16 recipes

Regency-Era Recipes

Recipes from 1800 to 1837: Paris restaurants after Waterloo, Grimod’s tasting jury, the first Burns supper and Accum’s warning about poisoned pickles.

Between Marengo in 1800 and Victoria’s accession in 1837, much of the cooking on this page is French. Antoine Beauvilliers printed his suprême of chicken and his Soubise cutlets in 1814, and in July 1815, three weeks after Waterloo, John Cam Hobhouse found Véry’s restaurant “very full of red coats”. None of that records what anyone ate, and Where Did the Victors Dine in Paris After Waterloo? keeps the dinners and the recipes apart.

A decade earlier Grimod de la Reynière had the food trades send him samples carriage paid, judged them before a weekly jury and printed the verdicts. That is the subject of What Did Grimod’s Tasting Jury Judge in 1805? The battle of Marengo lent its name to a chicken dish, though no record from 1800 says Bonaparte’s cook invented it, and the recipes under the name are later: Was Chicken Marengo Really Cooked on the Battlefield?

In Scotland in the summer of 1801, nine men dined in the Alloway cottage where Robert Burns had been born. No full menu of the first Burns supper survives, and later accounts name a haggis and a sheep’s head. And in London in 1820 Fredrick Accum warned of poisons cooks added at home, cherry-laurel leaves in custards and copper or brass to turn pickles green. What Was in the Pot Accum Warned About in 1820? pairs his warnings with safe custards and pickles of the time. Several recipes come from books printed later in the century, and their pages say so.