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By Elaine Leong I have held a long fascination with how textures are represented in recipes. As we all know, then as now, producing medicines and food often involves a multi-step process, and careful observation of changes in textures is often the key to success. Classic White SauceTake, for example, the classic white sauce.It all seems simple enough – we mix and heat together butter and flour and thenadd milk (hot or cold, depending on where you stand on this issue), simmer andwhisk away and, voilà, we should have a silky-smooth sauce, ready for some poshmac and cheese, or baked endive, and much more. Now readers, I know what you’rethinking. It sounds so easy on paper but, if we were honest, we all havestories of failed batches of béchamel. The sauce can taste raw (classic mistakeof not cooking the flour enough) or be lumpy (the blender trick never works forme) or end up too thin or thick. Mixing Flour and Butter A few years ago, I finally found theperfect recipe for me from Annie Bell’s In my Kitchen. However, though Annieprovides the perfect ingredient proportions for my family’s taste of whitesauce, for the crucial step – cooking the butter and flour together – I rely onMarthaSchulman’s description. The mixture needs to be heat for around 5 minutes untilit looks like ‘wet sand.’ The monitoring and observing of textures,particularly any changes, is key to making the perfect white sauce and manyother dishes besides. The early modern recipe archive is alsofilled with similar sets of instructions where changes in texture were used asmarkers for the completion of a particular step in production. In my recentbook Recipes and Everyday Knowledge,I discuss some of these examples in a chapter on “Recipes Trials.” Due to thegenerosity of friends and colleagues and the enthusiasm of groups such as the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective(EMROC) and BeforeFarm to Table, new examples emerge all the time. Today, I wanted to share aparticularly intriguing recipe, which came to light at the EMROC transcribathon last fall. Dawson's Recipe for Lemon WafersThe recipe is for making lemon wafers andis part of the recipe collection of a seventeenth-centuryEnglish gentlewoman named Jane Dawson. The instructions are brief but detailed.We are told to dry, sift and beatdouble-refined sugar and mix with the juice of a lemon until it becomes the consistency of honey.[1]Then, scooping some of the mixture in a spoon, we should heat the spoon over achafing dish of hot coals until the surface of the mixture touching the spoonis “crisp” – that is (according tothe OED) rippling, folding or wrinkling. Taking care that the mixture does notboil, we should then spread the melted mixture onto a square piece of paper,pinning the two corners of the paper together in order to curl or bend thewafer and let it dry in this configuration. When we are ready to eat or servethe lemon wafer, we should wet the “wrong” side of the paper with water torelease the candy. As with making béchamel, key to this recipeare the practices of observing and interpreting changes in texture. Two pointsare of particular importance here – ensuring that the sugar and lemon juice mixachieves the ‘consistency of honey’ and that the mixture heats until it crispsor ripples on the hot spoon. After the transcribathon, some EMROC members wereso intrigued by this recipe that they tried their hands at re-creating it.Lisa Smith, Maggie Simon, and their various assistants spent afternoons mixingand tasting lemony sugar syrup and heating it using a variety of methods fromplate warmers to electric hobs. I’ll leave you to read about their adventures hereand here, but it istelling that both ended their posts with a reflection about the assumed knowledgerequired for this recipe. One particular texture was picked up for comment –the consistency of honey. Both Lisa and Maggie were stymied by the instructionsto mix fine sugar and lemon juice to the “right” consistency of honey. Afterall, as a natural product, honey can come in many guises. Our intrepid makerstried to reproduce the thickness of raw honey, runny honey, and crystalizedhoney and each resulted in a different product with varying degrees of success. Maggie's Sugar and Lemon Juice Mixture (Photo taken by Maggie Simon)Observing textures or changes in textures is clearlya key part of following recipes. Yet, it turns out that it is hard to convey hands-onexperiential knowledge on paper, particularly across time and space. Oftentimes, descriptions of textures are made using analogies (e.g. consistency ofhoney) or metaphors (e.g. wet sand) requiring the recipe writer and reader towork within a similar frame of reference. Further focus on reading orinterpreting representations of “textures” in past and present thus seems afruitful way to shed light on histories of observation, sensorial andexperiential knowledge.[1]Folger v.b. 14, p. 47. 