How to Cook Early Modern Recipes.

Step 1: Choose your recipe.

There are two ways to go: either seek out a popular cookery text of the time on eebo. Here is a short and sweet bibliography to get you started:

Hugh Plat, Delightes for Ladies , 1602
Hannah Wooley, The Accomplish'd ladies delight in preserving, physick, beautifying, and cookery. 1675: She has several general manuals, all of which will contain recipes.
Gervase Markham, The Early English Housewife
May, Robert, The accomplisht cook, or The art and mystery of cookery. 1660.

 Here is a longer bibliography including latin, italian and french books: 


Accessible Manuscript recipe Books:

This is of course a little trickier. You need to have a basic proficiency in paleography. You can search for them on archive hub.


The one I generally use is:
Mary Baumfylde's recipe book and it can be found on British Literary Manuscripts Online 1660-1900. Simply search Baumfylde.

The first half of this book is medical receipts written by Mary Baumfylde in the 1620s, and the second half are cookery recipes written by Katherine Foster  in 1707.

Another option is Arcana Fairfaxana Manuscripta,
A victorian facsimile of the Fairfax family's medical recipe book. Most of the book centres on herbal remedies, but around from page sixty-five onwards there are some cookery recipes.

Before you pick your recipe, be sure to consider the following:
- Try to figure out what the recipe will look like. A cheesecake is not the same as a modern cheesecake, but sometimes resembles a steam pudding, what is a posset? Do they mean the same thing when they say bisket?
- What ingredients does it require: Read the whole recipe, there are no ingredient lists.
- Have I got the equipment to make this. This is a skill in itself. Early modern equipment has modern equivalents, be inventive!
- Be flexible. Robert May's recipe for blood pudding suggests that you use the still warm blood of a hog, but you could probably get away with using lukewarm sheep's blood.

The Cook - Bernado Strozzi c. 1620

Step 2: Buy your ingredients.

If you are going savoury, don't feel the need to buy a live pig and flay it yourself. Instead, ask the butcher to help you.

Replace in more delicious equivalent ingredients. I made a currant pudding using a recipe by Katherine Foster, and the currants had small pips, I'll use raisins next time.

Step 3: Weights and Measures.

Use a set of scales that can measure pounds and ounces. (If you even breathe the word cups near me... I won't be held accountable for my actions.)

Step 4: Common sense is your friend.

The recipes you will receive will not be complete. They will not have all the information you require. Having a bit of cooking experience will be a valuable help in this difficult time:

To make an extraordinary good Cake.
TAke half a bushel of the best flour you can get very finely searsed, and lay it upon a large Pastrey board, make a hole in the midst thereof, and put to it three pound of the best butter you can get, with fourteen pound of currans finely picked and rubbed, three quarts of good new thick cream warmed, two pound of fine sugar beaten, three pints of good new ale barm or yeast, four ounces of cinamon fine beaten and searsed, also an ounce of beaten ginger, two ounces of nutmegs fine beaten and searsed; put in all these materials together, and work them up into an indifferent stiff paste, keep it warm till the oven be hot; then make it up and bake it being baked an hour and a half, ice it, then take four pound of double refined sugar, beat it and searce it, and put it in a deep clean scowred skillet the quantity of a gallon, boil it to a candy height with a little rose-water, then draw the cake, run it all over it, and set it into the oven till it be candied.

Take for example this recipe. Clearly, Robert May was cooking for an extremely large household. A bushel of flour is 42 pounds. He literally made a hole in the sack and used that to make the cake. I would suggest dividing the quantities by 20. A mere 900g of flour. Other things worth noting: he ices the cake, but does not tell not tell you what kind of icing to use, or how to make it.
Finally he covers the entire cake in sugar syrup; something we simply wouldn't do, and then places it back into the oven to harden. The page will be littered with missing information, it's important to have the confidence in your decisions, and just hope for the best. There will be no oven temperatures beyond hot, medium and cool: Look up modern equivalent recipes for good oven temperatures.

Step 5: Use modern equipment.

I'm not saying pull out the food processor and mix it all in there, but if a recipe asks you, as in the case of Katherine Foster's biskett to beat eggs for three quarters of an hour, use an electric whisk. Experiencing material history is one thing; tennis elbow is a different but potentially related thing.

Postscript:

Cooking early modern food is really fun, and can be pretty time consuming. The resulting product, however, is not necessarily going to be delicious; the flavours were still experimental and the processes very much affected by how hot the fire would be at different times of day. Even if you end up with a completely inedible piece of cookery, enjoy learning about the intricate relationship between work and food in the period, and how skill intensive this work was for the men and women who performed it. Take it all in, with a pinch of salt.