Frederick Nutt's Millefruit Biscuits on a small English bobbin stemmed salver from the 1760s. The raised edge around the top of the salver is perfect for stopping small sweetmeats from slipping, making it very easy to construct miniature pyramids.
From the seventeenth century onwards English cookery and confectionery texts abound with recipes for a family of biscuits which contain no flour. The ingredients are held together with a simple mixture of powdered sugar and egg white. Base ingredients include everything from dried jasmine flowers, slivered almonds to slices of candied peel. One variant, known as bane bread or bean bread, consists of little piles of flaked almonds held together with an orange or rosewater icing and baked with a generous scattering of caraway comfits. These biscuits were usually baked on wafer paper. They blister a little while cooking and sometimes spread out a little beyond their brittle bounds, but they crisp-up once cold and hold their crispness for weeks. They remind me very much of the Italian bruti et buoni to which I am sure they are closely related. The London confectioner Frederick Nutt, one time apprentice to the great Domenico Negri gives a number of recipes for this type of biscuit, which may have originated from the Italian peninsula. For instance, one, in his Complete Confectioner of 1789 called 'almond faggots' is very close to modern Umbrian bruti et buoni. These delicate crunchy biscuits have a feather-light texture and are redolent of orange flowers. They were probably eaten with sweet dessert wines.
However, Nutt's most interesting recipe in this genre is for a biscuit consisting of little morsels of citrus peel, which he calls millefruit biscuits. As well as the finely chopped preserved peel of oranges and lemons, they also contain angelica, slivered sweet almonds and bitter almonds, all held together with egg white and orange flower water icing. I have put Nutt's original recipe below. Try it. These unusual, delicate biscuits are easy and quick to make.
Nutt's book, first published in the year of the French Revolution was in its first few editions issued anonymously, the author being named at first as 'A Person'. Although Nutt's marvellous book is forgotten now, in its day it proved to be a best seller and went into a number of editions. Its easy to follow recipes have a professional ring about them. It certainly affords a remarkable glimpse into the sophistication of late Georgian dessert food. Nutt also gives us recipes for both Millefruit Ice Cream and Millefruit Water Ice. Just like his biscuits, these two frozen dessert dishes are spotted with little dots of cochineal at the end of the freezing process to create a kind of marbled effect. I have made both and they are excellent. I will devote a post to them at some time. But in the meantime, here is the process to make his delightful Millefruit Biscuits.
John Thacker's 1758 Marrow Pudding or Poudin de Mouëlle formée with its ornate cut cover
A few days ago a researcher working on a TV bakery programme rang to say that she wanted 'to pick my brains' about 'the history of latticework tarts', as Google and Wikipedia had not furnished any revelations on the subject. Funnily enough I had just filmed a short feature for a rival baking programme on puff pastry, in which I made the elaborate decorated lid for the baked pudding pictured above. So the subject was topical. Dishes like the good old woven pastry 'criss-cross' jam tart of modern England and the crostata of Italy have a venerable and surprisingly sophisticated history. In fact many made in the past were very much more ambitious than those I have seen coming out of the ovens of modern bakers.
The great heyday of this kind of pastry trellis work lasted from the second half of the sixteenth century to the first half of the eighteenth. The practice almost certainly had its origins in a burgeoning fashion for knotted strapwork ornament inaugurated by Mannerist architects such as Sebastiano Serlio (1475-1554). Interlacing decorations like those published by Serlio found their best known expression in architectural detailing and garden design, but food ornamentation was strongly influenced by the same zeitgeist. The curious knotted biscuits or sweetmeats known as jumbals emerge at this period and elaborate tarts and pies in kaleidoscopic knot-garden form start to adorn the tables of the wealthy. Edible strap work was all the rage.
A plate of sixteenth century sweetmeats I made for Francis Drake's house at Buckland Abbey about fifteen years ago. The knotted biscuits are jumbals. All were copied from Netherlandish paintings of the period.
Another expression of strapwork on the English table were designs painted on banqueting trenchers in the second half of the sixteenth century. Sometimes as here, these were made out of sugar paste and painted with edible colours. I made these sugar copies of some Tudor beechwood originals for a table display I created for Chatsworth House about eight years ago.
Although tarts with intricate strapwork lids appear from time to time in Netherlandish still life paintings like that of Clara Peeters below, it was not until the 1660s that designs for these tarts were published in recipe collections.
A table setting by the Antwerp artist Clara Peeters (1594 – c. 1657) , including a pastry with a cut design, c. 1611, oil on panel. Museo del Prado, Madrid. Nothing to do with lattice work pastry, but note how Clara has painted the spit roast birds with their livers tucked under their pinions.
When they did appear (with one major exception) they were exclusively to be found in English cookery texts. The designs below for Florendines are from Robert May's TheAccomplisht Cook of 1660. Florendines were shallow pies filled with various kinds of meat or fish. May was not quite the first European cook to offer us designs for pastry ornamentation of this kind, as another Englishman, Joseph Cooper had included a few crude woodcuts of pie shapes in his The Art of Cookery Refin'd and Augmented (London: 1654). But May was the first to publish a wide variety of designs for different pastry types. Although they are quite crude, his woodcuts give us an insight into the extraordinary lengths that pastry cooks went to in high status houses in baroque England.
Other than a handful of English cookery books from the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, no other European printed texts contain designs like those of Robert May. Apart that is, from one notable exception from Austria, Conrad Hagger's Neues Saltzburgisches Kochbuch (Augsburg: 1719). This magisterial collection of recipes occupies a full horizontal five inches of my bookshelf and is one of the most important books I own. I often marvel at my good fortune, as I was lucky enough to buy a copy of this rare work in Liechtenstein for $50 in the 1970s! No other cookery text allows us such a detailed insight into the pastry techniques of the baroque Hofkoch than Hagger's work. Its 305 full plate engravings provide a bewildering variety of designs for pies, pasties, marchpanes and torts. Here are some of his variations on the lattice work tart.
Lattice work pastry designs from Conrad Hagger, Neues Saltzburgisches Kochbuch (Augsburg: 1719)
Hagger's designs are very similar to those in May's book, but offer us far more detail. They indicate that the culinary expectations of his master Franz Anton von Harrach (1665-1727), the Prince Archbishop of Salzburg from 1709-1727, must have been very demanding. However, food in the Archbishop's palace appears to have been somewhat conservative and old fashioned. Elements of of the new French cookery style are present in Hagger's book, but many of his pie designs hark back to the previous century. He was an old man when he wrote his book and was probably documenting the cookery style of his heyday. Ecclesiastical households were much more conservative than princely ones and appeared to favour the old style of cookery. This is also apparent in the work of the English ecclesiastical cook John Thacker, who worked for the dean and chapter of Durham Cathedral between 1739 and 1758. Thacker's book The Art of Cookery (Newcastle upon Tyne:1758) was the last of the baroque recipe collections to contain illustrations of pastry work. Here is his design for a cover for a marrow pudding.
Covers like this were usually made out of puff pastry and baked separately from the tart or pudding they adorned. Here is my interpretation of Thacker's design sitting on a sheet of paper on a baking tray and ready for the oven.
Thacker gives no instructions for doing this, but I could not resist dusting the pudding with powdered sugar and then removing the lid. What a lovely effect!
Nearly a century earlier Robert May had published directions and diagrams for making cut lids of this kind. The shapes between the pastry 'slips' were designed to be filled with coloured preserves and fruit pastes, making some of them the most colourful baked goods in the history of English food.
I made the cut laid tarts above, based on May's designs for my exhibition Supper with Shakespeare at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts in 2012. Towards the end of Shakespeare's life, Gervase Markham in The English Housewife (London: 1615) describes similar tarts, though unlike May, he does not offer any illustrations. These edible stained glass windows were the mothers of all jammy dodgers!
A strap work tart sits in front of a sugar paste banqueting house at the MIA exhibition
Cut pastry continued to be popular well into the eighteenth century. One kind that emerged was the 'crocant', a technically difficult genre which involved placing a sheet of a specialised crocant paste (sometimes called 'crackling crust') over a domed mould and then cutting it by hand with decorative designs in the form of leaves, birds, animals etc. They were baked on the domed moulds. When finished, crocants were often iced and then placed over plates of colourful sweetmeats. We will never know what these ephemeral creations looked like, because no designs have survived, though ceramic manufactories such as Wedgewood and Royal Copenhagen produced pierced lids for vessels which may have been influenced by these edible cut covers. However, we can be sure that standards were incredibly high and there were quite a lot of professional bakers who were prepared for a fee to instruct ladies in the art of cutting designs like this in pastry.
The images on this page are of food produced by attendees on my two most recent courses, with a little help from me! I do try to convey to my students that standards of food and presentation in the past were frequently very high and that one of the best ways to understand this is to work with original equipment in order to replicate dishes that convey the staggering beauty of much of our ancestors' food. Appearance was everything!
But taste was pretty important too - look at this delicious nineteenth century pie, garnished with truffles and crayfish in the image above - and marbled with truffles, pigeon, capon breast and turkey when cut through. We had it for our lunch on my moulded foods course last Sunday - it tasted as good as it looked. I made eight pies like this last week - all different - for a BBC drama production set in the early nineteenth century. They were all spiked with silver hatelet skewers and ornamented like the one above. You might get a glimpse of them when the programme goes out at Christmas, but more on that later on.
My current obsession - Mrs Elizabeth Raffald's 'Solomon's Temple in Flummery' made in a 1790s Staffordshire mould. The first one we turned out on the course failed because I was not concentrating when I turned it out. But we made another the next day - the one depicted above - and that came out perfectly, looking like some beautiful alien being from another planet with its garniture of fresh flowers.
We used these tiny profiteroles filled with apricot preserve to make a delicious profiterole pudding, a moulded custard very lightly set with gelatine and flavoured with kirsch and muscatel raisins poached in syrup. The recipe we used was from Jules Gouffés The Royal Cookery Book (London: 1871). Rather like a cold luxury bread and butter pudding, we made it in a tall and spectacular stepped mould. There are over fifty profiteroles embedded in the soft rich custard. Because they give strength to the
The finished profiterole pudding was delicious.It was served at dinner with two other moulded dishes made on the course, an iced cabinet pudding and a raspberry jelly surmounted by a blancmange portrait of Queen Victoria. Here they all are after a marathon unmoulding session in my kitchen. The iced cabinet pudding is in the centre. It is embellished with maidenhair fern fronds and surrounded by garnish ices made of muscadine water ice, a delicious lemon sorbet flavoured with elderflowers.
On my moulded food course last weekend, one of the students brought along a lovely wooden sugar mould for pressing out a small grapevine design in gum paste she had recently bought on ebay. But she was unsure how to use it. Just for fun I taught her to use it to construct a Wedgewood style Jasperware plate entirely out of sugar. With the use of a few other moulds belonging to me, we made the components to make it into an impressive edible taza.
