Straight to the recipe A familiar recipe with a twist One of the first modern recipes I published in the Dutch section of this website was a cucumber salad. That was back in 2002. In the following years I kept adding recipes to this page which eventually contained cucumber salads from all over the world. This is the first historical recipe for cucumber…
17th century
Pickle Herring, the ‘forgotten fish’
It is time to change that! In February 2016 I organized a cookery course for the first time in nearly ten years, with members of the re-enactment group Het Woud der Verwachting (litt: ‘the forest of expectation’, after a historical novel by the Dutch author Hella Haasse). The menu was in concordance with the date of the course:…
A brief history of pasta – Part 2
To part 1 of the history of pasta When I published two macaroni recipes from World War I, I also added a page on the recent history of the production of macaronipasta. This page can be considered as the ‘prequel’ of that history section: pasta and macaroni from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century….
Fish with ‘sauce ramolade’
Straight to the recipe A light dish from the court of Louis XIV Sometimes food from the past seems very modern, such as this elegant and simple fish dish from the seventeenth century. The source of the recipe is Le cuisinier royal et bourgeois by François Massialot. More on the author and his book…
Plum Pie and Pieter Cornelisz Hooft
Straight to the recipe A delicious Dutch pie from the seventeenth century Straight to the recipe Summer is plum season. In Dutch the expression tot in de pruimentijd (litterally ‘see you in the plum season’) has a special meaning: ‘Until we meet again, whenever that may be’. This expression is commonly ascribed to Pieter Cornelisz. Hooft (1581-1647), but there are…
Divine wine
An exquisite drink from the seventeenth century Straight to the recipe During the seventeenth century a meal was often concluded by drinking spiced wine to stimulate the digestion. Hippocras was such a drink, which was already known during the Middle Ages. But there were other kinds of spiced wine as well. Vin des dieux (‘wine of the gods’) is such a spiced wine,…
Chicken with spring vegetables
Straight to the recipe A recipe from the First Stadtholderless Period On 30 April 2013 Dutch Queen Beatrix abdicated from the throne and Willem-Alexander was inaugurated as King of the Netherlands. For the first time in 123 years the Netherlands have a king instead of a queen. As a counterweight to the excessive monarchist manifestations,…
Tuna with mustard crust
Straight to the recipe A spicy Walloon dish from the sixteenth century Last year I published a recipe for mushroom pie from Lancelot de Casteau, the sixteenth-century cook for several bishops of the Prince-Bishopric Liège, and I promised to revisit this cookbook soon. Not a lot is known about Lancelot de Casteau. He was born in Mons, lived…
Garden Salad
Straight to the recipe The kitchen garden en vogue In the Middle Ages vegetables were impopular. They were unhealthy according to the dietetics of those days, and were held in low esteem. The poor ate greens out of economical need, but the rich and powerful preferably gorged themselve on meat and fowl (and fish if it was…
Pastry dough according to Lancelot de Casteau
This one of the rare recipes for dough in old cookery books. Cooks knew how to prepare dough, so it was not considered necessary to provide recipes. In the cookbook from Lancelot de Casteau, dating from 1604, is a recipe for a kind of puff pastry. It is part of the recipe for ‘tourtes de…
Vegetarian stock for Lent
Recipes from the seventeenth century During Lent, between carnival and Easter, the catholic church (and after the Reformation several protestant churches as well) restricted the faithful to a meatless diet. During the Middle Ages all diary products were also banned during Lent, later the use of butter was permitted. Almonds were used instead of meat…
Spinach Pie
This the third recipe for Good Friday. The other recipes are Pomegranate Salad and Jacobin Sops. If one grows spinach in the kitchen garden, or is from an older generation, one might remember the sharp-edged seeds of some varieties of spinach. Spinach had to be washed very thoroughly to remove all those unpleasant seeds. Nowadays…
Jacobin sops for Good Friday
In the introduction to the recipe for Pomegranate Salad I mentioned the only day that the (catholic) French alle ate vegetarian. That is really something special, because ordering a vegetarian dish in an average French restaurant usually results in raised eyebrows and a rather plain meatless dish. The recipe on this page and the recipe…
The day all France was vegetarian
Straight to the recipe Jean-Louis Flandrin, who died in 2001, wrote in his posthumously published book L’Ordre des mets that the reformation had such rapid succes in North-West Europe because of the prohibition of butter by the catholic church during Lent. Southern Europe used olive oil anyway, but in the North-West suet, lard and butter were the…
Lemonade
Een French recipe from the seventeenth century Straight to the recipe A very simple recipe, because I am in the middle of moving house (summer 2007), and have been very busy. Where does the word lemonade come from? Lemonade comes from ‘lemon’ or the French ‘limon’. Another French word for lemon is citron, which is…