THE COOKBOOK TEST #0023: THE WILLIAMSBURG ART OF COOKERY
INSTALLMENT #0023 (PAID) LET'S DO THE TIME WARP AGAIN / VAGUELY USEFUL / A PUDDING... MADE OF CHICKEN?! / GOTTA GET THOSE WILLIAMSBURG SWEET POTATO BUNS
Dear Subscribers,
There's something about obsolete recipes that is increasingly appealing to me. They often don't work, and they're generally written with gaps and vagaries that make accurate execution nearly impossible. But because of that, you can find yourself trying new things (like making a chicken pudding, or baking dinner rolls that harness the power of sweet potatoes) that are, in fact, actually very old things that we've just forgotten how to do, or evolved beyond completely.
THE WILLIAMSBURG ART OF COOKERY OR ACCOMPLISH'D GENTEWOMAN'S COMPANION: BEING A COLLECTION OF UPWARDS OF FIVE HUNDRED OF THE MOST ANCIENT AND APPROV'D RECIPES IN VIRGINIA COOKERY is absolutely stuffed with things that we're generally not attempting in the kitchen anymore, sometimes for good reason, and sometimes for no obvious reason whatsoever. You don't see a lot of orange pies or oyster salads anymore, and maybe that's a bad thing - it's kind of fascinating to see dishes that fit comfortably into the "American" pantheon of food but are so antiquated as to have disappeared almost completely.
Even the physical attributes of this little book - itself a 1966 Colonial Williamsburg reprint of a 1938 book collecting 18th and 19th Century recipes from Virginia households - are curious. It's small enough to fit comfortably into a coat pocket, most of its recipes are really just methods that are a couple of paragraphs (or a few long sentences) in length, and it's a snapshot of how limited the national pantry was at one point in time. Vast kaleidoscopes of cuisines and galaxies of ingredients that we use on a daily basis are absent, mostly depriving these recipes of spicy heat, acid, funky depth, and spice-driven complexity. This is a whole lot of onions and egg, of molasses and chicken, of brandy and cream, and of ham and herb-bundles. And yet: It still feels like a pretty big world with a lot of options for everything from snacks to mains to dessert.
As a die-hard history guy who once delved deep into George Washington's personal letters for a book contextualizing contemporary politics and whose Roman Empire is, in fact, the Roman Empire, The Williamsburg Art of Cookery does the thing that I love: it tantalizes with the exotic while still managing to convey the message that: "People back then... they were still people, just like us!"
at your service,
James
THE WILLIAMSBURG ART OF COOKERY
COMPILED BY HELEN BULLOCK
A COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG PRODUCTION | 1938 | $21
It's sort of hard to know how to approach a book like this. You know that it's not really going to be terribly useful - the recipes are written broadly and briefly, and some aren't recipes so much as vague suggestions or culinary innuendos. ("Take about a Pint of Coffee made with Water, put in it a Pound of loaf Sugar, set it on the Fire and boil it to the ninth Degree" really raises more questions than it answers, including "what else were they making coffee with?" and "how do you fit that much sugar into that much liquid?" and "are there really nine discernible degrees of 'boiling,' and how were they measured?")
So after a bit you stop reading the book in search of things to cook, and you instead read it for the joy of poking around antique kitchens and dining rooms. And there are fun things to be found, for sure - homemade Green Gage Plum Ice Cream, or Brandied Apricots, or Tongue a la Terrapin, which unless I'm misguided is a recipe for how to cook a large turtle tongue with mace and serve it with hard boiled eggs. There are even instructions for how to prepare ortolan, the tiny little bird that's so sinful to eat that you're supposed to hide under a napkin so that God doesn't see you do it. (Or whatever, that's the theory I'm buying into, mostly because I love the idea of an almost-all-powerful Supreme Being whose one shortcoming is not being able to see through cloth napkins.)
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