Tag Archives: food

Cooking Our Collection: Pi Day 2023

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By Anthony Murisco, Public Engagement Librarian

My name is Anthony Murisco. I am the Public Engagement Librarian here at NYAM. A few weeks back, we celebrated Pi Day by baking a couple of pies. I wanted to share my own experience.

For those who may not know or need a refresher, Pi is a mathematical constant. The symbol π, the Greek letter for P, represents the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The ratio will always be π. When written out, π is approximately 3.14. π is an irrational number, whose decimal form continues forever, which is why a shorter form is used. Hence March 14, 3/14, is known as Pi Day.

Pi Day is a celebration of all things mathematical as well as that certain baked good. Pi and pie not only share a name but are both circular. While the holiday may have earlier origins, the first recorded celebration was heralded by physicist Larry Shaw in 1988. When discussing the “mysteries of pi” with a colleague, he realized the irrational number has some rationality to it! In an effort to make learning math fun, he conducted the first Pi Day celebration with his class. The event, now celebrated by math enthusiasts all over, includes reciting the value of π to as many decimal places as one can, a real memorization challenge, and of course, pie tasting.

An illustrated image of chef's working in a kitchen in a hotel.
From The encyclopædia of practical cookery (1898) by Theodore Francis Garrett

What better way to celebrate than by baking a pie? This year, this was my task. The New York Academy of Medicine Library has a plethora of recipe books, some more than 200 years old. A selection of these books has been shared before, on social media, in this very blog, and even on our digital exhibition. Here was one of the first attempts of our staff making a dish!

After searching through several books and finding only savory recipes, our Historical Collections Reference Librarian, Arlene Shaner, discovered what I was looking for. In the 1824 edition of The Virginia house-wife lay a recipe for simply “Apple Pie.”

An advertisement payed for by The Apple Growers of America. A blonde woman is holding up an apple. The caption reads "For weight control... a tasty appetite-appeaser."

Mary Randolph first published The Virginia Housewife in 1824. Its popularity led to several editions and reprints. The Virginia housewife, or Methodical Cook was the first of its kind, a published manual of recipes and housekeeping tips that would later surge and create an industry. This was the perfect book to make a pie from.

Title page of the 1824 edition of The Virginia house-wife by Randolph.
Title page of the 1824 edition of The Virginia house-wife by Randolph.

The book featured three different recipes. Only one specified that it was a pie. Arlene predicted that the second recipe was for pie filling. She is an experienced baker. She went with that one. I had never baked a pie before. I didn’t want to do anything wrong. I stuck with Randolph’s “Apple Pie.”

I looked at the recipe to make a list of ingredients. Apples. Cloves. It called for “powdered sugar.” And rose water. I stopped by my local pop-up market and got four large red delicious apples. Each looked almost double the size of a single apple. Surely this would be enough! Powdered sugar and whole cloves were easy to get. It wasn’t on my list but, I opted for a pre-made crust. While I know that pre-made is not ideal, I had never made a crust before. I would have needed even further directions! If store-bought is fine for Ina Garten, it would be good enough for me. The rose water ended up being the most elusive ingredient in my neighborhood. After several failed shopping trips, I contemplated looking up replacements. I ended up finding rose water downtown at a hip chain grocery store.

Having never baked like this before, I tried to stick exactly to the recipe. The years of doing mail-in meal services will do that to you! Without the exact measurements, I was left a little confused—how would I know how much to use?

Three recipes from page 152. Apple Pie. Baked Apple Pudding. A Nice Boiled Pudding cuts off at the end.
Two of the pie recipes. Notice how the second is not specifically stated as a pie!

The Virginia House-wife and other older cookbooks are not specific with their instructions. There’s a notion that you have some culinary instinct if you are reading it. The recipes are a supplement to your knowledge. Randolph did not foresee someone like me, a beginner, taking on the challenge.

A picture of a pie crust in process of being filled with apples, cloves, and powdered sugar.

During the filling of the crust, I noticed, two apples in, that I should have gotten more apples. I’ve seen pies filled before with an arrangement of the fruit, a kind of beautiful Busby Berkeley dance. This was not my case. Still, I used what I had! While the apples didn’t fill the pie completely, it wasn’t as empty as I had feared.

The pie completed before it was baked. On top is the pi symbol carved in.
Ready to be baked!

