Miguel de Baeza

Miguel de Baeza: Los Cuatro libros del arte de la confiteria (1592), intro by M. Garcia Ruiperez and M. del Prado Olivares Sanchez; Antonio Pareja, Editor, 2014, 161 pages, paperback

Reviewed in PPC 125

"The most important source, Los Cuatro Libros del Arte de la Confiteria (1592), was the first Castilian confectionery manual. Written in Toledo by a working confectioner, Miguel de Baeza, of whom nothing is known, its recipes were used until well into the nineteenth century, but only two original copies of the book survive in libraries and neither is digitally available. Lightly modernized and east to read, this reprint has a brief introduction, but the sixteenthe-century text quickly shows how confiterias built a commercial niche for themselves by pulling away from apothecaries, who made medicinal sweets and from aristocratic cooks, who prepared dairy creams and pastries. De Baeza kept to sugar work involving fruits, flowers, almonds, egg whites for clarifying sugar, a few spices like musk and sandalwood, and, in just one of his 83 recipes, egg yolks and flour for spongecakes. No fats, gelatines, milk or chocolate appeared and neither did large-scale sugar sculptures of any kind. Items were small, even tiny, or spoonable. Here were affordable sweets to buy all year round, even in Lent and on the days of each week when meat and fish were off the menu.

De Baeza's tone is amusingly secular. He highlights Portuguese recipes, explains the names of cakes based on sugars, and comments drily that confectioners' spongecakes are better than those baked in monasteries. White and muscovado sugars from unirrigated mature Caribbean canes were his favourites, but he bought home-grown sugar too. The recipes of today's supposedly "traditional" Spanish sweetmeats, which were in reality early modern Christian sweets, but many with acknowledged semitic and Arabic origins, are revelations. Back then membrillo quince paste was honeyed not sugared, Andalusian pinoates were flour-free, Cuenca's alaju was made with pure fruit solids, and the small white sugar and almond paste figures we still know were available in dozens of shapes mainly now disappeared: various animals and birds, knights or armed men, women with fruit baskets, hats, letters, miniature furniture ... but none of today's fish. Written with precise quantities the book's recipes often end firmly, 'Y esta es la orden.' Published two decades later and included in this reprint, the city's confectionery statutes were similarly strict. Products were confiscated and heavy fines imposed if confectioners used the wrong sugar or almond variety.

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On-line facsimile Los quatro libros del arte de la confitería. - RAG - Real Academia de Gastronomía (realacademiadegastronomia.com)