It's been a very long time since I've posted here - sorry about that. The past few years have been interesting for us all.
Thanks to Johnna Holloway, I've learned of this late 17th century Welsh manuscript. It's not properly medieval in itself, but after skimming through the recipes I have the distinct impression that many of them were copied from a pre-1600 CE source. That suggests to me that it could be a very useful resource, especially given the scarcity of Welsh sources.
With that in mind I'm starting a new project of transcribing the manuscript. I'll be posting entries for it here as often as I can, and eventually will make the transcription available for reading and searching on the website.
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Merryell Williams' Book of Recipes
Peniarth MS 513D
This is a volume of cooking and medicinal recipes which were collected by Merryell Williams of the Ystumcolwyn Estate, Montgomeryshire, towards the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century. The manuscript is in English. Within its covers we are given a glimpse of the types of meals created in the kitchens of mid Wales' nobility during this period.
Images of the original manuscript are freely available on the National Library of Wales website.
I have done my best to provide an accurate, but readable transcription. Common abbreviations have been expanded, letters like thorn and yogh have been replaced with their modern equivalents, and some minor punctuation has been added.
Copyright © 2022 by Daniel Myers, MedievalCookery.com
[p1]
[1] Oyster Loaves. Take a dozen of good oysters & Clean them as usuall, then boyl them in their own liquor till they be enough to Pickle, then take a fair Sweet Breed of veal, and Boyle it in water till it be enough to be eaten, but rather under than over boylid, your oysters must be under done,. When the sweet Breeds and osters be thus boyled shred the Sweetbreed into small squares about the bigness of French bean, & take the finns from the osters and put em altogether and grate over them half a nutmeg or more, and sprinkle also over them two penny-worth of Capers shreed as small as Dust, & a reasonable quantity of Peper & Salt according to your Palat and let them stand by, then take a Quarter of a Bint [pint?] of Gravie that is good and stronge. And shred into it half a Midling Oster, and half an Anchovie, & put it over a Gentle fire, till the anchovie be disolved then strain the gravie from the Onion into a Sauce-pan, to which put a quarter of a pound of fresh butter & shack it about the pan till be Melted thick, & then put in your prepared Oysters & Sweet Breeds and Sturr them Gently together till they be well mixt & put them by till the loaves be fryed as followeth. Take 4 New French Rowles, & cut a peice Neatly out of the top of Each, No bigger than that your finger & thumb will jest goe in, & carefully take out all the crumbs as close as can, not to breake through the sides, when you thus ordered the Loaves, Gett a narrow Skellet barely wide enough for a loaffe to goe Cleverly in, & so turned, & putt into it a pound of fresh Butter without any watter and lett it boyle a litle, scuming it clean from the Butter-Milk, into the Boyling butter, put first one Rowle, And lett it take One or two turns Rounds, turning it that Each side may be fryed then take it up & lay it upon a plate to drain, the hole downwards & then put in another, till the Loaves be all fryed, & att last putt in the Bitts, that you cut out, and when they be Enough lay em to Drain, as the loaves. Then take your Loaves and fill them with your Oysters with a sweet-meat spoon, taking care that every part be full, & Close them with the piese, when you would Eat them, you must put them in an oven Moderatly hott for about a quarter of an hour themselves, Or with roasted fowles.
While I stated in the introduction that many of the recipes in this book seem like they were copied from an earlier source, this is not one of those recipes. In fact, I couldn't find anything quite like this recipe in my usual collection of sources.
Oysters that are boiled and then pan-fried in butter? No problem!
Add in Sweetbreads that have been similarly treated? Sure ... wait, what?
Mix with gravy, anchovies, and onion juice? Uh ...
Stuff into rolls that have been hollowed out and fried in butter? ... I give up.
Both sweetbreads - and to a lesser degree, oysters - have fallen out of fashion in the past century or so. That means that even though I've come across a lot of recipes for them in early cookbooks, I'm not likely to cook them (my family of taste-testers only have so much patience). So I expected to find something at least vaguely close to this recipe.
Nope. There was nothing similar in the online medieval sources, so I turned to my collection of print books. Nothing there either.
I finally found a clue to the origin of this recipe when I came across this one for an oyster and sweetbread casserole. It's attributed to Recipes of Early America by Helen Duprey, published in 1967 by Heirloom Publishing Co., New York.
It appears that Helen Duprey was also known as Helen Duprey Bullock, and that some of (all?) the recipes in Recipes of Early America may have come from The Williamsburg Art of Cookery, printed for Colonial Williamsburg in 1938. That book includes the note:
"Even as many of the recipes which it contains are taken or adapted from the first American cook book, which was printed at Williamsburg in 1742 by William Parks, so is this volume a typographical adaptation from Parks' The compleat housewife, or, Accomplish'd gentlewoman's companion." - A note to the reader, p. [275]
There are multiple editions of The Compleat Housewife: or Accomplish'd Gentlewoman's Companion available online - a source I've been only vaguely aware of up until now because I'm pretty strongly focused on pre-1600 sources. Sure enough, on page 10 of the 1729 edition (printed in London) the following recipe is given:
To Stew Oysters in French Rolls. Take a quart of large Oysters; wash them in their own Liquor, and strain it, and put them in it with a little Salt, some Pepper, Mace, and sliced Nutmeg; let the Oysters stew a little with all these things, and thicken them up with a great deal of Butter; then take six French Rolls, cut a piece off the top, and take out the Crum, and take your Oysters boiling hot, and fill the Rolls full, and set them near the fire on a Chafing-dish of Coals, and let them be hot through, and as the Liquor soaks in, fill them up with more, if you have 'em, or some hot Gravy: So serve them up instead of a Pudding.
While there's no mention of sweetbreads, it's still pretty clearly the same recipe. An interesting side note here: the use of the word "em" near the end of that recipe is actually telling as it appears multiple times in the Merryell recipe (which I expanded from the common contraction, 'em).
[update: 23-7-2022]
While looking for versions of the subsequent recipe, I came across the recipe below:
61. Oyfler Loaves. Take French Rowls, cut a little hole on the Tops as big as half a Crown ^ then take out all the Crumb, but don’t break the Cruft off the Loaf: then stew some Oysters in their own Liquor, a blade of Mace, a little whole Pepper, Salt, Nutmeg and a little White-wine : skum it very well, and thicken it with a piece of Butter rowled up in Flour : then fill up the Rowls with it, and put on the piece again that you cut off: then put the Rowls in a Mazerene-dish, and melt Butter and pour it into them, let them in your Oven till crisp : let the Oven be as hot as for Orange-pudding. [England's Newest Way in All Sorts of Cookery, H. Howard (1708)]
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