Category Archives: Series: What Is A Recipe? Virtual Conversation

Reflections on Reconstructing Eighteenth-Century Recipes

By Katherine Allen

For the ‘What is a Recipe?’ Virtual Conversation on Saturday, 24th June, I reconstructed two eighteenth-century recipes from Mary Wise’s recipe book: a lip salve remedy and a pound cake. You can find out how these experiments unfolded over at my blog, and you can also check out Twitter @KAllen622 for the tweets on making the lip salve, and Instagram @raspberrythriller62 for photos of the pound cake.

The task: choosing a manuscript recipe collection

Actually, this wasn’t difficult. I knew that I wanted to pick both recipes from the same manuscript because this gives me insight into what one individual (or connected group of people creating one collection) desired to record: whether it was out of use, interest, or preserving inherited knowledge. I’ve long been interested in the two manuscripts belonging to the Wise family of Woodcote, which are housed at the Warwickshire Record Office, so I decided to look at these manuscripts for inspiration. For more information on the manuscript I selected, and the family, please refer to this post.

What’s particularly interesting about the lip salve remedy and the pound cake recipe is that they are the third and fourth recipes recorded in Mary’s collection. This means that she could have been inspired to begin a manuscript and had these recipes in mind at the start, and they could have been her own creations or ones passed down to her. Or, she copied recipes from another collection/printed work/letters and these recipes are again among the first she selected.

It’s also worth noting that this manuscript is organised with a table of contents, with a large proportion of the medicinal recipes following the culinary ones written in two different hands. Yet, there are several intermixed medical/culinary recipes (such as these two) recorded at the start of the collection.

Much of the research involving manuscript recipe books is based on speculation and inference: why the compiler began his/her collection, why recipes were selected, if these recipes were deemed effective/valuable, and why the compiler organised the work in a specific way. As neither of these recipes have annotations or statements of efficacy to guide me in determining their value and use, they proved an exciting and unknown challenge for reconstruction. They were also safe to create and I could source the ingredients.

The challenge: selecting a medicinal remedy to re-create

I would have loved to make a plaster or medicinal drink, but I quickly found the ingredients to be prohibitive. For instance, most early modern plaster and salve remedies for treating aches or burns contain lead and turpentine (no thank you!). The main category of remedies found in eighteenth-century recipe collections is for digestive complaints, and many of the recipes I considered contain purgative ingredients such as senna and ‘true’ rhubarb. These ingredients were common since early modern medicine focused on evacuating the body as part of treatment.

I also don’t think my local Boots chemist has Peruvian Bark (cinchona) on hand, and let’s not even get started with the opiates to avoid… I also obviously don’t have access to popular early modern panaceas like Venice treacle (theriac) or mithridate, both of which were cited several times in Mary’s collection for plague and bite of the mad dog (rabies) recipes.

Even when ingredients weren’t toxic, they were difficult to source. Many remedies are herbal-based and I simply don’t have the time or resources to try and track down handfuls of fresh flowers/herbs (unless they’re available at the supermarket). I was additionally restricted by the process of creating recipes. Although my research is on household distillation in eighteenth-century England, I do not own a still and, in any case, wouldn’t feel confident trying to distil a cordial water.

‘How to make Lipsave’

For a transcription of the recipe and my troubles with re-creating it please see my blog post.

Once I settled on this recipe (a few weeks ago) I knew that I had to source beeswax, golden pippins, and orange flower water. Orange flower water could be prepared at home via distillation, and some early modern collections contain recipes, though Mary’s  does not.

As Mary may well have purchased her orange flower water, I too ordered a bottle off Amazon. Simultaneously, I was fortunate enough to find exactly a 1 ounce bar of beeswax! The golden pippins were more difficult to find. They certainly don’t sell pippins in my local shops, and it’s also the wrong season for harvesting apples. So, I opted for golden delicious.

The final line of the recipe is ‘& if you see occasion pair of the Drops’. This instruction presumably meant that you can use it in conjunction with another liquid-based remedy. However, nowhere does it specify what the drops are for, and, moreover, there is no recipe in either of the Wise family books that has ‘drops’ in the title. This leads me to suspect that Mary copied this recipe from another source, but omitted the accompanying ‘drops’ remedy.

‘How to make a pound Cake’  

Again, please see my blog post for further details on the process of creating this cake.

Sourcing ingredients for this culinary recipe was easier. I ordered a bottle of rose water at the same time as the orange blossom water off Amazon. The only ingredient hurdles I encountered were substituting medium dry sherry for sack (an antiquated term for fortified white wine), and deciding how many large eggs I would use, since early modern eggs were likely not as big.

Upon reflection, this was a hugely rewarding and enjoyable experience and I’m thankful that I was able to participate in this virtual conversation on several platforms. The challenges I faced sourcing ingredients in a modern marketplace (and interpreting instructions) likely compare to those that eighteenth-century compilers could have faced when navigating which recipes and remedies to collect and prepare. Sometimes ingredients are simply unattainable, unsuitable for one’s constitution, or undesirable. Instructions are frequently lost in translation, and households needed to improvise and adapt recipes to their available equipment and domestic circumstances.

