plague water

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!

Over the past few weeks, friends, family members, students, and colleagues have been asking me about plague and recipes. Outbreaks of the plague, and restrictive public health initiatives designed to stop the spread of the disease, were a regular feature of life in the early modern period. (I’m not an expert on this topic, but I’ve found these accounts especially engaging: on the history of quarantine in Italy, on the 1665 plague in London, on Shakespeare’s writing during times of plague.)

Plague correspondingly leaves its marks in manuscript recipe books. During outbreaks, early modern people used “Plague Water” as a preventative and a cure for the disease. Samuel Pepys writes in his diary for Thursday 20 July 1665 — a week when 1089 people died from the plague in London by his account — “My Lady Carteret did this day give me a bottle of plague-water home with me.” Recipes for “Plague Water” are so common that a single manuscript will often include multiple, different recipes for this healing water. What these recipes have in common is that they require a range of fresh and dried herbs that are infused in alcohol before the water is distilled. Although “Plague Water” likely had antibacterial effects due to its alcohol content, it is unlikely that it stopped the spread of plague as the pestilence was carried by small animals and transferred to humans by infected fleas.

This recipe “To make Plague water” is from Folger Shakespeare Library Ms. V.b.380 and, from what I’ve seen, a typical recipe for this preventative tonic. I’ve been researching this manuscript alongside a team of undergraduate researchers and librarian colleagues since early 2019. (See related posts here.) The paper in the manuscript dates from 1667 and accordingly this recipe for “Plague Water” was collected, saved, and perhaps prepared in the aftermath of the 1665-1666 plague.

55 To make Plague water.
Take Rue, Agremony, Wormwood, Selandine, Red Sage,
Balm, Mugwort, Dragons, Fetherfew, Burnett, Sorril,
Tormentil, Scordium, Cardus-Benidictus, Dittanter, Bittany, Mary-
-golds, Scabius, Peniroyal, of Each half a pound, Rosemary
one pound, a quarter of a pound of Angellico leaves, a good
quantity of Elingcompane roots: Cowslips, Marygolds, Burage
Clovegilly flowers, of each a good quantity, Anniseeds & Corrander
of each 2 ounces, strip and pick all your herbs, then cut them
very small and put them in a vessell close cover’d, put to them
3 Gallons of sack or white wine and 2 quarts of Brandy
stirr it 2 or 3 times a day for 2 or 3 days together, then
distill them in a Cold Still or Limback.

Unfortunately, I can’t test this recipe for you.* Even if I could correctly identify, purchase, or forage for these herbal ingredients, I don’t have distilling equipment – a cold still or an alembic – at home. I also cannot recommend that you prepare this recipe yourself as a number of the ingredients are now known to be toxic. For example, “Peniroyal” or Pennyroyal, an herb that I’ve seen listed in many medicinal recipes, causes liver damage.

Ultimately, recipes for “Plague Water” offer us an insight into the medical landscape of early modern England. In times of sickness and in health, households would collect medicinal recipes from members of their local and extended social networks seeking out efficacious cures for immediate use or future preparation.** Households would consult printed texts, such as Nicholas Culpeper’s ground-breaking English Physitian published in 1652 to seek out medical information (this page includes a list of plants mentioned in Culpeper’s book). Household members would gather herbs, purchase ingredients, and distill healing waters in the home. My students are often surprised (and intrigued!) to learn that family members would, essentially, test new medicines on their sick relatives. Indeed, recipe manuscripts are a unique repository of medical practice within the household in times of plague and prosperity.

*If, however, you find yourself in Minnesota, you might be able to taste some Plague Water made in a collaboration between Tattersall Distilling, Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) and the Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine at the University of Minnesota.

** My discussion of recipe collection practices here draws on Elaine Leong’s recent monograph Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2018).

I’d like to thank Joseph Malcomson for the helpful discussion of Nicholas Culpeper and medicinal plants that shaped the final form of this post.

Cooking in the Archives

Updating Early Modern Recipes (1600-1800) in a Modern Kitchen

To make Sage Pudding

Plague Water