We’ve all taken a crack at a tempting recipe or two that we found online. How would you like to try your hand at making a dish or cocktail from a centuries-old cookbook – and do that prep in front of an audience?
That’s what five Siena CURCA Summer Scholars did as part of their involvement with the Siena College Beverage Institute. They recreated recipes from a “receipt-book” (what we would now call a cookbook) compiled in 1760-68 by Maria Schuyler Sanders Van Rensselaer.
The receipt-book, part of the collections at Historic Cherry Hill in Albany and digitized here, is a practical document from the colonial period, featuring recipes for cakes, wines, liquors and jellies, as well as household items such as boot black and a cure for the dropsy, which was the term back in the day for edema/swelling.
An interdisciplinary team of Jeremy Bult ’26 (visual art and design), Colin Caulfield ’24 (management), Karina Greco ’25 (history), Isabella McClave ’24 (creative arts) and Simon Meisel ’24 (French/theatre) under the guidance of Krysta Dennis, Ph.D., producer of creative arts, selected recipes from the book to share at a public tasting held June 21 at Cherry Hill.
They made currant wine, raspberry brandy, fire cider, mead, wine jelly, and a whipped cream dessert called syllabub. The syllabub, alas, was not created precisely according to the centuries-old directions, as the students were not able to milk a cow directly into the cider as instructed by Van Rensselaer. The mead, however, was completely legit. Meisel is Siena’s student bee steward; he takes care of the hive next to Rosetti Hall with Dennis as his bee-keeping mentor.
On the food side, the students made rice pudding, puffard (a sort of currant cake), ginger cakes, and the Ten Eyck family recipe biscuits to accompany the beverages.
The team headed back to the Siena campus to present the following morning on their community-engaged work at the Association of Franciscan Colleges and Universities symposium.
“It was truly amazing watching our students engage in this very practical conversation with the past,” said Dennis. “They would pore over a recipe and then figure out how to prepare it through practical application of their research skills.”
The team’s first round of puffard was “absolutely terrible,” said Dennis, thanks to an overload of eggs. The students theorized that perhaps the 12 eggs the old recipe called for were much smaller eggs those available today. After examining paintings from the time period and seeing that indeed eggs were much smaller, they cut the eggs by three-quarters and the result was a very palatable cake.
“Not only are they learning important research skills, but they are learning a lot about cooking in the process!” she said.
Before the sold-out tasting event at Cherry Hill, the student team furthered their research into colonial cooking and brewing with a visit to Fort Ticonderoga, where they learned from Victoria Cole ‘24, who is interning there this summer.
Meisel credited that field trip with helping them fix the puffard disaster.
“We spoke with their culinary historians and director of interpretation on the role of experimental archaeology in our research, and picked up tricks like cross-referencing recipes with paintings to get an idea of the size difference between modern and colonial eggs,” he explained.
He said his joy in collaborating with the Beverage Institute comes from its interdisciplinary nature.
“Students involved with this project are afforded the opportunity to capitalize on their unique skills and interests in partnership with fascinating people from a wide variety of majors and departments, and the Cherry Hill event is a perfect example of this. It's amazing how time scrubs away detail; the skill of Cherry Hill's historians in bringing the living past back into the present is something close to magical.”
Greco said she enjoyed being able to research history in a way that benefitted both the local community and Historic Cherry Hill.
“It was so much fun to decipher the cookbook and make its recipes come to life with my fellow members of the Siena Beverage Institute! As a history major, it was rewarding to be able to interpret a primary source from a local historic site.”
Simon Meisel '24 will add theatre to his current French major.
"What I love about theatre at Siena is that there's almost no way to do just one thing," he explained. "If you wade in deep enough - and with classes and colleagues as fascinating as you find in the theatre, it's hard not to - sooner or later you end up broadening your horizons. You could start out as an actor, make a friend in design, help out in the costume shop or try your hand in a tech role, or even student-directing. The structure of the major is particularly clever in this way; it transforms students into well-rounded, holistic, interdisciplinary theatremakers."
Meisel originally enrolled at Siena to study pre-law.
"Speaking from experience, I know the major will also benefit students in other disciplines. After discovering the rich theatre program here, I shifted my academic focus and found a real passion for a totally different area of study. I'm really glad that this major is now here to afford the same opportunity to other students, present and future."
The foursome of Vogt, Ellis, Coetzee and Meisel received an ensemble merit award at the most recent KCACTF for their work in last semester's production of Doctor Faustus.