It's 1670. Charles II is on the throne. Only five years ago the Great Plague swept through the city, and the year after that, the Great Fire. Samuel Pepys had buried his cheese in a garden to save it from the flames, while ferrymen rowing people across the Thames glanced back at the glowing, crackling embers of what once were homes, businesses and places of worship. The event changed the skyline of London forever, removing the wonky, Medieval timber-framed buildings that huddled the city's streets. Now, London was being rebuilt. 

As you sit down after a busy day's work you might want something satisfying, easy and nutritious. Cue what the cookbook The Ladies Cabinet called, 'To Bake Collops of Bacon and Eggs'. 

Here's the actual recipe, from the 1670 book: 

Take a dish and lay a pie plate therein, then lay in your Collops of Bacon, and break your eggs upon them. Then lay on Parsley, and set them into an oven not too hot, and they will be better than fried. 

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When I first tasted this recipe, from The Good Huswife's Jewell, I was unsure whether it would have been a sweet or savoury dish. The lemons are sliced and eaten raw, but strewn with sugar they're not as acidic as you'd expect. Nowadays we could eat a piece of sweetened lemon as a palette cleanser or perhaps have on the side with a fish dish and this might have been the point of this recipe. I imagine that this dish wasn't eaten as we would eat a 'salad' today, but just some available lemon slices on the table to balance out a fish, chicken or meat dish. 

The recipe, dating from 1587, includes this instruction: 

Cut out slices of the peel of the lemons longways, a quarter of an inch one piece from another, and then slice the lemon very thin, and lay in a dish across, and the peels about the lemons, and scrape a good deal of sugar upon them, and so serve them. 

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 A Potage of Cherries, adapted from A Book of Cookrye, London, printed by Edward Allde, 1591

Ingredients

• 2 slices of traditionally baked white bread, or use brioche if fanciness outweighs historical accuracy
• 1 tbsp butter
• a large handful of frozen (or fresh) cherries, if they're fresh make sure the pips are taken out first
• 1 tbsp sugar
• half tsp ground ginger
• half tsp ground cinnamon
• a splash of white wine (you can use red instead if that's what you have).

• Heat a frying pan and melt the butter in it. When melted, add the slices of bread and fry, turning, until crisp on both sides. Transfer to serving plates while you make the cherry topping.
• Tumble the cherries into the same pan, along with the sugar, ginger, cinnamon and the splash of white wine and simmer until the cherries are tender and they're bubbling in their own ruby-red, syrupy juices.
• Serve the cherry topping over the fried bread slices and spoon over the juices.

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I know, it's hardly a recipe really, is it? 

But there's a lot to be said for the flavouring of sugar, and it's something our Tudor and Stuart ancestors would have done. A sprinkling of cinnamon-infused sugar would have added a soft sweet spice to an apple pie, or some stewed fruits, maybe even dredged lightly over some lemon slices or fresh strawberries. Spices were expensive and this way, none of it - not even a knobbly end of a cinnamon stick - was wasted. 

For us modern folk it's lovely stirred into coffee or over warm porridge oats with honey. 

The recipe appears in the c.1611 book Delightes for Ladies written by Hugh Plat. It requires that we: 

"Lay pieces of sugar in close boxes amongst sticks of cinnamon, cloves, etc and in a short time it will purchase both the taste and scent of the spice."

It really is that easy. 

Cinnamon Sugar

Ingredients:

• golden granulated sugar, or other sugar of your choice, to fill a small jar or container - I used about 100g and a small jar
• 3-4 cinnamon sticks

Fans of a nice Mezze platter or hot Tagine will know, as well as the Tudors did, that cinnamon and cloves are not weird things to sprinkle and roll into your meatballs. 

I remember years ago, the wide-eyed, nine-year old me was told that spices were used in food in 'olden days' to mask the flavour of rotting meat. 

This makes no sense. 

Farming was much more small-scale and individual than it is today, with very little waste. Intensive production-line farming was five hundred years into the future. Meat was expensive and if a family could afford to eat it, it would have been bought in small quantities, cooked and eaten straight away. I'm sure, too, that they would have shared any leftovers if they had it, with family and neighbours. 

No, I don't think that the Tudors tried to 'disguise' the whiff of rotten meat with herbs and spices. They used them because they enjoyed the exotic and warming flavours they brought to the dish. When reading sixteenth century - and older - cookbooks there is a real sense that the authors really grasped the qualities of each spice or herb used. As written in Gerard's book on plants in 1597, spices were believed to have medicinal qualities, too. 

Some notes to compare these meatballs to the original ones, before we start: 

This recipe, which first appeared in A Book of Cookrye in 1591 used mutton, which is great if you can get it, but I've used lamb as it's generally easier to get hold of. The all-important quantities of ingredients aren't specified, so I've considered modern tastes here and added enough to gently 'season' the meat. Feel free to tweak a little with the amounts listed if you'd like a stronger spice, but go easy. And finally, the original recipe has these meatballs rolled raw and dunked into a sauce to continue cooking. I've roasted them because I like the flavours this gives. 

Like most of the foods I adapt from historic sources, these were really tasty. The sauce is thickened with egg yolk, resulting in a creamy and very rich sauce. The dried fruits in the broth sweeten the sauce, and it honestly tasted to me like a richer version of our favourite Swedish meatball dish.

Enjoy!