Some of my students collect antique moulds and want to learn how to use them. Though few would be able to make this Alexandra Cross jelly. Although surviving outer moulds in this design are not uncommon, the internal liner required to make one with the Danish Flag running through it is extremely rare. So it was a great experience for them to make this crazy Victorian set piece dish, which they had all heard of, but never seen. For those of you who might like to have a go at making food of this quality, I will be publishing my 2014 course schedule on my website and on this blog in September.
Halfpenny (above) and penny (below) wooden gingerbread blocks formerly belonging to Dundee baker John Scrymgeour (1827-1881). Scrymgeour, who founded his bakery in Nethergate in 1861 after seeking his fortune in Australia, was a prominent Dundee citizen with many civic responsibilities, including that of trustee to Dundee harbour. Cape Scrymgeour at the North-East point of Andersson Island in the Antarctic was named in his honour. Curiously, Mr Scrymgeour was born in the town of Kirremuir, chiefly famous for a local form of gingerbread.
Most British recipe books from the late fourteenth century onwards usually contain a recipe or two for gingerbread. Throughout its long and complex history this ancient baked good has gone through many transformations. Medieval and early modern versions were very different to the soft spongy cakes, tray bakes and anthropomorphic children's biscuits that are usually sold under the name in contemporary Britain. From time to time on this blog I will look at aspects of gingerbread's remarkable evolution, focussing particularly on some of the high points in its development before it became degraded into the currant-eyed homunculus of the modern bakery aisle. If surviving moulds are anything to go by, most gingerbread men in the past were far more sartorially elegant than the naked Mr Men of today. And there were plenty of well-dressed gingerbread women too. Just look at King William and Queen Mary further down this page. But what I want to touch upon in this brief posting is a type of commercial gingerbread which was once commonly sold in just about every street corner baker's shop, but which seems to have died out in the years leading up to World War I. Known as block gingerbread, this ubiquitous mainstay of the baker's trade was a dark treacle-flavoured variant on the theme, which was usually printed with a patriotic design, most often a royal crown or the royal coat of arms.
Surviving moulds for block gingerbread sometimes have the name of the baker carved on them, as in the two examples above, which are in my own collection. These moulds have a fascinating history. They are inscribed with the name J. Scrymgeour. This was John Scrymgeour (1827-1881), a prominent Dundee baker active in the second half of the nineteenth century. Scrymgeour's old friend Thomas Robertson captained the ship Active, which with three others went on an exploratory whaling expedition from Dundee to the Antarctic in 1892-3. Robertson named Cape Scrymgeour on Andersson Island in the dead baker's honour. Perhaps the red stone cliffs of the cape reminded him of his old friend's gingerbread! On this voyage Roberston also discovered Dundee Island and the Antarctic Firth of Forth.
Scrymgeour's two moulds were designed for making two different sizes which were sold at different prices. Like many of these moulds they are carved in a primitive style, the supporters on either side of the highly stylised royal arms looking rather like cartoon animals. This was probably intentional on the part of Mr Scrymgeour, as the principal devourers of cheap block gingerbread were children.
A halfpenny block gingerbread made with the smaller mould above
By the time Mr Scrymgeour was selling his wares to the hungry juveniles of Dundee, the tradition of moulding gingerbread into patriotic designs was already a well established practice. Sometimes they were formed into a likeness of the reigning monarch and his queen. As well as the fine examples below of William III and Mary, there is a similar mould from the 1830s in the Stranger's Hall collection in Norwich which depicts William IV on one side and Queen Adelaide on the other.
The mould (see below) from which these large gingerbreads were pressed has King William III (reigned 1689-1702) on one side and his wife Queen Mary II (reigned 1689-94) on the other. It was carved in the late seventeenth century. Photo Michel Finlay
A Georgian block gingerbread mould with the coat of arms of Great Britain. These moulds are very difficult to date, but the fourth quarter on the shield contains elements which show the Hanoverian royal descent, so it dates from between 1714 and 1800. The arms of Great Britain was superseded by the arms of the United Kingdom in 1801. It is difficult to be more precise.
The gingerbreads made in these moulds were chiefly produced and sold by professional bakers and confectioners, who kept very quiet about their recipes and methods. There were countless gingerbread recipes in both manuscript and printed sources, but these were of a domestic nature and aimed at housewives. It was not until the nineteenth century that professionals started sharing their secrets in print. One of the first bakers to write extensively on the subject was George Read, who issued The Complete Biscuit and Gingerbread Baker's Assistant as the second part of his book The Confectioner's and Pastry Cook's Guide (London: nd. c.1834). The intended readers were members of the trade, particularly bakers' apprentices. As a result the gingerbread recipes it contains are quite different from those found in domestic cookery books. Quantities are much larger and processes more complicated. Read tells us about the practice of preparing treacle for gingerbread by getting it to slowly react with various aerating chemicals, such as alum and potash. In one recipe he tells us to add 2 lbs of alum and 4 lbs of American potash to 112 lbs of treacle, though he indicates that this large scale recipe was for use by the gingerbread wholesalers. He tells us that flour was added to this aereated treacle to make a sponge, which he calls 'light dough'. This was left to mature and then added to the other gingerbread ingredients when required.
George Vine, another professional baker active at the end of the nineteenth century also produced a series of small books aimed at the trade. In one, Saleable Shop Goods (London: 1898), he devotes a chapter to the production of gingerbread. Like Read, he discusses many types and gives some very useful information specifically on block gingerbread. He explains how to prepare the treacle with the rising agents and how to make it up into a sponge with flour. He tells us,
'The longer this dough stands the better will be the resultant gingerbread. In the old days it was always a rule to put away the gingerbread sponges early in the spring, and then it would be in prime condition for use about September; but at the present time it would, most probably be deemed ripe in from one to three months. At any rate, give it as long as you possibly can, remembering always the longer the better'.
Gingerbread leavened with chemicals such as pearlash (Potassium carbonate - this was Read's American potash) were being made in late eighteenth century America, but do not seem to have been produced in Britain until the 1820s. Amelia Simmons, American Cookery (Hartford: 1798), adds pearlash to what was a fairly standard treacle gingerbread mix to get a lighter result. Pearlash and other alkaline leavening agents such as ammonium bicarbonate and sodium bicarbonate were probably used in Britain in the early nineteenth century, but do not appear in the cookery books until the 1820s and 30s when a few recipes are included in manuscript collections. However, the process of maturing the treacle for a long period to make a sponge, seems to have only been undertaken by professionals.
A recipe for Rich Gingerbread from the manuscript receipt book of Mrs Morton c.1835 (my collection). The recipe calls for 'sal ammoniac' (ammonium carbonate) as a leavening agent. There is some evidence to suggest that rich gingerbreads made with treacle had been around since the Restoration of Charles II. Though yeast does feature in some recipes, early forms of gingerbread were normally made without any form of leaven. The use of these raising agents changed the nature of gingerbread from a flat biscuit-like confection into the lighter cake-like forms with which we are familiar today.
Professional gingerbread bakers purchased their treacle in large barrels. Nineteenth domestic bakers probably bought theirs from the local grocery store. Before treacle was retailed in cans it was sold as a loose liquid. The purchaser arrived at the shop with a purpose made ceramic treacle jar like that illustrated above. They had a screwtop lid, probably for keeping flies and wasps at bay.
Gingerbread block. From Frederick Vine, Saleable Shop Goods (London: 1898)
Vine also gives some useful details on how to mould gingerbread and provides the illustrations reproduced here. He tells us that,
'Blocks (Fig. 104) for gingerbread can be purchased from any of the confectioners' machinists
advertising in these pages. Usually two impressions are cut into one block, the halfpenny on one side and the penny on the other. In some places it is usual to have your name down the centre, but of course, in that case, it will be necessary to have the blocks specially cut for the purpose'.
Mr Scrymgeour up in Dundee obviously went to this trouble, but had two different sized blocks carved rather than one 'with the halfpenny on the one side and penny on the other'.
Wooden blocks were carved in larger sizes for making more expensive gingerbreads. Vine gives a number of recipes for these more pricey block gingerbreads, including some richer options, which contain candied orange and citron peel. We made Mr Scrymgeour's halfpenny block gingerbread on my moulded foods course last week (illustrated at the top of this post) by using this recipe from Saleable Shop Goods,
Weigh the flour on to the board, and rub the fat into it; make a bay; lay the peel round, cut fine; put the sugar and spice into it, and wet up with worked treacle (No. 209) (of course before the flour is added) into a tight dough; let it lie a short time. Then take your 6d. or 1s. block; dust them out with flour; scale off the dough into 1lb. pieces; mould them up round; flatten out to the size of the shilling block, and press it well upon it, keeping the dough perfectly square with the edges of the block; then take off, and place on to thick high-edge tins. Tins that we used for this purpose were about 1/8 in. in thickness, and would hold twelve 1s. cakes, four across and three down; dock well with a fork; fix an upset firmly along the bottom, or foot of the tin ; wash over, and bake in a cool oven. When cooked, glaze over with Bun Wash (No. 190), while hot, then cut out and sell at 1s. or 6d. per square, as the case may be. Sixpenny cakes are made in exactly the same way, but, of course, are only half the size. Whole blanched almonds, cherries, sultanas, preserved fruits, and ginger can be added in the place of the peel as required ; but if you add these you will have to weigh the lumps smaller to recompense you for it, especially if you use cherries, almonds, or the more expensive preserved fruits.
The inclusion of finely chopped candied or preserved citrus peels in gingerbread recipes was an old tradition dating back to the seventeenth century. A very early recipe for a treacle gingerbread was included in William Salmon The Family Dictionary (London: 1710). Salmon claims this gingerbread was served to Charles II.
Orange peel and ginger are a great combination and both harmonise well with the strong caramel flavour of treacle. Orange gingerbread was particularly favoured in the eighteenth century and is frequently advertised on confectioners' and gingerbread bakers' trade cards.
Block gingerbread was once made all over Britain, but even when Vine was writing in the 1890s it was getting scarcer. He assumed it was because of the decrease in the frequency of fairs. By the time of the Great War it had disappeared just about everywhere, though an unusual variety of it still survives in a much modified form in the seaside town of Whitby in Yorkshire. What made Whitby block gingerbread unusual is that instead of being formed into printed flat sheets as described by Vine, it was made up into thick loaves. When these came out of the oven they were very hard. They were formerly put into damp rooms for some time to soften. The kind now made in Whitby commercially is not printed, though it is still a loaf with a rather dense texture. The wonderful Whitby Museum has a number of local Block Gingerbread moulds in its collection, which in addition to the royal coats of arms feature the town arms of three ammonites on a shield. Bothams of Whitby, an old local firm, make a modern form of the delicacy, though it is far removed from the block gingerbread of the nineteenth century.
