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Foods with Health Benefits

Trying to Make Sense of the Medical Recipes

Posted May 2016 
by Stephen Schmidt 

By Stephen Schmidt, with Elaine Leong

This post was written in collaboration with medical historian Elaine Leong and borrows from several of her online articles. Elaine received her doctorate in Modern History from the University of Oxford in 2006. She is currently in residence at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), based in Berlin, Germany, where she recently completed a book titled Treasuries for Health: Making Recipe Knowledge in the Early Modern Household. Elaine is also a collaborator in The Recipes Project, which hosts a fascinating, wide-ranging blog focusing on historical medical recipes. 

6th century copy of De Materia Medica by Dioscorides (40-60 CE), still a central text of early modern medicine

6th century copy of De Materia Medica by Dioscorides (40-90 CE), still a central text of early modern medicine

The 1916 autobiography of Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau1 reveals the astonishing recentness of effective medicines. In 1882 Trudeau established the first American tuberculosis sanitarium at Saranac Lake, New York, where patients underwent a “rest cure” in the cold, clear air of the Adirondack Mountains. Unfortunately, this cure worked only for some and usually only for a time, and by the 1890s Trudeau realized that the disease would only be effectively treated when the bacteria that caused it were identified and medicines against these agents were developed. Amazingly, some of Trudeau’s physician colleagues scoffed at the notion that bacteria caused tuberculosis—or for that matter any disease. Given this state of affairs, it is unsurprising that Oliver Wendell Holmes, a physician of Trudeau’s day (as well as a famed jurist), commented, “If we doctors threw all our medicines into the sea, it would be that much better for our Patients and that much worse for the fishes.”

I often think of Holmes’s pithy remark when reading early modern medical recipes, which appear in many early modern manuscript cookbooks and which were also compiled in manuscript books devoted solely to medical subjects. These medicines are compounded in diverse forms—spirits, wines, waters, syrups, electuaries, pills, salves, and poultices—and are purposed for a variety of conditions, some relatively minor, like chapped hands, pimples, or “surfeit,” and others grievous, like “cancer of the breast” or “the bite of a mad dog.” Some of these medicines seem harmless and pleasant enough to take, while others sound perfectly horrid, containing urine, animal parts, or substances now known to be poisons. As a culinary historian, I can make little of sense these medicines, and given how “unscientific” (and sometimes dreadful) they seem I assume that the persons who took them would have been better off if they had tossed them to the fishes.

Johanna St. John Her Book (Wellcome Library MS 4338)

Johanna St. John Her Book (Wellcome Library MS 4338, digital images)

But the women who made these medicines in their homes clearly thought otherwise. In October 1711, Elizabeth Freke (1671-1714), a gentlewoman living in rural Norfolk, spent four days compiling a room-by-room inventory of “some of the best things” in her house. Written in a notebook containing her memoirs and her culinary and medical recipes,2 Freke’s inventory lists not only jewelry, clothing, furniture, linens, and kitchenware among her “best things,” but also 200 bottles of homemade medicines, which she kept in five locked cupboards in her private sitting room: “several bottles of cordiall water 114 quarts; of pintts of cordy water 36. And of the severall sorts of sirrups is 56 quarts and pints.” Another English gentlewoman, Johanna St. John (1631-1705), placed a similarly high value on her medical knowledge in a will she wrote out a few years before Freke compiled her inventory. Contemporary readers find nothing surprising in the bequests of valuable possessions that St. John made to beloved heirs: her Bible to her eldest son, various pieces of furniture, paintings, and silver to her daughters and granddaughters, and small gifts of cash and linens to old, loyal servants. But we do find it somewhat odd that St. John also made space in her will for her two manuscript recipe books: a book of “receipts of cookery and preserves,” which she left to her “granddaughter Soame,” and her “great receipt book,” an alphabetically organized compendium of remedies, which she bequeathed to her daughter Cholmondley. Few people today think to preserve their personal recipe collections for posterity, but St. John considered hers gifts of great value.