When I discussed my experience with Arlene, she told me that the powdered sugar I used was the wrong ingredient. Powdered sugar today is not the same as it was then. In the past, you would get a loaf of sugar, scrape off what you needed, and “powder” the cake that way. It was more akin to granulated sugar today. Modern-day powdered sugar, or confectioners’ sugar, quickly dissolves and tends to absorb the moisture. Though the pie tasted good, I had given it a different spin. I think that may have been Randolph’s goal. She doesn’t want to tell you exactly how to bake or cook, she just gives you some general directions.

The finished product.

While it may not have looked the best, that didn’t matter. The pie I made was tasty. The powdered sugar dried up some of the apples. I also put too many cloves. This led to quite a spicy taste.

Since 2020, Dr. Rachel Snell, a historian, has been working her way through The Virginia house-wife. Using two editions, 1824 and 1838, she created “The Virginia Housewife Project” to explore the recipes while investigating ideas of domesticity and the history of each recipe. I wish I had seen her blog prior to making the pie, so I could have prepared a little more!

I hope to be able to share more of these recipes in the future. In the meantime, please check out our digital collection of cookbooks. Maybe something will inspire a course for your dinner tonight!

A piece of Arlene's baked apple pudding pie.
A piece of Arlene’s finished baked apple pie.


References:

Berton, Juston. “Any way you slice it, pi’s transcendental,” San Francisco Chronicle (11 March 2009) https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Any-way-you-slice-it-pi-s-transcendental-3169091.php, accessed 27 March 2023.

Randolph, Mary. The Virginia house-wife. Washington : Davis and Force, 1824.

Snell, Rachel A. “The Virginia House-wife Project” https://virginiahousewifeproject.com/, accessed 27 March 2023.

Valentine’s Day Cards from NYAM

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by the NYAM Library Team

On February 14th we observe Valentine’s Day!

Our previous blog posts on this commercial holiday highlighted both cards created for Valentine’s Day as well as trading cards from our collection. At the close of the 19th century, improvements in printing allowed for cheaper goods and paper cards for friends, lovers, and families to send written sentiments.

These early cards varied from caricatures of their subjects and beautifully drawn miniscule script, to what we now think of as Valentine’s Day cards – humorous or sentimental acknowledgements.

To celebrate this year, we have created six of our own Valentine’s Day cards featuring images from our collections. One is for the celebration of the popular Galentine’s Day, a celebration of friendship.

Feel free to print out and share with your loved ones!

From Sei sparsam!… by Anny Wothe (Leipzig, 1900.)
From Historiæ animalium... by Conrad Gessner (Zurich, 1551.)
From Illustrated Natural History of the Three Kingdoms…edited and compiled by A. B. Strong (New York, 1853.)
From Illustrated Natural History of the Three Kingdoms…edited and compiled by A. B. Strong (New York, 1853.)
From De motu cordis et aneurysmatibus… by Giovanni Maria Lancisi (Neapoli, 1738.)
From Ryzon Baking Book compiled and edited by Marion Harris Neil (New York, 1917.)

The History of Garlic: From Medicine to Marinara

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Today’s guest post is written by Sarah Lohman, author of Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine (Simon & Schuster, 2016). On Monday, June 5, Lohman will give her talk, “The History of Garlic: From Medicine to Marinara.” To read more about this lecture and to register, go HERE.

Ms. Amelia Simmons gave America its first cookbook in 1796; within her pamphlet filled with sweet and savory recipes, she makes this note about garlic: “Garlickes, tho’ used by the French, are better adapted to the uses of medicine than cookery.” In her curt dismissal, she reflected a belief that was thousands of years old: garlic was best for medicine, not for eating. To add it to your dinner was considered the equivalent of serving a cough syrup soup.

There are records of ancient Greek doctors who prescribed garlic as a strengthening food, and bulbs were recovered from Egyptian pyramids. Garlic was being cultivated in China at least 4,000 years ago, and upper class Romans would never serve garlic for dinner; to them, it tasted like medicine.

In medieval Europe, garlic was considered food only for the humble and low.  While those that could afford it imported spices like black pepper from the Far East, lower classes used herbs they could grow. Garlic’s intense flavor helped peasants jazz up otherwise bland diets. It was made into dishes like aioli, originally a mixture of chopped garlic, bread crumbs, nuts and sometimes stewed meat. It was intended to be sopped up with bread, although it was occasionally served as a sauce to accompany meats in wealthier households.

woodville_medicalbotany_garlic_1790_Watermark

Garlic (Scientific name Allium Sativum) from Medical Botany (1790) by William Woodville.

