Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share Revisiting Historical Recipes
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
Revisiting Historical Recipes
After you’ve found an historic recipe, sourced appropriate ingredients, figured out the maddeningly imprecise quantities, and grappled with instructions that are often little more than a reminder for someone who already knows how to cook the dish, you’re left with an insoluble mystery: how should it taste? If you’re in search of some notion of authenticity, that is the ultimate stumbling block. There is just no way to know. Or maybe there is.
Marieke Hendriksen of the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam and her colleagues recently published a paper outlining a procedure for approaching the taste of the past rigorously. After a thorough analysis of early cookbooks as well as medical texts and botanical treatises from the Low Countries, they settled on an apple pie from the 1669 De Verstandige kock.
Dough
Take wheat flour, butter, rosewater, sugar and some eggs, of each as needed.
To make an apple pie the Wallonian way
Take peeled apples the cores removed cook them in Rhenish wine well done, add butter, ginger, sugar, raisins, cinnamon, all cooked well together, then stir in the yolks of two eggs put it in your dough and bake in the Oven as above [i.e. “with fire from below and above”].
After all the analysis and experimentation, though, there’s only one thing to do: taste the end result.
Notes
Huffduff it
View all episodes
By Jeremy Cherfas
4.9
5757 ratings
After you’ve found an historic recipe, sourced appropriate ingredients, figured out the maddeningly imprecise quantities, and grappled with instructions that are often little more than a reminder for someone who already knows how to cook the dish, you’re left with an insoluble mystery: how should it taste? If you’re in search of some notion of authenticity, that is the ultimate stumbling block. There is just no way to know. Or maybe there is.
Marieke Hendriksen of the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam and her colleagues recently published a paper outlining a procedure for approaching the taste of the past rigorously. After a thorough analysis of early cookbooks as well as medical texts and botanical treatises from the Low Countries, they settled on an apple pie from the 1669 De Verstandige kock.
Dough
Take wheat flour, butter, rosewater, sugar and some eggs, of each as needed.
To make an apple pie the Wallonian way
Take peeled apples the cores removed cook them in Rhenish wine well done, add butter, ginger, sugar, raisins, cinnamon, all cooked well together, then stir in the yolks of two eggs put it in your dough and bake in the Oven as above [i.e. “with fire from below and above”].
After all the analysis and experimentation, though, there’s only one thing to do: taste the end result.
Notes
Huffduff it
More shows like Eat This Podcast
View all
This American Life
90,994 Listeners
Radiolab
43,898 Listeners
Freakonomics Radio
32,100 Listeners
Planet Money
30,666 Listeners
99% Invisible
26,197 Listeners
StarTalk Radio
14,378 Listeners
Savage Lovecast
6,174 Listeners
Good Food
1,110 Listeners
The Food Programme
259 Listeners
Science Friday
6,435 Listeners
The Daily
111,948 Listeners
Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel
14,880 Listeners
Articles of Interest
3,552 Listeners
No Stupid Questions
3,626 Listeners
The Ezra Klein Show
15,950 Listeners