Recipes Of Middle Ages Catered For Huge Appetites

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 13, Issue 84, 9 May 1949, Page 6

Recipes Of Middle Ages Catered For Huge Appetites

Four hundred pounds of currants, 300 pounds of brandy were among the ingredients stirred into the Windsor Castle mincemeat every Christmas-time. Its recipe taken from a cookery book belonging to the Duke of Devonshire’s cook 100 years ago, is included in “Traditional Fare of England and Wales,” just published by the National Federation of Women’s Institutes at 2s 6d. An Early Refrigerator

In this book over 30 recipes of their ancestors have been collected by countrywomen as a record of the traditional art of the English housewife.

Recipes go back to the Middle Ages, when the family refrigerator was often an underground cave filled with ice blocks taken from frozen rivers and lakes in the winter time.

Some of the recipes have merely an historical interest, such as the banquet given to 15,000 guests at Sir Watkin William Wynn’s coming-of-age party jn 1770. Others, like the “Hasty Pudding” served to the novelist Daniel Defoe when he stayed at Felton nearly 300 years ago, are quite appropriate for today’s frugal coming-of-age parties. Like Champagne

Tandra and Kattern cakes made for Lacemakers’ festivals, courses of harvest cakes, and gooseberry wine tasting like champagne are also possible on today’s rations. An old Bucks recipe shows how brown sugar sprinkled over a baked joint of beef 4 instead of salt results in extra rich gravy and a fine flavour, while from the North Country comes the saying: “Apple pie without cheese is like a kiss without a squeeze.”