Safari Friday searching the web for writers and readers – food research at the British Library

Safari = Swahili for long journey.I am on the look out for anything accessible from a keyboard that educates, entertains, intrigues, raises a smile. Anything that helps a reader get through the day or a writer the next draft. Let me know if you write a website that you’d like featured or discover something that really should be shared.

The British Library is a wonderful resource and its website offers riches for writers and readers. Here, for example, in the BOOKS FOR COOKS section you can sample the food of times gone by from the books in the library’s possession.  A Boke of Kokery, written around 1440 when eating raw fruit and vegetables was thought to cause disease, contains a recipe for custard – a type of open pie .
Wooden plates were an innovation in Elizabethan times: before that they were simply thick slices of bread and the invention in the late 17th century of a muslin cloth for steaming allowed the well fed to go pudding mad. I found an 18th century recipe for cabbage pudding….mmmm
Before muslin came along a cook had to use fresh animal guts to steam her pudding…double mmmm
Click HERE to find digitised pages from the original cookery books, as well as background information on English food through the centuries.

Related articles

• AP: “British Library Sets to Archive the Web” (infodocket.com)
• How the British Library is breathing life into old books | Roly Keating (guardian.co.uk)