This cobbler recipe takes minutes to prepare and makes a great summer dessert for picnics, barbecues and potlucks. I am lucky enough to own a copy, so here is a scan of Betterley's crocant cover.Blackberry cobbler is made with sweet, juicy blackberries and topped with a flaky, buttery homemade pie crust. We get a rare glimpse of a crocant in a tiny detail on a trade card for the London confectioner John Betterley who traded from 437 Oxford Street in the late eighteenth century. However, we can be sure that standards were incredibly high and there were quite a lot of professional bakers and confectioners who were prepared for a fee to instruct ladies in the tricky art of cutting designs like this in pastry. We have a hazy idea of what these ephemeral creations looked like, because no specific designs have survived, though ceramic manufactories such as Wedgewood and Royal Copenhagen produced pierced lids for vessels which may have been influenced by these edible cut covers. When finished, crocants were often iced and then placed over plates of colourful sweetmeats. One kind that emerged was the 'crocant', a technically difficult genre which involved placing a sheet of a specialised crocant paste (sometimes called 'crackling crust') over a domed mould and then cutting it by hand with decorative designs in the form of leaves, birds, animals etc. Here is his design for a cover for a marrow pudding.Ĭut pastry continued to be popular well into the eighteenth century. Thacker's book The Art of Cookery (Newcastle upon Tyne:1758) was the last of the baroque recipe collections to contain illustrations of pastry work. This is also apparent in the work of the English ecclesiastical cook John Thacker, who worked for the dean and chapter of Durham Cathedral between 17. Ecclesiastical households were much more conservative than princely ones and appeared to favour the old style of cookery. He was an old man when he wrote his book and was probably documenting the cookery style of his heyday. Elements of of the new French cookery style are present in Hagger's book, but many of his pie designs hark back to the previous century. However, food in the Archbishop's palace appears to have been somewhat conservative and old fashioned. They indicate that the culinary expectations of his master Franz Anton von Harrach (1665-1727), the Prince Archbishop of Salzburg from 1709-1727, must have been very demanding. Hagger's designs are very similar to those in May's book, but offer us far more detail. Lattice work pastry designs from Conrad Hagger, Neues Saltzburgisches Kochbuch (Augsburg: 1719) Although they are quite crude, his woodcuts give us an insight into the extraordinary lengths that pastry cooks went to in high status houses in baroque England. But May was the first to publish a wide variety of designs for different pastry types. May was not quite the first European cook to offer us designs for pastry ornamentation of this kind, as another Englishman, Joseph Cooper had included a few crude woodcuts of pie shapes in his The Art of Cookery Refin'd and Augmented (London: 1654). Florendines were shallow pies filled with various kinds of meat or fish. The designs below for Florendines are from Robert May's The Accomplisht Cook of 1660. When they did appear (with one major exception) they were exclusively to be found in English cookery texts. Nothing to do with lattice work pastry, but note how Clara has painted the spit roast birds with their livers tucked under their pinions. 1657), including a pastry with a cut design, c. A table setting by the Antwerp artist Clara Peeters (1594 – c.
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