Candy Flowers
Old Elizabethan Dessert Recipe

Picture of Hannah Woolley Recipe Book

 

Candy Flowers
Old Elizabethan Dessert Recipe

  • Ingredients for Candy Flowers - an Old Elizabethan Dessert Recipe

  • Cooking method for Candy Flowers

  • Free Candy Flowers  - Old Elizabethan Dessert Recipe

Old Elizabethan Recipes

Elizabethan Era Index

Candy Flowers
Old Elizabethan Dessert Recipe

Candy Flowers

To Candy Flowers the best way
Takes Roses, Violets, Cowslips, or Gilly-Flours, and pick them from the white bottoms, then have boiled to a Candy height Sugar, and put in so many Flours as the Sugar will receive, and continually stir them with the back of a Spoon, and when you see the Sugar harden on the sides of the Skillet, and on the Spoon, take them off the Fire, and keep them with stirring in the warm Skillet, till you see them part, and the Sugar as it were sifted upon them, then put them upon a paper while they are warm and rub them gently with your hands; till all the Lumps be broken, then put them into a Cullender, and sift them as clean as may be, then pour them upon a clean Cloth, and shake them up and down till there be hardly any Sugar hanging about them; then if you would have them look as though they were new gathered, have some help, and open them with your fingers before they be quite cold, and if any Sugar hang about them, you may wipe it off with a fine Cloth; to candy Rosemary Flours, or Archangel, you must pull out the string that stands up in the middle of the Blossom, and take them which are not at all faded, and they will look as though they were new gathered, without opening

 

Candy Flowers Old Elizabethan Dessert Recipe
The above Old dessert recipe for Candy Flowers is written in totally different way to today's recipe books!

  • There were no lists of ingredients - these were included as part of the text

  • Food and ingredient measurements were extremely basic - quantities were not often specified!

  • Temperature control was difficult and therefore not specified!

  • Cooking times were vague - and left to the cook to decide!

  • It was assumed that the reader would already have some knowledge of cooking

The History of the Recipe Book

  • Some of the language might be referred to as 'Olde English'

  • The art of cooking and the recipe was passed verbally from one generation to the next

  • The first printed book ever to be published in English was in 1474!

  • Most Elizabethan women were unable to read!

  • The idea of a Recipe Book was an entirely new concept

  • The first Recipe Books to be printed in England which included many old Elizabethan and Medieval recipes were called:

    • 1545 - 'A Propre new booke of Cokery'

    • 1588 - 'The Good Huswifes Handmaid for Cookerie in her kitchen'

    • 1596 - 'The Good Hyswife's Jewell'

    • 1610 'Mrs. Sarah Longe her Receipt Booke'

Candy Flowers Old Elizabethan Recipe
The above Old recipe is taken from the book by Hannah Woolley (1622-1675) printed at the White Lion in Duck-Lane, near West-Smithfield, London in 1672 and entitled:

The Queen-like Closet
OR
RICH CABINET
Scored with all manner of
RARE RECEIPTS
FOR
Preserving, Candying and Cookery

Candy Flowers
Old Elizabethan Dessert Recipe

  • Ingredients for Candy Flowers - an Old Elizabethan Dessert Recipe

  • Cooking method for Candy Flowers

  • Free Candy Flowers  - Old Elizabethan Dessert Recipe

  • Have fun reading this Candy Flowers old dessert recipe

  • What food people ate during the Renaissance era

  • The cooking instructions used

  • The different types of food used in old dessert recipes

Candy Flowers
Old Elizabethan Dessert Recipe

 

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