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Candy Flowers Old Elizabethan Dessert Recipe

Queen Elizabeth Ist

"Queen Elizabeth Ist"

To make Candy Flowers the best way
Takes Roses, Violets, Cowslips, or Gilly-Flours, and pick them from the white bottoms, then have boiled to a Candy height Sugar, and put in so many Flours as the Sugar will receive, and continually stir them with the back of a Spoon, and when you see the Sugar harden on the sides of the Skillet, and on the Spoon, take them off the Fire, and keep them with stirring in the warm Skillet, till you see them part, and the Sugar as it were sifted upon them.

Put them upon a paper while they are warm and rub them gently with your hands; till all the Lumps be broken, then put them into a Cullender, and sift them as clean as may be, then pour them upon a clean Cloth, and shake them up and down till there be hardly any Sugar hanging about them; then if you would have them look as though they were new gathered, have some help, and open them with your fingers before they be quite cold, and if any Sugar hang about them, you may wipe it off with a fine Cloth; to candy Rosemary Flours, or Archangel, you must pull out the string that stands up in the middle of the Blossom, and take them which are not at all faded, and they will look as though they were new gathered, without opening.

Candy Flowers Old Elizabethan Dessert Recipe
The above Old dessert recipe for Candy Flowers is written in totally different way to today's recipe books.

  • There were no lists of ingredients - these were included as part of the text
  • Food and ingredient measurements were extremely basic - quantities were not often specified.
  • Temperature control was difficult and therefore not specified.
  • Cooking times were vague - and left to the cook to decide.
  • It was assumed that the reader would already have some knowledge of cooking
Old Elizabethan Recipes
Elizabethan Era Index

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