It was the first old recipe that ever interested me. The recipe was called rafioli comun de herbe vantazati. It was ravioli filled with spinach or beet leaves, ricotta, raisins, cinnamon, and nutmeg. The “sauce” was a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese. The recipe was an adaptation of one from the fourteenth century. The results were quite tasty, but in those days it seemed like a lot of work.

Before my full-time interest in Chinese cookery, I was cooking lots of noodles. In some perverse way, I moved into Chinese cookery because I found the noodles of Asia more interesting than the noodles of Europe. This old ravioli recipe was one of 22 that I highlighted in Anna Del Conte’s Portrait of Pasta when I purchased the book in $7.95 1976. It felt somehow good to be preparing a six-hundred-year-old recipe, even in an adapted form.

Although I never saw the original version of that recipe, not that I could even read ancient Italian, I became curious about old recipes. In those days, even recipes from fifty years earlier were somewhat of a mystery to me.

A few years after my adventures in pasta waned, I picked up what at the time was my oldest cookbook. The Harrisburg Telegraph Cook Book set me back $9.00 when I found a nice used copy of it around 1980. It was published in 1908, and originally sold for one-dollar. As the newspaper advertised 1911,

The book gave an insight into the cooking of the time without the preaching found in the cookbooks by the domestic science mavens of the period. There were dishes that seemed ordinary even seventy years after it was printed, and there were dishes that I couldn’t comprehend, like mushroom catsup.

But that was then. Today, I’m more likely to be found with my nose in an eighteenth-century cookbook as a modern one. And these old recipes are no longer a mystery. Often I wonder why the old recipes are ignored in favor of modern, complicated versions. I realize that there are advantages to modernization: heat at the flip of a switch, food available all year round, modern cookware, refrigeration, etc. Nonetheless there are things to be learned from old recipes. Today, I think I get more ideas from old recipes than I do from modern ones. For example, carrot pudding from Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery. First published in 1796, there were thirteen known editions of the book between then and 1831. It is considered the first cook book written by an American. The carrot pudding recipe that caught my attention is from page 28 of the 1798 edition.

This is from a time when puddings were a much more general dish than just the dessert we know of today. One of the definitions provided by the OED is “A preparation of food of a soft or moderately firm consistency, in which the ingredients, animal or vegetable, are either mingled in a farinaceous basis (chiefly of flour), or are enclosed in a farinaceous ‘crust’, and cooked by boiling or steaming. Preparations of batter, milk and eggs, rice, sago, tapioca, and other farinaceous substances, suitably seasoned, and cooked by baking, are now also called puddings.” Preparations like black pudding, what others call blood sausage, gets the pudding moniker because the contents are packaged in the entrails of a pig.

My version of this pudding produces 4 to 6 servings as a mignardise, depending on how you bake and serve it.