If you enjoy cooking (or maybe even if you don't), it is great fun to read old cookbooks and imagine the dishes and the people who made them. Sometimes we are lucky enough to have such a treasure left to us, but they are also available at flea markets or yard sales. You can tell you have a good cookbook if it is bespattered, worn, and falling to pieces.
In fact, the more decrepit looking the better when it comes to old cookbooks. That’s the way you know that the recipes are tasty and that the cook actually made whatever was described inside. Never trust a spotless, clean cookbook unless it is newly come off the bookstore (or library) shelves. Many of us who love to cook leave traces of all of our meals and experimental dishes like echoes in the pages of our cookbooks. Those stains and creases show that the cook came back to that book again and again.
I remember reading a very old family cookbook in my Granny’s kitchen. She still used it, and so do I, though not so much these days. In any event, I saw a recipe for cookies that called for butter the size of an egg and water at “milk” temperature. I was told that this would not be an especially large egg, but the kind you might find in your hen’s nest. And the water should not be cold (from the fridge), but warm (like out of a cow.) Hmmm. So, you can see that a certain amount of translation is necessary. The recipe is good however, though I try to avoid cooking with butter now. Unhappily, the cookies don’t taste the same without it.
But before we consign these old cookbooks to the entertainment section, be aware that some of those recipes are still useful. In fact, scientists in the UK have discovered that a medieval remedy can kill the resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteria (MRSA). This breakthrough came when a microbiologist and an Anglo-Saxon scholar made a potion from Bald’s Leechbook, a thousand-year-old recipe book of medical prescriptions and remedies.
The original recipe was intended to treat sties, and it included crop-leeks and garlic pounded together with wine and bullock’s gall, and then it was to be brewed in a brass pot. There was more, of course, but that was the base of it. Intrigued, the microbiologist decided to try to recreate the recipe. She had to do considerable research, looking into old vegetable varieties and ancient wine recipes. Bullock’s gall was found to be cow’s bile, but that didn’t make it easier to buy. The whole business was quite a difficult and complicated process.
Once all the stuff was in the pot, the brew fermented, and then it started killing off the soil bacteria. Of course, it also reeked and soon grew pretty revolting. After the required nine days, the recipe had turned into a sort of disgusting slime. But when it was tested on MRSA infected material, it killed 90 percent of the bacteria—and it proved as potent as the leading antibiotic. There is no information about what it could do to a virus, but it might give it a run for its money. In any event, antibiotic resistant bacteria are on the upsurge, so it may be helpful that way. It just goes to show that you can’t keep a good recipe down—though you might not want to keep it in the house.
Besides recipes, some of these books include household hints from a by-gone age. There are ways to get candle wax stains out of linen, the proper number of forks for a dinner party, and how to address the servants. These may not be especially practical at the moment, but some are very amusing. So don't underestimate an old cookbook. It just might provide a really good recipe, an entertaining journaling idea--or even a miracle cure.
Linville, Susan. Moment of Science: Medieval Brew Kills MRSA. n.d. <https://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/medieval-brew-kills-mrsa.php> (13 Oct. 2015).
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