Thomas Muffet, Skirret Recipes
Thomas Muffett is best known for a book that was published posthumously. The book’s title claims much. It is called,”Healths Improvement: or, Rules Comprising and Discovering The Nature, Method, and Manner of Preparing all sorts of Food Used in this NATION.” It was written some time before Thomas Muffett’s death in 1604 and published in 1655 by a man named Christopher Bennet who, according to the text on the title page, “corrected and enlarged” the work. In fact, he at the least added subtantial material by plagerizing other authors.”Health’s Improvement” was a popular book. It went through multiple editions and can be found in the catalogues of many eighteenth century libraries. Dietary books are often a source of culinary information. I am finding them particularly useful sources of information on ember roasting — a techinque that seems to have been common — but was largely outside the interest of cookbook authors. Thomas Muffett’s work, a combination of medical and culinary text has a wonderful entry on skirrets in which roasting “four or five together in a wet paper under embers” is one of the suggested cooking methods. I include the full text of the skirret section, below.
Ash baking is a cooking method of poverty, and as such is little documented. Thomas Muffett, however, was hardly a man of poverty. He was a well-known physician and scientist. Like La Varenne, whose ash baking I discuss in another web page, Thomas Muffett moved amongst the aristocracy.
The original manuscript was obviously written prior to 1604, the year of Muffett’s death. The parenthetical phrase (as one would roast a Potato) is thus most likely something that Christopher Bennett added as potatoes, according to Alan Davidson’s summary of the literature, were probably not introduced into England until the 1590’s, and thus would probably not have been brought in as an informal aside at that time. The text, as you will notice, incorporates ideas based on the humoral system of medicine — this is the reference to “a mild heat and temperate moisture.” John Aikin thought these references to the Galen system of medicine peculiar in a book by Thomas Muffett because Muffett was famous for debating doctors who supported Galen and was a proponent of modern medicine — medicine based on chemistry. As Aikin put it, “It is somewhat surprising that he should admit the fanciful distinctions of Galen founded on the qualities of heat, cold, dryness, and moisture; the fallacy of which he seems so well apprized of in his chemical pieces.” If one of my readers happens to know something more about Christopher Bennett and Thomas Tuffett and could help better tease apart who wrote what, please get in touch with me.
Regarding Thomas Muffett’s hearth technique — he calls for multiple pieces of paper — as does La Varenne — but he specifies that they be wet paper. I have always used oiled paper — and it oiled paper I specify in my book on hearth cooking, The Magic of Fire.
Thomas Muffet, the nature, method, and manner of prepare all sorts of food
