
To Make Sassages​ - hoffmannesque
https://rarecooking.com/2018/03/12/to-make-sassages%E2%80%8B/
======
JasonFruit
I love these old recipes. Sometimes the flavors are delightful and unexpected;
other times they are just unexpected. Always, they're a reminder that the past
was far less familiar than we usually imagine. That's an especially good
reminder to me, as an instinctive conservative, that the past was not the
ideal time I often imagine it to have been.

------
pfarrell
The spelling in old written text, makes me think of the way the Canterbury
Tales is comprehensible, but at the same time feels like I'm reading something
foreign.

Also love how, even 300 years ago, people couldn't avoid leaving ambiguity in
their recipes

"as much salt as you shall think fitt to season the meat"

Great... thanks, Miss Baumfylde

~~~
moate
Go read larousse gastronomique sometime. Anything from the "meat" section is
just hilarious. Phrases like "prepare the shank in the usual way" and "get a
measure of beef" occur WAY too often.

~~~
pfarrell
Thank you! I've not heard of this.

------
DanAndersen
Obligatory mention of the "18th Century Cooking" YouTube channel:
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxr2d4As312LulcajAkKJYw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxr2d4As312LulcajAkKJYw)

The Mushroom Ketchup recipe is one I repeatedly go back to -- it's just that
good:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29u_FejNuks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29u_FejNuks)

I also encourage anyone who still has their elderly relatives with them to ask
them for recipes they had from their era. My family keeps a common cookbook,
and it's nice to be able to pull out Grandma's shrimp-dip recipe for special
occasions.

~~~
HarryHirsch
For those who want to go further back in time the Getty Museum published an
Apicius edition:
[https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/0892363940](https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/0892363940)

~~~
twic
I got a copy of Apicius several years ago. For reasons which now escape me, my
mother and i decided to cook from it for our christmas dinner. That was a
memorable meal.

------
dbg31415
Well... at least the Detect Zero-Width Character add-on is working.
[https://imgur.com/a/OprrD](https://imgur.com/a/OprrD)

* roymckenzie/detect-zero-width-characters-chrome-extension || [https://github.com/roymckenzie/detect-zero-width-characters-...](https://github.com/roymckenzie/detect-zero-width-characters-chrome-extension)

~~~
chanz
Yes I saw that too and we posted in the same minute! :-)

~~~
dbg31415
Yeah, but if you're not first, you're last. Ha.

------
mtkd
Interesting it uses lean pork leg and beef fat over lard. 300 years ago the
pig breeds were often fattier so there was a lot of lard around and was the
easy choice - it's an optimisation the cook has made or learned to use beef
fat.

I've bought a lot of old cookbooks - there is so much basic knowledge that's
been lost as industrial automation took over the food industry.

Sausage packaging does all it can in 2018 to affirm it contains 96% or 98%
pork.

------
andkon
Is it mindblowing how readable the recipe is despite it being 311 years old.
Turns out we knew what beef suet was back then!

------
chanz
Why does the recipe contain zero length characters? Like described here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16754987](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16754987)

Screenshot taken with addon:
[https://i.imgur.com/rgG0tMb.png](https://i.imgur.com/rgG0tMb.png) Screenshot
taken without addon:
[https://i.imgur.com/BV3sxqP.png](https://i.imgur.com/BV3sxqP.png)

The zero length character is also at the end of the title in this hacker news
entry.

~~~
fluxsauce
There's some odd markup:

> <div>you cant p<span class="ex">er</span>​seve the suet from the meat</div>

It's also around a possible spelling error"? (preserve vs perseve)

~~~
coroxout
The markup flags up abbreviations. I'm not quite clear on the distinctions
between the different tags but it looks like "ex" is for expansions/excluded
letters and "sl" is something to do with superscript letters, or thereabouts.

See here for more on early modern "secretary hand" abbreviations:
[https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/ehoc/conventions.html#co...](https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/ehoc/conventions.html#contractions)

