reference: digby-1669

Very thin plain paste, oven dried rather than baked, to give a very crisp texture (Digby 1669, etc)

Honey and ale fermented together, or ale flavoured with honey and spices. Known at least since Chaucer's 'Miller's Tale' of c1386 "Hir mouth was sweete as brago...

Eggs, cream and butter beaten together and cooked (Digby 1669).

Boiled whiting mashed with egg and butter "It is a most savoury dish" (Digby 1669).

The fermented juice of apples. Known by this name since the 14th Century (OED), and presumably much older.

Ale mixed with the jelly or minced meat of a boiled cock, typically with fruits and spices.

General term for any thin piece of meat, whether natural or reformed. Sometimes a synonym for 'bacon rasher', known as far back as as Langland 1390 (Digby 1669,...

Parsnips boiled in milk and mashed.

Although 'pottage' just means soup or stew, 'English Pottage' has come to mean a clear dark meat-stock soup, though the Digby 1669 receipt includes oatmeal (Bri...

Starchy set-jelly dessert made originally made by soaking oatmeal overnight in water, boiling the strained liquor with sugar and flavourings such as rosewater a...

A flummery (set desert) boiled in ale to make a thick drink.

A 'Green-Goose' is a young, unhung, goose.

A type of meat stew or hash.

A mixture of ingredients, commonly diced sheep meat with carrot, lettuce (or cabbage) and other vegetables, cooked so as the ingredients fall and produce a high...

Fermented drink of water and honey. Digby 1669 has several receipts.

Powdered whole mustard seeds mixed with Sherry and sugar (Digby 1669).

Boiled capon in a mutton-and-veal broth with cream and rich fruit and nut flavourings, including almonds, 'chess-nuts', raisins, dates, orange, sack and sugar.

Apple juice with apple pulp, sugar, lemon juice and orange peel boiled to a set jelly (Digby 1669).

Lettuce stalks, peeled, boiled, dried and candied, as a sweet (Plat 1609, Digby 1669, etc).

Red (ie. smoked) herrings, soaked in oil and vinegar, then grilled. Soaked and grilled again until very crisp. Served with salad (Digby 1669).

Boiled peas, some fallen, some whole, with coriander seed, onion, mint, parsley, winter-savoury, marjoram, salt, pepper and butter (Digby 1669).

Stoned cherries boiled to jam with raspberry and redcurrant juice and sugar.

(Also recorded as: manged, maunchett, maynche, maynchett, mayned, mengyd, meyned, manchete, manchett, manchet, mainchet, mancheat, mancheate, manched, manchuet,...

Sweet semi-set fruit-and-sugar jam preserve made with citrus fruit (orange, lemon, lime, grapefruit, singly or in any combination) usually including chopped fru...

Pasties of meat marrow with fruit or vegetables, fried (Family Guide 1747). Digby 1669 adds shredded spinach.

Cooked (roasted or boiled) bone marrow, spread on toast. Commonly highly spiced. Served hot. Digby 1669 soaks the marrow-bones in sweet wine.

An alcoholic drink made by fermenting honey and water. When flavoured with herbs it is Metheglin

Mead flavoured with herbs, known since the mid 1500's.

Capon in broth with blanched almonds and cream, nuts such as "Chess-nuts" pistachios or pine-nuts, beaten egg and citrus peel (Digby 1669)

Cheese matured while wrapped in nettle leaves. (Digby 1669, Wooley 1672, etc)

The 'Parsley Root' occasionally referred to in old receipts is not the modern herb grown for its leaf but the 'Hamburg' or 'Dutch' parsley, which produces a par...

Canada Goose

Mushrooms in salt and vinegar. Digby 1669 uses wine vinegar and adds pepper, cloves, nutmeg, mace and bay.

Woodland herbs such as rue, rosemary, sage, sorrel, celandine, mugwort, the tops of red brambles, pimpernel, Balm, Angelica, (Digby 1669, Family Guide 1747) ste...

Puff-paste base with slices of bread and lumps of marrow on, custard poured over. Fruit and lemon peel (Digby 1669).

Barley Cream soup with "Almond-Milk, and, if you will, some Melon seeds. You may put some juyce of Limon or Orange to it. Also season it with Cinnamon" (Digby 1...

('Quick' as in 'lively') Bottled ale with raisins or wheat-corns added. "After a while this will drink exceeding quick and pleasant" (Digby 1669). The adding of...

A thick semi-set fruit syrup, almost a jelly or jam (Plat 1609, Digby 1669, etc.)

Although rice has rarely, if ever, been commercially grown in England, it appears in more-or-less every English cookbook since Cury 1390, usually as an ingredie...

A peppery salad leaf (Eruca sativa), known at least since Digby 1669, but rather fallen from favour in the 19th Century, to be revived in the late 20th. cf. Hed...

Grated cheese mixed with savoury ingredients, placed on toast, toasted. The first exact reference to this is in Digby 1669 where he suggests chopped asparagus, ...

Unripened, very soft, white cheese formed in a small mould, or moulded in leaves. Once commonplace, we know of only one producer, High Weald Dairy in West Susse...

The wild celery, as a flavouring herb, known from several receipts (Digby 1669, Mrs.B, etc), now very rare.

A summer drink made from raisins and lemon. Known at least since Thomas Blount's 'Glossographia' of 1656; "Stipone, a kind of sweet compound liquor, drunk in so...

Hot tea mixed with egg yolks and sugar (Digby 1669)

"In the Spring (about the beginning of May) the flowry-leaves of Tulips do fall away, and there remains within them the end of the stalk, which in time will tur...

Oliver asks for more ...

Original Receipt in 'The Closet Of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight, Opened' (Digby 1669)

A pasteurised cow's milk cheese formed into wheels wrapped in nettle leaves, or, more recently, wild garlic leaves. Off-white, slightly green-grey, creamy under...