Charlotte Mason's 1773 Jaune Mange made in the form of the sun
When I was a child in the 1950s, a common sweet served at our school dinners was blancmange, a milk pudding thickened with cornflour, or more likely made up from a commercial packet mixture. We all hated it, probably because it usually had the same pink colour as the surgical plasters of the period. Without any knowledge of French, it never occurred to us that its name implied it should actually be white. Little also did we know that this despised dish had a remarkably long history with numerous extant recipes dating back to the thirteenth century. It was a dish that seemed to know no national boundaries. Recipes were included in cookery texts written in every European language. Early versions usually contained minced capon breast, or even fish (or fish spawn) on days when meat was outlawed. Its other common ingredients were rice, almonds, milk or cream, rosewater and sugar. It could be a bland food for invalids or an ornamented dish for gracing the tables at major state events. The early fifteenth century English version below belonged to the latter category and was 'flourished' with red and white anise comfits and almonds.
A recipe from The Forme of Cury for Blank Maunger. This is a page from a c.1420s version of the text - courtesy John Rylands Library, University of Manchester. The original text dates from the 1390s. This early English recipe, just like its continental cousins includes shredded capon's breast. Here is a transcription,
Blank Maunger. XXXVI. Take Caponis and seeþ hem, þenne take hem up. take Almandes blaunched. grynd hem and alay hem up with the same broth. cast the mylk in a pot. waisshe rys and do þerto and lat it seeþ. þanne take brawn of Capouns teere it small and do þerto. take white grece sugur and salt and cast þerinne. lat it seeþ. þenne messe it forth and florissh it with aneys in confyt rede oþer whyt. and with Almaundes.
Versions with meat no longer survive in modern Europe, though in Turkey a sweet set pudding called Tavuk göğsü is still very popular. Like the older European incarnations of blancmange this is made with chicken breast, milk and rice flour. It is so similar to medieval blancmange that it must be linked in some way. It is delicious and refreshing. In eighteenth century Britain, where the chicken breast and rice started to be omitted in the early eighteenth century, the dish was more usually thickened with isinglass. By the second half of the eighteenth century blancmange borrowed the name of a native set pudding called flummery, which was originally congealed with oatmeal. In the culinary literature of this period the terms flummery and blancmange are usually interchangeable. Flummeries and blancmanges were frequently allowed to cool in moulds and turned out in a remarkable variety of decorative forms, with an important industry producing both wooden and ceramic moulds for making them in.
Much has been written about blancmange, mainly regarding its history in the medieval and early modern period.* But very little is ever said about a close relative called jaunmange or jaune mange, a dish, which despite its French name, seems to be an entirely English creation. As its name suggests, it is yellow in colour due to the inclusion of egg yolks in the composition. Despite a long and thorough search, I have found no versions of this dish in French recipe collections. The earliest printed recipe I know is in Charlotte Mason, The Lady's Assistant (London; 1773). I am currently searching eighteenth century manuscripts for the dish, but have so far not found any that predate Mason's recipe. Here it is.
Charlotte Mason not only gives a recipe, she also offers a table plan which features the dish
There are many later recipes for Jaune Mange. Both English and American recipe collections in the nineteenth century frequently include at least one. J. H. Walsh in The British Cookery Book (London: 1864) gives three -
J. H. Walsh in The British Cookery Book (London: 1864)
Mason's recipe employs Seville orange juice as a flavouring, while most of the later authors substitute this with lemon juice. I have made it with both and prefer the Seville Orange version. It should have a light set and a really delicate mouth feel, so if you make it with gelatine, be very sparing.
* Three noteworthy essays on the early history of blancmange are,
Gillian Goodwin, ‘Blancmange.’ History Today 35, no. 7: 60, 1985.
Allen J. Grieco – ‘From the Cookbook to the Table: A Florentine Table and Italian Recipes of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,’ in Du Manuscrit a la Table, edited by Carole Lambert, Paris: Champion – Slatkine - 1992.
Constance B. Hieatt - Sorting Through the Titles of Medieval Dishes: What is, or Is Not, a ‘Blanc Manger,'' in Food in the Middles Ages: A Book of Essays. Edited by Melitta Weiss Adamson, New York: Garland : 1995
In my Northern garden the white currants are just ripening as the last of the elderflowers are opening
For those of you who research the history of food these days, you have a much easier time finding sources than I did when I started getting a taste for the subject in the early sixties. Nowadays there are many online scanned and transcribed texts of period recipe collections, as well as modern reprints and facsimiles. If I wanted to consult one of these rare works I would have to go to the British Library and look at an original copy. The trouble was I was only thirteen when I first got interested, which was too young to have a reader's pass. So the only alternative was to buy originals with whatever pocket money or holiday job wages I could muster. The first cookery book I ever bought was John Nott's Cook's and Confectioner's Dictionary (London: 1723). I found a good working copy for about 75p ($1.00). When most of my friends were spending their spare time listening to the Beatles or the Stones, I was trying to learn to cook out of this masterpiece of baroque gastronomy. I thought I had discovered a golden age of British food and just had to learn more. So, once I had learnt how to seek out and buy books of this kind, I spent every penny I had on acquiring more, and more, and more! Armed with a copy of Arnold Whitaker Oxford's bibliography, I started hunting out some of the key works he describes in what became my bedside bible.*
I was lucky. With not too much outlay, by the time I was sixteen I owned good original copies of works by Gervase Markham, Joseph Cooper, Kenelm Digby, Hannah Wooley and a few other Jacobean cookery writers. In 1967 I cashed my £40 premium bonds to buy a perfect copy of John Parkinson's Theatrum Botanicum (London; 1640). This teenage obsession grew into a lifelong passion, the result of which is a lovely and incredibly useful book collection. An early purchase which really tickled me, was Mr Oxford's own copy of T. Hall's The Queen's Royal Cookery. It was an imperfect one with a note in Oxford's hand explaining that the last page of the text was missing, but it only cost me half a crown (twelve and a half new pence)! I have since found a better copy, but I had to pay a lot more than that for it.
By the time I was in my twenties, I became particularly interested in works on confectionery. The very first I acquired was a second edition of Borella's The Court and Country Confectioner (London: 1772). It was this marvellous little book that kindled an early interest in ice cream and I was soon attempting to learn how to make ices using the methods described by this head confectioner to the Spanish Ambassador .
I remember buying this particular book in July when the elder bushes were in flower, so I had to have a go at making his Muscadine Water Ice, a lemon sorbet flavoured with elder flowers. This was the very first period ice I ever made. I used salt and ice in a bucket and an old milk can because I did not at the time own a sorbetiere. Once I had figured out Borella's rather confusing instructions with his cross references to other recipes, I got it to work really well. What amazed me was the incredible smoothness of the finished ice - no detectable ice crystals and a silky feel on the tongue. In a brief footnote to his recipe, Borella (we do not know his first name) explains that a variation on the theme was to make the ice with white currants.
This is a sorbetiere and spaddle, the equipment Mr Borella used to make his muscadine ice. I prefer this to any modern ice cream maker. It is usually quicker and makes wonderful smooth ice creams and water ices
This unassuming little N.B. is one of those treasures that occur from time to time in our culinary literature, where in a brief note a truly wonderful masterpiece of a dish is delineated. I managed to get hold of a huge basket of white currants from a friend in Sussex and had a go. What a revelation! This was in 1971, when many considered British gastronomy to be in a trough of despond. Not in my London flat it was n't! I fed my flatmates with this icy nectar and they were truly astonished. Marine Ices had been open for a few years down the road in Chalk Farm, at the time about the only place in London where you could get decent ice cream. But as nice as their ices were, Mr Borella's Muscadine Water Ice with elderflowers and white currants was on a much higher plain.
I had a lot of the currants left over and with them made another eighteenth century delicacy, white currant shrub, from Charlotte Mason's The Lady's Assistant (London: 1773), though delicate is probably the wrong adjective to describe this fiery high octane liqueur. Again, the recipe is in the form of a very brief note, the use of white currants just an alternative suggestion to red ones. I made about a quart with my currants - again a superb forgotten use for these translucent, pearl like fruits.
Pennyroyal (Mentha pulegium L.) has been used as a culinary and medicinal herb since antiquity. One of its popular English synonyms 'Pudding Grass' clearly indicates that this mint-like herb was a popular ingredient in certain kinds of puddings. It is still used in some regional versions of black pudding, such as those made in Bury in Lancashire. However, the popularity of pennyroyal as a kitchen herb waned during the course of the nineteenth century and nowadays it is rarely used in a domestic context. This is almost certainly due to two rather worrying factors. The first of these was the traditional folk belief that the plant could be used to induce abortions and should therefore be avoided at all costs by pregnant women. The second was the more recent discovery that the essential oil of pennyroyal is highly toxic and its consumption has frequently proved fatal to both humans and animals - and probably to insects too, as over the centuries the plant was widely used to discourage fleas, lice and other six legged pests. It should not come as a surprise then that nowadays it is not to be found on the supermarket herb and spice shelf. However, the dried herb can be obtained from herb suppliers and some still make a tisane from it, the consumption of which in moderate quantities is considered to be pretty harmless, as is its inclusion in small quantities in black puddings.
Pennyroyal was also once employed as a flavouring for other members of the pudding family, including an unusual herb dumpling, a recipe for which was included in Charlotte Mason's The Lady's Assistant (London: 1773).
Like many other puddings, Mrs Mason's pennyroyal dumplings were boiled in cloths.
Mrs Mason's pennyroyal dumpling is closely related to another commonly made pudding called 'green pudding'. Some think that this was consumed as a spring tonic, rather like the herb pancake known as a tansy. Green puddings were certainly designed to be eaten during Lent and at Easter. Pennyroyal is frequently an ingredient, though it is often just one of a medley of different garden and wild herbs. The late seventeenth century recipe below also includes spinage, savory and thyme.
Although Elizabeth Rainbow's recipe called for the green puddings to be fried, they were more usually boiled in a cloth, like Mason's pennyroyal dumplings. However, the recipe below from the manuscript receipt book of Elizabeth Birkett (aka Brown) dated 1699, specifically instructs us to boil her pudding in a bag, rather than a cloth. Her recipe does not include pennyroyal and is flavoured with strawberry leaves, violet leaves, thyme and marjoram. Like Mason's and Rainbow's dishes, the basis of the pudding is grated bread.
A green pudding recipe from the manuscript receipt book of Elizabeth Birkett (1699) of Townend Farm, Troutbeck, Cumbria. Photo courtesy of Kendal Public Record Office.
