Food History

Mrs. Mary Eales’s Receipts is one of those lovely little reproductions put out by Prospect Books. It was originally published in 1718, but this little very bright orange volume is reproduced from the 1733 edition. I chose it for this week’s book because I’m very much in eighteenth and early nineteenth century mode right now, what with that Regency Gothic banquet getting closer and closer. The Banquet is just a month away.

I like lots of things about this book.

I like it that Mary Eales called herself “Confectioner to her late Majesty Queen Anne” though there is apparently absolutely no evidence of her holding a formal position. She didn’t even supply the quince marmalade for the Royal Breakfast (that was Elizabeth Stephens). The introduction to the Prospect Books facsimile edition doesn’t put it outside the realm of possibility that she was a supplier for Court, but I would like to see more evidence, myself.

I like it that Mrs. Eales gave us the earliest printed English recipe for icecream. She calls it “to ice cream” which exactly explains what’s happening and explains why we call icecream “icecream” and not “frozen thingie” or even “straw pots”.

I like it that the book lasted until 1788 - I keep wanting to believe the French Revolution rang its death knell, but of course there’s no proof of anything like that. Romancing isn’t history, no matter what a good story can be spun from it. Let me take a moment from blogging to sigh pathetically. (If I had put that last sentence in brackets, I would have been sighing parenthetically.)

I want to give you a half-dozen recipes from this little book. There are so many that are so much fun. It’s a lovely book to keep with you through from the cherry season until all the berries and stone fruit are finished, because there are instructions on drying and preserving and making clear-cakes, jelly and paste. The clear-cakes look like a cross between a jelly and the sort of moulded fruit I tried with quinces earlier this month. Less dense than a mould, but with far more firmness and flavour than a jelly.

I think I’ll give you two recipes. Ice cream, obviously, and maybe a chocolate one. After all that talk of fruit and pastes and clear-cakes, too. I’m just a spoilsprt. Mind you, if one of you has a fruit tree and really, really wants a recipe to help deal with your annual surfeit, I’m quite willing to bring out my little orange book again and find something suitable.

To ice cream

Take Tin Ice-Pots, fill them withh any Sort of Cream you like, either plain or sweeten’d, or Fruit in it; shut your Pots very close; to six Pots, you must allow eighteen or twenty Pound of Ice, breaking the Ice very small; there will be some great Pieces, which lay at the Bottom and Top: You must have a Pail, and lay some straw at the Bottom; then lay in your Ice, and put in ammongst it a Pound of Bay-Salt; set in your pots of Cream and lay Ice and Salt between every Pot, that they may not touch; but the Ice must lie round them on every Side; lay a good deal of Ice on the Top, cover the Pail with Straw, sit it in a Cellar where no Sun or Light comes, but will be froze in four Hours, but it may stand longer; than take it out just as you use it; hold it in your Hand and it will slip out. Whe you would freeze any Sort of Fruit, either Cherries, Rasberries, Currants, or Strawberries, fill your Tin-Pots with the Fruit, but as hollow as you can; put to them Lemmonade, made wtih Spring-Water and Lemmon-Juice sweeten’d; put enough in the Pots to make the Fruit hand together, and put them in Ice as you do Cream.

To make Chocolate-Puffs

Take a pound of fine sifted Sugar, and three Ounces of Chocolate, grated, ad sifted through an Hair Sieve; make it up to a Paste with White of Eggs whip’d to a Froth; then beat it well in a mortar, and make it up in Loaves, or any Fashion you please. Bake it in a cool Oven, on Papers and Tin-Plates.