The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened

About the Book

Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–1665) was one of the great English polymaths: privateer, diplomat, natural philosopher, founding fellow of the Royal Society, and Chancellor to Queen Henrietta Maria. He was also, by all accounts, a devoted and discerning cook. Upon his death, his household recipes were gathered and published by a close servant in 1669 under the title The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Kt. Opened.

The book is best known today as the single most important primary source for historical mead and metheglin recipes. Digby collected dozens of variations from correspondents across England and the Continent — from simple one-to-three honey-water meads to elaborately spiced metheglins perfumed with herbs, flowers, and citrus. He also distinguishes honeys by floral source (wild thyme, rosemary), by extraction method (virgin, life, and stock honey), and by region (Hampshire, Norfolk, Provence), offering the modern mead maker a rare window into how seventeenth-century brewers thought about their most essential ingredient. No other period source approaches its breadth or detail on the subject.

But the Closet is far more than a mead manual. Its second half contains recipes for meat, fish, preserves, cakes, cheese, and poultry — a wide-ranging snapshot of genteel English cookery in the mid-seventeenth century. Many of the recipes are attributed by name to their contributors: lords, ladies, physicians, and foreign acquaintances, giving us an unusually vivid picture of how recipes circulated among the educated classes of Restoration England.