Category Archives: Animals

To Make Muske Cakes

By Casey Mitchell

From a cultural perspective, odd foods are a common occurrence in the world today. Individuals from America might be horrified to eat something as foreign as monkey brains–a delicacy in Africa and India–or haggis, the Scots’ age-old recipe for beef-in-a-sheep’s bladder/stomach/what you will. Jane Baber’s Book of Receipts, compiled in 1625, contains several recipes that are, well, interesting, to say the least. Most of them have medicinal qualities of some sort, and, while nutritious, may be pungent or downright aromatic in their own way. One such recipe is “To Make Muske Cakes.”

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Musk? Like the really smelly ‘perfume’?” Yes, indeed. The very thought of including a glandular secretion from an animal into a recipe sounds fairly disgusting, right? The important part is not in its smell or taste, but its purpose, as musk grain, like most smelly ingredients, is used as “a remedy for very grave diseases known to all antique pharmacopeias”.[1]

The process of obtaining the musk itself is worth mentioning, as it can be long. During the period in which Jane Baber was collecting recipes, musk had been an international commodity for about 300 years. Marco Polo’s journey to the Orient in the late thirteenth century yielded the West’s first real encounter with the identity of the musk deer, the animal responsible for the big stink (pun intended). The animal itself, native to Kashmir, was hunted once a year for the two musk pods contained under the belly of the males, which gave off the odious secretions we’re so familiar with today. Once the secretions congealed, they became very much like coffee grounds, filling the glands with musk grain. According to a modern Kashmiri perfumer, “3 small grains of one gram are sufficient to make a liter of alcoholic perfume”.[1] Taking into account the offensiveness of the musk itself and the amount used in making perfume, Baber’s recipe calls for “2 grains of Muske,” making this a very smelly cake.

musk 1
Contents of a Musk Deer’s Gland. Source: Abdes Attar, www. profumo.it.

Other ingredients include, at the very start of the recipe, “gum dragon” or Tragacanth, to be laid “3 days in Bee water.” The plant itself is used in foods and pharmaceuticals as a binding agent, like flour and eggs in baking, and can be administered medicinally to treat both constipation and diarrhea.[2] The “Bee water” remains something of a mystery, being a possible reference to another early modern recipe entitled, “An aproued medesen for them that have ther water stoped with the stone or Strangrel them & it will make them make water in tow hours”.[3] The recipe itself involves the pulverizing of bees using a wooden mortar and pestle, straining the resulting juice, and drinking it to cure urinary blockages, which plays into the waste-managing qualities of the remaining ingredients of the Muske Cakes. Alternatively, it might refer to the syrupy sugar water used by beekeepers to supplement the diets of bees during late winter and early spring when honey and pollen are scarce. This particular concoction in its modern form is made of a heated combination of water, cane or beet sugar–and a small amount of apple cider vinegar to prevent the sugar from caramelizing, which can harm the bees.[4]

The inclusion of caraway seeds in the recipe fulfills the role of an added spice to the cake itself, which is also comprised of “one new laid eg” and “double refine sugar,” mixed in a mortar and pestle. Because this particular recipe doesn’t call for flour, yeast, or any other composite for making a bread-based cake, one would assume that the gum dragon would render the “cake” into something resembling a flan or Jell-O mold. The recipe calls for “the stuffe” to be laid on “wafers” before being put into the oven, to be made “as hott as you can that they maye bee well bakt.” Because I was so interested in what the final product of this oddity might look like, I searched for and found an image that might closely resemble it.

Musk Cakes 2
Pink Musk Cake Pop Bite. Source: Bubble and Sweet’s flickr photostream, http://www.flickr.com/photos/bubbleandsweet/5037947115/in/photostream.

The differences between this version of what the description referred to as a “Pink Musk Cake Pop Bite” and Jane Baber’s version are many.[5] The main one, however, is that the ingredient of true musk grain is now very difficult to find, given that the musk deer has been hunted almost to extinction. Therefore, the musk utilized in the recipe pictured above is very likely taken from the derivative of a musk plant, which serves the same aromatic purpose, though not the medicinal one. The texture of the cake’s interior, however, appears to be pretty close to what I pictured as that of Baber’s.

While the medicinal purpose of Jane Baber’s musk cake is yet unknown, having possibly some connection with the digestive and laxative properties of gum dragon, its composition remains fairly simple. Its ingredients thereof, including artificial musk, can be found in most markets and health food stores. Buyers beware, however, as the smell of musk in a kitchen may be enough to put off the appetites of others! In short, I would only recommend this recipe to those who have no problem in adopting their own special fragrance.

