Category Archives: Series: Christmas

Christmas Recipes in Early Modern Barcelona

Marta Manzanares Mileo

In 1786, Rafael d’Amat i de Cortada, a member of Catalan nobility known as Baron of Maldà, described the Christmas holiday in his memoirs, noting that: “All sorts of torrons are sold in confectionery shops at Christmas, and eaten as dessert at the table of gentlemen as well as many artisans and other people”[1]. 


Tomás Hiepes, Sweetmeats and Dried Fruit on a Table, ca.1600–1635, Prado Museum. Image Bank ©Museo Nacional del Prado.

During Christmas time, professional confectioners fully engaged in the making of the quintessential Christmas dessert: the torró or turrón. The traditional Torró is a confection made of honey and/or sugar syrup, beaten egg whites, roasted nuts — mainly almonds or hazelnuts — covered with wafer paper and cut into rectangular bars. This combination of ingredients brought together Arab confectionery methods with Iberian ingredients, which shows the intercultural culinary traditions in early modern Spain.

 

One of the earliest recipes of torró written in Catalan is the recipe for Torrons d’avelanes, or a hazelnut nougat, which is located in the 14th century manuscript recipe book titled Llibre de totes maneres de confits (Book of the methods of making confections) in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at University of Barcelona. According to the preface of this book, all these recipes were provided by many “notable especiers”, the medieval sellers of spices and sugary food. [2]

Recipes for turrón can be also found in the book Los quarto libros del arte de la confitería (Four Volumes on the Art of Confectionery) by the Toledan confectioner Miguel de Baeza (Alcalá de Henares, 1592), the earliest print confectioner book in early modern Spain. Baeza offers two different recipes for turrón: turrón fino (Fine Nougat), a ground roasted almond nougat, and the recipe for turrón entrefino (Common Nougat) made of roasted pine nuts.

Unlike other food recipes, confectionery formulas clearly specify the amount of ingredients as well as the ‘degree’ or temperature of sugar or honey syrup, as being fundamental criteria to obtain good results. Confectioners recognized the correct degree for each confection by the visual and tactile signs given by the boiling honey or sugar syrups. In the recipe Del turrón fino (Of Fine Nougat), Baeza instructed to test the degree of honey syrup as follows:

Take a bowl or a casserole pot and a bit of cool, clear water, and you will dip your finger into the water; and then you will dip your finger into the honey, and look it crumbles and then it is good.

The numerous references to the confectioner’s workshop and journeymen suggest that the Arte de confitería would have been intended for professional confectioners. Only two original copies are known to date, located in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and in the library of the monastery of El Escorial (Madrid). Strikingly, a third handwritten copy of Baeza’s work can be found as part of the manuscript notebook of Melcior Palau, a Catalan confectioner who lived and worked in Barcelona during the early seventeenth century.

Front page of the manuscript copy of Los cuatro libros de arte de confitería by Miguel de Baeza. Biblioteca de la Universitat de Barcelona (BUB), ms. 62, f. 53r. Biblioteca Patrimonial Digital de la Universitat de Barcelona.

 

From 1562, the members of the College of Druggists and Confectioners of Barcelona (Col·legi de droguers i confiters de Barcelona) were the main suppliers of torrons in the city. They were entitled to exercise as druggists, dispensing drugs, spices and other colonial commodities, as well as confectioners, making and selling sweets. The rich archives of Catalonia have revealed an unusually high number of confectionery books belonged to professional confectioners, in which they collected and recorded a wide range of sweets recipes. 

As regards Melcior Palau’s handbook, it contains an additional recipe for torró titled Per fer torons de amella (To make almond nougat). The annotations following this last recipe make clear that it was added by another reader, specifically Gaspar Arnau, the apprentice of the confectioner Melcior Palau. Here, the apprentice Arnau limited himself to indicate the quantities of honey and nuts.

