This recipe “To Make Jumballs of Chocholett” is from Elisabeth Hawar’s recipe book (now William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, fMS.1975.003). A favorite on the banqueting table or dessert spread, many recipes for “Jumballs” or jumbles are collected in early modern recipe books. These small cookies are made from flour and almonds in varying proportions, sweetened with sugar, and flavored with anise, caraway, and, in this recipe, lemon, rosewater, and chocolate. I was thrilled to return to the Clark Library last week to speak about my recipe recreation work, take a look at Elisabeth Ha ..read more

See the end of the post for information about the fourth annual Great Rare Books Bakeoff that is taking place this week (September 30-October 8, 2023)!   On a recent visit to State College, I was delighted to see a new addition to our recipe book collection. Lady Elizabeth Craven began to compile this recipe book in 1702 in the early years of her marriage and was still adding recipes to its pages at the time of her death in 1704, at age 25. There is much more to learn about Lady Craven and her manuscript and I was immediately interested in her fashionable recipe for “Chocolett Cr ..read more

Bake this recipe between September 30 – October 8 to participate in the fourth annual Great Rare Books Bakeoff! (More information at the end of the post.) Many thanks to my Barclay Project collaborators, (especially Jonah Carver and Christina Riehman-Murphy), Eberly Family Special Collections (especially Clara Drummond), and The Center for Virtual/Material Studies (especially Sarah Rich). I first saw Christian Barclay Jaffary’s 1697 recipe book in February 2020 when librarians brought materials from Penn State Libraries’ Eberly Family Special Collections to the Abington College campus for ..read more

This recreation of a Seed Cake recipe was both inspired and informed by my participation in conversations about Robert Forbes’s manuscript The Lyon in Mourning in Edinburgh in 2022 and beyond. Learn more about the project here: https://dhil.lib.sfu.ca/lyoninmourning/ Charles Edward Stuart eats oat porridge, bread and butter, and cake in various episodes documented in Robert Forbes’s encyclopedic and commemorative manuscript, The Lyon in Mourning. But Forbes did not only describe scenes of eating. He also collected and transcribed the documents relating to provisioning the househol ..read more

Earthy sage flavors this tender, savory pudding. Last weekend I had the pleasure of cooking it in the bake oven at Pottsgrove Manor with the help of Ann Mumenthaler and in dialogue with a wonderful group of guests at our collaborative cooking event. As always, the recipe that I’ve written below is ready to use in your home kitchen. That said, I’m still mulling over what I learned from preparing this recipe (and Locke’s pancakes) using historical techniques and equipment. The Original Recipe Take your sage & put em to boyle on the fire with watter, & when it has Colloured the watt ..read more

Next week I’ll be speaking & cooking at Pottsgrove Manor! Details here: https://fb.me/e/29igr5Is5 ..read more

This recipe for “Cornish Cakes” caught my eye a few weeks ago when I was sitting in the reading room at the Huntington Library looking at  mssHM 84007, a recipe book that was compiled in the last decade of the seventeenth century and the early decades of the eighteenth century. I was intrigued to see a recipe for a cake that began with claret, an imported Bordeaux wine, and called for mace, a spice made from the husk of a nutmeg,  as its primary seasoning. The Cornish cakes that I prepared this weekend are sweet, purple-hued spice cookies. Original Recipe Cornish Cakes Take C ..read more

I’ve baked a number of spicy and surprising gingerbread recipes as I’ve worked on this site over the past eight years. When I saw this one in Bridget Parker’s 1663 recipe book at the Wellcome Collection reading room in London this past June, I was intrigued by the fact that this gingerbread contains no ginger. What is gingerbread without ginger? This gingerbread is sweet and spicy. The cookies are fragrant with clove, mace, and cinnamon, and crunch with floral coriander seeds. Even without the ginger, they have the classic warming taste of other gingerbread cookies. Since ginger was ..read more

This post was first published on the Folger Shakespeare Library’s blog Shakespeare in Beyond: “Love-in-idleness, Part One: Adapting an early modern recipe for heartsease cordial” You can also read more about heartsease in Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a second blog post that I wrote for the Folger: “Love-in-idleness, Part Two: Intoxicating botanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream“ heartsease/pansies Pansies were intertwined with matters of the heart – both lovesickness and cardiac ailments – linguistically, in the herbal tradition, and in recipe manuscripts that were ..read more

A collection of philosopher John Locke‘s papers at the Bodleian Library includes letters, accounts, poetry, notes on medicine and books, and recipes. When David Armitage posted this recipe for pancakes in the Bodleian collection on Twitter, I knew that I wanted to try it. These rich, nutmeg-scented pancakes are absolutely delicious. (Many thanks to Rhae Lynn Barnes and the other readers who immediately sent this recipe my way.) Want to know “the right way” to make pancakes? John Locke’s got you covered (Bodleian MS Locke c. 25, f. 85). pic.twitter.com/f7FvCaDstg — David Armitage (@Davi ..read more