One of the features of this book is a series of engravings of suggested menus for each month, based on the food then in season, and showing how the dishes for the first two courses, a mixture of sweet and savoury, would have been laid out on the table. Here is the menu for June.
Back at the start of May we shared a couple of recipes from Eliza Soane's copy of the popular The London Art of Cookery, by John Farley. Published in 1783, the year before her marriage, the book recommends a variety of seasonal dishes, using foods that were in season at the time. Today, we post two June recipes from this fascinating cookbook.
We've shared a couple of these intriguing recipes below:
Florentine Rabbits
"Skin three young rabbits, but leave on their ears, and wash and dry them with a cloth. Carefully take out the bones, but leave the head whole. Lay the rabbits on the table and put in the following forcemeat: Take the crumb of a penny loaf, the livers shred fine, half a pound of fat bacon scraped, a glass of red wine, an anchovy, two eggs, a little winter savory, some sweet marjoram, thyme, and a little pepper, salt , and nutmeg. Having put this into the bellies, roll them up to the heads, skewer them with packthread, as you would a collar of veal. Wrap each in a cloth, and boil them an hour and a half, in a saucepan covered, with two quarts of water. Have ready a white sauce made of veal gravy, a little anchovy, the juice of half a lemon, or a tea-spoonful of lemon-pickle. Strain it, and take a quarter of a pound of butter rolled in flour, so as to make the sauce pretty thick. Keep stirring it while the flour is dissolving. Beat the yolk of an egg, put to it some thick cream, nutmeg, and salt, and mix it with the gravy. Let it simmer a little over the fire, but not boil, and pour it over the rabbits."
Moonshine
"Have a piece of tin in the shape of a half-moon, as deep as a half pint bason, and one in the shape of a large star, and two or three lesser ones. Boil two calf’s feet in a gallon of water till it comes to a quart, then strain it off, and when cold, skim off the fat. Take half the jelly, and sweeten it with sugar to your palate. Beat up the whites of four eggs, stir all together over a slow fire till it boils, and then run it through a flannel bag till clear. Put it in a clean saucepan, and take an ounce of sweet almonds blanched, and beat very fine in a marble mortar, with two spoonfuls of rose-water, and two of orange-flower water. Then strain it through a coarse cloth, mix it with the jelly, stir in four spoonfuls of thick cream, and stir it all together till it boils. Then have ready the dish you intend it for, lay the tin in the shape of a half-moon, in the middle and the stars around it. Lay little weights on the tins to keep them in place where you lay them. Then pour in the above blanc-mange into the dish; and when it be quite cold, take out the tins. Then fill up the vacancies with clear calf’s feet jelly. You may colour your blanc-mange with cochineal and chocolate, to make it look like the sky, and your moon and stars will then shine brighter. You may put round it rock candy sweetmeats for a garnish."
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