From catching rats to making cookies: Researchers collect old Maritime recipes
A researcher at the University of New Brunswick and a researcher at Dalhousie University in Halifax collaborated to construct a database of old Maritime recipes — and it includes everything from making cheese to curing dog bites.
Edith Snook of UNB and Lyn Bennett of Dalhousie searched through archives, old manuscripts, newspapers, letters and accounting books from New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island to find 515 old recipes.
They even found a recipe glued to the pages of a book about militia regulations.
In fact, many of the recipes they found aren't about food at all.
"I think one of the biggest surprises for us was the range of things that recipes were used for," Snook said. "We were surprised by how much other stuff was talked about in recipes, like how to make various kinds of agricultural products, particularly fertilizer."
There are several different types of recipes included in the database — ones for food, drinks, medicine, cleaning, construction and cosmetics.
Snook and Bennett stumbled across some strange recipes in their searches, too, like a recipe originally from Siberia that was written on a piece of paper by a Nova Scotia doctor.
It was about how people in Siberia froze milk and then scraped the powder off before mixing it with water and chocolate to make a drink.
'It seemed particularly delicious and useful, particularly in a cold climate," Snook said in an interview with Shift.
She said after awhile she became "immune" to the strange recipes.
Bennett said one of her favourites was a recipe for mushroom ketchup.
"Unlike the sweet tomato version that we know so well, this is made by squeezing the moisture out of salted mushrooms and then adding some spices," Bennett said.
She tried making the recipe and she said it tastes a lot like Worcestershire sauce. The recipe can also be used to treat ringworm, a fungal skin infection.
Other interesting recipes included a recipe for keeping vermin out of your footwear and one for rum jellies — essentially the 18th century equivalent to Jell-O shots.
Snook has made a couple of the 515 recipes in the database, including a batch of gingerbread cookies with her students last year.
Bennett and Snook began collecting the recipes in 2016.
Snook researches women's writing in the 17th century and she's found the most common form during that period is recipes. Most of the recipes they found in the Maritimes are written by men, however.
Bennett said she wanted to be a part of it because she researches medicine and medical remedies, which some of the old recipes touch on.
The researchers said they're interested in hearing from people they think might have recipes before 1800.
