"How many of the recipes have urine in them?"
It's a question I've asked alarmingly early in my conversation about Irish culinary manuscripts with Nora Thornton and Joanne Carroll, two Assistant Keepers at the National Library of Ireland, but one they take in their stride.
We're sitting in a small room overlooking Kildare St, at a small glass-topped wooden table that Thornton reveals was dramatist Sean O'Casey's own table, leafing through two of the library's culinary manuscripts. Just weeks before, the archivists had held a talk for Heritage Week where they spoke about the recipes inside and shared insights into their own attempts at cooking them.
On top of their work digitising and cataloguing the library's many collections, the pair have made a habit of sharing forgotten recipes that were once cooked by the Irish middle to upper classes.
So, how did this project begin?
"I wanted to win a very competitive bake-off", Thornton says, referring to a 2018 staff event in the library.
"I had the idea to look through some of our manuscript cookbook collection just for a little bit of a novelty. And I found the gingerbread loaf. And the recipe seemed normal enough, so I made that. It sank in the middle, but it still won the competition because I think of where the recipe came from."
The recipe came from manuscript 42,009, a deceptively utilitarian name for one of the books in front of us: a well-preserved collection of handwritten recipes and clippings collected from other texts.
This book, Thornton says, was created by Anna Irvine, who was born in 1819 and lived in a big (but not big big) house called Rosebank in Mowville, Co Donegal.
"Her father was a surgeon in the Navy, so he would have been quite prosperous", Thornton says. "She had two sisters and a brother. She never married, but all of her siblings did. So she had the time and patience to sit at home combining recipes.
"You can learn a lot from the types of recipes she liked and collected", Thornton adds, explaining that we don't know if she wrote the recipes herself or if her cook did. "We can just assume that Anna would compile these recipes from if she visited a friend, and she really liked the lemon biscuits that was served."
Far more unusual, however, is the second manuscript: Curious Receipts vol. 1st, a volume of remedies, "cures" and household tips compiled by a woman called Jane Burton, who lived in Co Clare sometime in the late 18th or 19th centuries.
Its former title, Poems: A Thought on Birth and Death, gives a hint as to what kind of woman Burton was, the kind of wink from the past that makes thumbing through these texts so delightful.
Expertly laid out, this book includes cures for everything from wrinkles and freckles to deafness. This is where the urine comes in.
Carroll recalls making a recipe for homemade hand cream from the book, made from ground almonds, milk and egg, which left the hands soft but covered in residue.
"When I did that hand cream, I came in from, obviously, a 21st-century point of view of thinking of, Oh, a nice hand cream. That'll make my hands soft. But it was, as you said, there was a residue on it, so you had to wash it off."
Convenience, Carroll thought, is king now. Not every woman has the time to sit and let a thick cream sink into your hands before tackling a task.
Still, this is the kind of connection to the past you don't always get from history: to feel the same somewhat unpleasant grease on your hands that a beauty-loving Irishwoman did 200 years before.
Some recipes, of course, are not fit for modern use, not least the 'cures' for deafness. One, which Carroll notes, was sourced from "a doctor who used it on his daughter", suggests dipping "fine clean black wool" into civet and placing it into the ear for up to a month.
Another, arguably more advanced, recipe instructs the user to "put your urine into a pewter dish" covered with another one and place it over hot coals, brushing off the "clear water" that gathers on the bottom of the second dish "with a feather" and placing it into the ear.
This, the author writes, "is also good for the noise in the head" - tinnitus.
An 18th-century beauty routine is less likely to be resurrected, however. Carroll reads out one recipe for banishing wrinkles: "To keep the face without wrinkles, take an iron frying pan."
Not a good start.
"When it is very hot, sprinkle it with good white wine. Fume your face with this smoke thereof, and then wipe it with a clean cloth. This done, set the pan on the fire again with a little myrrh, and with that, fume your face as before.
"While you do this, cover yourself on that the steam or smoke may not be dispersed from you. After you have done this, you tie up your face with some linen cloth and so go to bed. You'd be repeat once in 15 days."
Many of the recipes can be made easily in modern times, such as the gingerbread loaf, which Thornton says she "made almost exactly" as per the recipe, except for using potash, or potassium carbonate. Made with a teacup of ground ginger, a pound of sugar and two tins of treacle, this recipe alone offers insight into the funds and tastes of some of our ancestors.
It is also extremely delicious.
A lemon cake with no less than 16 eggs and a "naggin of whiskey" is one such recipe that would be a hit with today's gym bros looking to get their protein and get lit at the same time, despite tasting like "a slightly lemon-flavoured omelette", as Thornton puts it.
Despite having up to 100 of these manuscripts, largely sourced through donations and booksellers, devoted archivists like Thornton and Carroll don't have as much time as they'd like to decode all the hints and intrigues in these highly personal books. This is where curious minds come in.
"We're archivists, but we're not researchers", says Carroll. "We don't necessarily have the time to go chasing things."
"Somebody could do the research, but find exactly who was friends with who, who was enemies with who. Maybe somebody really liked the biscuits, but then they fell out", Thornton adds.
If such a task whets your appetite, the library is free for everybody to visit and peruse the collections. All you need is a reader's ticket and to be over 16.
Oh, and be sure to order in advance - these archivists aren't sitting around having tea parties every day!