BUB, ms. 62, f. 43v. Biblioteca Patrimonial Digital de la Universitat de Barcelona.

Palau’s confectionery book suggests handwritten copies of the print Arte de confitería could have encouraged a larger spread among professional confectioners during the seventeenth century. Furthermore, the multiple handwritings and annotations contained in this handbook show a wide circulation across generations of guild members. The exceptionality of Catalan confectioner books raises some questions about the extent to which similar manuscript recipe collections might be used in the acquisition and transmission of craft knowledge in other European urban contexts, alternative to oral transmission and print culture.

Bon Nadal! Merry Christmas!

Footnotes:

[1] AMAT i de CORTADA, Rafel d´, Baró de Maldà, Calaix de Sastre (Barcelona: Curial, 1987), vol. I.

[2] FARAUDO de Saint-Germain, Luís, “Libre de totes maneres de confits. Un tratado cuatrocentista de arte de dulcería”, Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, XIX (1946), p.106.

Christmas Cookies in Series: Recipe Booklets and the Annual Reinvention of a Tradition

By Reinhild Kreis

One of the early indicators that Christmas is just around the corner in Germany is the publication of Christmas cookies recipe booklets. Once it gets cold outside, readers are invited to heat up their ovens and ring in the holiday season by baking sweets. Many families have established traditions around annual Christmas baking – starting baking on a certain day, insisting on particular kinds of cookies, and even on the strict adherence to tried and tested recipes. The annual publication of special recipe booklets has become a tradition itself.

Many of these recipe booklets, whether distributed as advertising brochures of a particular brand or as removable special issues of a magazine, are designed as collectibles. Some are numbered and thereby marked as a part of a larger series, such as the Rezept-Sammlung of Dr. Oetker, a German brand for baking ingredients. The first issue of that series, which includes Christmas specials as well as brochures with recipes for other occasions, came out in the late 1980s. Other recipe booklets are promoted as annual special issues that readers can expect to be enclosed with the annual Christmas edition of a particular magazine. For example Brigitte, one of the leading women’s magazines in Germany offers just such a booklet every December.

The recipe booklets combine tradition and innovation. They are based on the long-standing practice of Christmas baking with its traditional specialties such as Vanillekipferl, Lebkuchen, or Zimtsterne, and familiar ingredients such as cloves, cinnamon, and gingerbread seasoning. Many booklets seek to continue and inscribe themselves into these traditions, not least by using headlines that looked as if they were written by hand or that quoted famous Christmas stories and poems. At the same time, in order to attract a large readership and be collectible item, each booklet of recipes have to be innovative and different from the previous years.

The booklets are intended to provide readers with much more than just recipes. They are designed to advertise lifestyles and products. Whether complimentary or attached to a commercial magazine, recipe booklets for Christmas cookies are aimed at selling. The free booklets from Dr. Oetker advertise the company’s products such as baking powder, chopped hazelnuts, and vanilla sugar by naming the brand product and by displaying images of the respective sachets on the same page as the recipe. Additionally, the booklets serve as advertising material for the company’s Back-Club (Baking Club). For a fee of then 18 DM, members of the club (est. 1989) received free samples of new Dr. Oetker products and the magazine Gugelhupf which was filled with recipes and other helpful information on cooking and baking.

The special issues attached to Brigitte, on the other hand, are designed to sell the magazine itself. Removable booklets are a relatively new phenomenon in the history of Brigitte. Still in the 1970s, it was rare for the magazine to include any recipes for Christmas cookies, not to mention an entire booklet. At that point, recipes for Christmas cookies were perhaps too common and well-known to be used as a purchasing incentive. Such recipes became a regular feature and a removable collectible only in the 1990s. The first booklets had traditional titles such as “Baking from A-Z” and pictures of familiar cookies such as the Vanillekipferl on the cover (1994).

