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Puff Paste Loaves aka Buttered Loaves
Following on in the series of recipes from Margaret Baker’s recipe books, I chose one from Sloane MS 2485. This book has the most culinary recipes, although there are still some medical and household recipes too. The front page is dated “The 27th of December 1672” when Margaret Baker must have been in her 60s…
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Margaret Baker’s Lombart Pye (Lumber Pie)
Imagine that in 400 years historians find your collection of hand-written recipes with no information about you other than your name and maybe a date. How much would they be able to say about you and your life? This is the problem faced by scholars of early-modern manuscript cookbooks and, perhaps surprisingly, the answer is…
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Medieval Fig Potage
One of the hardest parts of recreating historical recipes is making something when you have no idea what its supposed to be like. It’s less of a problem with more modern recipes which give measurements and clearer instructions, but with medieval and earlier recipes you’re often going in blind. That’s how it was with this…
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Fruit Damper for the Great Rare Books Bake Off
It’s time for the annual Penn State vs. Monash University Great Rare Books Bake Off where readers and cooks can support a side by making a recipe from the universities’ special collections. This year there are twelve recipes to choose from, from Wet Shoo Fly Pie to Lamington Cake. I figured I’d better go with…
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Two Medieval Fruit Purees
In May, in between lockdowns I was able to attend my first medieval event in about four years, and it has inspired me to finally post some of the medieval recipes I’ve been working on. When we camp at events in the fourteenth-century ‘village’ breakfast is always a problem. Evidence for breakfast is patchy during…
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Virtual Gatsby Summer Afternoon Picnic
Every September the Art Deco Society of California hosts the Gatsby Summer Afternoon but even though I’ve been living in the Bay Area for the last few years I’ve never made it to one of these huge art deco themed picnics. This year, because of COVID-19, there was a Virtual Gatsby Summer Afternoon which meant…
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Recipes from Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery
Like many others, baking is providing a lot of comfort for me and my family as the world has been upended around us. But, now that I’ve run the usual gamut of quarantine baking from banana bread to sourdough, I’ve been taking a deep-dive into some historical cookbooks. This week, that means taking a closer…
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Jane Dawson’s Jockelet (Chocolate) Cream
This week it’s time for the annual transcribathon hosted by the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC) and for the first time Stanford is taking part. Each year, people around the world come together to transcribe a hand-written book of recipes from the early modern period. Manuscript receipt books are great to work with because…
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Carolina Snowballs Re-do
Way back in 2015 I made a late nineteenth century recipe for Peach Snowballs from Mina Lawson’s The Antipodean Cookery Book. Even though the peaches tasted great, the rice didn’t form a homogeneous layer the way that it is supposed to (for good examples see Savoring the Past and World Turn’d Upside Down). These snowballs…
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Plum Cake/Early Black Bun for Twelfth Night
Years ago on a trip to Scotland I picked up a copy of Maw Broon’s But an’ Ben Cookbook. Inspired by a weekly comic strip produced since the 1930s, the But an’ Ben Cookbook is a kind of imaginary scrapbook collated by the extended Broon family at their holiday house with recipes cut from newspapers…