Recipes had been written since antiquity. But the avid trading of recipes and the compilation of recipe books in English homes was a distinctly early modern phenomenon, promoted by England’s impressive literacy rate, including among women, and its relatively fluid society, where moving up by acquiring knowledge was a realistic possibility. A gentlewoman like St. John could find recipes from many sources. Quite possibly she had inherited recipe books from family ancestors, just as her descendants would inherit recipe books from her. Because she was a wealthy woman, she likely owned printed recipe books (then expensive) that she could copy, and she could readily borrow more such books from people she knew. Her family, friends, and acquaintances, too, had recipes. If St. John was like other gentlewomen, she collected culinary recipes primarily from those of her own social rank or higher, whose taste and judgment she respected—and she was particularly interested in culinary recipes said to originate with titled individuals, whose rank implied connections with the court, where fashions were set. St. John’s medical recipes may have been culled from a more diverse network, for cures that worked for the humble also worked for the privileged.

Johanna St. John Copyright Lydiard House / Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

Johanna St. John Copyright Lydiard House / Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

St. John was likely aided in her search for recipes by other members of her household. These helpers probably included some of the men of her family, for many early modern men were avid recipe collectors. The letters of the third Viscount Edward Conway (c.1623-1683) and his nephew Edward Harley (1624-1700) show that the two men extensively exchanged and discussed both culinary and medical recipes during the 1650s. And many men compiled manuscript recipe books, especially during the second half of the seventeenth century. Sir Peter Temple of Stanton Bury (1613-1660) created bespoke recipe books for his daughter Eleanor, and the manuscript cookbook of Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665) became a huge bestseller when it was posthumously published by Digby’s assistant in 1667.

Given the faith that St. John placed in her recipe books, we can assume that she submitted her recipes to proof. It is unlikely that St. John personally tried the culinary recipes she collected in the manor kitchen—her cooks would have done that. But she likely did test the medical recipes herself, if with the aid of servants, for medicine-making, with its expensive ingredients, complex procedures, and high stakes, was regarded as a gentlewoman’s personal responsibility. If St. John’s manor was like other fine homes, it was built with a designated stillroom, and this is where she prepared her medicines.3 The stillroom was equipped with apparatus for distilling spirits, wines, syrups, and waters (Elizabeth Freke, unsurprisingly, owned extensive distilling equipment) and a waist-high charcoal brazier, or chafing dish, for procedures that required heating. The stillroom was attached to a stove room, a small chamber outfitted with slatted shelves and some sort of furnace, to which items were remanded that required drying or that needed to be kept dry during storage. Once a recipe had been made, it was evaluated by the household collective. If the results were poor, the recipe was rejected. But if the recipe worked, it was judged suitable for inclusion in the household recipe book, perhaps with modification. The modification process can sometimes be glimpsed on the pages of recipe books, in corrections or comments inserted by the writer.

Woman distilling, frontispiece of "The Accomplished ladies rich closet of rarities," 1691, Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org A woman hard at work distilling. Scene opposite title page of "The accomplished ladies rich closet of rarities..." 1691 The accomplished ladies rich closet of rarities: or, the ingenius gentlewoman and servant-maids delightful companion. Containing many excellent things for the accomplishment of the female sex ... (1.) The art of distilling. (2.) Making artificial wines. (3.) Making syrups. ... (8) To make beautifying-waters, oyls, pomatums musk-balls, perfumes, &c. (9) Physical and chyrurgical receipts. (10.) The duty of a wet nurse; and to know and cure diseases in children, &c. ... (14.) The accomplished dairy-maids directions, &c. (15.) The judicious midwives directions, how women in travail before and after delivery ought to be used; as also the child; and what relates to the preservation of them both. To which is added a second part, containing directions for the guidance of a young gentlewomen. As to her behavior & seemly deportment / J. S. Published: 1691. Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Woman distilling, frontispiece of “The Accomplished ladies rich closet of rarities,” 1691, Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