Elizabeth Birkett's' Greene Pudding' 1699. This pudding was wrapped in a caul before being boiled in a bag
Both Elizabeth Rainbow and Elizabeth Birkett wrote their recipe collections in the late seventeenth century in the English Lake District, a part of the world where green or herb puddings are still made today, most usually at Easter. To some Cumbrian locals these latter day paschal puddings are known as 'Easter Ledge Pudding', 'Easter Ledges' or 'Easter May Giants'. These curious terms are also local vernacular names for bistort (Persicaria bistorta (L.) Samp.), one of the main ingredients of the dish. Incidentally another regional name for bistort is 'pudding grass'. Other herbs included in the mix are alpine lady's mantle, nettle leaves, giant bellflowers and black currant leaves. However, I have not yet come across a modern Lakeland recipe which calls for pennyroyal. Both Rainbow, a bishop's wife and Birkett, the wife of a yeoman farmer, used wheaten bread as a basis for their herb puddings. But in their day only the well-off could afford white bread, because wheat was very difficult to cultivate in the wet, cool climate of the Lake District. Oats and barley were the staple cereals for the poorer farmers. The surviving modern Cumbrian recipes for herb pudding are made with a base of either oatmeal or pearl barley, so it is likely that they have evolved from a more low status version of the dish, rather than the somewhat genteel puddings described by the two Elizabeths. This may well also explain why modern versions of Easter Ledges Pudding are made from foraged wild plants, which are free, rather than the Mediterranean herbs that were grown in the gentlewoman's herb garden. As green puddings became unfashionable among the increasingly more sophisticated gentry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the conservative Lake District peasantry continued to make their version of the dish, which has survived to this day among the farming community. Though of course there seem to be no surviving printed recipes for their dish earlier than the twentieth century.
Easter Ledges or Easter May Giants, two of a number of Cumberland/Westmorland dialect names for bistort (Persicaria bistorta (L.) Samp.). The leaves of this plant, which like pennyroyal is sometimes called 'pudding grass', are picked when young and tender.
A friend and neighbour of mine, who gathers her Easter Ledges from the same stream-side in our village as I do, recently showed me two precious family heirlooms - the pudding bags used by her mother and grandmother in which they boiled the Easter herb pudding mix. These venerable 'clouts' are made from 'ticking', a strong weave of textile used for making mattresses and pillows. They are stained with the juice of generations of herbs. Both bear a few campaign scars which have been neatly repaired. I suspect that the 'bag' mentioned in Elizabeth Birkett's greene pudding recipe must have looked just like these hoary veterans.
Two well-used veteran Westmorland herb pudding bags. Photo courtesy of Jean Scott-Smith
So herb puddings could be fried in butter, or boiled in a cloth or bag. In Elizabeth Birkett's recipe for green pudding she tells us 'to wrap it in a mutton caul' before you boil it in a bag. The caul fat of calves and lambs was much used in the early modern period for holding fragile ingredients together in dishes of this kind. The caul or omentum, is the inner lining of the animal's abdomen and its anastomising network of veins of fat on a thin transparent membrane give it the appearance of very delicate lace. Not only does it work very well as a wrapping, but the fat also bastes the outside of the pudding. In some regions of England caul is still used for making a fatty jacket for wrapping the little pork offal 'puddings' known as faggots or savoury ducks.
'Caule of veale, or lamb' turns up in another of Elizabeth Rainbow's recipes, this time in a pie filled with little round puddings flavoured with herbs, including pennyroyal. The recipe is acknowledged as one contributed to Elizabeth by a Lady Sedley. This was Catherine Sedley, daughter of John Savage, Earl of Rivers, who married Sir Charles Sedley the poet and courtier in 1657. A surviving book of receipts (mainly medical) dated 1686 by Lady Sedley survives in the library of the Royal College of Physicians. Lady Sedley's husband, a favourite companion of Charles II was noted for his drunken, often lewd behaviour.
A lumbard pye, sometimes known as a lumber pie, was a pie filled with meat balls, or as in this rare example, miniature green puddings. In fact, the small caul wrapped puddings in Lady Sedley's Lumbard Pye are very similar to Charlotte Mason's pennyroyal dumplings cited earlier in this post. Both have pennyroyal as a principal flavouring and both contain currants. However, Lady Sedley's little pennyroyal dumplings are wrapped in caul and baked in a pie with butter, marrow and dates. The pie is later filled with a 'caudle' made of wine, egg yolks and sugar. Unlike most of the lumber pie recipes from this period, the filling contains no meat. Lady Sedley's little pie-baked puddings are not a hundred miles away from the modern butcher's faggot in construction, if not in ingredients. Lumber pies however, were luxury dishes found only at the tables of the rich.
Elizabeth Rainbow also gives a recipe for a more conventional Lumbard Pye, this time filled with 'round balles' made of minced lamb or 'the brawn of a cold Capon' (cooked chicken's breast). Unusually each ball contains a 'soft centre' in the form of an egg yolk and a 'good piece of marrow'. Each one is wrapped in an endive and/or? sorrel leaf before they are baked with a rich assortment of artichoke hearts, skirrets, potatoes, chestnuts, dates, hard egg yolks, marrow, barberries, grapes, preserved orange peel, apricots or other preserved fruit. Like Lady Sedley's, the pie is filled after baking with a caudle and put back in the oven to warm through. I will be making both of these lumbard pies over the next few weeks and will eventually post an article about the full process.
The author of the above recipe was Elizabeth Nodes (b.1648), who married Charles Fane, the 3rd Earl of Westmorland in 1665. She probably met Elizabeth Rainbow in London, most likely at Suffolk House, the London home of the Earls of Suffolk. Little is known about Lady Westmorland, but a fine portrait of her was painted by John Michael Wright.
Elizabeth, wife of Charles Fane, 3rd Earl of Westmorland, by John Michael Wright
Most of the printed cookery books and many manuscripts of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century give at least one recipe for lumber, lumbard or lombard pies. They seem to have been very popular. The name is usually assumed to be a corruption of Lombard, suggesting some Italian link, but its true origin remains obscure. The herald Randal Holme in An Anatomy of Armoury (Chester:1688) defines it thus, 'Lumber pie, made of Flesh or Fish minced and made in Balls‥with Eggs‥and so Baked in a Pye with Butter'.
Over the course of the past three decades I have made many different lumber pies. It is my favourite English pie of the early modern period. On my Pie and Pastry course I frequently teach my students to make one of Robert May's versions of the dish, usually from the recipe below, though over the years we have also made two of his fish based lumber pies - one of sturgeon and the other with salmon.
To Make a Lumber Pye Take some grated bread, and beef-suet cut into bits like great dice, and some cloves and mace, then some veal or capon minced small with beef suet, sweet herbs, fair sugar, the yolks of six eggs boil’d hard and cut in quarters, put them to the other ingredients, with some barberries, some yolks of raw eggs, and a little cream, work up all together and put it in the caul of veal like little sausages; then bake them in a dish, and being half baked have a pie made and dried in the oven ; put these puddings into it with some butter, verjuyce sugar, some dates on them, large mace, grapes, or barberries, and marrow - being baked, serve it with a cut cover on it, and scrape sugar on it.
From Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook (London: 1660).
A lumber pie made on a recent pie and pastry course from Robert May's recipe above. Each meat ball has been wrapped in caul. The bright red berries are barberries.
May tells us to finish the pie with a cut lid scraped with sugar
Designs for the pastry cases for lumber pies abound in seventeenth and early eighteenth century cookery books. Many were quite elaborate and often had very eccentric shapes, as those reproduced below.
A stumpe or lumber pye design from Hannah Bisaker's manuscipt receipt book (1690s). A stumpe pie was usually filled with a spiced mixture of mutton and currants. I am currently baking my way through Hannah's many lovely pie designs and will eventually post an article called 'Baking with Bisaker', my own personal antidote to The Great British Bake-off. However in the next few weeksI will make Lady Sedley's Lumbard Pye and bake it in Hannah's case and publish the results in another post on the subject of lumber pies. Photo courtesy Wellcome Library
Above: a rather crude lumber pie design from T.P., The Accomplish'd Lady's Delight (London: 1675). Below: Edward Kidder, in Receipts of Pastry and Cookery (London: nd. c.1720) offers this much more neatly delineated version of the same design.
However, one lumber pie design in particular seems to have been popular, as it is illustrated in at least three different sources. A 3D version of the design was even published on a playing card! This remarkable and rare pack of playing cards was illustrated with directions for carving various foods. It was issued in 1676/77 by the London printers Joseph and James Moxon. All of the cards belonging to the clubs illustrate the modus operandi for carving up pies and pasties. The six of clubs shows a lumber pie in the same form as the design published the previous year in The Accomplish'd Lady's Delight, but much more skilfully drawn and showing dissection marks used for cutting up the lid. Time after time, recipes for these early modern pies instruct us to cut up the lid. This card shows how it was actually undertaken with a lumber pie. This is by far the most detailed illustration of the form of a lumber pie and is the one I will be using when I make Lady Westmorland's version of the dish later this month - watch this space!
I have posted this scan from my paper 'Illustrations in British Cookery Books', 1621-1820 in Eileen White (ed.), The English Cookery Book - Historical Essays. (Prospect Books, Totnes:2004) to illustrate a point I make in my reply to Kaprifolia's comment below.
A swan pie I made for the exhibition 'London Eats Out' held at the Museum of London in 2000.
I have just listened to a BBC radio news item about the remains of a mute swan discovered a few days ago on Baths Island in the Thames not far from Windsor Castle. The state of the bird indicated that it had been killed, skinned and then grilled on a disposable barbecue. Thames police have indicated that since swans are the property of the Crown, the case would be treated as one of theft. Mute swans also also have statutory protection under the Wildlife and Countryside Act and a Llandudno man was jailed for two months in 2006 for killing and eating a swan. Very few of us nowadays have had the dubious pleasure of dining on this regal bird, but I am pretty sure that the heartless hooligans who killed the Baths Island swan would not have enjoyed their illegal alfresco meal. In a newspaper photograph the charred left-overs of their supper appeared to belong to an adult specimen. Mature swans have little subcutaneous fat and their flesh is exceedingly dry, making them a tough and entirely unsuitable subject for barbecuing. It would have tasted awful. Serves them right I say. But we all know that swans were once eaten with relish by the wealthy at great feasts, one of the reasons why they were so valued by the Crown. But if they are such poor eating what was the fuss all about? Well swan once really was an esteemed dish, but it was not the adult birds that ended up in the pot (or on the grill for that matter). This is what Ross Murray, a compiler of household manuals for Victorian housewives told his readers in the 1870s,
'Roast Swan. This splendid dish, worthy of a prince's table, is only too locally known. It is, of course, only eligible for the table in its cygnet state.'
So it looks like they ate the babies - the ugly ducklings that is? Not exactly. Murray goes on to say,
'The cygnets when all hatched are of a slaty grey, which grows lighter as they grow older. The cygnets of the wild swan are white. But it is of the grey cygnets we have to speak. They are hatched in June. If if is intended to eat them they must be taken from their parents and put into a separate swan pond, at the end of August or first week in September. After they have been "hopped or upped", as it is called, from their native place grass is thrown to them twice a day with their other food for a fortnight. They are fattened on barley: a coomb each cygnet suffices for the fattening. The corn is set in shallow tubs just under water. Cygnets can only be fattened before the white feathers appear; after that no feeding will do any good; as soon as a white feather shows they will cease fattening, no matter what food they have. They can consequently only be eaten in December, and they are a capital and magnificent Christmas dish. Their weight then will be from 25 lbs to 28 lbs.'*
So these teenage super-sizers were fattened by feeding each of them on a coomb of barley. A coomb was a dry measure consisting of four bushels! That was some fattening up process. They were slaughtered the moment their white adult plumage appeared, which pretty well coincided with Christmas. They were seven months old and pathologically obese. Murray goes on to tell us that swan was a popular local dish in Norfolk and explains how they were roasted in homes in that county on a spit in front of the fire as a Christmas dish. He explains that the finished swan was garnished with four little swans carved out of turnips and 'a paper frill, nicely cut, about the shoulders'. He even quotes a popular Norfolk poem on how to prepare the bird and provides a chromolithograph of the finished roast garnished with its miniature turnip swans and surrounded by all the other dishes of a high Victorian Christmas dinner. Both poem and illustration are reproduced below.
