A Case Study with Scones: problems with old recipe transference

It isn’t very often you get to see a recipe transference like you might see in ancient medical texts in a modern context. Last night I had that exact experience and thought I should share.

To understand what happened, I need to share some family history. 

When my grandmother passed away in 2001, my mother and I had requested the opportunity to look at grandma’s recipe book. After more than 15 years, we finally got to look at it. I copied out every recipe it contained, including one for soap. Well, Grandma was born in 1912 in rural New South Wales, Australia. Grandma rarely used this book when I was a child because she knew the recipes she used often by heart. In fact, we didn’t recognise some recipes immediately as we knew them by other names, but that's another story.

So, I copied out all the recipes which had been originally written by my grandmother into a little recipe book I bound for this specific purpose. It included the following recipe for scones:

Lorna's Scones      1983
2 cups S.R. Flour, salt sifted into basin. Melt 1 tablespoon butter and add 1 cup milk to it, stir into flour, roll out, cut, and bake 12-15 minutes in hot oven.

No, I haven't become a recipe blogger! This will relate to ancient history I promise. Please bear with me.

Lorna, is my great aunt (Grandma's sister) and for some reason Grandma wrote this recipe into her book rather late, as most of the recipes were written significantly earlier than 1983.

My mother had praised Aunty Lorna's scones for some years as superior to the recipe she had, so when looking through our copy of Grandma's recipes, she was delighted to see "Lorna's Scones" even though she was bewildered as to why her mother copied the recipe so late. 

Looking closely at the recipe, she realised it looked familiar. She grabbed her own recipe book and found the following recipe:

Scones
Source: Mum
2 cups S.R. Flour
pinch of salt
1 tblespoon melted butter
1 cup milk
Sift flour and salt.
Combine milk and butter then add to flour mixture.
Bake at 250° to 260℃ for 10-12 mins.

While the recipe is the same, the directions for baking are catastrophically different. 

My mother gave up making scones decades ago because they never baked correctly for her. Upon finding her aunt's recipe, she thought that she would try to bake scones once again thinking her aunt's recipe was superior to her mother's. It works out that the recipe was the same.

So, what happened here, and what does it suggest about historical recipe transference in general?

Well, my mother firstly misattributed the recipe to the wrong person. Given that Grandma wrote the recipe out as her sister's, this was likely a miscommunication. Grandma passed the recipe to my mother, and she assumed it was her mother's recipe. 

Secondly, the temperature is completely wrong. My grandmother learnt to cook using a wood stove without a thermostat or temperature gauge. She would shove her hand in the oven and gauge for herself if it was the temperature she required. If you look at a lot of old recipe books, you will often see temperature descriptions such as "slow", "moderate", "hot", "very hot" etc. This is because there were no temperature gauges in old wood ovens. Grandma never taught her daughters to cook or bake and continued to gauge temperatures in this manner even after she got an electric oven. Upon reflection, Mum is sure that Grandma gave her the recipe verbally (remember, she knew her most commonly used recipes by heart) without looking at her recipe book and described the oven as "very hot". A "very hot" oven is commonly 230° to 260℃ (at least according to the recipe book my mother used in high school home economics where she was taught to cook), and thus she interpreted the baking instructions as 250° to 260℃. 

Is it any wonder my mother's scones had previously turned out terribly!

By looking at the recipe my grandmother had written out, Mum realised what she had been doing wrong and was able today to bake some excellent scones for possibly the first time in her life. The look good don't they. Taste damn good too!

Aunt Lorna's scones baked by my mother today

After a while, she realised she should have wrapped them in a clean tea towel to prevent them from getting hard. This direction is recorded nowhere in the recipes. Also not included in the recipe is her preference to brush her scones with milk to glaze them.

So, what does this scone case study tell us about recipe transference? An awful lot.

1. Misattribution of recipes can occur very easily and innocently.
2. Recipes given from memory can easily contain errors.
3. Instructions can be influenced and interpreted by the giver's and receiver's personal experiences, skills, and understanding.
4. Assumed knowledge is often left out of recipes.

Now you need to realise that this case study involved three written recipes: 1. the original one written by my grandmother; 2. the copy I made around 2019; 3. my mother's copy given verbally by my grandmother; four individuals: 1. my great-aunt Lorna; 2. my grandmother; 3. my mother; and 4. me; and the passage of 41 years between our texts. 

Now consider these kinds of changes in recipes and understanding in ancient medical texts where we may be dealing with longer time periods, more copies and transfers, and more people. We are dealing with often very complex recipes which might have been passed down for centuries. With each copying of a medical recipe, things might be left out and misunderstood. Here are some examples where something similar might have happened in the past:

1. Galen lost many recipe notebooks and his original copy of some of his books of On Compound Drugs in the Roman fire of 192 CE. He had to rewrite much of this work, so I do wonder was he working from memory? If so, how many errors crept in of the nature I have just described?
2. When else might this have occurred?
3. How many medical recipes are attributed to the wrong person by accident?
4. How many recipes were misunderstood given the knowledge of the recipe recipient differing from the person who gave it?
5. How many elements of the preparation were left out of the directions because it was assumed people understood how something was to be prepared or stored?

And these do not even take into account copyist errors.

These are questions we can rarely ever answer but are worth considering when we start working at trying to recreate ancient recipes, medical or not. Perhaps when we try to follow a recipe from the past it is not our fault they don't work out, just like my mother's scones in the past. Sometimes we have the wrong information, incomplete information, or both.

Oh, in case you are interested, my mother has updated her copy of the scone recipe. The scones pictured above were baked in a fan-forced oven at 210℃ for 10 minutes. She still hasn't written that they should be wrapped in a cloth or that she glazes them. I guess I need to write out my own version and include that.

If you want to read about actual ancient medical recipes, I recommend some of my previous blogs:

A Pharmaceutical Recipe From an Egyptian Temple Which does address recipe transference from temple wall through to Galen via at least one other person.

Treating Joint Disease in the Roman World which addresses medical recipe evolution.

Marshmallow and a treatment for so-called gout: experimental ancient history Upon reflection, I do wonder what is left out about processing marshmallow root.