Culinary historians can readily believe that St. John’s culinary recipes, if conscientiously tested and copied, actually worked—and still work today, as many early modern culinary recipes do, often in fascinating ways that confound contemporary expectations. But could any of St. John’s medical recipes possibly cure, given their “unscientific” basis? In her gloss of the Eleanor Fettiplace recipe book, dated 1604, Hilary Spurling speaks indirectly to this question.4 She notes that Lady Fettiplace mostly avoids the violent purges, caustic poultices, and poison-filled tonic waters sometimes prescribed in the day in favor of gentle palliatives such as ointments, scent bags, soothing compresses, and stomach-settling drinks, many of which may well have been helpful. In fact, a great deal of early modern medicine was directed at increasing wellbeing rather than effecting cures. Perhaps this was simply inevitable given the lack of medical knowledge in the day, but there was also wisdom in this approach, wisdom that has been lost today. As Dr. Atul Gawande reflects in Being Mortal, doctors today too often prescribe, and patients too often accept, last-ditch treatments that are as excruciating as they are hopeless, as though mortality were a disease rather than a human condition.

Even though I know almost nothing about the complex subject of medical history, I keep up with The Recipes Project blog, for which Elaine writes frequently, because early modern medical recipes share certain features with the culinary recipes and sometimes provide insights into them. A particular area of overlap between early modern food and medicine was the humoral belief system, which (to greatly simplify) held that wellbeing was a matter of maintaining the four bodily humors in reasonable balance and that virtually all ingestible substances had properties that affected this balance in some specific way. Although faith in this system was on the wane in the early modern period, medical recipes were still framed by it, and thus medical recipes sometimes reveal humoral thinking in early modern cooking. For the most part, it seems that early modern people—and even medieval people—more often honored dietary rules than actually observed them in their cooking and eating. While a few dishes scream their humoral scrupulosity—like cold, moist sea creatures doused with hot, dry spices—most dishes, and nearly all surviving bills of fare, appear to ignore humoral precepts, if not flout them.

Violet syrup, used both for cure and for pleasure. Credit: annewheaton,co.uk

Violet syrup, used both for cure and for pleasure. Credit: annewheaton.co.uk

But there were exceptions. Certain items produced in the stillroom had originated as medicines and still retained medical uses in early modern England and yet had come also to be served as foods and drinks. Elizabeth Freke’s more pleasant cordial waters and syrups (assuming there were some) fell into this category. So did a number of other articles common in early modern English recipe books, such as candy-coated spices and nuts (comfits), spiced sugar candies, fruits and plant materials preserved in sugar syrups, fruit jellies, fruit conserves, quince pastes, marmalades, and crumb gingerbreads. These articles contained a variety of putatively beneficial substances and were purposed to alleviate diverse conditions. But their most important “active ingredient” was sugar, which was regarded in the humoral system as almost perfectly balanced and was, for this reason, a prime constituent of many humoral medicines. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England these sugary conceits appeared as foods primarily at banquets, glittering meals of sweets that the elite enjoyed both after great meals and as stand-alone entertainments. Banqueting was a delicious, often drunken, sometimes lascivious indulgence that was meant to flaunt the consumption of expensive sugar. But banqueting also had a curative subtext (or perhaps pretext) in that it supposedly facilitated the digestion, sweetened the breath, and revived the libido after heavy eating and drinking. Certain sugar-laden “banqueting stuffs” were still considered nutraceuticals into the nineteenth century. In 1829, American cookbook author Lydia Maria Child wrote that “economical people will seldom use preserves, except for sickness.”

Indian candied fennel seeds, which are comfits

Indian candied fennel seeds, which are comfits

The compilation of household recipe books in early modern England shifted the paradigm of knowledge generation. Earlier, knowledge had been largely generated by a few genius actors (often supported by wealthy patrons) and by political institutions, the church, and learning centers such as universities and medical schools. Knowledge generation was largely top down. With the advent of recipe books, knowledge was also generated in fairly ordinary households, both through collecting, testing, and writing recipes and through manufacturing products from recipes, during which new ingredients and methods were pioneered. This knowledge was widely disseminated through English society when manuscript recipes were taken up by printed books, a collateral development of the early modern age. Printed recipes, in turn, cycled back to manuscript, where they were further refined before once again returning to print. This cycling between manuscript and print was partly responsible for the speeding up of culinary fashions that occurred with early modernity. From 1200 to 1500, the cooking of the English elites changed hardly at all to judge from manuscript recipe collections. But starting in the sixteenth century, culinary styles were revamped every forty or fifty years, ushering in new ingredients and techniques and of course new dishes. Thus culinary knowledge rapidly increased, even if, then as now, older culinary knowledge tended to be forgotten, at least temporarily, every time tastes and fashions changed.

