18th Century Mead
Last updated: Jan 5, 2024
Eighteenth-century recipes for (and references to) mead.
Recipes below for “white mead” tend to be quick meads (some aging only a few days) before “it will be fit to drink.”
- To make mead in the manuscript cookbook of D. Petre (1705)
- How to make English Canary, no way inferior to the best of Spanish Wines, The True Amazons: or, The Monarchy of Bees (1713)
- The Accomplished Housekeeper, and Universal Cook (1717)
- The Cook’s and Confectioner’s Dictionary (1723):
- Court Cookery (1725)
- The Compleat City and Country Cook (1732)
- To make an Excellent Mead, answering to Sack, Sherry, or Mountain White-Wine in Instructions for Managing Bees (1733)
- A Collection Of above Three Hundred Receipts in Cookery, Physick, and Surgery (1734)
- The Whole Duty of a Woman (1737)
- The House-Keeper’s Pocket-Book and Compleat Family Cook (1739)
- Of Vinous-Mead in A Treatise of all Sorts of Foods, Both Animal and Vegetable (1745)
- Of the Way to make Mead in Of Husbandry (a 1745 translation from the ancient Latin)
- “Two Receipts for making Mead, take also which ever of them you think best,” in The Practical Bee-Master (1747)
- A Collection Of above Three Hundred Receipts in Cookery, Physick and Surgery (1749)
- Two recipes “to make mead” in Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery and Booke of Sweetmeats
- The House-Keeper’s Pocket-Book, And Compleat Family Cook (1760)
- “To make STRONG MEAD” and “To make MEAD another Way” in English Housewifery (1760)
- Of Mead in A New System of Practical Husbandry (1766)
- The Experienced English House-keeper (1769)
- The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy (1774)
- The Experienced Bee-Keeper (1783)
- Of Mead, and Wines to be made with Honey
- To make Mead
- The way to promote, or check fermentation
- The method of scenting casks with the match
- To give Mead the flavor of Rhenish Wine
- To give Mead the flavor of Frontiniac
- To give Mead an agreeable roughness
- To give Mead the flavor of Rasberries, Currants, &c. &c.
- To tincture Mead of a fine red colour
- To cure Mead when it is foul or ropy
- To recover Mead when it is flat, or fretting
- Further Remarks on the making of Mead, &c.
- The Experienced English Housekeeper (1786)
- The Lady’s Assistant for Regulating and Supplying the Table (1787)
- Mead Wine (including walnut mead and cowslip mead) in The English Art of Cookery (1788)
- The Universal Cook and City and Country Housekeeper (1792)
- Mead in Every Woman Her Own House-Keeper (1796)
- To Make Mead in The Antient Bee-Master’s Farewell (1796)
- Hydromel, or mead in The Virginia Housewife by Mary Randolph (1831)