The English, contrary to the stereotype about bland British cooking, seemed particularly enchanted by garlic. In the first known cooking document in English, a vellum scroll called The Form of Cury, a simple side dish is boiled bulbs of garlic. Food and medicine were closely intertwined in Medieval Europe, and garlic was served as a way to temper your humors. Humors were thought to be qualities of the body that affected on your health and personality. Garlic, which was thought be “hot and dry,” shouldn’t be consumed by someone who was quick to anger, but might succeed in pepping up a person who was too emotionally restrained. According to food historian Cathy Kaufman, a medieval feast might have a staggering amount of different dishes, all laid on the table at one time, so that different personality types could construct a meal that fit their humors.

Up through the 19th century, people also believed you got sick by inhaling bad air, called “miasmas.” Miasmas hang out by swamps, but also by sewage, or feet–I always imagined them as the puddles of mist that lie in the nooks between hills on dark country roads. Garlic can help you with miasmas, too. Ever see an image of plague doctors from Medieval Europe wearing masks with a long, bird-like beak? The beak was filled with odorous herbs, garlic likely among them, designed to combat miasmas.

In 18th-century France, a group of thieves may have been inspired by these plague masks. During an outbreak of the bubonic plague in Marseilles in 1726 (or 1655, stories deviate), a group of thieves were accused of robbing dead bodies and the houses of the deceased and ailing, without seeming to contract the disease themselves. Their lucky charms against the miasmas? They steeped garlic in vinegar, and soaked a cloth or a sponge in the liquid, then tied it like a surgical mask over their mouth and nose. In their minds, the strong smells would repel miasmas. This story is probably a legend, but I think there is some grain of truth to it: in modern studies, garlic has been shown to obfuscate some of the human smells that attract biting bugs. Since we now know bubonic plague was carried by fleas, it’s possible the thieves were repelling the insects. The plague is also a bacterial infection, and both vinegar and garlic are effective antimicrobials.

Garlic remained in the realm of medicine for most of the 19th century. Louis Pasteur first discovered that garlic was a powerful antimicrobial in 1858. In 1861, John Gunn assembled a medical book for use in the home, The New Domestic Physician, “with directions for using medicinal plants and the simplest and best new remedies.” Gunn recommends a poultice of roast garlic for ear infections:

“An excellent remedy for earache is as follows: Take three or four roasted garlics, and while hot mash, and add a tablespoonful of sweet oil and as much honey and laudanum; press out the juice, and drop of this into the ear, warm, occasionally.”

Salmon_EnglishHerbal_1710_408_garlic_watermark

Garlick from Botanologia: The English Herbal (1710) by William Salmon.

He also recommends garlic for clearing mucus from the lungs and reducing cough, given by the spoonful with honey and laudanum.  Gardening for the South: Or, How to Grow Vegetables and Fruits, an 1868 botanical guide, says the medicinal values of garlic include making you sweat, which,  like bloodletting, was believed to leach out disease; it will also make you urinate, and is an effective “worm destroyer,” for any intestinal hitchhikers you might have. By the late 19th century, scientists also used garlic to treat TB and injected it into the rectum to treat hemorrhoids.

Today, garlic is one of the most heavily used home remedies, and it is increasingly being studied in the medical field. Some of its historic uses have been proved as bunk–while others, like its efficacy as a topical antiseptic, hold up. But since the late 19th century, garlic has found an even more worthwhile home, thanks to French chefs and Italian immigrants, who spread their garlic heavy cuisine around the world, and made even garlic-reticent Americans a lover of this pungent plant.

Join us on Monday, June 5 to learn more about this topic.  Click HERE to register.

Announcing the March Madness Food Fight Club Winner

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Drum roll please…

The winner of the 2016 March Madness Food Fight Club is…

Vegetable Curry!

Background image: Kirkland, The modern baker, confectioner, and caterer, c1907.

Background image: Kirkland, The modern baker, confectioner, and caterer, c1907.

Thanks to all who voted throughout the competition. If you decide to make this winning recipe, please tell us about it and share some photos.

Vegetable Curry recipe in Blatch, 101 Practical Non-Flesh Recipes, 1917.