[1.] AbdesSalaam Attar, “Moschus Moschiferus, The Kashmiri Musk Deer”, www.profumo.it, March 2006. Date accessed, 6 April 2013.

[2.] “Tragacanth”, www.webmd.com. Date accessed, 6 April 2013.

[3.] “An aproued medesen for them that have ther water stoped with the stone or Strangrel them & it will make them make water in tow hours.” British Library, Egerton MS 2608.

[4.] Tammy Curry, “How to Make Sugar Water for Bees” www.ehow.com15 August 2012. Dates accessed, 6 April 2013.

[5.] Linda V. “Pink Musk Cake Pop Bite”, Bubble and Sweet’s Photostream, 29 July 2010. Date accessed, 6 April 2013.

Casey Mitchell is an undergraduate student at the University of Texas, Arlington. Casey was involved in a class project to transcribe Jane Baber’s recipe book, led by Amy Tigner.

Wot’s fer dinna luv? Yer favrit, stuffed dormouse!

By Thony Christie

The British Museum has a new exhibition on Pompeii and Cambridge classicist and current media star Mary Beard has been doing the rounds of the English press writing entertaining glosses on it. In her piece for The Sun (yes really that Sun!) she mentioned amongst other things that the Romans ate dormice. Now most English people on being informed of this Roman culinary delight automatically think of the common or hazel dormouse (Mucardinus avellanarius) famously seen being stuffed into a teapot by the Hatter and the March Hare at the formers tea party in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Hatter’s Tea Party, John Tenniel. Source: Wikipedia.
Hatter’s Tea Party, John Tenniel. Source: Wikipedia.

Now this creature is about the same size as the common house mouse (Mus musculus) but has somewhat thicker brown fur and a furry tail. Skinned and boned it would provide, at best, a very delicate hors d’oeuvre or amuse-bouche but never a real meal. There are however many different species of dormouse something that most people are not aware of.

Hazel dormouse, (Mucardinus avellanarius). Source: Wikipedia.
Hazel dormouse, (Mucardinus avellanarius). Source: Wikipedia.

Where I live in Southern Germany for example we have lots of Siebenschläfer, literally translated seven sleeper, (Glis glis) which is supposedly so named because it hibernates for seven months of the year. It looks like a small grey squirrel with a grey and white stripped tummy and a very long, very bushy tail that curls up right over its head like a sunshade. They look very cute and cuddly but you shouldn’t try to stroke one as they are very aggressive and you’ll come away with some very nasty bites.

Edible dormouse (Glis glis). Source: Wikipedia.
Edible dormouse (Glis glis). Source: Wikipedia.

The edible dormouse is the domesticated Glis glis, which when fattened can weigh up to 300 grams. The Roman cookbook Apicius, now thought to date from the late 4th or early 5th century, famously contains a recipe for stuffed dormouse, which I reproduce below:

Apicius, De opsoniis et condimentis (Amsterdam: J. Waesbergios), 1709. Frontispiece of the second edition of Martin Lister’s privately printed version of Apicius. Source: Wikipedia.
Apicius, De opsoniis et condimentis (Amsterdam: J. Waesbergios), 1709. Frontispiece of the second edition of Martin Lister’s privately printed version of Apicius. Source: Wikipedia.

Liber VIII: Tetrapus

 IX. Glires

 Glires: glires: isicio porcino, item pulpis ex omni membro glirium, trito cum pipere, nucleis, lasere, liquamine farcies glires, et sutos in tegula positos mittes in furnum aut farsos in clibano coque.

Book 8:

Four-footed beasts

9. Dormice: Dormice: dormice: stuff the dormice with minced pork as well as the flesh from all of the dormouse’s limbs, together with ground pepper, pine nuts, laser and liquamen and place them sewn up on a clay tile in the oven or cook them in a roasting pan.

Liquamen or garum is a fermented fish sauce and almost universal condiment that served roughly the same function in the Roman cuisine as salt in ours. Laser or silphium was a, now extinct, Roman spice or herb thought to be similar to asafoetida.

So next time you want to surprise your loved one with some truly exotic cookery just rustle up a couple of Glis glis and get stuffing.

Thony Christie is an independent historian of science who blogs at the Renaissance Mathematicus mostly about the mathematical sciences and mostly about the Early Modern Period.

Oral Testimony and Remedies Over Time

By Alun Withey

When studying the history of recipes, the longevity of certain remedies, ingredients or substances in healing is often striking. In terms of the early modern period, it is often remarked how far back certain remedies into ancient Greek or Latin texts; in many cases, how far forward they survived is also noteworthy – often long after the rise of (modern) biomedicine.

