Straight to the recipe Pork pies with Stilton cheese Not so many decades ago, English cuisine stood for bland taste: glassy potatoes, boiled lamb and peas as large and hard as marbles. However, in the Late Middle Ages the English had one of the most interesting cuisines of Europe. Perhaps this was due to the…
England
Medieval blancmange with fish
Straight to the recipe Dainty and delicate This recipe, the oldest redaction of which is dating from the end of the fourteenth century, is a typical dish for a fish day, or even Lent. Many people think of a medieval meal as a table laden with meat and fowl, but the truth is that on…
Puff Pastry according to Hannah Glasse and John Farley
Straight to the recipe The Apple Pie of Hannah Glasse (The Art of Cookery made Plain & Easy, 1747) is prepared with a puff paste-crust. John Farley (The London Art of Cookery, 1783) has the same recipe as Glasse, but with a difference: Glasse rolls up the dough, Farley folds it. Both writers prescribe rolling out the dough…
Jane Austen’s Apple Pie
Straight to the recipe Or: Plagiarism and Hackwork Who does not love apple pie? At least, good apple pie, because there are tearooms in museums or train stations where I have seen very sad, sometimes even partially defrosted prefab apple pie. Like apple sauce, apple pie is one of the basic, primeval dishes of European cuisine (here is a medieval…
Dutch Bishop Wine
Although actually it’s English! The Dutch consider Bishop wine as a typically Dutch mulled wine for Sint Nicholas Eve. But it appears that its origins are not Dutch at all. According to the large Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (Lexicon of the Dutch Language, published in installments from 1864 to 1998), bisschopswijn has English roots. The name indicates the…
Stock from winter vegetables
A recipe from a century ago I prepared this vegetarian stock for the vegetable cutlets from Iwan Kriens. The stock recipe is also from his cookbook, that he wrote with Dorothy Peels in 1918 to provide the British with recipes to use during the food rationing. More can be read at the recipe for vegetable…
Medieval goose
Straight to the recipe An English recipe from the fourteenth century Turkey seems to be the bird par excellence for a Christmas dinner. Personally I do not like turkey. The meat is rather tasteless and much too dry. Presumably it is exactly that neutral taste and low-fat meat which make turkey such a popular…
To make a trifle
Straight to the recipe Mrs Beeton’s calorie bomb Our Christmas dinner from 2011 was themed Austen and Dickens. The recipe on this page was the dessert: trifle. An enjoyable dish to prepare, but a veritable mountain of sugar and liquor at the close of the meal. The dish can be prepared almost completely in advance;…
Rhubarb, the reverse tomato
Two recipes for early summer Straight to the recipe Rhubarb is a culinary eccentric, the counterpart of the tomato. Much like the tomato is a fruit that we treat as a vegetable, the rhubarb is actually a vegetable that we treat as a fruit. However, this has only been the case since the last two…
Vegetarian cutlets from World War I
Straight to the recipe Recently a book was published containing the biography of the Dutch chef Iwan Kriens (1871- ca 1957) who had a very succesful career in England. To honour the occasion, this page contains a recipe from The Victory Cookery Book, which he wrote with Mrs C.S. (Dorothy) Peel in 1918. Kriens already had…
Clear Oxtail Soup
Haute cuisine for the Middle Class In my youth we used to eat oxtail soup as the first course of our Christmas dinner. My mother did not really like cooking, so the rest of the year our dinner fare was simple. If she did serve soup, it was prepared from a can or stock cube….