Historical Insight

Published circa 1390, The Forme of Cury, or Forms of Cooking in modern English, is an ancient English cookbook. It was written by ‘The Master Cooks of King Richard II.’ The original version was written on vellum and contains 205 recipes. It is the oldest known cookbook in the English language. Take sage, parsley, hyssop and savory, quinces and pears, garlic and grapes, and stuff the geese with them, and sew the hole so that no dripping comes out, and roast them well and keep the dripping that falls from the

1. Mix a quart of milk, four eggs, a little salt into a thick batter with flour to match a consistency like pancake batter.

2. Ensure you have a good piece of meat cooking and put some dripping in a stew-pan.

3. After it boils, pour in the pudding and let it bake on the fire before turning a plate upside down in the dripping pan so the dripping is not blackened.

4. Put your stew-pan under your meat and let the dripping drop on the pudding so the heat of the fire makes it brown in colour.

5. After your meat is done, drain all the fat from the pudding and set it on the fire to drain it a little.

6. When dry, melt some butter and pour it into a cup for the middle of the pudding.

(Src) The Complete art of cookery by Hannah Glasse

Gravy from the 17th Century.    

Take the drippings of whatever beast you've been cooking, add some water, and starch, and cook it down. That's how you make Gravy. Until we stumbled across this video from 'Townsends'

1. Take half a pint of water and the same from a beer pale ale beer

2. Cut an onion and a little bit of lemon peel

3. Take 3 cloves, a blade of mace, whole pepper and a spoon of mushroom pickle, and an anchovy. 

4. Put a piece of butter the size of a hens egg and and when melted shake in a little flour 

4. Stir in all the ingredients and let it boil for quarter of an hour.

5. Drain and serve

(Src) The London book of Cookery by John Harvey.

In Theodora Fitzgibbon's massive The Food of the Western World, stuffing is “The name given in England to combinations of a variety of foods which are inserted into meats, poultry, fish, eggs, or vegetables.  Paxo was invented in 1901 by John Crampton, a butcher from Eccles. Back in