One of the ways through which we can track this process is through surviving examples in oral testimonies. While early twentieth-century antiquarian obsessions with all things weird and grotesque might not fit with modern academic approaches, the records they collected from oral testimonies, especially from people in rural areas, are often fascinating. Indeed, in many ways, these records are often the only remnants of medical traditions now past and, even more interestingly, the fact that they can be traced back through family generations tells us something about transmission.

An interesting survey was taken in the 1970s of herbal remedies still in use in rural Wales, which had some evidence of long-term family use. In many cases, recipes and ingredients they provided can be readily found in early modern collections. In the early modern period, it was common to use snails as ingredients in recipes to treat eye conditions. Typically, they might be impaled on a pin, with the juice allowed to drop into the afflicted eye. In the 70s, interviewees remembered similar recipes used in their families, including one involving skinning 12 black snails, putting sugar on them and leaving them overnight, before eating the gooey remains the next day!

Another enduring ophthalmic remedy was the ‘snakestone’ or ‘adder stone’ – essentially a polished river stone resembling a snake’s eye. Directions for use of the snakestone can commonly be found in Medieval and early modern texts and, when the survey was taken, reports were included for glain nadredd – in English, ‘adder beads’.

The example shown here was found in the foundations of an old Carmarthenshire house i 1836, and can be seen in the Carmarthenshire County Museum: – http://www.carmarthenshire.gov.uk/english/education/museums/carmarthenshirecountymuseum/pages/home.aspx

An 'Adder stone' found in the foundations of a Carmarthenshire house in 1836

It was reportedly common to use the herb rue in preparations for children suffering from worms. Similar remedies occur in several Welsh collections of the 17th century. Lungwort and eyebright were still in evidence in the 1970s for respiratory and ocular conditions, respectively, and can be traced well back almost into antiquity. Human urine was another common ingredient in the seventeenth century in a variety of remedies and, in living memory, has still been noted as having cosmetic value and also in the treatment of ear conditions. Perhaps most interestingly, in a journal article of 1906, it was reported that a Montgomeryshire woman who injured herself with a scythe went back to the scythe for seven days after and repeated an incantation over it. This bears extraordinary similarity to the so-called ‘weapon salve’ noted by Sir Kenelm Digby in the seventeenth century, whereby the idea was to treat the instrument that had injured somebody, rather than the wound itself.

Image used with permission of the Wellcome Trust/Wellcome Images

It is also interesting to note some echoes of older practices involving modern substances. For example, inhalants were a common facet of early modern recipes, such as boiling herbs and drawing in the steam or even, in one remedy, inhaling the vapour of Mercury as a cure for worms in the teeth. The modern practice of putting Olbas Oil or Friar’s Balsam into boiling water is little different.

In many respects then, it is worth remembering the longevity both of remedies and medical practices. While manuscript collections give us evidence of usage, of remedy networks and contributors, oral testimonies often yield more direct evidence of the transmission of remedies from generation to generation. They also speak of people’s continuing belief in the power of old remedies, even in the face of modern, scientific, alternatives.

(For a fuller discussion of this survey see Anne E. Jones, “Folk Medicine in Living Memory in Wales”, Folklife, 18 (1980), pp. 58-68)

See Lisa Smith’s blog post about cure-all medicines here:http://recipes.hypotheses.org/800

Also, for a different version of this post, see my blog article at:  http://dralun.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/weird-remedies-and-the-problem-of-folklore/

A Bag of Worms: Treating the Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580-1720

By Hannah Newton

Parents today are all too familiar with the problem of worms in children. Tiny, threadlike creatures, they cause terrible itching. How did parents in the past respond to this common childhood complaint? In the following paragraphs, I use early modern collections of medical recipes, doctors’ casebooks, and medical treatises, to find some answers.

L0016479: Karl Asmund Rudolphi, ‘Entozoorum sive vermium intestinalium histor’: courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

Worms were defined as ‘Annimals generated in the body, variously hurting the Operations of the Body’.[1] Growing out of rotting food in the stomach, these creatures were ‘deservedly reckoned among those Diseases which frequently afflict Infants and Children, seldom…troubling people of Years’.[2] The reason, according to the physician John Pechey, was that ‘Children eat greedily, and are delighted with…sweet things’, such as summer fruits and candied cherries, foods which easily putrefy and ‘nourissheth and fedeth’ the worms.[3] Children’s bodies provided worms with the ideal conditions to grow, because they were thought to be more moist and warm than adults, qualities which promoted putrefaction.[4]

