1700 recipe analysis

http://www.bl.uk/learning/images/texts/cooks/large876.html


England’s Newest Way in Cookery, by Henry Howard, was first published in 1703. It was so popular that the first edition sold out in less than a year. This was the book that these recipes were in. These are short examples of recipes from the 1700’s. These recipes are quite concise as they don’t go into detail and do not provide any measurements for the reader to follow. At the beginning of each recipe imperatives are used, for example, “Take” “Boil”. Also throughout all of the recipes there is a use of extended S, an example of this would be in the first recipe it says “beat feven eggs” when now days we would say “beat seven eggs”.  In the second recipe there is an example of non-standard spelling as it says ‘rowl’ instead of roll. This could be due to the time the recipe was created, it was created in 1703 and the first dictionary was punished in 1755. The second recipe also states that there is a use of ‘sheep’s caul’, however, I was unaware of what this was until I searched it, this shows a contrast in time as currently we tend to buy everything readymade so we wouldn’t need to use ingredients such as sheep’s caul. Furthermore, in the third recipe the word order seems to be non-standard, it almost seems elliptical as when reading the sentences it sounds like words are missing.  In addition the second to last recipe has a lot of capitalisation, there are words within this recipe such as ‘Fingers’ that shouldn’t have a capital letter within the middle of a sentence but do. However, this may just be because there weren’t many spelling/language rules as there was no current dictionary.