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The Closet of Sir Kenelme Digbie Knight Opened
- Year
- 1669
- Era
- 17th century
- Origin
- England · Europe
- Language
- English
- Category
- Specialist
The Closet of Sir Kenelme Digbie Knight Opened, issued posthumously in 1669, gathers the household receipts of the courtier, natural philosopher and diplomat Kenelm Digby. Renowned for its extensive sections on meads, metheglins and other fermented honey drinks, the collection preserves recipes attributed to named aristocratic and gentry sources, offering an unusually social portrait of seventeenth-century English domestic cookery and brewing practice.
Cooking from this book
My Lady Cowers White Meathe Used at Salisbury
A characteristic English honey wine from the household of Lady Cower, reflecting the seventeenth-century fashion for pale, lightly herbed meads scented with rosemary, sweet marjoram, and thyme. The 'groat' test (an egg floating with a coin-sized area above the surface) was the standard period gauge of correct sweetness and strength.
Take to four gallons of water, one gallon of virgin honey; let the water be warm before you put in the honey; and then put in the whites of 3 or 4 eggs well beaten, to make the scum rise. When the honey is thoroughly melted and ready to boil, put in an egg with the shell softly; and when the egg riseth above the water, to the bigness of a groat in sight, it is strong enough of the honey. The egg will quickly be hard, and so will not rise; therefore you must put in another, if the first do not rise to your sight; you must put in more water and honey proportionable to the first, because of wasting away in the boiling. It must boil near an hour. You may, if you please, boil in it a little bundle of rosemary, sweet marjoram, and thyme; and when it tasteth to your liking, take it forth again. Many do put sweet-bryar berries in it, which is held very good. When your meath is boiled enough, take it off the fire, and put it into a kiver; when it is blood-warm, put in some ale-barm to make it work, and cover it close with a blanket in the working. The next morning tun it up, and if you please put in a bag with a little ginger and a little nutmeg bruised; and when it hath done working, stop it up close for a month, and then bottle it.
Reproduced from the public-domain text via Project Gutenberg. Spelling lightly modernised; the headnote is editorial.
An Excellent White Meathe
A spiced white mead flavoured with cinnamon, ginger, mace, cloves and lemon peel, fermented on a yeasted toast in the old English manner. Digby notes it is fit to drink after two or three months but improves greatly with a year's keeping.
Take one gallon of honey, and four of water; boil and scum them till there rise no more scum; then put in your spice a little bruised, which is most of cinnamon, a little ginger, a little mace, and a very little cloves. Boil it with the spice in it, till it bear an egg. Then take it from the fire, and let it cool in a wooden vessel, till it be but lukewarm; which this quantity will be in four or five or six hours. Then put into it a hot toast of white bread, spread over on both sides, pretty thick with fresh barm; that will make it presently work. Let it work twelve hours, close covered with cloths. Then tun it into a runlet wherein sack hath been, that is somewhat too big for that quantity of liquor; for example, that it fill it not by a gallon. You may then put a little lemon peel in with it. After it hath remained in the vessel a week or ten days, draw it into bottles. You may begin to drink it after two or three months: but it will be better after a year. It will be very sprightly and quick and pleasant and pure white.
Reproduced from the public-domain text via Project Gutenberg. Spelling lightly modernised; the headnote is editorial.
