Ferraguto, and Joseph Malcomson for taste-testing and cocktail ideas.
I love doughnuts. When I crave one, however, I usually go to one of the excellent doughnut shops in my area, rather than make them myself. It was exciting to try this delicious recipe for spiced, sweet donuts fried in butter when friends were visiting earlier this summer. We were all delighted with how they turned out.
I hope this recipe for “How to make Donuts” will entice you into the kitchen. Today I’m also inviting you to a virtual baking competition: the second, annual The Great Rare Books Bake Off, a friendly contest between the sister libraries of Penn State University and Monash University. There are twelve intriguing recipes to try out; six from the collection of each library. 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 5-11 September 2021 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.
As the Penn State lead baker, I encourage you, Cooking in the Archives readers, to give these donuts a try and cast your vote in #TheGreatRareBooksBakeOff If doughnuts are not for you, there other recipes to choose from. Last year, I updated a lemon tart recipe and I’ve also helped with some of the early twentieth-century recipes: Suffrage Angel Cake (new this year!), Cinnamon Buns, and Lamington Cake. I might give the Pavlova recipe a try next week, too.
Thanks to the hard-working digitization staff at Penn State Libraries, I’ve been able to spend time with images of Christian Barclay’s manuscript recipe book even though I haven’t been able to visit Eberly Family Special Collections to consult it in person recently. Her recipe with instructions “How to make Donuts” (61v) is one of the many culinary and medicinal recipes in the volume. Here is the information about the manuscript that my Penn State Libraries colleagues wrote up for our Bake Off site:
This donut recipe comes from a handwritten recipe book kept by Christian Barclay from 1697-1723, which includes cooking recipes, home remedies, instructions for dying cloth various colors, and two pages of marriage and birth records of her children with Alexander Jaffray. The recipe book is part of the Robert Barclay of Ury family papers and maps, 1685-1835 collection.
I have a few more recipes from Barclay’s manuscript on my to-cook list and I’m also hoping to transcribe it with future students as a part of my “What’s in a Recipe?” undergraduate research project.
The Recipe
How to make Donuts
Take one english pint of flour take 3 eggs
taking out 2 of the yolks, beat it with
suggar, till they be like a thin sirup
grate a little ginger, & 2 or 3 cloves &
nutmug among it, take as much butter
as eggs, & as much milk as eggs and
butter both, put the butter & milk to
the boyll together, then pour it in
among the flour, stirring it with
a spoon, then put in the eggs still
working it up like paste, roull it out
with a roulling pin, like a cake,
cut it in what form ye please, have
a pan boylling with a good deall of
butter, so putting them in the boylling
butter little & little, let them
boyll till they be crisp, then take
them out if ther be butter enough
to color them ye may put in
& take out till the butter be
quite broun.
Some modern doughnuts are leavened with yeast and have an open, light texture while others get their rise from bicarbonate of soda and have a denser, cake-like texture. Barclay’s donuts puff-up slightly from the eggs during frying, but are unlike either modern yeasted or cake doughnuts. The flavors, however, are spectacular. The blend of ginger, clove, and nutmeg spices with the rich, sweet dough, and butter frying medium makes for a truly delicious treat.
Updated Recipe
Makes 24+ 2-inch (50 mm) donut rounds.
3 eggs (one whole egg and two egg whites)
¼ cup (50g) sugar
¼ teaspoon ground ginger
¼ teaspoon ground cloves
1/8 teaspoon ground or grated nutmeg
1 cup (250g) milk
17 tablespoons (238g) butter, divided – 9 tablespoons (125g) butter for the dough, 8 tablespoons (113g) for frying
2 cups flour (272g), plus additional flour for rolling out dough
Optional: powdered sugar for serving
Separate the whites from the yolks of two eggs. You will use one whole egg and two egg whites for the batter.
Whisk together the eggs, spices, and sugar. Set aside.
Melt butter and warm milk together in a saucepan or the microwave until the mixture begins to bubble.
Measure out the flour in a large bowl. Pour the hot butter and milk mixture and stir to combine. Then add the egg mixture and form into a soft dough.
Put the dough on a floured surface and flatten with your hands and/or a rolling pin to approximately ¼ inch (1/2 cm) thickness. Cut the dough into rounds or strips that will fit in your frying pan or skillet. (I used a 1 inch (50mm) pastry ring to cut small, circular donuts.)