It is a few days later and I’m still using the little pot of lip salve, and my lips feel very smooth! The cake is disappearing slice by slice.

Day 6: What is a recipe?

Welcome to Day 6 of our virtual conversation on ‘What is a Recipe?’. Don’t forget to check out the H-Nutrition discussion which has been going on all week! This is their last day of joining in! They’ve been discussing ‘Weight Watchers’ Fried Chinese Chicken‘, ‘First Bouillon, Then Meat with Potatoes‘, ‘Spaghetti Mexican Style‘ , ‘Statistical Analysis of Yorkshire Pudding‘, ‘Branding Bran: School Breakfast As A Recipe For Healthy Children’, ‘Who Says We Can’t Cook!’, ‘Carbohydrate Hell’, ‘A Healthy Dose of Skepticism’, ‘Organic Tools For Social Standing: Oehm’s and Allestein’s Recipes for Brain, Lung and Udders, 1850-60s’, ‘Dehydrated Rations for Indian Soldiers in the Second World War’,  ‘Bachelorette Chow’, and ‘What is a Recipe? Update #2’.  Lots to get your teeth into!

‘Cooking With Anger’ will be continuing with their Story Telling Project! Topics so far have included: ‘The Terror of Chard’,  ‘Chukkar’,  ‘Rawhide’, ‘The Fountainhead of Regret’, and ‘Father’s Day D. Lights.’ You can play in the comments here!

Today is a continuation of current projects and a few new ones:

  • Katherine Allen “Reconstructing Recipes from an Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Recipe Book” with Instagram, Twitter and a Blog! Live tweeting about her experience reconstructing the medicinal remedy and doing an Insta Story as I create an eighteenth-century dessert. Afterwards, a de-brief on the experiments over blog. Find Katherine on Twitter @KAllen622, Instagram @raspberrythriller62 and on her Blog at   https://raspberrythriller.wordpress.com/ and recipes.hypotheses.org
  • Siobhan Carlson is back with “Spuddenly Farming: A reconstruction of Rev. Mr. Cochran’s Potato experiment, 1791”, Find her on Instagram at @SpuddenlyFarming or Twitter at @Spuddenly_Farm
  • Harry Hayfield brings us “Henri’s Kitchen” with ‘Croque Madame’ at the Recipes Project
  • Kierri Price is going to be using Facebook Live to present “Into the Mix: Creating a Recipe” at 2pm today. This project invites anyone and everyone to contribute to the creation of a recipe – without any set idea in mind! Viewers’ suggestions will shape the steps of the recipe, with something perhaps starting as a pastry eventually evolving into a cake. Drawing upon the experience and imagination of diverse people, “Into the Mix” hopes to explore the potential of social media to bring us together and encourage creativity, while (hopefully!) making something tasty at the same time. The Facebook Live will be broadcast here!

As always, comments, contributions, stray thoughts, questions, and anything else you wish to put forward are always welcome! Join us on twitter using #recipesconf, or comment on any one of the projects above. We look forward to hearing from you!

Henri’s kitchen: 3. Croque Madame

Harry Hayfield, a resident of Ceredigion in Wales, has long had an interest in the stories of the Musketeers which are set in early 17th century France, this led in turn to an interest in the Stuart period of history and joining a living history group. However, as a registered carer for his grandparents, he is unable to get to many of the events and yet wanted to do something to help. One day he was watching “The Little Paris Kitchen” broadcast on the BBC and thought “These are recipes designed by the French, therefore could they be converted in the 17th century versions of themselves?”. Doing some research he found that they could. Harry will therefore contribute four of the recipes as shown in the programme as if cooked by Henri de Ceredigion (Harry’s Stuart persona) a cadet member of the Musketeers, with able assistance from Planchet, his manservant cum stable lad.

Whenever I invite people to have a meal with me, they are always very surprised by how little I actually have. I explain this by saying that both Planchet and myself are very careful about what we eat for two reasons. Firstly, I don’t want to be as big and rotund as Athos and secondly, I have always had a very small appetite and therefore all my meals are very small. That does not mean that they are boring, as demonstrated when Planchet introduced me to what he called Croque Monsieurs, which were absolutely delicious, but so filling I could only manage one of them. So I wondered if I could make a version just a little smaller, and that’s when I came up with the idea of Croque Madames (after all, most ladies are smaller than me) with a few English connections.

The first thing that you need is to make a sauce, which is the simplest thing in the world to do. Take a knob of butter and melt it in a pan, then take roughly the same amount of flour, give it a good mix then pour a good quarter pint (English I should point out) of milk slowly into the mixture whilst still mixing. Then, depending on your opinion on the subject, add some mustard and then start to make your croques. These are so simple even Porthos could make them (but don’t tell him that I said he was simple). First you take a loaf of bread and slice it into as many slices are you want croques, ignoring the comments from a certain manservant about how dull and uninspiring that sounds, then cut off the crusts. Then flaten them with a roll until they are as half as thick as they were to begin with and then brush them with butter on both sides. This is the get the crunch. As Planchet has often told me “Monsieur, no crunch, no croque”, and who I am to argue with him!
 