Vegetable Curry recipe in Blatch, 101 Practical Non-Flesh Recipes, 1917. Click to enlarge.

The four recipes in this competition—from a pamphlet, a manuscript receipt book, and two printed cookbooks—don’t begin to scratch the surface of what our cookery collection holds. We acquired our Margaret Barclay Wilson culinary collection in 1929, and it now contains about 10,000 items. The collection includes manuscripts, menus, and pamphlets that demonstrate the way cookery changed over time, and a large collection of printed books, beginning in the 16th century. These include works by Scappi, Platina, and Carême, as well as many other milestones in culinary printing.

Our cookbooks offer aspirational recipes, practical recipes, and everything in between.  Our collections hold a snapshot view of what daily cooking was like in a range of households across the world. These recipe books also reflect the changes that occur when people have access to new innovations—refrigeration, for example, or the gas range. We also have strong collections related to diet regimens and cooking for health, as well as cookbooks published during wartime when resources were scarce.

Interested in researching historic cookbooks? Our library is open to the public. To make an appointment, call 212-822-7315 or email library@nyam.org.

Food Fight Club Final: Snail Water v. Vegetable Curry

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It’s the Food Fight Club final! Snail Water won round 1 and Vegetable Curry won round 2. Now it’s time for these two tough competitors to duke it out once and for all.

Background image: Kirkland, The modern baker, confectioner, and caterer, c1907.

Background image: Kirkland, The modern baker, confectioner, and caterer, c1907.

This final bout pits a recipe from a manuscript recipe collection against one found in a printed cookbook.

From A Collection of Choise Receipts. Click to enlarge.

From A Collection of Choise Receipts. Click to enlarge.

The recipe for Snail Water comes from A Collection of Choise Receipts, one of 36 manuscript receipt books in our collection. These collections of recipes, dating from the late 17th through the 19th century, tell stories about the ways food was prepared in a range of households. In many cases, they incorporate source material from contemporary cookbooks in print, showing us the kinds of recipes households valued and relied on. These manuscripts often include personal information about the families who kept them. One noteworthy case in our collections is a recipe for “How to make coffy of dry swet aple snits (slices),” found in a recipe book kept by a German-American family in Pennsylvania-Dutch country between 1835 and 1850. Manuscript cookbooks can also show us the kinds of cooking technologies used by families. Repeated references to coals and the Dutch oven indicate that Pennsylvania-Dutch cookbook’s author was cooking at the open hearth.

Vegetable Curry recipe in Blatch, 101 Practical Non-Flesh Recipes, 1917.

Vegetable Curry recipe in Blatch, 101 Practical Non-Flesh Recipes, 1917. Click to enlarge.

Publishers of printed cookbooks responded to demand from readers. These books—and the number of editions that were published—can tell us a great deal about cooking trends. Our 1917 copy of 101 Practical Non-Flesh Recipes, for example, is the book’s second edition, the first published just a year before. Cookbooks could be aspirational, practical, or a combination of both. A 19th-century cookbook published in Milwaukee in German in multiple editions tell us that there was a demand for cookbooks written in the mother tongue for newly-arrived German immigrants. The mixture of German and American recipes in these books indicate a need for familiar recipes from the Old World, as well as instruction on how to prepare foods that were more typical of the New. A number of printed cookbooks in our collection have emended recipes or manuscript recipes laid-in to their pages, offering clues to how readers modified published recipes for personal use.

Which recipe should be crowned the 2016 Food Fight Club Champion? Vote for your favorite—be it the most appealing, least appealing, or one that just tickles your fancy more—before 5 pm EST on Monday, March 28.

Food Fight Club Round 2: Vegetable Curry v. Ragout of Squirrel

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It’s time for match two of our March Madness Food Fight Club.

First, the reveal of last week’s smackdown: Snail Water triumphed over Pear and Tomato Chutney. Whichever recipe wins this week has a tough competitor for next Wednesday’s final match.

March Madness Food Fight Club_Round1winner

Background image: Kirkland, The modern baker, confectioner, and caterer, c1907.

This week, we pit Vegetable Curry against Ragout of Squirrel.

Vegetable Curry recipe in Blatch, 101 Practical Non-Flesh Recipes, 1917.

Vegetable Curry recipe in Blatch, 101 Practical Non-Flesh Recipes, 1917. Click to enlarge.

