Delightes for Ladies

A fun link via The Morning News: "international confectionary historian" Tim Richardson lists his favorite sources from the British Library. Delightes for Ladies sounds like it fulfills the promise of its title with a recipe for "a way of candying rose petals on the bush by pouring syrup over them and letting them dry in the sun." Also charming to the Committee is Richardson's description of The Court and Country Cook, a 1698 manual explaining how to produce a memorable dessert course:

The tablecloth would be drawn, so that the shiny sweets and luscious jellies glittered in the candlelight and were reflected in the mahogany table. A few decades later in England, the dessert course had become such a cult that special banqueting houses would be built in gardens (or even on the roof of the main house) so that guests had a little exercise before the fun of the sweets course.

I regret the lack of posts this week — unfortunately I spend only a small portion of each day becoming acquainted with confectionary history, and a large portion of each day toiling in a thoroughly charmless litigation mine in midtown, without so much as a canary to let me know when I've been exposed to dangerous levels of bloated ego. Or distasteful levels of self-important preening. Etc. Sigh.


Will Cotton, "Creamy Dream" 2000, oil on linen, 60" x 72"