A nice piece of ham for my croque madame. Credit: Wellcome Images.
Place the buttered slices into a cup, adding some ham, a small egg and the sauce last of all before dusting them with a liberal amount of cheese of your own choice and brushing the exposed pieces of bread with some more butter before placing into the oven. Now, depending on how runny you like your egg, you leave them in for about fifteen minutes for a soft egg (as Planchet prefers) or twenty minutes for a set egg (as I prefer). Once you take them out of the oven, don’t worry if the edges of the bread look a little burnt as this adds to the crunch. Then simply serve and enjoy your meal as myself and Planchet will in about thirty minutes, as writing about these has made me rather peckish. Planchet, have you got any sliced bread not doing anything? I would like a Madame.

 

Boundaries: Reflections on Day 5

By Lisa Smith, with Rosie Redstone

I found myself thinking of the importance of limts and boundaries throughout the day:

  • What is the importance of place and time for a recipe?
  • How does the way in which we record a recipe shape our experience of it?
  • What is the significance of constraint, either in terms of ingredients or method?

The theme of place came up in several presentations. Dorothy Cashman discussed the specific Irish and familial context for Mrs. Baker’s book; it served as a family memorial in her widowhood and served as a microcosm of early nineteenth-century Dublin society. In an interview for the Endless Knot podcast, Laura Carlson (of The Feast podcast) considered the meaning of specific foods (and chickens) along the Camino de Santiago and the ways in which medieval recipes reflected Mediterranean trade. Over at H-Nutrition, several of the posts in their recipe series this week have looked at ethnicity: the Americanization of pasta in a 1920s cookbook, the ideal Central European meal, and a recipe that revealed the privations of the poor in Soviet Ukraine.

Recipes were, of course, on the move — between people and between regions. But sometimes a recipe’s significance remains fixed in its original place. Mrs. Baker’s book can be read alongside the family’s archives, and emphasises just how connected the collection was to time and city, even if we encounter similar recipes elsewhere. But a recipe occasionally becomes something ‘other’, as Anastasia Lakhtikova found.  She realised how privileged her family was when she discovered another family’s treasured, and quite horrible, recipe for ‘Wonder Sand’. This recipe cannot be detached from the context of Soviet privation.

The way in which recipes are recorded can also shape our experience of them: are they in print, manuscript or digital? are they on recipe cards or scraps, or in a book? In an article in The Observer last weekend, Bee Wilson looked at the rise of digital recipes and whether more recipes mean better cooking. (Spoiler: no! But you should read the whole thing.) Digital recipes, she suggests, lack life and context, even if they are convenient. Although there are some super recipes in circulation, there is also far more dross than ever before. This is all very true, though perhaps it’s not all bad — I’ve often been struck by the sense of community in the comment sections, where users assess the recipe, discuss any adaptations they made, and even connect it to their own family’s life.

The physical object is often important to us, as well. The messier side of manuscript recipes is appealing, drawing us into a sense of intimacy, as with the crossings-out in a recipe that Sietske Fransen shared (above). The importance of presentation is something that came out in Wilson’s article, too. Her son, she noted, trusted the shiny recipe cards of Hello Fresh as being authoritative, even though recipe cards and their exchange has fallen out of use in the past decade.

For their exhibition on food history, the Provincial Archives of Alberta is displaying old recipes in recipe card format. Recipe cards are pleasingly organised; no wonder they might be seen as authoritative.

As in the case of Wonder Sand, recipes sometimes reveal constraints. Ingredients are frequently substituted, whether because of seasonality, regionality, or cost. But are there other ways in which constraint might shape recipes? Format is one way. For example, recipe cards limit the writer to two small sides and enforcing brevity, while digital readers are notoriously fickle and tending to skim-read, which forces short statements and clearly marked ingredient amounts.

This month, the Cooking with Anger Project is available at The Recipes Project. It’s an intriguing story-telling game in which you’re given a list of ‘ingredients’ that must be mentioned in a (very) short story. I found the strictness difficult, and flicked through several baskets over several days before settling on one to try. (My attempt is in the comments, along with several much better ones.) But as good poetry shows, working within a tight framework can encourage creativity to flourish.

Siobhan Carlson’s potato experiment continues. When I started writing this post, I was prepared to suggest that the boundary  between experiments and recipes might not be very permeable; after all, the purpose of a modern experiment is replicability–and she has been very careful with her timing and measurements this week. But perhaps even here, there is some scope for creativity, as she found last week when confronted with the problem of unclear instructions with regards to the size of potato cuttings.

An interesting day all around. You can check out the full day in Rosie Redstone’s Storify of Day 5. It’s worth it for the summer drinks and crocodile alone, even before getting to our interesting presentations!