While initial issues stuck with established recipes and offered few surprises, the Brigitte booklets soon started to present a peculiar mixture of old and new types of cookies, often variations of old and well-known recipes. The issue from 2003, for example, juxtaposed each “classic”, for example Vanillekipferl or Bethmännchen, with a new variation such as “Orangen-Anis-Brezeln” (pretzel-shaped cookies with orange and anise) or “Gefüllte Marzipanmonde” (filled marzipan crescents). International recipes also made their way into the booklets. Furthermore, the booklets of both Dr. Oetker and Brigitte increasingly began to include recipes that required little time and experience, accompanied with additional how-to information for those new to baking.

These different sales strategies explain why advertising brochures in the form of recipe booklets such as Dr. Oetker’s have a longer history than special issues attached to magazines. Brands like Dr. Oetker want to sell their baking products each year anew, regardless of current baking trends, and therefore used brochures as a marketing strategy early on (the company started selling baking powder in 1893). For a magazine like Brigitte, however, special issues on baking only made sense after women were no longer expected to be (only) housewives. The “modern woman” often took on multiple roles and might only bake infrequently. Some did not possess a large collection of traditional recipes and others looked for new inspirations. This explains why it was only in the 1990s that the removable booklets have become an annual feature.

In many ways, the serialized recipe booklets are a substitute for family recipes once passing from generation to generation. It is no longer the mother or grandmother whose experience guarantees success but rather the long-established brand and its test kitchens. The Brigitte booklets, which do not promote ingredients of particular brands, prominently introduce their test kitchen personnel and emphasize that the recipes are well-tried and tested before inclusion in the booklet.[1] Every year, just when it starts to get cold outside, they tap into the longing for tradition and remind their readers that it is finally time to roll up their sleeves and to get ready for the Christmas season.

[1] The same holds true for the internet presences of both Dr. Oetker and Brigitte which usually mention the test kitchens. See here for Dr Oetker and here for Birgitte, (last accessed on Dec 18, 2018).

All booklets and magazines featured in the photos here are in the collection of Reinhild and her mother. Photos are author’s own.

 

The CIA’s “Secret” Weapon: Dorothy Pompeo’s Christmas Fudge Recipe

By Jennifer Sherman Roberts

Twitter is a funny, messy place where topics and tropes wantonly mingle and merge. Memes about Tide pods follow presidential proclamations. Rankings of Very Good Dogs scroll alongside obituaries.

And sometimes you can go to Twitter for updates on twenty-first-century American politics and find modern-day illustrations of your-seventeenth-century English research interests. Or at least I did when following a tweet thread from Benjamin Wittes (Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution and editor-in-chief of the acclaimed Lawfare blog): between intergovernmental document requests, I found the kind of cultural exchange of recipes that fascinates me.

In the Lawfare blog post, Wittes explains he had heard rumors that a 2017 holiday message from CIA director Mike Pompeo was divisive, “inappropriately political and exclusionary.” He filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to see the message and wrote a post about it (as he does with all FOIA requests he makes).

A month later, before he could hear back about his FOIA request, Wittes received a letter from Pompeo himself. Enclosed was a copy of the holiday message to the CIA and a letter from Pompeo with this closing:

We both agree that our country is facing some of the most complex national security challenges in history and that we all benefit if we work jointly to promote American national security, even if we disagree on the best way forward. It is unfortunate, indeed sad, that you chose to publicly cast doubt on our team without so much as the courtesy of a simple phone call that could well have answered your ‘question.’ You should have been better than that, Ben.

And then, incongruently (as least to me):

I hope, too, that you will try the fudge recipe that I also included in the workforce message. It is my mother’s recipe and she loved that others enjoyed it during the holiday season.

As you can see in the document embedded in the post, the recipe itself is a little ho-hum (apologies to Dorothy Pompeo)—it is almost identical recipe to one found on the back of jars of marshmallow fluff.

