Kenelm Digby (1603–1665)

Imagine a cookbook written by George Patton or Mike Hoare and you have some sense of this work by Sir Kenelm Digby, scholar, poet, Royalist soldier, mercenary, secret agent, and gourmet. The seventeenth century style makes things difficult for modern cooks used to exact measurements and lacking, say, chunks of ambergris (though there are several good books out there which update some of Digby's recipes), but entirely worth it for the anecdotes, blatant name-dropping, and generally chatty style. Digby is also unusually exact in some of his preparation instructions, so the reader gets a pretty good idea of how a seventeenth century cook got things done. Highly recommended.… (mais)

Imagine a cookbook written by George Patton or Mike Hoare and you have some sense of this work by Sir Kenelm Digby, scholar, poet, Royalist soldier, mercenary, secret agent, and gourmet. The seventeenth century style makes things difficult for modern cooks used to exact measurements and lacking, say, chunks of ambergris (though there are several good books out there which update some of Digby's recipes), but entirely worth it for the anecdotes, blatant name-dropping, and generally chatty style. Digby is also unusually exact in some of his preparation instructions, so the reader gets a pretty good idea of how a seventeenth century cook got things done. Highly recommended.… (mais)