So if ordinary Norfolk folk, other than the ones who resided at Sandringham, ate swan at Christmas were they breaking the law of the land like the heartless criminals who cruelly murdered the Baths Island bird the other day? No. Because the swans they roasted on their spits were not necessarily the property of the monarch. All swans that were at liberty on open waters belonged to the Crown by prerogative right, but as long as the birds had their wings 'pinioned' and their bills marked, ownership could be granted to a landowner. Today the queen only claims her right to those birds on certain parts of the Thames that have not been marked by others. In addition to the monarch, there are not many other Thames swan owners, currently only two London livery companies - the Vintners and Dyers, who both have ancient rights to possess swans on the river. For centuries swans' bills were cut with identifying marks that indicated the identity of the 'swannery' to which they belonged. All over the country abbots, bishops and wealthy landowners raised young swans for their tables and all marked their bird's bills with unique distinguishing marks. These swan marks were granted by the Crown to the various owners. It was a similar process to that of being issued a Crown licence to have permission to develop a deer park on your estate. Between 1450 and 1600, there were about 630 swan marks recorded for different owners of swans on London waters alone. So the monarchy did not claim them all. The marks illustrated below were granted to various owners resident in Lincolnshire. Since these eccentric hieroglyphic barcodes were cut into the birds' bills, the practice was considered to be cruel to by Queen Alexandra and it was discontinued in the early twentieth century.
Royal Society MS 106 pp 6-7. A register of swan bill marks compiled by Elizabeth I's swan master. The various owners are identified to the left of the diagrams. Courtesy of the Royal Society.
A sixteenth century book of swan bill marks. Harley MS. 3405 Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. ff. 18v-19. Courtesy of British Library
So swans were not only kept for looking pretty on your lake or moat, but had a definite gustatory purpose. As early as the thirteenth century they were an item of commerce and were being sold in markets as food. They were not cheap. In the reign of Edward III, they were sold at a price of four to five shillings, making them ten times more expensive than goose. In fact swans were eaten all over Europe and are frequently depicted in table still life paintings, usually sitting on top of magnificent pies. In 2000 I recreated a 1566 livery company feast in which swan pies featured for an exhibition at the Museum of London. I used a painting by David Teniers the Younger (reproduced below) as a model for the pies which had gilded pastry decorations, as well as taxidermy specimens of swans 'swimming' on their lids.
Jan Breughel the Elder, An Allegory of Taste (detail). 1618. The Prado, Madrid
In England, of course swan featured on Christmas menus. Below is the bill of fare for a Christmas day feast published by the seventeenth century master cook Robert May. In the first course item 11 is 'A swan roast'. The second course is regaled with item 6 'A Swan Pye'.
From Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook. (London: 1660)
Nearly a hundred years after May published the bill of fare above, another Christmas dinner featuring a swan pie, this time as a centrepiece for the first course appeared in John Thacker's The Art of Cookery (Newcastle upon Tyne: 1758). Thacker was the cook to the Dean and Chapter at Durham Cathedral where there had been a swannery since well before the Reformation. He gives us a recipe which indicates that the Dean's Christmas Swan Pie would have been ornamented in the style of those depicted in the paintings above.
Bill of fare and recipe from John Thacker, The Art of Cookery (Newcastle upon Tyne: 1758)
By the nineteenth century, swan had gone out of fashion (other than in the wilds of Norfolk). However, the use of taxidermy swans to embellish fancy food items continued, as witness this bizarre trophy of woodcocks, snipe and other game birds illustrated by Theodore Garrett in the 1890s.
From Theodore farrett, The Encyclopaedia of Practical Cookery (London: 1890s)
Although barley-fattened roast swan and swan pie had vanished, swans made of butter, ice cream, aspic, nougat, chocolate and countless other confections graced the entremet courses of the Victorian high class dinner party. Mould manufacturers had a field day producing swans in copper, tin, pewter and wood for kitchen staff to make these decorative sweet substitutes.
I found this cutting in a Victorian scrapbook. I do not know its original French source. It explains how the English performed a trick at the table by concealing a small piece of iron in a butter swan and then with a magnet hidden in a piece of bread, encouraged the swan to swim across a wet plate!
Some English biscuits from a recipe book published in the year of the French Revolution. Left: Toad in a Hole Biscuits, Top: Judge's Biscuits, Right: Fine Almond Faggots, Bottom: Yarmouth Biscuits
Biscuits have been on my mind for some time. Last week food writer and television cook Nigel Slater came to my kitchen to find out about how biscuits were made in Britain before they were mass-produced in factories. Nigel is the presenter of a programme on biscuits which will air on the BBC later this year. We made seventeenth century Shrewsbury Cakes from a recipe collected by John Evelyn and I introduced him to a number of forgotten English biscuits that once graced the dessert tables of the Georgian nobility. Most of these I made from recipes in Frederick Nutt's The Complete Confectioner (London: 1789). These luxury items, designed for accompanying wine rather than tea, are so much nicer than a lot of the manufactured biscuits consumed in Britain today They are also very easy to make. So I have appended some of Nutt's recipes at the end of this article.
My all time favourites are his toad-in-a-hole biscuits, whose name almost certainly arose because of their similarity to the popular Georgian supper dish toad-in-a-hole. This cheap and cheerful delicacy was originally made by covering pieces of meat, usually beef, in a milk, egg and flour batter and baking it in the oven. The earliest printed recipe for the savoury toad-in-a-hole is in Richard Briggs, The English Art of Cookery (London: 1788) published only a year before Nutt's biscuit version. In the modern incarnation of the dish, the beef has been replaced with sausages. India Mandelkern, to my mind the foremost blogger on eighteenth century English food culture, has written a short, but fascinating essay on toad-in-hole, to which there is a link at the end of this posting.
Toad-in-a-hole-biscuits were made from little rounds of almond paste into which one or two dried cherries were pushed before they were baked. Like the Yorkshire pudding batter used in the savoury dish, the almond paste rises as it bakes, enveloping the cherries, thus creating the miniature 'toad-in-a-holes'. Nutt's recipe calls for 'dried cherries'. What he means by this are syrup sweetened and candied cherries, not exactly the same as glacé cherries. I use dried morello cherries which work really well.
If my own favourite from the filming session was the toad-in-a-hole biscuit. Nigel Slater's was Nutt's 'Orange Biscuit', which he said was the most delicious biscuit he had eaten in his life. Tasting like a cumulus cloud lightly spread with marmalade, this fluffy, but incredibly crisp morsel dissolves on the tongue in micro-seconds. If you cannot read Mr Nutt's recipe in the photo below, I have appended a clearer version at the end of the posting.
Frederick Nutt's Orange Biscuits. Photo: Nigel Slater
One biscuit which originated in the early nineteenth century and remained popular for over a century was the Union Biscuit, designed originally to commemorate the Acts of Union of 1801. But why celebrate a political act with a biscuit? I cannot be sure, but I suspect that these biscuits were consumed with wine during the toasts at the end of a formal dinner. Toasts to the reigning monarch, Union etc. took place during the dessert course when biscuits were usually laid out with the other sweetmeats. These little biscuits pirnted with the word Union would have been perfect for nibbling with the sweet wines. They were still fashionable in the early twentieth century when Frederick Vine gave detailed instructions for making them in the second edition of his marvellous trade manual Biscuits for Bakers (London: 1906).
Nutt not only explains the recipe, which is a very basic one, but the process of stamping them with the Union design. His full instructions are below. By 'volatile' he means ammonium bicarbonate, once known as sal volatile, or hartshorn, because it was formerly made by calcining stag antlers. At some point I will publish a detailed posting about volatile and other leavening agents.
Over many decades I have sought out quite a few of the biscuit prints and dockers formerly used by confectioners and bakers, but so far a Union Biscuit stamp has eluded me. However, I do own a remarkable biscuit roller which is carved with a total of fifteen different designs, among which is a Union stamp. Some of the other stamps on the roller are also patriotic. One, emblazoned with VR, dates the roller very definitely to the reign of Queen Victoria. There is also a royal crown, a shamrock of Ireland, a thistle of Scotland and a rose of England. Some of the other designs are decorative and represent ears of wheat, pineapples and a ship's anchor. One is engraved with the word WINE, indicating that it was for making a dessert biscuit to be consumed with a glass of wine.
Frederick Vine gives five recipes for wine biscuits and has this to say on the subject,
'Almost all biscuits not made for special purposes are really wine biscuits; yet in almost every shop you will invariably find a special biscuit made and sold under this heading. Why it should be so, I know not; yet , being so it becomes my duty to direct your attention to the fact, and give a few special mixtures accordingly.'
What he is saying is that most biscuits were once made for consuming with wine. We now of course devour them more commonly with tea. Applying this information to the biscuits that my roller was used to produce makes a great deal of sense. Only one recipe mix was required to make the fifteen different biscuit designs, which I suspect were all intended to be used when toasting. The VR, the royal crown, the Union and the symbols of the constituent countries of the kingdom are all represented. During the nineteenth century the very large industrial biscuit manufacturers, such as Carrs, Huntley and Palmers, Peak Freans etc. produced many different stamped biscuits of this kind. Some like 'zoological biscuits' were moulded in the form of various animals for the delight no doubt of Victorian children, but all were made with the same basic recipe, usually along the lines of Vine's recipe for Union biscuits above. These enormous factories used mechanical rollers to produce their printed biscuits which were made by the million. Despite the competition from these big companies, small scale confectioners and bakers continued to make handcrafted biscuits using the old fashioned techniques described by Vine. However the biscuit roller was a step up from the biscuit stamp and I have had a great deal of fun using it to recreate these Victorian delights.
Twelve of the designs on the roller stamped into some biscuit paste. Note the symbolic flowers of Ireland, England and Scotland above. The pineapple was a symbol much used for a confectioner's shop. The anchor represents the navy. The borders designs of the biscuits represent wheat straw and ears of corn. Although these biscuits can be trimmed down to size with a knife, I think it likely that originally a little rectangular tin cutter would have been used to cut them out more quickly.
Here are the recipes for the biscuits illustrated at the beginning of the posting. All are from Frederick Nutt, The Complete Confectioner (London: 1789). I suspect that some of them, like the fine almond faggots and orange biscuits, are Italian in origin. It is possible that Nutt learnt these from his master Domenico Negri, a confectioner from Turin who founded the Pot and Pineapple in Berkeley Square in the late 1750s. Because of the high sugar content, the orange biscuits blister and spread in the oven, but do not worry. When they are cool, just break off the ragged pieces round the edges and they will look good. The Yarmouth Biscuits are incredibly buttery. Delicious!