The symptoms of worms were well known. ‘Worms are known to be in a Body’, stated Daniel Sennert in 1664, ‘when there is much spittle and a stinking breath, troublesom sleep, gnashing of teeth, crying and bawling’.[5] If the infestation continued over a long period, the patient became emaciated, as Walter Harris observed in his casebook: his thirteen-year-old patient ‘was much liker a Skeleton than a live Boy: His Face was like that of one raised from the Grave, his Eyes hollow; his Nose sharp, and his bones only covered with skin’. The child’s ‘ratling joynts’ could scarcely ‘carry him from one end of the room to another with the swiftness of a Snail’, lamented Harris.[6]

A child’s drawing: MS 1796 (From a collection of cookery and medical recipes written by two unidentified compilers. c.1685-c.1725), f.125v. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

How were children treated? ‘A special regard’, declared John Pechey in 1697, ‘is to be had to the Methods and Medicines, for Children by reason of the weakness of their bodies, cannot undergo severe methods or strong Medicines’.[7] Instead of using the usual remedies of the day – vomits, purges, and bloodletting – children were to be treated with milder medicines, such as ointments and suppositories.

Medical texts and manuscript collections of remedies are replete with recipes to remove worms. In 1664, the doctor ‘J.S.’ prescribed suppositories made of honey, by which ‘the Worms [are] drawn by sweetnesse, [to] the lower parts of the Guts’, where they could be voided by natural defecation.[8] Like children, worms loved sweet things, and could be tempted out of the body this way.

Wellcome Library, MS 1340 (Katherine Jones, Collection of medical receipts, c. 1675-1710), f.87v. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

Other, more bizarre treatments were recommended. In the late 1600s, Lady Mary Dacres suggested the following ‘rare thing for Wormes in…children’: ‘Tak[e] five live earth worms…sew them up in a piece of muslin, and lay them upon the navill’.[9] The London gentlewoman Katherine Jones suggested a similar remedy: she instructed, ‘Take Earth worms’, and put them ‘in a linnen bag, and bind the bag to the navel of the Child all night’.[10] It is not clear how these treatments were thought to work, but it is possible that people believed there existed a sympathy between similar creatures, so that when the earthworms died, so too did the worms in the child’s body.

Whilst early modern medicines might seem odd to modern eyes, it is clear that doctors were motivated by compassion. Francis Glisson noted in 1651 that he wished to make his remedies ‘grateful & pleasing to the sick Child’.[11] Clearly, children were regarded as different from adults, and in need of special medical treatment.

Occasionally children’s own thoughts leave a trace in the sources. In 1650, the Essex clergyman Ralph Josselin recorded in his diary the words of his eight-year-old daughter Mary, who was suffering from worms: she pointed to her tummy, and cried, ‘poore I poore I’. Five days later Mary died. [12]

Dr Hannah Newton is Wellcome Trust Fellow at the University of Cambridge, and the author of The Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580-1720 (OUP, 2o12). Her current research project is about recovery from illness in the early modern period.


[1] J.S., Paidon nosemata; or childrens diseases both outward and inward (London, 1664), 167.

[2] Franciscus Sylvius, Dr. Franciscus de le Boe Sylvius of childrens diseases…also a treatise of the rickets (London, 1682), 127.

[3] John Pechey, A general treatise of the diseases of infants and children (London, 1697), 119. Thomas Phaer, ‘“The Booke of Children: The Regiment of Life by Edward Allde” (London, 1596, first publ. 1544)’, in John Ruhrah (ed.), Pediatrics of the Past (New York, 1925), 157-95, at 182.

[4] Nicholas Culpeper, Culpepers directory for midwives: or, a guide for women . . . the diseases and symptoms in children (1662), 239.

[5] Daniel Sennert, Practical physick the fourth book in 3 parts: section 2: of diseases and symptoms in children (London, 1664), 259.

[6] Walter Harris, An exact enquiry into, and cure of the acute diseases of infants, trans. William Cockburn (London, 1693), 129.

[7] Pechey, A general treatise, 15.

[8] J.S. Paidon nosemata, 172-3.

[9] British Library, Additional MS 56248 (Lady Mary Dacres, ‘Recipe Book…for cookery and domestic medicine, 1666-96’), 59v.

[10] Wellcome Library, MS 1340 (Katherine Jones, Collection of medical receipts, c. 1675-1710) 87v.

[11] Francis Glisson et al, A treatise of the rickets being a diseas common to children, trans. Philip Armin (London, 1651), 344.

[12] Ralph Josselin, The Diary of Ralph Josselin 16161683, ed. Alan Macfarlane (Oxford, 1991), 201