TEST YOUR 17TH-CENTURY COOKING CHOPS BY MAKING SOME ‘LEMUN CREAME’

Kristine Kowalchuk has made several of the recipes in Preserving on Paper herself, once hosting a Renaissance dinner party for friends that featured a trout poached in beer, with roasted parsnips and “frittars of eggs and herbes.”

“I don’t want people to be afraid to try these recipes,” she says. “I think they are challenging, but rewarding.”

Kowalchuk says it’s not easy to read the recipes, and some trial and error is required to make the dishes. But that’s not so different from modern recipes, which can also be hard to interpret.

“Even from one 17th-century woman to the next, the recipes were not replicable. And they were OK with that,” says Kowalchuk. “It is this sense of control, and almost perfection, in terms of authorship and cooking that we have today that is a completely different cultural frame than from the 17th century. They were more comfortable with the idea of mutability and impermanence.”

Here is a recipe for “Lemun Creame” that Kowalchuk recommends to readers, complete with the spelling seen in the text:

“Take 4 faire new lemons — chip them very thinn — cutt the chips very smale & putt to them the Juce of the lemons — & and lett them stand all night next morning putt to them 6 or 7 whits of eggs & 3 youlks beat them very well — & put to them the lemon Juce — with pill & all — a poringer & a halfe of faire watter — a quarter of a poringer of rose watter — stir them very well togather — then straine it throwre a cotton strainer — & sweeten it with fine sugar & musk if you please — sett it on a chafindish of cools until it bee as thick as the thickest creame & it must butt scald not boyle — so putt it out in to a whit dish — when it is cold it is ffitt to Eate/”

Kowalchuk added too little sugar the first time she made the pudding, and recommends five to seven tablespoons. She says the rosewater and lemon may seem like an unusual combination, but they work well together.

“We have to suspend our expectations and be open to an experience that’s very different from the modern experience,” says Kowalchuk. “That is how I feel about cooking these things.”