Heat butter in a sturdy frying pan or skillet until sizzling. The butter-level should be high enough that the thin donuts are almost entirely submerged.
Fry the donuts in butter until golden brown and crispy. Flip the doughnuts so that both sides brown. Depending on your stove and pan, this should take approximately 1 minute for each side. Not all your donuts will fit in the pan at the same time. Do not crowd them and instead cook in approximately three batches.
Consume your donuts immediately. Sprinkle with powdered sugar before serving if desired.
The Results
Sweet, lightly-spiced, and buttery, these donuts were delicious straight from the frying pan. My guests and I devoured the first batch while I was still frying the others. There were no leftovers.
Last week I had the pleasure of attending the conference Intoxicating Spaces: Global and Comparative Perspectives and sharing my research on a recipe for “The Ice Cream” that I posted here two years ago. The ice cream recipe is from a manuscript that was compiled and used by Elisabeth Hawar around 1687, and it includes two London addresses. The recipe book is now held at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library (fMS.1975.003). In my paper, I tried to locate Elisabeth Hawar’s recipe book in the mercantile communities of Shoreditch and Spitalfields in East London at the end of the seventeenth century.
Hawar’s book has another, intriguing London reference: a recipe for “How to make a London Possett.” I’m not sure, exactly, why this posset recipe is specific to London, but it’s certainly another link between Hawar’s manuscript and the city where she lived, cooked, and ate. I didn’t have time to speak about the posset at the conference — there’s always a lot to say about ice cream! — but I wanted to share some thoughts about testing Hawar’s posset recipe here.
Possets were widely consumed in seventeenth-century England and considered both medicine and food. Usually a mix of heated cream, alcohol, and spices, possets were designed to sooth the stomach, promote good digestion, and aid in sleep. I’ve made a number of possets from seventeenth and eighteenth-century recipes over the years.
I’ve had Hawar’s posset recipe on my list for a long time and even written about it in the introduction to the “Textures” series that Amanda Herbert and I co-edited for The Recipes Project. In Hawar’s “London Possett” recipe, the mixture of cream and eggs form a “cheese” on top of the flavored, spiced, sack. I wanted to know how this cheesy layer would form, what might be texturally pleasing about it, and how it would effect the familiar posset mix of spices and alcohol.
Original Recipe
How to make a London Possett 2x Take a pint of sack & 12 eggs, beat them very well both whites & yolkes, then strain them & put the sack & eggs togather, & sweeten it with sugar & Nutmegg as you please, & sett it ouer the fire keeping it stirring till it be scalding hot then take it of the fire & put in a quart of Creame boyling hott, holding your hand as high as you can in the pouring of it, then give it a stir & couer it close with a plate, & let it alone till it be like Cheese, & if it shoud not come set it on a gentle fire till it begins to Corn.
A word of warning: As curious as I was about this recipe, my recipe trial didn’t quite work. There were many clumps of eggs in the finished posset, but no pleasant “cheese.” I can think of a number of reasons for the failure of the recipe trial to produce what Hawar describes. I suspect the biggest culprits were my twenty-first century ingredients: modern sherry substituted for seventeenth-century sack, egg size and moisture differences, cream pasteurization and homogenization. I also wonder if a tall thin, cooking pot might have enabled the ingredients to separate differently. Finally, it was a hot day in Philadelphia which may have impacted the ingredients and the finished product.
Updated Recipe
This recipe is halved from theoriginal and did not produce the desired “cheese.” I invite you to use it as a starting point and share the results of your own recipe trials in the comments.
1/2 cup sherry
3 eggs
1 tablespoon sugar
1/8 tablespoon nutmeg, freshly grated
1 cup cream
Beat the eggs together. Add sack, sugar, and nutmeg to the eggs.
Pour this mixture into a medium size pot. Gently heat to body temperature. Do not allow the eggs to cook.
In a separate, smaller pot, boil the cream.
Pour the cream into the egg and sack mix from a high hight.
Cover the posset with a lid and let it cool. A cheesy layer of eggs and cream should form on the top.