While the culinary recipes teem with clever, delicious new discoveries and beg to be cooked from even now, the medical recipes, I admit, generally strike me as backward-looking and blind with ignorance, not only useless but terribly sad. I will read a recipe for lemon cream followed by a hopeless medicine for “bleeding in the gut” and think what a shame that the people who ate such a lovely thing often suffered so terribly and died so young. But medical historians tell us that early modern cures were not actually as mired in the past as they appear to the uninformed—and that the same early modern recipe explosion that woke up cooking also spread and reinforced the habit of scientific thinking. In fact, many scientific discoveries about the human body and the natural world had already been made by the end of the seventeenth century. It is a pity that it took so long for these discoveries to bear fruit as effective medicines.

  1. Trudeau, Edward Livingston, An Autobiography (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1916). The book was republished into the 1940s and is available in several contemporary reprints. ↩
  2. Commonplace Book of Elizabeth Freke, British Museum, Add MS 45718. ↩
  3. In more modest homes that lacked a stillroom and stove room, women produced whatever medicines they could and bought the rest from physicians, apothecaries, and freelance purveyors like Hannah Woolley (1622-c.1675), who is better known as England’s first published female cookbook author. The use of commercial medicines and medical services increased among all social classes during the early modern period. ↩
  4. Spurling, Hilary, Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book (New York: Elizabeth Sifton Books, Viking, 1986), 18-20. ↩
This entry was posted in Foods with Health Benefits, Medicine, Stephen Schmidt Tagged: A Collection of Choise Receipts  |   Adapting Historical Recipes  |   Ambergris  |   Amelia Simmons  |   American Antiquarian Society  |   Andrew Boorde  |   Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook  |   Atul Gawande  |   Banqueting houses  |   Banquets (sweets)  |   Barbara Wheaton  |   Boston Public Library  |   Bread  |   bread pudding  |   British Library  |   C. Anne Wilson  |   Catharine Beecher  |   Catharine Dean Flint  |   Charles Perry  |   Christopher Kemp  |   Clements Library  |   Collation  |   Cracknels  |   Custards  |   E. Smith  |   Edna Lewis  |   Edward Livingston Trudeau  |   Elaine Leong  |   Elinor Fettiplace  |   Eliza Leslie  |   Elizabeth Freke  |   Elizabeth Raffald  |   Emptins  |   English influence on U. S. foodways  |   Fannie Farmer  |   Flour Measure  |   Folger Shakespeare Library  |   Forme of Cury  |   Frances Trollope  |   French culinary influence  |   Fricassees  |   Georgetown University  |   Gervase Markham  |   Gingerbread  |   Hannah Glasse  |   Hannah Woolley  |   Henry Frederick (Prince of Wales)  |   Hilary Spurling  |   Hoppin Family Cookbook  |   Hot Bread Kitchen Cookbook  |   Italian culinary influence  |   Ivan Day  |   Johanna St. John  |   John Evelyn  |   John Murrell  |   Joy of Cooking  |   Karen Hess  |   La Varenne  |   Lacock Abbey  |   Longleat House  |   Louise Conway Belden  |   Marchpane  |   Maria Parloa  |   Maria Rundell  |   Marie Kimball  |   Martha Washington Cookbook  |   Martino da Como  |   Mary Cornelius  |   Mary Henderson  |   Mary Lincoln  |   Mary Randolph  |   Marzipan  |   Max Planck Institute  |   Medieval cooking  |   Medieval Islamic cooking  |   Molasses and treacle  |   Morgan Library  |   Mrs. (Elizabeth) Goodfellow  |   Mrs. Cornelius  |   Mrs. N. K. M Lee  |   Musk  |   Neapolitan Recipe Collection  |   Oysters  |   Patriotic cakes  |   Paul Freedman  |   Peter Rose  |   Portugal Eggs  |   quince  |   regional cooking  |   Rose water  |   Sandra Oliver  |   Sarah Josepha Hale  |   Scappi  |   scientific cookery  |   Service a la francaise  |   Service a la russe  |   Seventeenth Century  |   Sicily  |   Spain  |   sucket fork  |   Supper Parties  |   Sylvester Graham  |   Tea  |   Terrence Scully  |   The Recipes Project  |   The Taste of America  |   Theobalds Palace  |   Two Fifthteenth-Century Cookery Books  |   University of Iowa  |   Viandier of Taillevent  |   Void (voidee)  |   waffles  |   Waldo Flint  |   Yeast  |   1 Comment on Trying to Make Sense of the Medical Recipes  

