Milk
Choice: Of young beasts fed in the choice pasture: 1. Womans344 2. Cows 3. Sheep 4. Goats.
Use: Milk increases brain, fats of the body: good for hectick,345 assuages scalding heat of the urine346: nourishes plentifully: procures good colour: furthers Venus.
Hurt: Naught for fevers, headaches, sore eyes, distillations of rheum, diseased veins, obstructions, the teeth, the gums, old folk.
Correction: A little before you take it, put in some salt, sugar,347 or honey, least it curdle in the stomach: drink it fasting.
Degree: Moist in the second, temperately hot.
Season, age and constitution: For hot weather, youth, choleric, and strong stomachs.
Lac
Story for Table-Talk
Milk consists of a three-fold substance. The first is whitish, cold and moist: Nitrous and powerful to make the belly soluble.348 The second fat and oily, of temperate quality, of which butter is made. The third is gross, clammy and phlegmatic, whereof cheese is made.
Eat not more Milk, than you can well digest: though it seems to be soft and easy meat, fit for children and milksops,349 yet it is not so. Use no violence after it, nor drink wine, before you feel it thoroughly decocted.350
Milk Recipes
Sweetened Milk
A little before you take it, put in some salt, sugar, or honey.
Henry Buttes, Dyets Dry Dinner (1599)
Because Buttes is not a chef for an important household, we can see small recipes like this that allude to comfort foods, or the possibility of everyday practices.
Ingredients
1 teaspoon of honey (or sugar)
1 cup of whole milk
Directions
Put honey into milk and stir.
Put mug of milk in saucepan and heat on medium heat, stirring until bubbles form around the edge of the pot.
Drink warm.
Cast Creame
To make cast creame. Take milke as it commeth from the cow, a quarte of lesse, and put thereto rawe yolkes of egges temper the milke and the egges together, then sette the same vppon a chafingdish and stirre it that it curde not, and so put suger in it, and it will bee lyke creame of almondes, when it is boyled thicke enough cast a litle suger on it, & sprinkle rosewater thereupon, and so serue it.
G. Steevens, The Good Housewife’s Jewell, (1596)
This is a precursor to egg nog.
Ingredients
2 cups of whole milk
2 well-beaten egg yolks
2 tablespoons white sugar-loaf, grated, plus garnish
½ teaspoon rosewater
Directions
Heat the milk on a medium heat until bubbles start to form around the edges.
Add ¼ cup of the hot milk to the yolks in a long stream, beating vigorously as you go, in order to temper the eggs, and then add the yolk mixture into the pot of warm milk in the same manner.
Add 2 tablespoons of sugar to warm milk mixture, and stir gently, and continuously, until mixture reaches 165F, about 15 minutes.
Pour into bowl, sprinkle with rose water and sugar-garnish.
Choice: The newest and sweetest, sheep.
Use: Cleans and mightily fetches up phlegm clodded up about the breast and lungs.
Hurt: Too often used, makes the stomach loose and weak: and causes loathing.
Correction: Meats upon it, or old Saccarum Rosatum.351
Degree: Hot and moist in the beginning of the second.
Season, age and constitution: At anytime, for the old folks rather than youth: because it much purges distillations.352
Butyrum
Story for Table-Talk
New Butter and new Oil are of like nature and operation. The benefit and use of salt Butter is very notable. For only that way it may be preserved, neither thereby does it lose his proper virtue, to open and enlarge the breast: the older it is the hotter also it waxes.
The Flemming or Hollander, is thought to live so long as he doth, only for his excessive eating of Butter.
Some eat it first, and last.
Butter Recipe
To make a Quaking Pudding.
Take a pint and somewhat more of thick Creame, ten Egges, put the whites of three, beat them very well with two spoonfuls of Rose-water; mingle with your Creame three spoonfuls of fine flower, mingle it so well, that there be no lumps in it, put it altogether, and season it according to your Tast; Butter a Cloth very well, and let it be thick that it may not run out, and let it boyle for half an hour as fast as you can, then take it up and make Sauce with Butter, Rose-water and Sugar, and serve it up.
W.M. The Complete Cook (1658)
Butter being used to create a sealed pudding bag is very interesting. Use a very tight weave cloth for this project. This recipe doesn’t work if you use teaspoons of flour, the following assumption is that the ‘spoon’ was more of a scoup. Dropping the amount of flour gives you very expensive scrambled eggs.
Ingredients
2 cups heavy cream
10 eggs
3 egg whites
1 teaspoon rosewater
11/2 cups flour
1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground ginger
¼ cup white sugar-loaf, grated
1/2 cup butter
Sauce
¼ butter
1 teaspoon rosewater
¼ cup white sugar-loaf, grated
Directions
Beat together cream, eggs, whites, and rosewater.
Take 1 cup of the cream mixture, and whisk in the flour, making sure there are no lumps, and then add it back into the cream mixture. Add in spices and sugar.