Reading recipe manuscripts, I’ve seen coffee called for as a flavoring for creams or “coffee cups” used for measurement. I’ve also read about the popularity of coffee in seventeenth-century London and the lively debates in coffee houses as part of the growing public sphere. This recipe, however, provides instructions for preparing coffee at home to serve to a household and its guests. It offers a window into domestic coffee consumption rather than the public coffee house. (There is also likely more to learn about the connection between Mary Clarke, her coffee recipe, and John Locke, but that will have to wait until I can visit Somerset.)
But this coffee recipe also gave me pause because it’s so simple. It only calls for “spring-water” and “Coffee-powder” and I knew that these two seventeenth-century ingredients were markedly different than the tap water and coffee beans that I had in my kitchen. Given these differences, how would I go about preparing it? And what could I possibly learn from trying this recipe in my own kitchen?
Yet the recipe has been stuck in my mind since I saw that tweet in April. It was often on my mind when I brewed a pot of morning coffee – how could 45 minutes of boiling ground coffee make a good cup of coffee? And it was on my mind when I read Neha Vermani’s wonderful post “Spilling the beans: The Islamic history of coffee” which centers Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal coffee culture. Vermani shows that coffee was part of a thriving public sphere in early modern Islamic empires. The recipe was also on my mind when I read Gitanjali Shahani’s chapter on coffee, Othello, and racialized depictions of coffee and coffee-drinking in anti-coffee pamphlets in in her book Tasting Difference.In a post for “International Coffee Day,” Shahani writes, “To get coffee is also to participate in easy cosmopolitanism” and to consume an affordable imported luxury: “Despite its associations with banal productivity, it somehow manages to retain exotic, even sensuous, connotations.” By bringing the trendy and exotic “Coffee-powder” from the coffee house into the home, this recipe from the Somerset Archives offers an interesting window into how new imported goods became a part of daily, domestic life.
The Recipe
To make Coffee Take Spring-water and Boyle it a full houre, then take a quart of the liquor, and put therein an ounce an halfe of Coffee-powder and boyle that three quarters of an houre. Let it not boyle too fast after the powder is in; and drinke it as hot as you can.
I used the Folger’s helpful guide to measurements to figure out what “an ounce an halfe” of coffee would be in modern measurements: 46.65 g. I also decided to simply bring my tap water to a boil because purifying spring water was not one of my concerns. I tested this recipe with 44 North Coffee, Royal Tar Blend that was roasted earlier this month and that I freshly ground from whole beans just before preparing the recipe. This is likely not the kind of coffee that Mary Clarke served John Locke in terms of place of origin, age, roasting method, or grinding method. Nevertheless, the recipe brewed a bold and distinct cup of coffee.
Updated Recipe
Halved from the original. Makes 1 cup (8 oz) coffee.
2 cups boiling water (16 oz)
23 g ground coffee (.75 oz, a heaping 1/3 cup)
Boil more than 2 cups of water in a kettle.
Pour two cup of boiling water into small pot. Add the coffee.
Simmer over a low heat for 45 minutes.
Pour coffee into a cup leaving the grounds in the pot. Drink as hot as you can.
The coffee was strong, fragrant, and flavorful. The oily sheen on the top of the cup showed that it contained a high concentration of fragrant oils. This is to be expected from coffee brewed by boiling the grounds in water rather than passing hot water through grounds. In this way – and this way alone – the brew reminded me of Turkish coffee that I’ve had in restaurants. Over the course of 45-minutes of simmering, half of the water evaporated yielding a concentrated cup.
It was certainly more intense in flavor than the coffee I brewed in my Mr. Coffee from the same beans at the same time. The color of the coffee made with the seventeenth-century recipe was only slightly darker in color than the coffee that I’d brewed in my normal pot for far less time.
After tasting it as hot as I could stand it (as the recipe instructs) and comparing the coffee to my everyday brew, I added some half and half (my preferred creamer) and watched as the cream distributed through the cup in different patterns than normal, again showing the higher concentration of oils. It was a rich and luscious cup of coffee.
This post is adapted from an article that I published in a special issue of the Early Modern Studies Journal on Mary Baumfylde’s recipe book (Folger Shakespeare Library, call number V.a.456). Take a look at the whole issue here – Early Modern Recipes in a Digital World: The Baumfylde Manuscript.
Recipes for preserved fruit and vegetables are ubiquitous in early modern recipe books. Mary Baumfylde’s recipe for pickled cucumbers (or “To pickell mutton Cowcumbers”) uses olive oil to form a natural seal between the outside air and the harvested vegetables (Folger Shakespeare Library, call number V.a.456).
