This week’s book is something special. It's an old one—sadly not an original, but a facsimile of Elizabeth Taylor's The Art of Cookery from 1769, produced by the Berwick History Society in 2002. It was a very limited run; this copy is number 189 of 300, gifted to me by an old friend. It’s a fabulous book, allowing the reader to glimpse life back then—how people dressed, lived, were housed, drank, and, of course, ate.
Written not long after the final Jacobite rising, there must have been some undercover tartan stuff going on, as I believe it was still banned, even in the Lowlands. The author, Elizabeth Taylor, was the daughter of a prosperous merchant when Berwick was a thriving trading town. The book overlaps with the work of another cook of the time, Hannah Glasse, with similar recipes and often identical methods and ingredients. There was even a court case or two over it, though I’m not sure of the details.
This book wasn’t for everyday folk; it was aimed at the higher classes in the Border region, who could afford quality ingredients. The average home certainly didn’t have a cooker; cooking was done over a fire in a simple but-and-ben cottage, perhaps with a turf roof. Not a lot of folk could read, so unless you had a certain level of education, this book wouldn’t have been much use. The language is fascinating, with recipes written in the old style, using an “f” in place of the modern “s.”
It’s remarkably concise, with plenty to work your way through. There are the usual sections on meat, poultry, and game, along with some amusing additions—such as “a good acid for punch,” “to ragoo a neck of veal,” and “to stew fresh neat’s tongues” (which we know now as beef or ox tongue). I was delighted to see an early version of sourdough, called “bread without barm, by the help of a leaven”, and a recipe for bread and butter pudding, a timeless favourite with a process quite similar to today’s.
The measurements are interesting too—bushels of this, pecks of that. One recipe for baking tench advises getting them fresh out of the pond, killing them with a hard stroke on the head, then scraping, gutting, and washing them. And then there’s “water gruel”, a blast from my childhood, here with the addition of sweet butter. There’s something for everyone, and I usually like to focus on the slightly more unusual dishes.
It’s a good book, still usable today (as long as you remember that “s” is “f”!). In the front, there’s a list of local subscribers, including a certain Mrs Forbes of Edinburgh—not the current one, I presume!
