Opening the past is an interesting recipe in finding something called Wormwood cakes. Wormwood is a bitter weed or shrub as the Bible notes in the star which falls in the End Times to earth and poisons the water with bitterness.
The wormwood I am familiar with is a noxious weed which is used for worming mammals including people, that is why I was fascinated that anyone would be making a cake of this strong sage scented plant that nothing will eat.
The recipe is pretty though as a great deal of effort goes into it to make it a marbled cake. I thought the coloring was fascinating in the old methods in how they created their dyes for cooking.
To make Wormwood Cakes:—Take one pound of double-refin'd sugar sifted; mix it with the whites of three or four eggs well beat; into this drop as much chymical oil of wormwood as you please. So drop them on paper; you may have some white, and some marble, with specks of colours, with the point of a pin; keep your colours severally in little gallipots.
For red, take a dram of cochineel, a little cream of tartar, as much of allum; tye them up severally in little bits of fine cloth, and put them to steep in one glass of water two or three hours. When you use the colour, press the bags in the water, and mix some of it with a little of the white of egg and sugar. Saffron colours yellow; and must be tyed in a cloth, as the red, and put in water. Powder-blue, mix'd with the saffron-water, makes a green; for blue, mix some dry powder-blue with some water.
Perhaps this is the way the English found to worm their people with spoonful of sugar making the medicine go down, so why not a slice of cake in the worming medicine eh.
agtG
