To the Reader

My copy of 'The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy ' has an inscription on the flyleaf. I have a ninth edition, published in 1775, but Miss or Mrs Williams used it intensively from 1789 onwards

 ( there are two hundred year old gravy stains and and smears on the pages, and it's falling to pieces)

I've been fascinated by this book since I found it among a lot of other books at my mum's house in a cupboard ( rather aptly, it's a 16th Century Suffolk cottage) and took it home with me ( I did tell her afterwards,she's fine about it). To me it's the easiest form of time travel; to taste what would have been eaten two hundred years ago, it gives an idea of their lives, the everydayness of it, the way the pre industrial revolution world worked. We are wrecking the earth at such speed and with such a industrial inefficiency, that the idea that I could make a cowslip pudding or a parsnip and cucumber soop or a ragoo in the slow pre industrial revolution style, is attractive. Not that the world was that different then as far as human nature is concerned of course. 1789 was a significant year, ushering in a horrific amount of bloodshed and terror that shook the western world but you know, there was  Enlightenment, human rights and the age of sensibility too.

 The book says it is written ' by a lady'  and that lady was Hannah Glasse,I want to explore her recipes, the weird and archaic ingredients people cooked with, and the techniques they used.  As I try out the different recipes I'm going to find out more about her and write a bit about her. Her writing style is crisp and easy to understand, and in the preface she explains that she's simplified what she's written so that serving girls and cooks can understand her, she won't tax their brains with writing in the high style, which is a good move and it made her cook book a runaway best seller - even in the colonies!. There are no amounts specified further than ' the size of a hen's egg' or a 'peck' ' a handful' or my favourite 'as much as you please' 

There is also a huge emphasis on meat, and I will write about some of these recipes and maybe try a few out. Some of the recipes call for endangered species ( fillet of Bittern anyone?) or other to us - most of us -  at any rate,deeply unappetising birds: Swans, Snipe, Herons (what meat could there possibly be on a Heron??) Quail (otherwise known as a bundle of toothpicks held together with a bit of string). Other recipes are fond of the ' recognising what you eat'  approach, to whit - boiling the hairs off a calf's head, preparing a rabbit and splitting the head down the centre to garnish it - I will be giving those a miss as well. I may do a chicken or pheasant though. (only if free range and had a good life)

The fish chapter is alright, until you reach the recipe for Turtle Soop - ' keep the turtle in a barrel of water overnight then before cooking slit it's throat or cut off it's head and allow the blood to drain'

I won't be doing this, it's not even allowed anymore thank God. The eighteenth century was obsessed by meat  and it wasn't unusual to have two or three different animals in one dish, or stuff a goose with forcemeat made from three different animals and smothered in bacon. Happily for me though there are plenty of recipes for good cakes, vegetables, soups and sauces, salads and puddings. In my allotment I am going to grow the sorts of vegetables that Ms Glasse would have used and I will learn to like nutmeg and mace, because they were excessively fond of it in 1770's. 

 I can't cook that well, so will have to have Hannah Glasse teach me as we go. x