English Gingerbread Old and New

Posted September 2014 
by Stephen Schmidt 

This post originally appeared on the Recipes Project blog, on December 21, 2012, and was reposted on the New York Academy of Medicine blog “Books, Health and History” on February 5, 2013.

Food writers who rummage in other people’s recipe boxes, as I am wont to do, know that many modern American families happily carry on making certain favorite dishes decades after these dishes have dropped out of fashion, indeed from memory. It appears that the same was true of a privileged eighteenth-century English family whose recipe book now resides at the New York Academy of Medicine, under the unprepossessing title “Recipe book : manuscript, 1700s.” (MCS title: English Receipt Book Headed “Wines, Sweetmeats, & Cookery,” mostly 1700 – 1740.)  The manuscript’s culinary section (it also has a medical section) was copied in two contiguous chunks by two different scribes, the second of whom picked up numbering the recipes where the first left off and then added an index to all 170 recipes in both sections. The recipes in both chunks are mostly of the early eighteenth century—they are similar to those of E. Smith’s The Compleat Housewife, 1727—but a number of recipes in the first chunk, particularly for items once part of the repertory of “banquetting stuffe,” are much older. My guess is that this clutch of recipes was, previous to this copying, a separate manuscript that had itself been successively copied and updated over a span of several generations, during the course of which most of the original recipes had been replaced by more modern ones but a few old family favorites dating back to the mid-seventeenth century had been retained. Among these older recipes, the most surprising is the bread crumb gingerbread. A boiled paste of bread crumbs, honey or sugar, ale or wine, and an enormous quantity of spice (one full cup in this recipe, and much more in many others) that was made up as “printed” cakes and then dried, this gingerbread appears in no other post-1700 English manuscript or print cookbook that I have seen. And yet the recipe in the NYAM manuscript seems not to have been idly or inadvertently copied, for its language, orthography, and certain compositional details (particularly the brandy) have been updated to the Georgian era:

25 To Make Ginger bread

Take a pound & quarter of bread, a pound of sugar, one ounce of red Sanders, one ounce of Cinamon three quarters of an ounce of ginger half an ounce of mace & cloves, half an ounce of nutmegs, then put your Sugar & spices into a Skillet with half a pint of Brandy & half a pint of ale, sett it over a gentle fire till your Sugar be melted, Let it have a boyl then put in half of your bread Stirre it well in the Skellet & Let it boyle also, have the other half of your bread in a Stone panchon, then pour your Stuffe to it & work it to a past make it up in prints or as you please.

English Recipes for "Wines, Sweetmeats, & Cookery," 1700 - 1740

English Recipes for “Wines, Sweetmeats, & Cookery,” 1700 – 1740

From the fourteenth century into the mid-seventeenth century, bread crumb gingerbread was England’s standard gingerbread (for the record, there was also a more rarefied type) and, by all evidence, a great favorite among those who could afford it—a fortifier for Sir Thopas in The Canterbury Tales, one of the dainties of nobility listed in The Description of England, 1587 (Harrison, 129), and according to Sir Hugh Platt, in Delightes for Ladies, 1609, a confection “used at the Court, and in all gentlemens houses at festival times.” Then, around the time of the Restoration, this ancient confection apparently dropped out of fashion. In The Accomplisht Cook, 1663, his awe-inspiring 500-page compendium of upper-class Restoration cookery, Robert May does not find space for a single recipe.

The reason for its waning is not difficult to deduce. Bread crumb gingerbread was part of a large group of English sweetened, spiced confections that were originally used more as medicines than as foods. Indeed, the earliest gingerbread recipes appear in medical, not culinary, manuscripts (Hieatt, 31), and culinary historian Karen Hess proposes that gingerbread derives from an ancient electuary commonly known as gingibrati, whence came the name (Hess, 342-3). In England, these early nutriceuticals, as we might call them today, gradually became slotted as foods first through their adoption for the void, a little ceremony of stomach-settling sweets and wines staged after meals in great medieval households, and then, beginning in the early sixteenth century, through their use at banquets, meals of sweets enjoyed by the English privileged both after feasts and as stand-alone entertainments. Through the early seventeenth century banquets, like the void, continued to carry a therapeutic subtext (or pretext) and comprised mostly foods that were extremely sweet or both sweet and spicy: fruits preserved in syrups, candied fruits, marmalades, and stiff jellies; candied caraway, anise, and coriander seeds; various spice-flecked dry biscuits from Italy; marzipan; and sweetened, spiced wafers and the syrupy spiced wine called hippocras. In this company, bread crumb gingerbread, with its pungent (if not caustic) spicing, was a comfortable fit. But as the seventeenth century progressed, the banquet increasingly incorporated custards, creams, fresh cheeses, fruit tarts, and buttery little cakes, and these foods, in tandem with the enduringly popular preserved and candied fruits, came to define the English taste in sweets, whether for banquets or for two new dawning sweets occasions, desserts and evening parties. The aggressive spice deliverers fell by the wayside, including, inevitably, England’s ancestral bread crumb gingerbread.

As the old gingerbread waned, a new one took its place and assumed its name, first in recipe manuscripts of the last quarter of the seventeenth century, and then in printed cookbooks of the early eighteenth century. This new arrival was the spiced honey cake, which had been made throughout Europe for centuries. It is sometimes suggested that the spiced honey cake came to England with Royalists returning from exile in France after the Restoration, which seems plausible given the high popularity of French pain d’épice at that time—though less convincing when one considers that a common English name for this cake, before it became firmly known as gingerbread, was “pepper cake,” which suggests a Northern European provenance. Whatever the case, Anglo-America almost immediately replaced the expensive honey in this cake with cheap molasses (or treacle, as the English said by the late 1600s), and this new gingerbread, in myriad forms, became the most widely made cake in Anglo-America over the next two centuries and still remains a favorite today, especially at Christmas.

By the time the NYAM manuscript was copied, perhaps sometime between 1710 and 1730, molasses gingerbread was already ragingly popular in both England and America, and evidently the family who kept this manuscript ate it too, for the second clutch of culinary recipes includes a recipe for it, under the exact same title as the first. Remembering the old adage that the holidays preserve what the everyday loses, I will hazard a guess that the old gingerbread was made at Christmas, the new for everyday family use.

150 To Make Ginger Bread

Take a Pound of Treacle, two ounces of Carrawayseeds, an ounce of Ginger, half a Pound of Sugar half a Pound of Butter melted, & a Pound of Flower. if you please you may put some Lemon pill cut small, mix altogether & make it into little Cakes so bake it. may put in a little Brandy for a Pepper Cake

"Recipe book England 18th century. In two unidentified hands." Credit: New York Academy of Medicine