14805648958_2eda0ac06a_z
Good Housekeeping, December 1962 – Vol. 155 No. 6 Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/29069717@N02/14805648958

This is not to say, however, that the recipe is presented as generic—it is printed on holiday paper, highlights pictures of the Pompeo family (including the dog) attempting the recipe, and adds a little history of Pompeo’s mother, Dorothy.

Despite its lackluster provenance, the recipe’s title trumpets this recipe as “secret,” a now clichéd way of lending a recipe authenticity and value. The recipe is framed as not just a postscript, but a valuable gift.

Many scholars, notably Amanda Herbert, have pointed out the use of recipes to create alliances and cement bonds of friendship. Herbert discusses women’s social networks in the seventeenth-century, but similar kinds of dynamics seem to be at play in this exchange between twenty-first-century men: the written recipe as means of cultural exchange and the reliance on ethos of the recipe’s author (Mike’s mother, presumably invoking tradition and welcome).

As Amy Tigner and Allison Carruth note in their examination of a recipe by Lady Ann Fanshawe for drinking chocolate and its colonial legacy, “this fundamentally literary act points first to collective memory, and then, to the act of exchange. The receipt/recipe is a medium of transmission that represents a sense of community networked in ever-widening circles.”

Is this recipe for fudge, then, a gift, an olive branch of sorts from Pompeo to Wittes? An attempt to create an alliance across political difference in a fractured and contentious American moment?

Or is this gift of a mother’s fudge recipe a performance, a sort of folksy, downhome counterstrike meant to evoke human exchange over legal maneuvering?

Wittes himself is noncommittal. He grants that the holiday message “contains nothing objectionable,” but says,

As to Pompeo’s accusation about me, I post all of my FOIA requests and will continue to do so. I will also always post all responses I get to them—whether they support, or, as in this case, refute the premises that led me to submit them.

I look forward to trying his mother’s fudge recipe.

Before he could get around to it, however, an associate of his, Shannon Togawa Mercer, managing editor of Lawfare blog, tried the recipe with happy results.

https://twitter.com/benjaminwittes/status/952971634419347458

In this one unexpected exchange run many themes familiar to those who study recipes:

  • Recipes as gift exchange
  • Recipes that establish bonds and forge connections
  • Claims of “secret” recipes
  • Documenting the recreation of recipes
  • Recipes as historical/familial archive.

This window into government and intelligence-communities also shows that recipes retain enormous cultural capital and can both convey meaning and actively form bonds.

They say politics makes strange bedfellows. Apparently, politics also makes strange kitchen-mates.

History Carnival 117 — A Twelfth Night Edition

Twelfth Night, when the world turns topsy-turvy until midnight and the wassail is drunk to ensure a good apple harvest… A fitting day for the first History Carnival of 2013! This month, The Recipes Project has the privilege of rounding up the past month’s history blogging.

As you might expect in a Twelfth Night edition, there are several Christmas-themed posts to be found. In the winter, a blogger’s interests might turn to thoughts of dark poetry. Over at The View East, Kelly Hignett offers us “A Communist Christmas Carol”, in which Romanian children (c. 1980) request that Father Christmas bring some simple food items (and toilet paper). Lindsey Fitzharris (The Chirurugeon’s Apprentice) takes “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” as her inspiration for a reminder of our mortality, “The Dead Man’s Poem“, wishing us to “thank God you are safe and secure in your life”.

Other bloggers considered another potentially heavy side of Christmas: food! Many of you may have already been back to the gym and turned to salad-eating, but Twelfth Night is a time of cake and pie, so let us remember once more the feasts of yore. Tiffany Stoziciki gives us a taste of American Christmas dinners at the History Reporter (“Christmas Dinners, 1860-1960“), starting with the pared down offerings of the Civil War tables to the best meal of the year on Cold War tables (with some very American bubbly)…  At The Board of Longitude Project, Alexi Baker looks at what Board of Longitude members, whether on shore or at sea, got up to during the Christmas season in “Longitude and a Christmas lark“– and yes, this is a reference to roasted lark! For the lighter side of Christmas, see Caroline Rance’s hilarious “‘Set the Spirit Alight’: Victorian festive science” (The Quack Doctor): from fiery masks to breathing flames, it sounds like Victorian Christmases were rather fun–if dangerous.

