And devising a modern recipe when comparing multiple historic sources
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This month we’re cooking from around the end of the Early Modern period (~1500-1800), which means blocks of narrative text and general guidance, rather than our step-by-step modern day recipes (I wrote about shifting recipe format for Mold Magazine here).
I chose to combine 2 versions of the same recipes from two important English-language books from that period: by American Mary Randolph (1762-1828), and Englishwoman Hannah Glasse (1708-1770). I talk a bit about working with two recipes for the same dish from two different books (which are also decades apart): And how I chose to go about comparing and combining them.
Historic recipe modernizing (or even just cooking them at all) is an art as well as a science, so you may have a different approach you’d take. If you think to yourself ‘I would have done that differently,’ I’d love to hear the approach you would have taken in the comments.
About the books:
Mary Randolph’s The Virginia Housewife was one of the first cookbooks written and published in America (the first American cookbook came out in the 1790s, about 30 years before hers.) Randolph was from a wealthy Virginia family and a distant relative of Thomas Jefferson.
After the Revolutionary War, Thomas Jefferson booted her husband from his government job, and they opened a boarding house to make ends meet. Boarders praised her cooking, and she published the cookbook, which adds quite an eclectic range of dishes to the repertoire of familiar English-rooted ones (for example, she has recipes for East Indian curry, gumbo, and ropa vieja).
Published a year before her death, Virginia Housewife became popular for its easy to follow recipes and simple preparations, and remained in print up to the Civil War. When Randolph died, she was buried below Arlington House, and her grave is the earliest known in what would later become Arlington National Cemetery.
Hannah Glasse published The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy in 1747, and it is widely considered to be the first modern English language cookbook (she began the use of precise measurements and replicable instructions that was later codified by Fannie Farmer in The Boston Cooking School Book in 1896): though of course there were many other English-language cookbooks before this, she experiments with new ways of formatting.
Glasse’s work was popular during her lifetime but, unlike the well-connected Randolph, her authorship was disputed after her death and until the twentieth century, when it was finally accepted that she had written her own book after all. Glasse had a difficult upbringing, and wrote her book to support herself and her children. It became popular across Britain for its approachable style geared towards beginner and advanced cooks. While Glasse became wealthy for a time, she declared bankruptcy, was sent to debtor’s prison, and passed away in 1770 having sold the copyright to The Art of Cookery decades earlier. She published two other books, but neither was very successful.
While the books are about 80 years, and a continent, apart, you’ll see many similarities in flavoring and technique. By this point, some American dishes had diverged from their British predecessors, but in others (as is the case with beef olives) we can still trace direct ties between the two:
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