The innocuous-sounding vegetable curry comes from Margaret Blatch’s 101 Practical Non-flesh Recipes, a nice little vegetarian cookbook from 1917. The title might sound a bit odd to modern readers and is an interesting choice, considering the term vegetarian was well-established by the 1840s.1 A 1908 physical education article sheds some light on the terminology of the time, saying the word vegetarian “usually suggests a person who abstains not on hygienic but on religious, ethical, or theological grounds,” preferring instead “flesh-abstainer.”2 It appears “non-flesh” was less provocative than “vegetarian.”

Ragout of Squirrel recipe in Recipes for the Jewett Chafing Dish, 1896. Click to enlarge.

Ragout of Squirrel recipe in Recipes for the Jewett Chafing Dish, 1896. Click to enlarge.

Our next contestant features two items not commonly seen on today’s dinner tables: Chafing dishes and squirrels. In the 1890s, chafing dishes experienced a surge in popularity in America, and Recipes for the Jewett Chafing Dish was just one of many cookbooks published featuring recipes specifically for the dish. The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel offered “chafing dish suppers” to top socialites, and stores sold table linens to match the cookware.3 Squirrel, too, was a common sight at the American dinner table due to its availability. One can track its rise and fall by looking at editions of The Joy of Cooking over time, where the numerous squirrel recipes of the 1930s gave way to recipes for chicken.4

Which recipe should face Snail Water in the final round? Vote for your favorite—be it the most appealing, least appealing, or one that just tickles your fancy more—before 5 pm EST on Monday, March 21.

References
1. Spencer C. The Heretic’s Feast: A History of Vegetarianism. UPNE; 1996. Available at: https://books.google.com/books?id=rIjZo-cvifAC&pgis=1. Accessed March 15, 2016.

2. Fisher I. The Influence of Flesh-eating on Endurance. Modern Medicine Publishing; 1908. Available at: https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=gW8yAQAAMAAJ&pgis=1. Accessed March 15, 2016.

3. Lovegren S, Smith AF. Chafing Dish. Oxford Companion to Am Food Drink. 2007:103. Available at: https://books.google.com/books?id=AoWlCmNDA3QC&pgis=1. Accessed March 10, 2016.

4. Smith H. Al rodente: Could squirrel meat come back into vogue? Grist. 2012. Available at: http://grist.org/animals/al-rodente-could-squirrel-meat-come-back-into-vogue/. Accessed March 10, 2016.

Food Fight Club Round 1: Snail Water v. Pear and Tomato Chutney

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Today we begin our March Madness competition, Food Fight Club.

This week and next, two recipes will go head to head, vying for your votes. The following week, the winners of the first two rounds will duke it out for the honor of being named the champion of our first Food Fight Club.

Background image: Kirkland, The modern baker, confectioner, and caterer, c1907.

The smackdown begins with Snail Water versus Pear and Tomato Chutney.

This lovely snail water recipe comes from A Collection of Choise Receipts, a late 17th-century English manuscript written in exquisite penmanship, perhaps written by a professional scribe. Snail water was thought to treat ailments including “sharpness in [the] blood” and appetite loss. Learn more about snail water in our blog archives.

From A Collection of Choise Receipts. Click to enlarge.

From A Collection of Choise Receipts. Click to enlarge.

It takes a bold competitor to go up against this beauty. But we have one: Pear and Tomato Chutney from the American Can Company’s undated Relishes from Canned Food pamphlet. As early as the 1850s, commercially canned goods—especially sardines, tomatoes, condensed milk, and fruits and vegetables—found an eager consumer audience in the Western United States. Their popularity only increased over time; by the 1930s, foods from supermarkets were increasingly prepackaged (learn more in our 2015 April Fool’s blog—the food history facts are true!).

Pear and Tomato Chutney from American Can Company, Relishes from Canned Foods, no date. Click to enlarge.

Pear and Tomato Chutney from American Can Company, Relishes from Canned Foods, no date. Click to enlarge.

Which recipe should move on to the next round? Vote for your favorite—be it the most appealing, least appealing, or one that just tickles your fancy more—before 5 pm EST on Monday, March 14.

Gather ‘Round the Table, We’ll Give You a Treat

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By Johanna Goldberg, Information Services Librarian

It’s almost Hanukkah, a time to light the candles, spin the dreidel, and argue about how to spell the name of the holiday.

