Our Viands. Whence they come and how they are cooked with a bundle of old recipes from cookery books of the last century / by Anne Walbank Buckland.

Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Our Viands. Whence they come and how they are cooked with a bundle of old recipes from cookery books of the last century / by Anne Walbank Buckland. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    Chambers’s ‘ Book of Days ’ contains an interesting account of tossing pancakes in Westminster School, the cook being obliged to toss the cake over the bar which divides the upper from the lower school, which being done the boys scramble for the cake, and the one who secures it unbroken, and carries it to the Deanery, receives an honorarium of a guinea. The same article gives the following quaint description of the pancake by the poet Taylor :— ‘ There is a bell rung, called the Pancake Bell, the sound whereof makes thousands of people distracted, and forgetful either of manners or humanity. Then there is a thing called wheaten flour, which the cooks do mingle with water, eggs, spice, and other tragical magical enchantments, and then they put it by little-and-little into a frying-pan of boiling suet, where it makes a confused dismal hissing (like the Lernian snakes in the reeds of Acheron) until at last, by the skill of the cook, it is transformed into the form of a flip-jack called a pancake, which ominous incantation the ignorant people do devour very greedily.’ Eggs, as a great ingredient in the pancake, are much in request on Shrove Tuesday, which, in Cornwall, gave rise to a very barbarous sport, for the hens, which had not laid an egg before Shrove Tuesday, were placed on the barn floor and beaten to death, or sometimes a hen, with some bells hung round it, was tied to a man’s back, and others blindfolded and armed with boughs, ran after him and ► struck at the bird, guided by the bells, and when the bird had been killed in this manner it was boiled with bacon, and eaten with the pancakes. The British pancake has been transformed in France