Although we often associate preserving recipes with fruit and vegetables (jams, compotes, jarred sauces, pickles), Ken Albala reminds us that the “salted and sometimes acidic environment that inhibits bacterial growth” created by pickling brines can preserve “almost anything … including meats, vegetables, fish, olives” (Food in Early Modern Europe, 98). Pickling is an essential element of kitchen thrift and I’m pleased to share this pickle recipe early in the growing season before you find yourself with too many cucumbers on your hands.
To date, I have not found other references to “mutton cucumbers” in early modern books. Cucumbers were sometimes thought of as food only for livestock due to their undesirable humoral properties (described below). Hence the variant spelling “cowcumber” and perhaps the “mutton” designation used here.
The Recipe
To pickell mutton Cowcumbers
Take the fairest of your younge xx
cowcumbers, and wipe them very
dry, then make your pickell, with
halfe water and halfe vineger
and some parings of the worst of
the cowcumbers, and let it boyle
very well, then let it coole, and
strayne it into your vessell
then put in your cowcumbers
and cast a pinte of oyle oliue one
the topp, and couer them close
the oyle keeps it without any
creame on the top, that when
you use any they shall not
take winde.
The image of wind blowing into the pickling vessel and disrupting the contents is provocative. However, cucumbers are also potentially troubling in other ways. Renaissance dietaries frowned upon the cucumber because of its impact on the body’s humors. As Albala puts it, they were “[c]onsidered among the most harmful vegetables because of their cold and moist qualities, physicians usually recommended that they only be eaten in the summer by people who were naturally hot” (29). Pickling these potentially dangerous vegetables would have altered their cold quality through the addition of salt, sour vinegar, and spices. Although this recipe is not particularly spicy, other pickle recipes include long pepper, cloves, and fresh herbs.
Updated Recipe
10 small cucumbers
2 c water
1 ½ c white wine vinegar
½ c apple cider vinegar
1t salt
¼ c olive oil
Wash the cucumbers. Slice one. Arrange the others in a large, clean jar.
Bring the vinegar, water, sliced cucumber, and salt to a boil. Pour this brine over the cucumbers in the jar.
Pour ¼ c olive oil on top.
Let sit at room temperature for 24 hours. Then refrigerate. The pickles will keep for a few weeks using this method.
before
after
Delicious or dangerous, pickling helps cucumbers last beyond the harvest. Crunchy and sharp, these pickles are delicious alongside a sandwich or paired with cheese and charcuterie. The blend of apple cider and white vinegar creates a tangy, substantial brine.
Sealing the jar with oil appears effective at room temperature as well as in the refrigerator. I would hazard a guess that it worked at cellar temperature as well. I’d never thought to seal a jar this way and this piece of information about preservation was my major takeaway from preparing the pickles. Give it a try if you grow or buy too many cucumbers this summer!
A few weeks ago, I was pleasantly surprised to see a unique vegetable listed on Green Meadow Farm‘s farm share announcement: skirret. This European root vegetable was very popular in Renaissance cookery and is now rarely cultivated.
I’ve been eager to taste skirret since the early days of this project. I’ve read news articles about skirret – the forgotten vegetable that potatoes replaced on the European dinner table. I’ve read John Evelyn’s praise for skirret’s use in salads in Acetaria and accounts of its lust-inducing capabilities in Gerard’s Herbal. Boiled skirret was dressed with oil or melted butter, salt, and pepper and served as a salad or alongside roast or boiled meats. After boiling and peeling, it was often fried and served as a side. In seventeenth-century recipe manuscripts, it most often appears as a side or as an ingredient in pies.
Of all the pieces I’ve read about skirret over the years, Ivan Day’s recreation of a skirret pie has been most helpful to me. He explains the process of boiling and peeling the small, fiddly roots before integrating them into dishes. None of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century texts discuss this as they assume cooks already have this knowledge. Following Day’s instructions, I’ve also planted the tender new roots in my garden and I’m hopeful that it will yield a crop next spring.
I took a small bite of it raw and it tasted like a sweeter parsnip with the slightest anise aftertaste. Cooked, the skirret was wonderfully sweet, like a baby carrot, and pleasantly starchy, somewhere between a parsnip and a potato. Despite the tedium of peeling these roots – perhaps why they fell out of favor as large, round potatoes became more popular – they were absolutely delicious and I’m eager to cook with them again.