Cover a cloth with lots of butter, making sure it is thick.
Bring a large pot, 3/4 full of water, to boil on high.
Drape buttered cloth over a dish making a pocket for the cream, slowly pour mixture into the cloth. Gather corners of cloth together, and tie them over a wooden spoon. Slowly submerge cloth bag into the pot of boiling water, resting the wooden spoon on edge of the pot to keep towel ends out of water.
Boil mixture in the cloth for 30 minutes on a high heat, checking frequently to make sure water levels are higher than mixture level, and that corners of fabric haven’t dropped into the water.
Carefully remove bundle from the water, and place in a colander to cool. Pudding should be firm but jiggly once cloth is removed.
Cream the butter, rosewater, and sugar together in a saucepan, then heat on low to dissolve the sugar.
Serve pudding with sauce once cooled.
Cream
Choice: New: boiled with a soft fire, so soon as it is flette353 of milk.
Use: As good as butter for the diseases of the breast: pleasant to the taste: cures the sharpness and drowth354 of the stomach.
Hurt: Slowly concocted: swims about over meats: of gross juice: easy turns to fumes.355
Preparation: Use it sparingly, put store of sugar, and honey into it.
Degree: Hot and moist in the first.
Season, age and constitution: Fitter for youth, Choleric, and strong stomachs, then the old and rheumatic.
Flos lactis356
Story for Table-Talk
Rightly so termed by the Latines, for it is the very flower of milk, as also butter is the flower of Cream.
Although it be not altogether so fat and oily as butter: yet shall one be glutted and even loathed with it, far sooner than with butter: neither is it so lasting as butter, but changes in a moment many times, as Dairy maids can better inform you357.
Cream Recipes
Cream Pudding
A very good Cream to eat hot is thus made. Into a quart of sweet Cream, put a spoonful of very fine powder of Rice, and boil them together sufficiently, adding Cinnamon, or Mace and Nutmeg to your liking. When it is boiled enough take it from the fire, and beat a couple of yolks of new-laid Eggs, to colour it yellow. Sweeten it to your taste. Put bread to it, in its due time.
Kenelm Digby, The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened (1669)
Use a natural, organic cream without additives.
Ingredients
4 cups of half-and-half cream
2 teaspoons rice flour
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
¼ teaspoon ground mace
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
2 beaten egg yolks
¼ cup of raw cane sugar
Slices of bread
Directions
Take a ½ cup portion of the cream, and add the rice flour; mix it well.
In an over-sized saucepan, pour cream, and the cream and rice mixture, and whisk together with spices.
Raise temperature of the cream mixture to medium, whisking every 2 minutes; bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low, and simmer for 5 minutes.
Remove from heat, and beat in egg yolks and sugar, until sugar dissolves.
Let cool, and serve with slices of bread.
Bake Custard with Dried Fruit
Take to every pinte of cream five eggs, and put in no whites, and straine your cream and egges together, season it with cloves & mace and sugar, and when your paste is well hardened in the oven, having small raisins & dates put in your stuffe, and let it not bake too much, for much baking will make your custard to quaile, or els to fail. Doucets after the same sort.
A.W., A Book of Cookery (1591)
The dried fruit adds a lovely sweetness to the tart. It would have added a great expense at the time.
Ingredients
Pie crust for pie (see Appendix B, recipe 1)
1 cup f whipping cream
2 eggs
¼ teaspoon ground cloves
¼ teaspoon ground mace
¼ cup white sugar-loaf, grated
2 tablespoons dried, pitted cooking dates, chopped small
2 tablespoons sultana raisins
Directions
Preheat oven to 350F.
Blind bake pie crust in oven for 20 minutes.
Combine whipping cream, eggs, spices and sugar.
Pour through a sieve to mix thoroughly.
Sprinkle dried fruit evenly over the pie crust.
Pour cream mixture evenly over the dried fruit.
Bake pie for 35 minutes until filling is fully set.
Cool and serve.
Curds
Choice: Made of the most choice morning milk: fire-new: for these be the most digestible.
Use: Wholesome for hot constitutions, and such as are troubled with the distillations of choleric humours: quench thirst: and restrain choler.
Hurt: Annoy cold stomachs and the sinews, make drowsy, slowly digested.
Correction:
Degree: Cold and dry in the first.
Season, age and constitution: At any time, for youth, Cholerics, and such as exercise much.
Lac coagulatum Recocta vulgo358.
Story for Table-Talk
Platina359 missed his cushion360, where he says that the Curds are hot of temperature: for experience thereof, we may not the use of them. For let a sound, hot and strong stomach eat them, and they do him more good then Hurt: but if a cold stomach eat them, they will never be concocted enough.
The reason is plain: their cold and gross temperature.
