![]() His recipe detailed apple pastries that were seasoned with sugar and lemon peel, encased in delicate, thin pastry, which were iced when cold. Folger Shakespeare Library.įor help, I turned to Robert May, whose masterpiece cookbook, published in 1660 in his old age, not only chronicled food fashions for most of the seventeenth century, but also influenced cooking for decades to follow. ![]() The accomplisht cook, or The art & mystery of cookery. It was like having thirteen pieces of a jigsaw and no picture to follow–no idea whether a recipe was one of the important bits, or just a dull bit of sky. It was difficult to know whether that meant it was the ‘true’ recipe or whether this was a close group of friends that were sharing their favorite pastries, and their manuscript books had all miraculously ended up in the same 21 st-century archive. Some of the recipes were identical, word for word, but attributed to different people. There seemed to be very little common ground. ![]() One recipe was concerned solely with the proper making of the pastry and didn’t mention fillings at all. Tarts were round, tarts were square, sometimes iced, other times un-iced, occasionally open or at other times with a pastry covering. Some cooked the apples down to a pulp, and another dyed the pulp to make different colors, using wine, cochineal, and lemon juice. One insisted that apples were cut in semi-circles and laid like roof tiles into the tart another was firm that the apples be cut in eighths then sliced, to make shapes closer to an actual roof tile. Each recipe seemed to have its own idea about what was important about the finished dish and so concentrated on that particular aspect in great detail. The best generalization I could manage at the time was that they were apple pastries. Trying to define what exactly this ‘thing’ was, however, was more complicated than I first imagined. Capricious orthography aside, this many recipes indicated that they were very much a ‘thing’ in seventeenth-century food fashion. Before long I had thirteen recipes across multiple manuscripts, decades, and, to be honest, spellings. Then I came across a second recipe, and then a third. I’ll come back to this one later.’ I made a note and moved on. I first read a recipe for them in a manuscript in the Wellcome Collection: ‘Interesting’, I thought, ‘unusual name. So, while I’m reading these manuscripts, if something catches my eye and causes me to highlight a recipe in my notes, it has to be something out of the ordinary. In the UK, we’ve only been recording recipes for just over 600 years and, for the most part, if, as a cook, you think up what you believe is a new recipe combination, chances are someone, somewhere, has done it before and written it down - and eventually it will turn up. I read a lot of old recipes over the years it has totaled hundreds of manuscripts and tens of thousands of recipes, and if there’s something I’ve had confirmed to me as a result, it’s that there’s pretty much nothing new under the sun. These recipes are now appearing online, thanks to the wonder of the internet, as institutions such as libraries and record offices embark on ambitious digitizing programs that both make their holdings available to a much wider audience and help to preserve them from damage through overuse. My passion for many years has been traditional British recipes and, for the last decade or so, those recipes appearing in handwritten household manuscripts: recipes that were recorded and passed on and passed down through families and friends. Courtesy of Mary-Anne Boermansįood historian and The Great British Baking Show winner Mary-Anne Boermans writes about piecing together 17th-century manuscript recipes for Taffety Tarts and shares her own recipe adaptation. Iced tarts in shortcrust pastry and puff pastry tarts without icing from manuscript recipes in the Folger collection (V.a.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |