by Matt Sitman
Librarian Judith Finnamore of London’s Westminster Archive Centre has been cooking her way through The Unknown Ladies Cookbook, “a 300-year-old British compendium of family recipes” she rediscovered. You can follow her culinary exploits via her blog, which offers detailed recipes and historical snippets from the manuscript. Handwritten by several different women between 1690 and 1830, the recipes show just how much the way we prepare our food has changed. In a profile of Finnamore’s work, Amy Guttman highlights a few of these shifts. One of them? Brits used to use a lot of eggs:
Some recipes call for as many as 30 eggs to bake a cake; others suggest whisking for an hour. But if you were to try out these recipes today, you’d need to use just two-thirds or even one-half of the eggs indicated, Gray says, because eggs have grown larger over the last century. As eggs began to be classed by quality and weight, farmers culled smaller chickens in favor of larger ones that produced bigger eggs.
Even in 1940, Gray says, egg cups were much smaller than they are today, indicating a gradual change. While whisking for an hour sounds like a workout, with servants to do the actual work, the women running a household wouldn’t have minded. Gray says she has actually whisked eggs for a full hour, and it does make a difference in texture. So if you have servants to do it, why not?
Samuel Muston notices some of the more interesting recipes Finnamore uncovered:
“Some of the recipes are ‘challenging’ for our palates – I mean the sheep’s head dish won’t be for everyone.” Other surprises include “mince pies” with calves tongue in them. There is also a vast 3lb cake, whose inclusion is puzzling given Finnamore doesn’t think this was used by a cook at some great country pile, but rather that it came from a “place like the Bennett house in Pride and Prejudice”.
The Dish 