In the spirit of Auld Lang Syne, you might check out the future of technology and entertainment at “Fun Places on the Internet (in 1995)” by Matt Novak (Paleofuture). The post is interesting in two ways: bringing back memories of one’s early online forays (ahhh–recalling the sound of a connecting modem still brings a thrill to my heart!) and considering the classification of “fun”…

What are the dark days of winter without a bit of inversion and oddity? Romeo Vitelli at Providentia examines the fascinating case of Mary Todd Lincoln’s mental breakdown in a four-part series, “Mary Todd Lincoln on Trial“. In a post on “Saintly Rivals – a brief comparison of the cults of Thomas Beckett and Edward the Confessor“, Steffan (My Albion) considers the seemingly contradictory ideas of what made a good medieval saint (peaceful virtue or violent martyrdom). Natalie Bennett at Philobiblon reviews Eleanor Hubbard’s City Women: Money, Sex and the Social Order in early Modern London, recounting several tantalizing stories of disorderly early modern women.

The ultimate inversion and oddity, perhaps, is that of tales of cannibalism. Ben Breen has written two intriguing (and beautifully illustrated) posts on medicinal cannibalism and other repulsive remedies in early modern Europe:  “Early Modern Drugs and Medicinal Cannibalism” at Res Obscura and “‘Ravens-scull & a Handfull of Fennel’: Early Modern Drugs” at The Appendix. (These last two posts, if read after Twelfth Night, may also aid in any weight-loss plans!)

December has also been a good month for pondering methodological questions. At The History Tavern and Prospero, the bloggers consider the usefulness concepts such as terrorism (“Boston Tea Party… Was It An Act of Terrorism?“) and genocide (“The Irish Famine: Opening Old Wounds“) in studying specific historical questions.

Trevor Owens and T. Mills Kelly, in turn, are concerned by the research and teaching challenges posed by rapid technological change. Owens–and the lively comments section–suggest ways that archivists might make their collections more searchable in a Google-dominated environment: “Implications for Digital Collections Given Historian’s Research Practices“. Kelly has a multi-part series in which he rethinks the entire history curriculum, specifically the imperative of integrating technology into teaching research skills: “The History Curriculum in 2023“.

The complicated relationships among history, narrative, author and audience were discused by Lucinda Matthew-Jones, Christopher Dummit and Christopher Jones. Matthew-Jones’ post “Doctor Who-ing the Victorians” (Journal of Victorian Culture Online) is a thoughtful response to a recent U.K. report on teaching history in British Schools. The use of history in Doctor Who, she argues, assumes a more sophisticated level of historical knowledge than the government report does! Dummit at Everyday History wonders if a historical novelist can be classed as a great historian  “Guy Gavriel Kay: Great Historian?” In “Narrative History and the Collapsing of Historical Distance“, Jones of The Junto discusses the problems and possibilities of blurring subject and author when writing narrative history. Rethinking our methodological practices and assumptions?  Contemplating non-linear Doctor Who history? Considering how best to tell stories? Fine questions to consider on Twelfth Night.

The world, obviously, didn’t end on December 21. For those who were disappointed, Sir Isaac Newton also had a few thoughts on the apocalypse, which he anticipated happening in 2034 or, perhaps, 2060: “Sir Isaac Newton’s Daniel and the Apocalypse (1733)” (The Public Domain Review).

In any case, it seems likely that we’ll all be here next month, so please come by next month’s History Carnival, which will be hosted by our own Sally Osborn at her blog Travels and travails in 18th-Century England. Happy Wassailing to you, tonight!