The Recipe
Unfortunately, the skirret has arrived in my kitchen at a moment when I’m without a functioning oven and thus unable to prepare a number of intriguing early modern recipes such as skirret pie. The twenty-year-old gas range that was installed in my house by previous owners gave up the ghost when my spouse was preheating the oven to bake a cake and pandemic supply chains have delayed its replacement. I’m hopeful that the rare cooking kitchen will be fully operational again by early May.
Since my options for skirret cookery were limited by my equipment, I tailored my search for a fitting recipe appropriately. Luckily, there are three wonderful skirret recipes in François Pierre de La Varenne’s Cuisinier François (1651) translated into English as The French Cook (1653). I accessed this text via Early English Books Online, which includes two copies of the text: The copy scanned from Harvard University Libraries includes an engraving of a chef and the British Library, which lacks the engraving, is a part of the Thomason collection.
La Varenne’s book, as many scholars note, was part of a paradigm shift in European cookery. As Ken Albala writes in Food in Early Modern Europe, “The essence of this new cuisine lies in the fact that foods are increasingly cooked in a way that accentuated and intensified the flavor of the main ingredient rather than contrast with it as the sugar, spices and vinegar of older cookbooks had” (156). The three skirret recipes that I tested from La Varenne’s cookbook show both older and newer styles of cookery in action. Two of the recipes (as well as the section header) specifically mention Lent and appropriate dishes for meat and fasting days where vegetables played a central role in menus. The final recipe calls for either the addition of milk or verjus to the batter for additional flavor. I recently purchased some verjus from my favorite local French bistro turned specialty shop and was excited to try it here.
Skirrets.
BOile them a very little, then peele them for to boile in brown butter after they are fried, serve.
Another way. For the flesh days, make a past liquid enough with eggs; a little salt, and a little flowre; for to make it more dainty; mixe with some soft cheese and white (a petits choux) dip your skirrets into it, frie and serve them.
Another way. For to frie them in Lent, allay your meale with a little milk or verjuice, and more salt; dip your skirret in this, and frie them in refined butter, for the better; If you will, garnish them with fried parsley, which to frie, when it is very cleanr and drie, you throw it into your frying pan very hot, then take it out forthwith, and set it before the fire, so that it be very green; serve your skirrets with the parsley round about.
Updated Recipe
To prepare these three recipes from La Varenne, I began by doing two things:
First, I browned a stick of butter (8T, 113g) and set it aside to cool. (Joy the Baker has good instructions for preparing brown butter.)
I also prepared the skirret. I cut the roots away from the plant and washed them carefully. Then I boiled them for about four minutes until they were tender. Then I peeled them using a peeler and my hands. It was easier, if more time consuming, to simply pick off the peel with my fingers that loosened during cooking. After this process, I was left with 4.5 ounces (135 grans) of cooked, peeled skirret. I divided the roots into three smaller batches of roughly equal size to test each of the three frying methods.
Recipe 1:
Heat brown butter until audibly sizzling. Fry skirret for 1 minute. Serve immediately.
Recipe 2:
1 egg
1 1/8 t salt
1 T flour
Heat brown butter until audibly sizzling. Mix the egg, flour, and salt together to make a batter. Dip the skirret roots in the batter. Fry battered skirret for 1 minute. Serve immediately.
Recipe 3:
1 egg
1 1/8 t salt
1 T flour
1 t verjus or milk
parsley sprigs
Heat brown butter until audibly sizzling. Mix the egg, flour, salt, and verjus or milk together to make a batter. Dip the skirret roots in the batter. Fry battered skirret and parsley for 1 minute. Serve immediately.
My spouse and I devoured the skirret in batches as it came out of the frying pan. Each version was delicious: Sweet, crisp, and nutty from the brown butter.
I couldn’t quite taste the verjus in the batter in the third preparation. Next time, I might add more. I did find that sprinkling a little verjus over the fried skirret added a nice tart flavor to cut the taste of the flaky fried coating. It has a similar effect to sprinkling malt vinegar on fish and chips (in the style of the British).
I’m excited to eat skirret again and already gathering recipes for next year – whether it comes from a local farm or the plant in my own garden.
