Let Them Eat Historic Cake
A late Stuart dessert table. Photograph from historicfood.com
Normally, if someone were to say that they've cooked for Marie Antoinette and Jane Austen, you would think they were crazy. But Ivan Day can make that claim and simply be describing his normal activities. By using authentic equipment and historic recipes, he examines history through what people ate. According to an interview with Day in The Age, history is the next big thing in food. Director Martin Scorsese recently phoned Day out of the blue, asking him to cook an authentic period banquet for a film Scorsese is producing about the young Queen Victoria.
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2 Comments:
I used to work at Historic Richmondtown in Staten Island and we made period dishes over an open fire/in the wood burning oven/in a tin reflector oven. We didn't do anything nearly as spectacular as some of these recipes above, although we did do wafers in a similar mold and they were one of my favorite things to make. I'm sad now that I barely remember some of the more obscure things, but I loved every second of it, and I still have some of the recipes-crumpets, Washington cake (fruity-brandy-infused cakey goodness), potato soup, jumbles (spice cookies)...but they never come the same using modern cooking methods.
BrooklynBaker at 9:35AM on 05/27/09
Thanks to a recent addiction to historical fiction, I have learned about many types of food and drink typically eaten by people in the 12th-17th centuries. It's fascinating stuff! So many ingredients we never hear of anymore, such as grains of paradise which, I learned, are a typical ingredient in Hippocras, a type of spiced wine which I'm anxious to try. Even familiar foods were often served in unfamiliar ways, such as dipping a hot metal rod into a mug of ale to heat it up. Hot ale? Hmmm...I can't even drink Guinness at room temp! But, I'm delighted to hear that historical cuisine may be the next big thing in food! What fun!
CanadaPat at 9:42AM on 05/29/09