Food in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
Tonight’s class took up where last week’s left off. We started with another non-cookbook source of potential recipes (Inquisition records) and ended with a 6 point plan for identifying reliable cookbooks for people who want to cook historical recipes. One of my students explained it back as “There’s the gold standard, and it descends from that.” Absolutely all my neat historical parallels failed and the class got to laugh at them far too much. I don’t think I need to hear the names John Howard, Paris Hilton or Martha Stewart for a while.
Along the way, we talked about why a pennyloaf is called a pennyloaf, what John Evelyn did for the world of salads, how cuisines changed over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, how fast and why cooking styles change, and recipes. Tonight I brought in a dozen books with recipes in and we did a number of exercises using them and analysing them and drooling over them. To help us in our drooling, one student brought in pomesmoille (a Medieval apple dessert) and another brought in the early nineteenth century ‘pretty dish of eggs.’ This led to a rather nice discussion of why it’s important to check back with original recipe descriptions rather than relying on someone else’s interpretation.
And that was tonight’s class. Next week I think I might do something really fun, like take in various types of chocolate to taste. It would be cool to sort out what processing does to the bean, although I can’t manage beans proper. I can manage Mexican chocolate and 99.45% pure chocolate couverture, and 85% couverture, and 100% baking chocolate, and Dutch cocoa. I suspect we might have fun :).
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