Toad-in-a-Hole Biscuits.
TAKE one pound of sweet, and one ounce and a half of bitter almonds, and pound them in a mortar very fine with water, then one pound and a quarter of Lisbon sugar, and mix it very well with the almonds: do not make it too thin, and remember there are no eggs in this; then put one sheet of paper on your wire, and some wafer paper on that, then take a spoon and make your biscuits round on the wafer paper, about the size of a half-crown piece; then put one or two dried cherries in the middle of them; and sift some powdered sugar over them, and put them in the oven, which must have a moderate heat, and when they come out, cut the wafer paper round them, but leave the paper at the bottom of them.
Judges Biscuits.
TAKE six eggs and break them into a copper pan, yolks and whites together, whisk them well for about five minutes, mix half a pound of powdered sugar with the eggs, and whisk them for ten minutes, put as many carraway seeds as you think proper, and half a pound of sifted flour, mix it well with a wooden spoon, and put three papers on your plates ; then take a spoon and drop them on papers about the size of a crown piece, sift some powdered sugar over them, let them be rather thick in the middle, and the oven rather sharp and when they come out, cut them off the paper while hot.
Fine Almond Faggots.
CUT some sweet almonds in halves, put them and some whites of eggs in a bason together ; put a little powdered sugar, to make the almonds stick together, mix them well together in a bason ; put some wafer papers on your wire, make the almonds up in little heaps with your fingers, as big as you please ; sift a little powdered sugar over them, before you put them in the oven ; let them be a little brown, and then take them out, and cut the wafer paper off round them, that is ragged, and leave the wafer paper at the bottom of them.
Yarmouth Biscuits.
TAKE six ounces of currants, wash and pick them very clean, dry them well, rub a little flour among them to make them white, and put half a pound of powdered sugar with the currants upon a clean dresser, add twelve ounces of flour sifted, and half a pound of the best fresh butter you can get; break three eggs and mix all the ingredients together to become a paste that you can roll it on the dresser the thickness of an eighth part of an inch, and then cut them out either round or what shape you fancy.
N. B. Your oven must be rather hot, and put two or three sheets of paper under them, do not bake them too much, only just make them brown.
Orange Biscuits.
TAKE one pound of sweet almonds, pound them in a mortar very fine with whites of eggs ; take ten China oranges, rasp the rind off them very fine, and put it with the almonds ; add three pounds of powdered sugar, and mix. it well, if you find it too thick, put more whites of eggs to it and mix it well; then put two or three sheets of paper under, besides that you have put them on : let your oven have a moderate heat ; drop little round pieces of paste on your paper, about half as big as a nutmeg, and put them in the oven : let them have a fine brown, and take them off when cold.
N. B. Your oven must be rather hot, and put two or three sheets of paper under them, do not bake them too much, only just make them brown.
I have just finished making a table full of early modern period sweetmeats for a BBC production which will chart the arrival of Renaissance culture in England. It will all be dispatched in some carefully packed pizza boxes I have scrounged from the local take away. The photo above shows an assemblage of 'banqueting stuffe' typical of the late sixteenth and seventeenth century. On the large charger on the left are 'cinnamon letters according to arte', jumbals, printed bisket, Shropshire cakes, Naples bisket, artificial walnuts, rolled wafers and date leach. At the back two edible sugar tazze are covered with marchpane in collops, muscadines, white gingerbread, sugar plate playing cards and comfits. To the right of the white hart marchpane is a gilded and painted sugar plate trencher copied from one made of beechwood in the British Museum collection. The white gingerbread figures were printed from an original early Stuart mould in my collection and made from a recipe in Lady Anne Clifford's receipt book in the BL.
There are two edible sugar tazze. One is in Venetian style, the other inspired by the wonderful designs for salts and tazze supported by dolphins by Giulio Romano in the Fitzwilliam Museum. I am truly fortunate in owning a remarkable wooden mould designed to make a tazza of this kind. Next month, I am running a course on sugarwork and confectionery (full up I am afraid) and my students will get a chance to have a go at making one of these themselves.
A group of sugar cavalry officers parade round the Prince of Wales Feathers on top of a Regency period twelfth cake
It seems ages since I had enough spare time to post on this blog. Since we are approaching Christmas I thought I would touch on a somewhat seasonal theme. On some of my recent courses I have been teaching my students how to make and decorate twelfth cakes and include some illustrations of their efforts here.
Some dishes are frequently mentioned in literary and historical records well before any recipes for them appear in the cookery books. A striking example of this is the twelfth or wassail cake, once commonly consumed on the Feast of the Epiphany on the 6th January. Formerly these cakes were made throughout Christendom, with numerous references to them in most European languages. From the Renaissance onwards, there are many tantalising descriptions of them in English sources, but a specific recipe does not appear in a printed cookery book until 1803 (John Mollard, The Art of Cookery).
Although they are first described in the sixteenth century, twelfth cakes were particularly popular in this country between 1750 and 1850, when they were often decorated with sugar or wax figures and other spectacular ornaments. During the Christmas holiday period, city confectioners would dress their windows with these cakes to show off that year's prize creations. Standards of decoration were very high, a fact that should not be too surprising as this was of course Georgian Britain, the age of the Adam Brothers, Thomas Chippendale and Josiah Wedgewood, who all set very high levels of accomplishment in the decorative arts. There are plenty of illustrations of twelfth cakes in contemporary books, newspapers, confectioner's trade cards and the cover designs on packs of twelfth day cards, so we have a pretty good idea of what they looked like. They were embellished according to the prevailing aesthetic trends of the period. Some were embellished with one or two crowns, though this was optional and designs varied enormously depending on the caprice of the confectioner.
A twelfth cake with crown from Robert Chambers, The Book of Days, (London: 1869)
Anyone wanting to replicate a twelfth cake nowadays would probably assume that they were ornamented with royal icing applied with a piping bag. But in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century when this cake was at its apogée, piping had not yet been introduced into England and another, entirely different mode of decoration was used.This was a technique which employed a material called gum paste, made with a mixture of gum tragacanth and powdered sugar blended into a porcelain-like paste with a little water. Gum paste ornaments were pressed out of very finely carved wooden moulds and stuck onto the cake with royal icing, gum water or isinglass.The moulds, sometimes called 'boards' or 'cards' were often carved by the confectioners themselves. Frequently the standard of carving was that of a virtuoso. Although they were used for all sorts of purposes, such as the construction of sugar pieces montées and other table decorations, many of these moulds were carved with motifs specifically intended for ornamenting twelfth cakes. I own two that were intended for making sugar crowns and one other which allowed a confectioner to construct a three-dimensional Prince of Wales Feathers complete with crown.
Two feathers pressed from the mould. To create the curled effect, the feathers are stuck back to back, wired and furled round a small confectioner's rolling pin
This is a close-up of a very finely carved Prince of Wales Feathers motif on a card mould from the late eighteenth century. It was used as a repeating relief motif in the top of the cake below
Dominated by the Prince of Wales feathers, this twelfth cake has been ornamented with motifs pressed in gum paste from late eighteenth and early nineteenth century confectioner's moulds. The crown is surrounded with the national flowers of England, Scotland and Ireland and small relief Prince of Wales feathers.
An eighteenth century card mould used to create the swags and drops around the cake. It also provided the flowers of England, Ireland and Scotland for the top of the cake
Difficult to see in this photograph, but the saddle covers on these horses are marked with GR. They probably date from the early 1820s. Attached back to back gum paste pressings of the two motifs were designed to be combined to make a three dimensional cavalry officer. Like most of these three dimensional features a stiff wire was run up one of the legs so the horse and rider could be attached securely to the cake.
Learn to make a Yorkshire Christmas Pie on my A Taste of Christmas Past Course
Below is the course diary for the period cookery courses I am offering in 2014. Click on the individual links to read more about each course on my website. If you would like to book a course there is a link to the booking form at the end of this post. All 2014 courses are £310 per person. Please book soon as places are limited and they quickly fill up.
Use original confectioners moulds like this to create a remarkable sugar paste neo-gothic church from the time of Lord Byron on my new Advanced Sugarwork and Confectionery Course
My clients come from all over the world. This is Philipp from Vienna, a regular attendant who has just finished off 'jagging' the crinkumcranks on the rim of Daniel Welstead's eighteenth century apple pie
Most of my courses cover the vast, unfathomable depths of British period cookery, but I also have a working interest in the early modern Italian kitchen. This is a loin of veal roasted in an original sixteenth century cradle spit and cooked according to a recipe from Bartolomeo Scappi (1570). The joint is spiked with sage, drenched in malvasia wine, sapa and agresto and roasted over ember-roast onions, prunes, rose vinegar and more malvasia. Amazingly delicious!
Maestro Martino's ravioli in tempo di carne, being cut with an original Italian Renaissance pastry wheel. Try this out on my Italian Renaissance Cookery Course
This, the twenty-eighth Leeds Symposium, focuses on technological advances both large and small in the English kitchen.
There is a much grander three day symposium which will examine a similar subject area in New York City in April, but with a much more international and predominantly US focus. This is the 2014 Roger Smith Conference, which is this year entitled,
I am in New York on 2nd April to give a lecture to the Culinary Historians of New York, but will sadly miss the Roger Smith conference as I have to fly to Ohio State University the next day to give a lecture at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies on 4th April. Maybe I will get a chance to meet some of you at one of these two venues.
I have often thought that if the great biblical deluge had taken place in the eighteenth century and Noah had been an Englishman, all those creatures which God placed in his care would never have survived. They would have all been devoured by Mr and Mrs Noah and all the little Noahs before they even had a chance to go forth and multiply and fill the four corners of the earth. Eighteenth century English diners were serial carnivores and I sometimes think it was their gastronomic ambition to gnaw their way through the entire creation. Just look at this pie baked in 1763 in the kitchen of a long vanished country house close to where I live in the English Lake District.
From the Manuscript Commonplace Book of Richard Hoggart of Clifton, Westmorland. 1760s (private collection)
If you find the handwriting a bit difficult, here is a transcript.
Feb 24th 1763
Contents of a Pye lately made at Lowther Hall
2 Geese, 4 Tame Ducks, 2 Turkeys, 4 Fowls, 1 Wild Goose, 6 Wild Ducks, 3 Teals, 2 Starlings, 12 Partridges, 15 Woodcocks, 2 Guinea Cocks, 3 Snipes, 6 Plovers, 3 Water Hens, 6 Widgeons, I Curlew, 46 Yellow Hammers, 15 Sparrows, 2 Chaffinches, 2 Larks, 3 Thrushes, 1 Fieldfare, 6 Pidgeons, 4 Blackbirds, 20 Rabbits, 1 Leg of Veal, Half a Ham, 3 Bushels of Flower, 2 Stone of Butter - the Pye weighed 22 stone
This makes the heroic Yorkshire Christmas Pies of the period with their fillings of boned turkey, goose and other poultry seem positively parsimonious. The ecological consequences of a pie filled with the fruits of a mass slaughter on this scale must have been severe. I don't suppose much bird song was heard in the Lowther Valley for some months.
