Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine

the methods, to dress pikes a la sauce Robert , to make blackcaps (apples baked in their skins) ; to make a Wood Street cake ; to make Shrewsbury cakes; to dress a leg of mutton like a gammon of bacon; to dress eggs a la Augemotte ; to make a dish of quaking pudding of several colours ; to make an Italian pudding, and to make an Olio. The eye seems to meet for the first time with hasty pudding, plum-porridge (an experiment toward the solidification of the older plum-broth), rolled beef-steaks, samphire, hedgehog cream (so called from its shape, currants being used for the eyes, and cut almonds for the bristles), cocks’-combs, orange, spinach and bean tarts, custards in cups (the 1723 book talks of jellies served on china plates), and lastly, jam — the real jam of these days, made to last, as we are told, the whole year. There is an excellent prescription for making elderberry wine, besides, in which Malaga raisins are to be largely used. “In one year,” says our chef, “ it will be as good and as pleasant as French wine.” Let us extract the way “to make Black- Cookery Books. caps ” : — “ Take a dozen of good pippins, cut them in halves, and take out the cores ; then place them on a right Mazarine dish with the skins on, the cut side downwards ; put to them a very little water, scrape on them some loaf sugar, put them in a hot oven till the skins are burnt black, and your apples tender ; serve them on Plates strew’d over with sugar.” Of these books, I select the preface to “The Complete Housewife,” by E. Smith, 1736, because it appears to be a somewhat more ambitious endeavour in an introductory way than the authors of such undertakings usually hazard. From the last paragraph we collect that the writer was a woman, and throughout she makes us aware that she was a person of long practical experience. Indeed, as the volume comprehends a variety of topics, including medicines, Mrs. or Miss Smith must have been unusually observant, and have had remarkable opportunities of making herself conversant with matters beyond the ordinary range of culinary specialists. I propose presently to print a few samples of her workmanship, and a list of her principal receipts Cookery Books. 8 7 in that section of the book with which I am just now concerned. First of all, here is the Preface, which begins, as we see, by a little piece of plagiarism from Nott’s exordium : — “ PREFACE . “ It being grown as unfashionable for a book now to appear in publick without a preface, as for a lady to appear at a ball without a hoop-petticoat, I shall conform to custom for fashion-sake, and not through any necessity. The subject being both common and universal, needs no arguments to introduce it, and being so necessary for the gratification of the appetite, stands in need of no encomiums to allure persons to the practice of it ; since there are but few now-a-days who love not good eating and drinking. Therefore I entirely quit those two topicks ; but having three or four pages to be filled up previous to the subject it self, I shall employ them on a subject I think new, and not yet handled by any of the pretenders to the art of cookery ; and that is, the antiquity of it ; Cookery Books. which if it either instruct or divert, I shall be satisfied, if you are so.