I love these old recipes. Sometimes the flavors are delightful and unexpected; other times they are just unexpected. Always, they're a reminder that the past was far less familiar than we usually imagine. That's an especially good reminder to me, as an instinctive conservative, that the past was not the ideal time I often imagine it to have been.
The spelling in old written text, makes me think of the way the Canterbury Tales is comprehensible, but at the same time feels like I'm reading something foreign.
Also love how, even 300 years ago, people couldn't avoid leaving ambiguity in their recipes
"as much salt as you shall think fitt to season the meat"
Go read larousse gastronomique sometime. Anything from the "meat" section is just hilarious. Phrases like "prepare the shank in the usual way" and "get a measure of beef" occur WAY too often.
I was watching "Ugly Delicious" the other day on Netflix and Mark Bittman acclaimed food writer said "I always write salt to taste." I think it's just one of those things that's the "art" side of cooking.
I also encourage anyone who still has their elderly relatives with them to ask them for recipes they had from their era. My family keeps a common cookbook, and it's nice to be able to pull out Grandma's shrimp-dip recipe for special occasions.
I got a copy of Apicius several years ago. For reasons which now escape me, my mother and i decided to cook from it for our christmas dinner. That was a memorable meal.
Interesting it uses lean pork leg and beef fat over lard. 300 years ago the pig breeds were often fattier so there was a lot of lard around and was the easy choice - it's an optimisation the cook has made or learned to use beef fat.
I've bought a lot of old cookbooks - there is so much basic knowledge that's been lost as industrial automation took over the food industry.
Sausage packaging does all it can in 2018 to affirm it contains 96% or 98% pork.
The zero width characters might be leftovers from the transcription process, marking disagreements or known spelling errors or something.
If you click into one of the books on that website, you can see options to mark stuff as "ex" or "unc", which explains the weird markup (<span class="ex">er</span>).
The markup flags up abbreviations. I'm not quite clear on the distinctions between the different tags but it looks like "ex" is for expansions/excluded letters and "sl" is something to do with superscript letters, or thereabouts.