But if you really wanted to munch your way through the entire avian population (with a few leverets and baby rabbits thrown in for good measure), why not do it in a more organised way and hold a dinner four times a year to regale your guests with just those birds that are in season. Here are four bills of fare offered by Charles Carter in his rare and much neglected The Compleat City and Country Cook (London: 1732). The ornithologists among you will have fun ticking off the various species on offer here against the twitcher's bible - The British List:A Checklist of Birds of Britain. Not quite all the birds of the air, but still a pretty impressive assemblage and a lot more generous than that modern emblem of plentitude, the 'family bucket'.
I think this justifies my claim that we English were dedicated carnivores, though you must understand that a lot of the birds served up at these dinners, such as the chick peepers, green geese, turkey polts, pheasant polts, squabs etc, are baby chicks, barely just sprouting their juvenile feathers. So as well as enthusiastic zoophagists, we also regularly committed serial infanticide. Unlike his modern equivalent, the Georgian diner had no sentimental barriers to eating babies - they tasted better and were more tender than adults. So what was the problem with a massacre of the innocents?
If a scorched earth ornithological orgy every three months failed to sate your appetite, you could always turn your gustatory inclinations to the scaly creatures of the briny deep. Here is another of Carter's great feasts, this time A Table of all Sorts of Fish, published in his third book The London and Country Cook (London; 1749).
Ever since the medieval period some classes of Englishmen have liked plenty of variety on the table in front of them. Fear of mass extinctions did not cross their minds. This was particulary true at the great livery company feasts in the City of London. The poet Edward Hake, writing in 1579 in his Newes out of St Powles Churchyard describes the variety of birds served at one of these occasions.
The keen bird watchers among you (and thanks to all those who helped me identify water dab as the little grebe) should have fun identifying some of these creatures from their Tudor names. Well over a decade ago I created a table at the Museum of London based on a feast book for the Grocers' Company from 1566. Here is the table, an avian disaster zone if ever I saw one.
I am a fairly committed carnivore myself, but this kind of excess has always troubled me. I am no anthropologist, but I suspect 'heroic' eating on this grand scale must have grown out of male hunting culture. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries one of the most conspicuous dishes of the baroque feast was the olio, a mixed meat stew of Spanish origin which was enjoyed on high status tables all over Europe. It was an edible expression of the extent of the aristocratic host's estates and game parks. Remember aristocratic gentlemen of this period had two main hobbies - hunting and warfare. They did n't usually eat their human enemies, but they often consumed the spoils of the chase on an enormous scale. John Nott, master cook to the Duke of Bolton, tells us in the introduction to The Cook's and Confectioner's Dictionary (London: 1723) that 'this happy Island of Great Britain, which like another Canaan, may properly enough be call'd, a Land flowing with Milk and Honey, so richly is it stor'd with Fish, Flesh and Fowl.' Later in his book he gives the following recipe to make an olio. After he had prepared this gargantuan dish for his noble lord, you might well wonder that even if the nation's rivers of milk and honey still continued to flow, its abundant supplies of flesh and fowl probably became seriously depleted.
Well I hope that one day all those birds and fish and creatures consumed in olios, city feasts and other orgiastic mass extinctions eventually got their own back. Just recently I acquired a lovely copy of my favourite image of the joys of the revenge of the eaten on the eater. Based on Henry Fuseli's celebrated painting TheNightmare, this marvellous satyrical lithograph by MG (1830), shows Lord Mayor John Key being attacked by the creatures that should have made up his Lord Mayor's feast the previous evening, but for political reasons the feast was cancelled by the king. This image was first brought to my attention by my dear friend Gillian Riley when we worked together in 2000 on the exhibiton Eat, Drink and be Merry. It became the banner image of the exhibition so I am so pleased after all these years to have found a nice copy to hang in my own study. I will let the creatures of Key's abortive feast have the last word and I truly hope that that huge green turtle snogging my Lord Mayor has been nursing a really chronic case of halitosis on his long sea voyage from the Caribbean.
However, there is an interesting American coda to this story of carnivorous excess. I passed through O'Hare airport in Chicago a few days ago on my way home from the Twin Cities. While I 'enjoyed' (wrong word) a modest, but pretty awful quasi-Chinese lunch in Manchu Wok in the airport food mall while waiting for my connection to the UK, I contemplated on one of the most extreme dîners à l'arche de Noé ever, served up in the Windy City in 1893.
From Theodore Garrett, The Encyclopaedia of Practical Cookery (London: nd. 1890s)
This edible ecological disaster, almost on the same scale as the mass exterminations of the Great Plains bison, was served to six hundred guests at the Grand Pacific Hotel in February 1893. This was the transatlantic incarnation of the baroque olio, but on an even more horrific scale. It is the culinary equivalent of one of those Victorian natural history museums, stuffed full of stuffed specimens in glass cases, the chief difference being that the diners in the Grand Pacific Hotel stuffed the specimens into themselves. The sheer logistics of hunting these unfortunate 'critturs', let alone skinning and plucking them, cooking them in a Victorian kitchen and finally serving them up with their complex garnishes to six hundred salivating Illinois huntsman is just mind-bogling. And did all six hundred manage to get a portion from the Pyramid of Wild Goose Livers? A wild goose only has one liver. Right? The manager and host of this grand event was called Mr. John Drake. With a name like that I thought he might have had a bit more sympathy with his feathered friends - and furry ones too - check out the black bear, cinnamon bear, opossum, racoon etc. among the roasts. But not a bit of it, in 1883 these annual 'eat all you can of God's creation for $9' indulgences had been going on for thirty-seven years! The 1883 bash was the very last. Drake died in 1895. I wonder if both he and Lord Mayor Key are still being tormented in their own personal circle of Hades by the angry souls of all those sturgeons, turtles, prairie chickens, fox squirrels, butter-ball ducks and cinnamon bears they devoured during their lives. Merry Christmas everyone!
The folks back in England at Windsor Castle kept a pretty good table too. To get you into the Christmas mood, this is a view of the carnage in Queen Victoria's game larder in 1857 at Yuletide. Note the festive holly.
New insights into Britain's extraordinary culinary history sometimes turn up in quite unexpected ways. A few weeks ago a great friend of mine, the sharp eyed Michael Finlay, a fellow Cumbrian with a lifetime's experience of dealing and collecting fine antiques, turned up at my house with an object he had just purchased. The vendor had described it as a Victorian jardiniere. This handsome looking copper vessel did indeed look like it may once have been given pride of place on a window sill, perhaps with a large aspidistra growing out of it. But careful scrutiny of its structure alerted the ever watchful Michael to the fact that it was not what it seemed.
Michael is a truly remarkable man. Over the years he has put together many major specialist collections of antique objects. These include bronze bell mortars, writing equipment and mining tokens. Once he has built up a large and representative assemblage, he then usually writes the authoritative book on the subject and sells the collection to finance his next interest. His remarkable book Western Writing Implements: In the Age of the Quill Pen won the Daily Telegraph book of the year award and now changes hands for hundreds of pounds. In the last few years he has turned his attention to collecting culinary antiques, an interest for which he blames me. In a very short time he has put together a museum style collection of the very highest quality. For instance in just one year he has assembled a truly extraordinary collection of pastry jagging irons, including wonderful rare examples dating from the renaissance through to the nineteenth century. They will form the subject of his next book, which is already taking shape. Michael has just launched a marvellous new website. There is a link at the end of this post.
However, let's return to his copper jardiniere. Michael thought that it had a very close resemblance to a nineteenth century pie mould. He should know, because he has some very nice examples himself and has spent many fruitful hours in my kitchen making pies with them. He was pretty sure he was right, but wanted confirmation from me. From the very moment I first saw it, I knew it had indeed once been a large copper pie mould, but had been subjected to a conversion probably at about the time of the First World War. Its once separate sections had been brazed together and a couple of brass handles attached. It was in fact one of the most unusual pie forms I have ever seen and certainly the most handsome. As you can see from the photograph, it is ornamented with the grimacing head of a horned satyr, perhaps intended to be old Pan himself. What a pie it must have made! A very interesting detail was an engraved ownership mark, an Italianate capital H surmounted by an earl's coronet.
Marks of this kind are often seen on items of batterie de cuisine out of great house kitchens and this particular one was very familiar to me as I had worked many times in the historic kitchen in Harewood House near Leeds, where many items are engraved with an identical symbol. However, there were also earls of Huntingdon, Halifax and Harrington, so the jury is still out as to which noble kitchen it originally came from. But I suspect it is from Harewood. How it came to be turned into a plant pot is a mystery.
Ivan making pies some years ago in the Harewood kitchen using some of the copper pie moulds that have survived there from the nineteenth century
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Michael took the jardiniere to a metalworking friend who skilfully converted it back to a pie mould.Yesterday, we both had a great baking session and used it to make a pie, the first time it had been used for that purpose for at least a hundred years. The problem now is how do I find a butcher who can provide me with satyr meat to make the filling?
Some spices commonly used in the preparation of hippocras - starting in the left hand bottom corner and rotating clockwise - grains of paradise (referred to in the recipes quoted here as grains), galingale, long pepper and cubebs
I recently had an email enquiry from the Australian historian Rachel Grimmer concerning the use of jelly moulds in sixteenth century England at the time of Henry VIII. Of all English monarchs Henry is probably the first to come to mind when thinking of feasting and gastronomic excess, though bills of fare for specific meals at his court are rare. Neither Peter Brears in his excellent book on the food culture of Hampton Court All the Kings Cooks, nor Alison Simm in Food and Feast in Tudor England give any examples of Henrician menus. Nevertheless, a few 'ordinances of fares of the dietts to be served to the King's Highnesse' transcribed from a manuscript of 1526 were published in 1790 in one of my favourite sources on British royal domestic matters, the wonderful A Collection of Ordinances and Regulations for the Government of the Royal Household printed for the Society of Antiquaries. And jelly appears on the menu. In fact a jelly made with the spiced wine hippocras is featured at the beginning of the second course of a royal diet 'on a flesh day' served alongside cream of almonds. (Though some doubt has been raised about this because of the comma separating the words Jelly and Ipocras - please read Tudor Cook's very pertinent comment below).
Jely ypocras seems to have been a royal favourite. It also occurs in an earlier bill of fare for a Henrician feast transcribed from a since lost manuscript in 1672 by the antiquarian Elias Ashmole in his magisterial History of the Noble Order of the Garter. Unlike the 'dietts' of 1526 this earlier meal was for a specific occasion and a very grand one too. In the second course of the dinner held as part of the Garter celebrations at St George's Hall, Windsor Castle on Sunday 29th May in 1520, 'jely ypocras' was again served to Henry XVIII and Queen Catherine of Aragon. As in the 1526 diet it is listed as the first dish in the second course.
