Even in the best scenario, recipes back then weren't like recipes now. A modern cook would find them useless as well, they left quite a bit up to assumed knowledge & experience.
For those that find this unuseful. Most of the works in the base has been digitized by google and others. Just look up any title you're interested in and you'll find the work.
If I ever become fantastically wealthy, one thing I'd love to do is build a culinary museum. Imagine rotating exhibits where you can taste-test food from hundreds of years ago (or at least a close approximation).
City Tavern in Philadelphia serves food made from 18th century recipes, using the tools available at that time. The prices are in line with typical casual dining (Applebees for example).
It's fun if you are in the area but some recipes have improved in the meantime. IMHO, creme brulee benefitted from the appropriation of the butane torch (I think City Tavern uses an iron).
> After 26 years, Chef Staib has decided to not renew his contract with Independence National Historical Park as operator of City Tavern. He closed the doors to the patrons effective November 2, 2020 allowing time wrap up affairs before turning the building back over to the Park Service.
Very useful. I searched for "pasta" and almost nothing showed up but I think I am not yet very good at using the tool. Anyway it's very interesting to have a database of some old text about cooking to search.
Pasta and its cognates is a real ball of culinary-taxonomic mud so that's a pretty unlucky first choice I think.
The word pasta and etymological relatives are also the words for all dough, sausage (pâté), porridge, pastry (pâtisserie), pesto, etc etc in different european cuisines and that's just what I know off the top of my head, in use in the last few decades. If you expand it out a couple hundred years who fucking knows what will have been known by that word or its variants.
I'm not even sure how long that usage dates in english either. Even as recently as mid-late 20th century american cookbooks referred to all noodles as macaroni and used that word generically the same way we use pasta now.
Why do people keep using Wikipedia? From an actual historical dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary:
Earliest use as an English word: 1830:
J. P. Cobbett Jrnl. Tour Italy 214 Maccaroni, like vermicelli, is only one of the forms into which the Italians make what they call ‘pasta’ or paste. It requires a particular sort of wheat, a brittle, flinty grain, to make this pasta.
Earliest mention in English (i.e., as an Italian word): 1820:
W. A. Cadell Journey Carniola, Italy & France II. 152 The Italians prefer that [sc. Macaroni] which is fresh made, and made at home, and called pasta di casa, household paste.*
I searched for beef, went through the list of results trying to find a recipe. I eventually got a link to a scanned google book called “Biscuits and Dried Beef, a Panacea” but then I started reading it and the first page had a quote from poetry. “Cool, these 1800 cookbooks were so well read”, but then as I continued it turned out to be a pleasant fictional work on the life of a poor young Episcopalian Priest with a young family. Nice find but seems like there’s a lot of noise in this.
Compared to some of these, it is not very old, but I regularly use a German cookbook from the 1800s. It was specifically crafted for young women learning to organize a household and contains detailed instructions about every necessary step to take.
The other big advantage is that it almost entirely relies on local ingredients, so it is very cheap to cook, as long as you reduce the amounts suggested for butter and eggs.
Compiled and adapted for the United States, according to the
Thirty-fifth German Original, with Weights and Measures
in American equivalents, and an Appendix of
Selected Recipes of Peculiar American
Dishes
Embracing also a Topically arranged List of over 550 Characteristic
German Dishes in German, with English translation,
giving page where these Recipes can be found
; also a Vocabulary of Culinary Terms in both
languages, with full table.
34 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 80.2 ms ] thread(when you trigger the search or view the Works table, the links are in last column)
But it does help if you know the language... :D
*looks for recipes*
“No not like that”
"Useless cookbook! My local grocer has never heard of Silphium"
> After 26 years, Chef Staib has decided to not renew his contract with Independence National Historical Park as operator of City Tavern. He closed the doors to the patrons effective November 2, 2020 allowing time wrap up affairs before turning the building back over to the Park Service.
The word pasta and etymological relatives are also the words for all dough, sausage (pâté), porridge, pastry (pâtisserie), pesto, etc etc in different european cuisines and that's just what I know off the top of my head, in use in the last few decades. If you expand it out a couple hundred years who fucking knows what will have been known by that word or its variants.
I'm not even sure how long that usage dates in english either. Even as recently as mid-late 20th century american cookbooks referred to all noodles as macaroni and used that word generically the same way we use pasta now.
- "From Latin pistus (“crushed, pounded”), from Latin pīnsō (“to pound, beat, crush”), whose frequentative also gave Italian pestare (“to pound”)."
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pesto#Italian
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pasta#Latin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasta
Evidently it is a young word relatively speaking.
Earliest use as an English word: 1830:
J. P. Cobbett Jrnl. Tour Italy 214 Maccaroni, like vermicelli, is only one of the forms into which the Italians make what they call ‘pasta’ or paste. It requires a particular sort of wheat, a brittle, flinty grain, to make this pasta.
Earliest mention in English (i.e., as an Italian word): 1820:
W. A. Cadell Journey Carniola, Italy & France II. 152 The Italians prefer that [sc. Macaroni] which is fresh made, and made at home, and called pasta di casa, household paste.*
Even if the correct date is 1830 or even 1820, it is a distinction without difference. It misses the middle ages by more than a hundred years.
Might give cooking a few of these a try
Here’s an example of Old English. https://www.omniglot.com/images/langsamples/smp_oldenglish.g...
The other big advantage is that it almost entirely relies on local ingredients, so it is very cheap to cook, as long as you reduce the amounts suggested for butter and eggs.
I fear there won't be an English version of it though.
https://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Davidis&lg_topic=libgen&ope...
Compiled and adapted for the United States, according to the Thirty-fifth German Original, with Weights and Measures in American equivalents, and an Appendix of Selected Recipes of Peculiar American Dishes Embracing also a Topically arranged List of over 550 Characteristic German Dishes in German, with English translation, giving page where these Recipes can be found ; also a Vocabulary of Culinary Terms in both languages, with full table.
[1] https://rarecooking.com/2021/12/14/john-lockes-recipe-for-pa...