As Christmas approaches, our thoughts will be much concerned with food and drink. Here are two eighteenth century recipes taken from a book of Jane Griffith of the Garn Estate in Denbighshire. First for your delectation:
Take 5 pound of fine flower and dry it well by the fire.
Then take half a pound of loaf sugar seaved [sieved], cloves, mace and nutmegs of each half an ounce. Beat them altogether.
Then mix the sugar and spice with the flow’r and rub into the flower 2 pounds and a half of fresh butter out of the churn.
Then beat 22 eggs, leaving out 6 whites. Mix these into the flower.
Then mix in a quart of new ale yeast and at the same time of sack and rosewater four spoonfulls. Then pour in a pint and a half of cream as warm as milk from the cow. So work it up for half an hour to make it light before you begin to mix the cake.
Have in readdiness a pound of raisins stoned and minced very small, and seven pd. of currants pick’t and rubed clean, then sprinkle them with half a pint of sack, so set them before the fire to plump, turning them often, but do not put the minced raisins before the fire.
When you have done working your cake together mix in the fruit, then butter the hoop and put in a third part of the cake & strew candyed lemon & cittron and orange all over the top. Then put in more cake.
When all is put in the hoop, set it in the oven and let it bake 2 hours & a half.
Then, to counteract over-indulgence:
Take before you drink 12 spoonfuls of betony water & after that drink as much as you please. Try’d. But make no practis of this sin.
Hilary Peters