Curds Recipe
Creamy Bean and Cheese Tart
To make a tarte of beanes. Take beanes and boyle them tender in fayre water, then take theym oute and breake them in a morter and strayne them with the yolckes of foure egges, curde made of mylke, then ceason it up with suger and halfe a dysche of butter and a lytle synamon and bake it.
Wiliam How, A Proper newe Booke of Cookery (1575)
Buttes refers to beans as fava, so one is safe to use fava beans in recipes of this time. If you sub in kidney beans, which were somewhat available in period, and cream cheese, it makes a smoother product, but less true to the original recipe.
Ingredients
1 cup dried fava beans, soaked overnight, then boiled to soften, rinsed well
4 egg yolks
½ cup cottage cheese
1 pinch of salt
4 tablespoons raw cane sugar
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
¼ cup of butter
Directions
Preheat oven to 350F.
Mash beans in mortar a few at a time to puree.
In a bowl, mash all the ingredients together until smooth, strain through a strainer to make even.
Pour mixture into a greased pie plate; bake for 50 minutes, until middle sets.
Let tart sit for 15 minutes before cutting.
Cheese
Choice: New made: of well tempered milk, of beasts fed in choice pasture.
Use: Mollifies: fatty: grateful to the palate.
Hurt: Too often use of it, breeds obstructions,361 especially in a weak stomachs.
Correction: Eat it with nuts, Almonds, Pears, and Apples, and never but when you have need.
Degree: Cold and moist in the second.
Season, age and constitution: For youth, and great exercises, for it requires a strong stomach.
Caseus
Story for Table-Talk
Green or new cheese, newly made, nourishes and moistens more than salt and old. That which is neither new nor old but in a mean, best agreed with the stomach: especially eaten moderately.
They that have best leisure & love cheese best, I would wish them to write an Apology in defense of the common dislike thereof, why so many love it not.362
Cheese Recipes
Tart of Cheese.
Take good fine paste and drive it as thin as you can. Then take cheese, pare it, mince it, and braye it in a morter with the yolks of eggs til it be like paste, then put it in a faire dish with clarified butter, and then put it abroade into your paste and cover it with a faire cut cover, and so bake it: that doon, serve it forth.
A.W., A Book of Cookery (1591)
Kitchens were often far from the serving areas in larger households. Pastry would preserve longer the thermal mass in a dish like this.
Ingredients
1 pie crust, for top and bottom of pie
12 ounces aged white cheddar cheese, grated
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature
3 egg yolks
Directions
Preheat oven to 350F.
Mash cheese in mortar, and slowly add in yolks to create a paste.
Combine cheese and egg mixture with butter until smooth.
Pour cheese mixture into pastry, and cover with more pastry. Bake for 45 minutes, or until crust is golden.
Sweet Cheese Tart
To make a tart of cheese. Take harde chese and cutte it in slyces, and pare it, than laye it in fayre water, or in swete mylke, the space of three houres, then take it up and breake it in a morter tyll it be small, than drawe it up thorowe a strainer with the yolkes of six egges, and season it wyth suger and sweet butter, and so bake it.
William How, A Proper newe Booke of Cookery (1575)
This sweet custard is a flavour contrast to the savoury before, but very similar in texture.
Ingredients
1 pound gouda, at room temperature
6 egg yolks
2 tablespoons milk
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature
½ cup raw cane sugar
Directions
Preheat oven to 350F.
Pound gouda in mortar until fully mashed.
Combine cheese, yolks, milk, butter, and 5 tablespoons sugar until creamy.
Pour mixture into greased dish.
Sprinkle top of pie with 1 tablespoon sugar.
Bake pie for 45 minutes, until top is brown.
344 For a discussion on drinking human milk, see Eating Right in the Renaissance, Ken Albala
345 Hectic Fever: A fever of irritation and debility, occurring usually at an advanced stage of exhausting disease, as in pulmonary consumption.
346 Milk in diet with fruits and vegetables to maintain alkaline bladder.
347 Adding sugar to a migraine trigger was suggested with fruit: almonds by Buttes.
348 Soluble: to loosen.
349 Milksops: the feeble.
350 Decocted: to extract the essence by heating or boiling.
351 Saccarum Rosatum: Sugar of roses.
352 Distillations: concentrations of liquid in the body.
353 Flette: to float; to swim.
354 Drowth: drought or thirst.
355 Fumes: stomach gas which can be irritating or harmful.
356 Latin: flos lactis: flower of milk.
357 Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act III, Scene 1: the virtues of a dairy maid are discussed by Speed and Lance.
358 Lac coagulatum Recocta vulgo: called ricotta in the vulgar tongue. Cocta means twice cooked.
359 Bartolomeo Sacchi (1421 – 21 September, 1481): known as Platina, an Italian Renaissance humanist writer and gastronomist.
360 Missed his cushion: slang for crazy.
361 Obstructions: blockages i.e. kidney stones.
362 From Fruits: Apples: Caseus est nequam, et mala sunt mala; Cheese is an evildoer, and evil things are evil.