[Sca-cooks] Confections was Cut-Off Date for Cookery Books?

[Johnna Holloway]

By way of explanation, for all those who think I was dissing their sweets literature….

Let me repeat and make clearer in that in my post of January 29, 2014 I was primarily talking about English printed sources because 
Countess Alys on 1/29 asked specifically about "recipes for confections and banqueting items (aka "desserts")." She then named,  
 "John Murrell, "A delightful daily exercise for Ladies and Gentlewomen" (1621); Gervase Markham, "The English Housewife" (1615); Kenelm Digby, "The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby" (1669); Robert May, "The Accomplisht Cook" (1660/1685)."
She didn't list but she might have listed also Hugh Plat's Delightes and A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen from 1608. 
These are all English printed cookery or confectionery books.

The question was -- what can we do about the 1600 official cut-off?

And I wrote in reply, "I think in practical purposes the SCA boundary of 1600 doesn't work very well with confections, especially in terms of English language materials. For a number of languages there are very few recipes at all. A manuscript here, a manuscript there, containing a few items. Alessio of course has a dozen recipes on confections, including the sugar paste recipe and he is printed and reprinted all over Europe in a wide number of languages starting in the 1550s. But we want more recipes for sweets than just those included in Alessio." 

I mentioned Alessio, properly, The secretes of the reuerende Maister Alexis of Piemount, 1558, because in England Alessio contains this recipe: 

To make a paste of sugre, whereof a man maye make all maner of fruites, and other fyne thynges, with theyr forme, as platters, dishes, glasses, cuppes, and such like thinges, wherwith you may furnish a table: and when you haue doen, eate them vp. A pleasant thing for them that sit at the table." 

There are also recipes for confections of melons, peaches, conserves of quinces, orange peels, walnuts, gourds, cherries, and little morsels as they use in Naples. So tucked away in this book of secrets we have this chapter on confections. It's overlooked, but it's the source recipe for sugar paste in England.  

[See also my article "Alessio and the Secretes of Cookery" Tournaments Illuminated Issue #147, Summer 2003.]


The question is -- where do we go after Alessio and which books are most valuable in terms of recipes for when we want to recreate a sideboard of sweets and confections? It turns out that most of those recipes are found in books published after 1600.

Johnnae