An interesting question is why the seventeenth-century English considered the European spiced honey cake sufficiently analogous to their ancestral bread crumb gingerbread to merit its name. It may have been simply the compositional similarity, the primary constituents of both cakes being honey (at least traditionally) and spices. Or it may have been that both cakes were associated with Christmas and other “festival times.” Or it may have been that both cakes were often printed with human figures and other designs using wooden or ceramic molds. Or it may possibly have been that both gingerbreads had medicinal uses as stomach-settlers. In both England and America, itinerant sellers of the new baked gingerbread often stationed themselves at wharves and docks and hawked their cakes as a preventive to sea-sickness. (Ship-wrecked off Long Island in 1727, Benjamin Franklin bought gingerbread “of an old woman to eat on the water,” he tells us in The Autobiography.) One thinks at first that the ginger and other spices were the “active ingredients” in this remedy, and certainly this is what nineteenth-century American cookbook authors believed when they recommended gingerbread for such use. But early on the remedy may also have been activated by the treacle. Based on the perhaps slender evidence of a single recipe in E. Smith, Karen Hess proposes that the first English bakers of the new gingerbread may have understood treacle to mean London treacle (Hess, 201), the English version of the ancient sovereign remedy theriac, a common form of which English apothecaries apparently formulated with molasses rather than expensive honey. I have long wondered what, if anything, this has to do with the English adoption of the word “treacle” for molasses (OED). Perhaps a medical historian can tell us.

Works Cited
Harrison, William. The Description of England. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1994
Hess, Karen. Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.
Hieatt, Constance and Sharon Butler. Curye on Inglysch. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
“Treacle, I. 1. c.” The Compact Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1991

This entry was posted in Foods with Health Benefits, Stephen Schmidt Tagged: A Collection of Choise Receipts  |   Adapting Historical Recipes  |   Ambergris  |   Amelia Simmons  |   American Antiquarian Society  |   Andrew Boorde  |   Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook  |   Atul Gawande  |   Banqueting houses  |   Banquets (sweets)  |   Barbara Wheaton  |   Boston Public Library  |   Bread  |   bread pudding  |   British Library  |   C. Anne Wilson  |   Catharine Beecher  |   Catharine Dean Flint  |   Charles Perry  |   Christopher Kemp  |   Clements Library  |   Collation  |   Cracknels  |   Custards  |   E. Smith  |   Edna Lewis  |   Edward Livingston Trudeau  |   Elaine Leong  |   Elinor Fettiplace  |   Eliza Leslie  |   Elizabeth Freke  |   Elizabeth Raffald  |   Emptins  |   English influence on U. S. foodways  |   Fannie Farmer  |   Flour Measure  |   Folger Shakespeare Library  |   Forme of Cury  |   Frances Trollope  |   French culinary influence  |   Fricassees  |   Georgetown University  |   Gervase Markham  |   Gingerbread  |   Hannah Glasse  |   Hannah Woolley  |   Henry Frederick (Prince of Wales)  |   Hilary Spurling  |   Hoppin Family Cookbook  |   Hot Bread Kitchen Cookbook  |   Italian culinary influence  |   Ivan Day  |   Johanna St. John  |   John Evelyn  |   John Murrell  |   Joy of Cooking  |   Karen Hess  |   La Varenne  |   Lacock Abbey  |   Longleat House  |   Louise Conway Belden  |   Marchpane  |   Maria Parloa  |   Maria Rundell  |   Marie Kimball  |   Martha Washington Cookbook  |   Martino da Como  |   Mary Cornelius  |   Mary Henderson  |   Mary Lincoln  |   Mary Randolph  |   Marzipan  |   Max Planck Institute  |   Medieval cooking  |   Medieval Islamic cooking  |   Molasses and treacle  |   Morgan Library  |   Mrs. (Elizabeth) Goodfellow  |   Mrs. Cornelius  |   Mrs. N. K. M Lee  |   Musk  |   Neapolitan Recipe Collection  |   Oysters  |   Patriotic cakes  |   Paul Freedman  |   Peter Rose  |   Portugal Eggs  |   quince  |   regional cooking  |   Rose water  |   Sandra Oliver  |   Sarah Josepha Hale  |   Scappi  |   scientific cookery  |   Service a la francaise  |   Service a la russe  |   Seventeenth Century  |   Sicily  |   Spain  |   sucket fork  |   Supper Parties  |   Sylvester Graham  |   Tea  |   Terrence Scully  |   The Recipes Project  |   The Taste of America  |   Theobalds Palace  |   Two Fifthteenth-Century Cookery Books  |   University of Iowa  |   Viandier of Taillevent  |   Void (voidee)  |   waffles  |   Waldo Flint  |   Yeast  |   Leave a comment  

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