Should a pudding be sweet or savory? Where do American and British definitions of pudding and pie overlap and diverge? And, most importantly for this post, what place does the potato – or sweet potato – have in pudding and pie recipes?
All of these questions were on my mind a few weeks ago when I first read this recipe for “A Potatoe Pudding” from the Browne manuscript at Penn State. Although the recipe title calls this dish a pudding, I think it also fits the American definition of a pie because it consists of a pastry crust and a creamy potato-based filling. As a sweet dessert, it fits the capacious, British definition of pudding and it is similar in some ways to classic British desserts (such as Bakewell Pudding). It is also reminiscent of American sweet potato and pumpkin pie recipes because it combines mashed vegetables with dairy, sugar, and seasonings.
Pie was on my mind because Christina Riehman-Murphy and I were planning to bake a potato pie for the Folger Shakespeare Library and UCLA Libraries’ Great Library Pie Bake-Off. First, Clara Drummond helped us access images of the recipe book at Eberly Family Special Collections. (They will hopefully be available online soon!) When I read this recipe and I realized that it would be perfect for the event. I collaborated with Christina on interpreting the original recipe and writing an updated version. Christina was the baker representing PSU in the competition and this post includes some of her findings from baking the recipe as well as my own.
The Browne recipe book was compiled in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. This recipe for a potato pudding speaks to a moment when European cooks were trying to make sense of where indigenous American ingredients – both sweet and white potatoes and particular cultivars thereof – fit into established cookery traditions. Was is best to include potatoes in sweet dishes or savory ones? How would their gorgeous sweetness and earthy flavors best compliment European ingredients?
The recipe is relatively straightforward. It instructs you to season cooked, mashed potatoes with butter, sugar, and lemon juice and peel and bake this filling in a dish lined with pastry. After trial and error, Christina and I determined that the pie achieved more structural integrity with a blind-baked crust. This prevented the dreaded soggy bottom. Since there are no eggs and milk to bind the filling, mine came out rather damp. In classic recipes for sweet potato pie (and even pumpkin pie), the mashed vegetable filling is a custard that relies on eggs and milk for structural integrity.
Updated Recipe
Halved from the original. You can also prepare both the crust and filling in advance and bake the pie from room-temperature ingredients. Christina found that a cooler potato-filling led to a pie that set better during baking.
8 Tablespoons butter at room temperature (1 stick, 113g)
1 1/8 cups sugar (226g)
2 lemon, juice and zest
2.5 cups of chopped potatoes (¾ lb, 678g)
A batch of your favorite homemade or store-bought puff pastry or pie crust.
Preheat oven to 425°F/218°C
Make or buy pastry.
Grease a pie or tart dish with butter or baking spray.
Roll out the pastry on a floured surface. Arrange pastry in baking dish.
To blind bake the crust, cover the pastry with foil and fill the dish with baking beans or another weight.
Bake at 425°F/218°C for 12 minutes. Reduce the temperature to 350°F/180°C for 10 minutes. The crust should be golden and set, but not as brown as when a pie is completely finished baking. Keep the oven at this temperature for baking the pie.
While the crust is in the oven and cooling after blind baking, prepare the filling.
Peel the potatoes. Chop them into small cubes. Boil them until they are cooked and tender (about 15 minutes). Drain off the cooking water using a colander. Juice and zest the lemons. Put the cooked potatoes, sugar, and butter in a sturdy bowl. Mash the potatoes and integrate the butter and sugar into the mix. Make sure there are no lumps of butter or potato. Stir in the lemon juice and zest.
Pour this mixture into the prepared pie crust.
Bake for 35-40 minutes until the pastry is brown and the filling sets. Cool before serving.
The Results
Christina and I agreed that the finished pie tastes much more like a lemon pie than a “potato pie.” In this preparation, the natural sweetness of the potatoes offsets the sharp flavors of citrus juice and zest. This dish was unlike any other potato-based pie or pudding I’ve ever consumed. Personally, I found the recipe very interesting, but I didn’t particularly enjoy eating it. I’m happy to report that the pie was a hit at Christina’s house (especially as breakfast). And while pie for breakfast may not be part of any “official” British or American culinary traditions, a slice of my mom’s pumpkin pie and a cup of coffee is my favorite breakfast the day after Thanksgiving.
Cooking in the Archives 
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