One of my roles has been testing and tasting recipes from each century for inclusion in this book. I’ve embarked with excitement on the pungent spiced sauces of medieval times, moving through the massive roasts and ragoûts of Louis XIV’s court to the elegance of eighteenth-century chilled and molded desserts. All the recipes are from books in our collection, and for each, I note the edition in which it appears—often a first and usually an early edition. Within each chapter, recipes appear in the order of their date of printing. The style of the text is a whole other subject, as I explore in “The Writing of a Recipe.” I have chosen the recipes both to represent their century and to be accessible to today’s home cooks. Most are easy to prepare: Carême’s apple soufflé (1815), for example, calls for just three ingredients. A few are more challenging: Hannah Glasse’s Yorkshire Christmas Pie (1747) calls for five different birds, all boned and reshaped one inside another to bake inside a robust, freestanding wall of pastry crust. The modern recipes follow the old as closely as possible, though the early authors can be difficult to interpret, their mind-set and methods of cooking being inevitably so far from our own. In all of these dishes, I’ve looked for that little element of surprise, the opportunity to try an odd combination of ingredients or a new way of doing things.