It’s also a time to eat foods fried in oil, traditionally potato pancakes (latkes) and jelly doughnuts (sufganiyot), a remembrance of the oil that miraculously burned for eight days to rededicate the Temple after its defilement by the Greeks.1

If you are looking to expand the offerings on your holiday table this year, Mildred Grosberg Bellin’s The Jewish Cook Book (New York, 1941) does not disappoint. She provides an elaborate “Menu for Channucah”:

The "Channucah" menu in Bellin's Jewish Cook Book, 1941.

The “Channucah” menu in Bellin’s Jewish Cook Book, 1941.

Click on an image to view each recipe listed:

The “Seven Layer Schalet” not enough dessert for you? The Economical Jewish Cook (London, 1897) offers a 30-minute recipe for “Hanucah Cakes.”

"Hanucah Cakes" in Henry's Economical Jewish Cook, 1897.

“Hanucah Cakes” in Henry’s Economical Jewish Cook, 1897.

And what would the holiday be without doughnuts? Here are a selection of recipes, one from the Brooklyn Jewish Women’s Relief Association’s A Book for a Cook (1909) and the rest from The International Jewish Cook Book (New York, 1918).

Recipe for doughnuts in the Jewish Women's Association's A Book for a Cook, 1909.

Recipe for doughnuts in the Jewish Women’s Association’s A Book for a Cook, 1909.

Several doughnut options from Greenbaum's The International Jewish Cook Book, 1918.

Several doughnut options from Greenbaum’s The International Jewish Cook Book, 1918.

If you try making any of these recipes, please let us know and share a picture of the results.

Note

1. Yes, we know the holiday commemorates a military victory, too.

Uncooked Foods and How to Use Them: A History of the Raw Food Diet

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By Danielle Aloia, Special Projects Librarian

There are endless diets, ways to prepare foods, and types of foods to eat in the world. One of these is the Raw Food Diet or Raw Foodism. While this may seem like a new age, trendy diet, it has been around for more than a hundred years. As defined in a 1923 American Raw Food, Health and Psychological Club publication, raw food has not “been subjected to the devastating heat of the flame and the consequent devitalizing changes which destroy its freshness and render it so much waste when taken into the human system.”1 Depending on whom you followed in the field, raw food diets could include eggs, milk, vegetables, fruit, and even meat.

Mr. & Mrs. Eugene Christian, authors of the 1904 book Uncooked Foods and How to Use Them, claimed to have cured all their stomach ailments with complete restoration to perfect health after following a raw food diet for a year. They held a seven-course banquet dinner in New York City to bring their theory to public attention—and it worked. They published this book after receiving many inquiries and hoped that it would emancipate women from the slavery of the cook stove and in turn allow her freedom to cultivate her higher faculties. (Not sure they met their goal there.)

The Christian’s dedication page from Uncooked Foods and How to Use Them, which they hoped would allow women to stop cooking by taking up a raw diet.

The Christian’s dedication page from Uncooked Foods and How to Use Them, which they hoped would allow women to stop cooking by taking up a raw diet.

The raw food diet’s most famous proponent was a Swiss nutritionist and physician Maximilian Bircher-Benner. He was also the creator of muesli and a contemporary of John Harvey Kellogg. The original muesli consisted of: “200 grams of apple (mashed) per helping with only a tablespoon of well soaked oats, some finely grated nuts for protein and fat, the juice of half a lemon and a tablespoon of sweetened condensed milk.”2 He believed that these foods contained all the energy the human body needed to sustain itself.

In Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz’s 1999 article about Bircher-Benner they explained that:

“The core of Bircher-Benner’s therapeutic programme was his dietary plan, which promoted raw food and carbohydrates over cooked food and animal protein…He called this a revolutionary diet, and that it was because, first, it turned prevalent bourgeois culinary values upside down, and second it contradicted the medical thinking of the day, which stressed the value of animal protein above all else.”3

In his book, The Prevention of Incurable Disease, Bircher-Benner argued that faulty nutrition was the root cause of incurable diseases.4 He outlined the mistakes “civilised people” make in their diets. His three biggest arguments were: “Change in Quality of Food by Heat,” “The Excessive Consumption of Protein,” and “Disregard of the Foodstuffs as a Whole.” The following diet is included in his book:

From: Bircher-Benner, Max Oskar. The Prevention of Incurable Disease. London : John Miles; 1938.

From: Bircher-Benner, Max Oskar. The Prevention of Incurable Disease. London : John Miles; 1938.

Conservatively cooked vegetables are cooked at less than 145⁰ F. According to Stella McDermott, author of The Metaphysics of Raw Foods (1919), heating food at or above 145⁰ F destroys certain properties of plant life.5 When foods are heated, but not cooked, little, if any, chemical change takes place.6

In her book, McDermott includes this chart on the nutritive values of raw foods. She explains that the discovery of the vitamin revolutionized “man’s understanding of foods, and theory of diet. Heretofore the value of a food has been determined by its power to give heat and energy. Now it is being determined as essential or non-essential to man according to its richness in Vitamines.”7

From: McDermott, S. Metaphysics of Raw Foods. Kansas City, Mo. : Burton Pub. Co.; [c1919]. Click to enlarge.

From: McDermott, S. Metaphysics of Raw Foods. Kansas City, Mo. : Burton Pub. Co.; [c1919]. Click to enlarge.

Raw food diets may not have been the panacea for fixing incurable diseases or getting women out of the kitchen, but the benefits of including raw foods in your diet cannot be denied. Eating lots of fruits and vegetables lowers blood pressure (BP) and cholesterol levels. According to Chan et al., “Among commonly consumed individual raw vegetables, tomatoes, carrots, and scallions related significantly inversely to BP. Among commonly eaten cooked vegetables, tomatoes, peas, celery, and scallions related significantly inversely to BP.”8

A more recent study suggests that “consumption of a strict raw food diet lowers plasma total cholesterol and triglyceride concentrations, but also lowers serum HDL cholesterol and increases tHcy concentrations (a protein associated with heart attack, stroke and blood clots) due to vitamin B-12 deficiency.”9

While it is necessary to eat your fruits and veggies, it’s also advisable to have a well-rounded diet that includes all the essential nutrients that sustain the body.

References

1. Estes SL. Raw Food and Health. Chicago: American Raw Food, Health and Psychological Club; [c1923].

2. Meyer-Renschhausen E, Wirz A. Dietetics, health reform and social order: vegetarianism as a moral physiology. The example of Maximilian Bircher-Benner (1867-1939). Med Hist. 1999;43(3):323-341.

3. Ibid.

4. Bircher-Benner Max Oskar. The Prevention of Incurable Disease. London: John Miles; 1938.

5. Christian E., Christian MG. Uncooked Foods & How to Use Them; New York: The Health-culture company; 1904.

6. McDermott S. Metaphysics of Raw Foods, Kansas City, Mo.: Burton Pub. Co.; [c1919].

7. McDermott S. Metaphysics of Raw Foods, Kansas City, Mo.: Burton Pub. Co.; [c1919].

8. Geleijnse JM. Relation of raw and cooked vegetable consumption to blood pressure: the INTERMAP study. J Hum Hypertens. 2014;28(6):343-344. doi:10.1038/jhh.2014.13.

9. Koebnick C, Garcia AL, Dagnelie PC, et al. Long-term consumption of a raw food diet is associated with favorable serum LDL cholesterol and triglycerides but also with elevated plasma homocysteine and low serum HDL cholesterol in humans. J Nutr. 2005;135(10):2372-2378.

Cook like a Roman: The New York Academy of Medicine’s Apicius Manuscript

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By Anne Garner, Curator, Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health

This is one of several posts leading up to our day-long Eating Through Time Festival on October 17, 2015, a celebration of food, cookery, and health. View the full program and register for the Festival.

Ancient sources document the culinary excellence of one Marcus Gavius Apicius, a Roman gourmet who flourished during Tiberius’ reign (1st century CE). It isn’t clear from textual evidence that this Apicius ever wrote a book of cookery.1 And yet, the gem of our Library’s cookery collection—a 9th-century manuscript collection of Greek and Roman recipes—bears his name.

9th-century manuscript De re culininaria (sometimes De re coquinaria), attributed to Apicius.

9th-century manuscript De re culininaria (sometimes De re coquinaria), attributed to Apicius. Click to enlarge.

Our manuscript, transmitting a 4th– or 5th-century compendium of culinary and medical recipes compiled from a number of 2nd-century Roman sources, packs a powerful wow factor. It contains 500 Greek and Roman recipes from the Mediterranean basin. A handful may date as early as the 4th century BCE. As such, our manuscript is sometimes referred to as the oldest extant cookbook in the West.

This collection of recipes was likely compiled from multiple sources. The 2nd-century satirical writer Juvenal indicated that the name “Apicius” was frequently used to describe a foodie, not a specific person. Other sources suggest that the name conjured luxury and excessive eating.2

These recipes appear to be written by and for cooks. While some recipes called for cuts of meat that might have been beyond the means of the average Roman citizen, many others, including a number of meat, vegetable, and legume dishes, were well within the reach of Rome’s tradespeople, builders, artists, and modest farmers. Some of the recipes may have reflected popular dishes served in local popinae (street bars).

A closer look at book one reveals a wide range of useful directives applicable for the Mediterranean home cook. Called Epimeles (careful, or attentive), book one includes recipes for a spiced wine surprise, honeyed wine, and Roman absinthe. Here too are tips for preserving pork and beef rind, fried fish, blackberries, and truffles.

The dishes reflect the polyglot culture of the Mediterranean basin. The dominance of Greek culinary tradition in the early empire makes it likely that the Apicius began as a Greek collection of recipes, though mainly written in Latin, and adapted for a Roman palate.3 The cookbook incorporates a number of Greek terms, like melizomum (honey sauce) and hypotrimma (here a mixture of cheese and herbs), despite the existence of Latin glosses. Other words are hybrids of Greek and Latin, like tractogalatae, combining the Latin tractum (thin sheet of pastry) and gala, Greek for milk.

The Apicius manuscript is the gem of the Academy’s Margaret Barclay Wilson Collection of Cookery, acquired in 1929. Conservators restored and rebound it in 2006.

Our manuscript was penned in several hands in a mix of Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian scripts at the monastery at Fulda (Germany) around 830 CE. It is one of two manuscripts (the other at the Vatican) presumed to have been copied from a now lost common source.4

The gilt and illuminated Vatican manuscript of De re culininaria, as replicated in a 2013 facsimile.

The gilt and illuminated Vatican manuscript of De re culininaria, as replicated in a 2013 facsimile. Click to enlarge.

Images from both 9th-century iterations illustrate the different approaches to the text. The image above shows the gilt and illuminated Vatican manuscript, as replicated in a 2013 facsimile. Below is the Academy’s text. The number of cross-outs and the plain, unadorned style of the manuscript suggest it may have been a teaching tool for scribes.

The Academy’s unadorned 9th-century manuscript of De re culininaria. Click to enlarge.

The Academy’s unadorned 9th-century manuscript of De re culininaria. Click to enlarge.

Apicius has been a bestseller since the beginning of the print era, published in multiple editions since the 15th century. The Academy library holds many print editions, including two of the earliest.

This title page is from the earliest dated edition of the text, published in Milan in 1498. Pictured below is the device of the printer, La Signerre, who later set up shop in Rouen. Our copy is annotated by an early reader who adds the titles of the text’s ten books, grouped by type of dish.

Title page from the earliest dated edition of the De re culininaria, published in Milan in 1498.

Title page from the earliest dated edition of the De re culininaria, published in Milan in 1498. Click to enlarge.

The second earliest dated edition, printed in Venice, offers one of the earliest examples of a title page in printing history. It too is heavily annotated by an early food-lover, fluent in Greek and Latin.

Marginalia in our 1503 printed Apicius offers Greek glosses on Latin terms.

Marginalia in our 1503 printed Apicius offers Greek glosses on Latin terms.

Enthusiasts will find many other print descendants of this extraordinary manuscript in the Academy’s library.

The Apicius manuscript and a number of print editions of the text will be on display in the Academy Library’s Drs. Barry and Bobbi Coller Rare Book Reading Room during our October 17th festival, Eating through Time. A complete schedule of events can be found here.

References

1. Mayo, H. (2008). “New York Academy of Medicine MS1 and the textual tradition of Apicius”. In Coulson, F. T., & Grotans, A., eds., Classica et Beneventana: Essays Presented to Virginia Brown on the Occasion of her 65th Birthday. Turnhout: Brepols. pp. 111–135.

2. Christopher Grocock and Sally Grainger, eds. Apicius. A Critical Edition with an Introduction and an English Translation of the Latin Recipe Text Apicius. Devon: Prospect, 2006. p. 35.

3. Grockock and Grainger, p. 17-20.

4. Mayo, p. 112.