How this jelly was presented to table is not indicated. Was it moulded, or served in glass or silver vessels? I don't suppose we will ever know. I have seen a number of carved wooden moulds (all continental) which date from the sixteenth century, but they are all carved in shallow relief and were probably used for printing marchpane paste and cotoniacs. But sophisticated methods of moulding jellies did exist at the Tudor court. A letter dated July 10th 1517, sent to Isabella d'Este, Marchesa of Mantua by Francesco Chieregato, the apostolic nuncio in England, describes a remarkable feast which Henry gave in honour of an embassy sent by the King of Spain. This extraordinary supper, which followed a magnificent pageant and joust, puts the 1520 garter feast and the rather domestic 1526 'dietts' firmly in the shade. Chieregato's comments at the end of his letter on the elegant manners at the English court belie the popular but mistaken image of Tudor dining as a boorish free-for-all. But note the fourth paragraph on the twenty different jellies served at the feast,
' All the knights and jousters then assembled together, and having made a fine procession around the tiltyard, accompanied the King to the palace, where his Majesty had caused a sumptuous supper to be prepared. There were present the King, the two Queens, the Cardinal, all the aforesaid ambassadors, the Duke of Norfolk, the Marquis (of Dorset), and their ladies, together with other baronesses, in such numbers, that at table each man paired with a lady. There was a buffet set out, 30 feet in length, and 20 feet high, with silver gilt vases, and vases of gold, worth vast treasure, none of which were touched. All the small platters used for the table-service, namely “seyphi,” dishes, basins, plates, saltcellars, and goblets were all of pure gold. The large vases were all of silver gilt, very costly and precious.
The guests remained at table for seven hours by the clock. All the viands placed before the King were borne by an elephant, or by lions, or panthers, or other animals, marvellously designed; and fresh representations were made constantly with music and instruments of divers sorts. The removal and replacing of dishes the whole time was incessant, the hall in every direction being full of fresh viands on their way to table. Every imaginable sort of meat known in the kingdom was served, and fish in like manner, even down to prawn pasties (fino alli gambari de pastelli); but the jellies (zeladie), of some 20 sorts perhaps, surpassed everything; they were made in the shape of castles and of animals of various descriptions, as beautiful and as admirable as can be imagined.
In short, the wealth and civilization of the world are here; and those who call the English barbarians appear to me to render themselves such. I here perceive very elegant manners, extreme decorum, and very great politeness; and amongst other things there is this most invincible King, whose acquirements and qualities are so many and excellent that I consider him to excel all who ever wore a crown; and blessed and happy may this country call itself in having as its lord so worthy and eminent a sovereign, whose sway is more bland and gentle than the greatest liberty under any other. After supper his Majesty and the chief ambassador from the Catholic King, together with other lords, danced with the ladies until daybreak.'*
The great Isabella d'Este, the recipient of Chieregato's letter had a real interest in this occasion, as her husband Francesco Gonzaga had gifted a magnificent horse to King Henry which was ridden at the joust. Feasting was an important element of life in the Gonzaga family and Isabella was well used to lavish banquets. Bartolommeo Sacchi (1412-1478), better known as Platina, author of the first printed cookery book had worked for Francesco's grandfather Ludovico II Gonzaga as tutor to his children. It is interesting to see how Cheiregato is trying to impress the marchesa with the scale of Henry's feast and to perhaps correct any stereotypical ideas she may have had about English food.
There were earlier examples of moulded jellies at the coronation feast of the eight year old Henry VI at Westminster Hall in 1429, including one in the form of a 'Gely party wryten and noted with Te Deum laudamus'. So the technology of making elaborate dishes of this kind had been around for at least a century before Henry's jellies in the form of castles and animals were borne to his table on the backs of elephants, panthers and lions.
Although there are recipes for plain hippocras in early sixteenth century cookery texts, a specific recipe for a jelly made with hippocras does not appear until the reign of Elizabeth I. It was published in A. W., A Book of Cookrye, Very Necessary For All Such As Delight Therin. (London: 1584) and is simply called jelly.
In case you find the black letter of the original difficult to read, here is a modern transcription.
To make Ielly.
Take Calves feete and fley them, and faire washe them, and set them on to seethe in faire licour, and faire scum them, and when they be tender sod, faire straine out the licour, and see your licour be verye cleere, and put your licour into a pot, if there be a pottle of it, put a pottle of claret wine unto it, and two pound Sugar, a quartern of sinamon, half a quartern of ginger, an ounce of Nutmegs, an ounce of grains, some long Pepper, a fewe Cloves whole, a few Coliander sads, a little salt, Isonglasse being faire washed and laid in water a day before, Turnsole being aired be the fier and dusted, and when they be wel sod, let it run through a bag, and put two whites of Egs in the bag.
One of the ingredients of A.W.'s recipe is turnsole, a dyestuff commonly used to colour jellies and other foods. It was chiefly made from the fruits of Chrozophora tinctoria, a type of spurge found in the Mediterranean. It appeared in commerce as a rag which you macerated in your jelly mixture in order to release its colour. Henry Lyte in his A niewe Herball or Historie of Plantes (London:1578) tells us that ‘they die and stayne old linnen cloutes and ragges into a purple colour wherewithall in this countrey, men use to colour gellies, wynes, fyne confeciones and comfittes.' More on turnsole and its applications in the kitchen in another post.
Chrozophora tinctoria or turnsole. Be careful with this plant. Like other members of the Euphorbiaceae, it contains toxic glucosides. Put it in your jely ypocras at your peril.
William (Gugliamo) Jarrin (1784-1848). Stipple engraving (1820).
I have not posted an article on this blog for ages. A number of demanding TV and museum projects have conspired to make me so busy that I have had no time to add anything in the past couple of months. So with all this going on, I thought I would set aside an hour or two to share with you a recent and remarkable find.
I have frequently mentioned the Italian confectioner Willliam Jarrin on this blog. Resident in London in the first half of the nineteenth century, his book The Italian Confectioner (London: 1820) provides a remarkable insight into the extraordinary world of the European confectioner of this period. In my own practical endeavours in this field, I have learnt more from Jarrin's writings than from any other printed historical source. He came to London from Paris in 1817 to work as an ornament maker for the celebrated London confectioner James Gunter. Even by this time the young Italian was a consummate practitioner of sugar sculpture. In his book he boasts of an occasion when he produced a gum paste piece montée for an entertainment in Paris attended by Napoleon, which included a full length sculpture of the Emperor himself. Napoleon was apparently impressed with his work. Jarrin tells us that he preferred to freely model in gum paste, but he also pressed the material into wooden moulds to make all sorts of motifs for various purposes. Like many confectioners, he carved his own moulds, his preferred woods being pear and box. In a chapter entitled Engraving on Wood, he claims that anyone with enough patience could learn to carve moulds of this kind. In 1820, he tells us that he had been practising the art for 16 years, which would have made him 20 years old when he started.
Until a few days ago, I knew of only one surviving sugar paste mould actually carved by Jarrin, a small slab of pear wood engraved with the figure of a drunken man and two busts - one a man in a tricorn hat, the other a Turk in a turban. This mould is signed Jarrin Fecit (Jarrin he made). These intaglio motifs are for making free-standing features - once knocked out of the mould, the two halves were joined together. He probably used these figures for ornamenting the tops of twelfth cakes, for which he was famous. Unfortunately, I have not yet located any images of Jarrin's ornamented cakes. But in the trade card below, advertising the wares of one of his London competitors, a twelfth cake surmounted by a group of tiny figures can be seen on the stand on the right.
Now we know of another mould carved by Jarrin, because yesterday I bought a small, but spectacular collection of early nineteenth century confectioner's moulds, which included the striking specimen below which depicts a winged Egyptian mask signed by him on the side. Unusually it is dated - 1820, the very year in which his book was published and portrait engraved. You can imagine my excitement! It is also exceptionally large, taking up almost the full length of a ten inch long block of pear wood. The mould still retains small residual patches of gum paste and starch, though it would be romantic to think that these were left by Jarrin, as the mould may have been used by a more recent confectioner. Jarrin was declared bankrupt in 1828 and in an inventory of his goods are listed 'Moulds, tools and different apparatus' to the value of £200. No doubt this newly discovered mould was once among these items.
An illustration of wood carving gouges from Jarrin's book
Egyptian motifs in architecture, furniture and the decorative arts were very popular at this period. Napoleon's campaign in Egypt (1798-91) and Nelson's victory at the Battle of the Nile (1798) had created a fashion for all things Egyptian in both France and England. In 1807, the Sèvres manufactury near Paris produced a vast porcelain dessert service based on Egyptian motifs which was gifted by Napoleon to Czar Alexander I. It can be seen at the marvellous Kuskovo Palace Museum near Moscow. Another version is on display at Apsley House in London, originally ordered by Napoleon for Josephine, but given as a gift to the Duke of Wellington by Louis XVIII of France.
The spectacular 1808 Sèvres Egyptian Service laid out in the Kuskovo Palace Museum
Two seminal publications, Charles Percier and Pierre François LéonardFontaine's Recueil de décorations intérieures (Paris:1801) and Vivant Denon's Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte (Paris:1802) both contained beautiful plates which helped spread the trend for Egyptian based design. In England, the traveller and interior decorator Thomas Hope (1769-1831) was one of the arbiters of taste who was instrumental in popularising the fashion for all things Egyptian in London. His book Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (London: 1807) includes an engraved illustration of an Egyptian room in his own house in Duchess Street off Portland Square, which he designed to house his collection of Egyptian antiquities.
Thomas Hope, Household Furniture & Interior Decoration. (London:1807).
Some of the most extraordinary examples of Egyptian influenced tableware from this period are a series of silver tureens designed by the great Regency silversmith Paul Storr. The earliest set was made as part of the 'Grand Service' for the Prince of Wales, later George IV (1762-1830) in 1802-3, for his dining table at Carlton House. In 2000 the Royal Collection generously lent one of them to us for the exhibition Eat, Drink and be Merry and there are some excellent photographs of it in the book of the same name, which I edited. A very similar set made in 1807-08 for the Duke of Cumberland can be seen in the Gilbert Collection in the V&A. Unlike the Royal Collection set these are not gilt. If you look carefully at the example below, you can see an Egyptian winged mask very much like that carved by Jarrin on the lower part of the bowl.
A close-up of Jarrin's as yet uncleaned mould- a pharaoh complete with remnants of sugar paste and starch
So the Prince Regent and his Carlton House guests enjoyed their soups served from Egyptian style tureens But what of Jarrin's mould? It is a sugar paste mould, probably used to make a motif for a complex sugar caprice for a dessert centrepiece. Certainly something much grander than a twelfth cake. When gilded this object was probably indistinguishable from some of the real silver gilt metalwork on the table. So did Regency diners actually enjoy eating food with a pharaonical theme? Well the evidence points to the fact that they did and not just as sugar decorations on fancy table ornaments. After the Battle of the Nile in 1798, Josiah Wedgewood started manufacturing creamware flummery and jelly moulds with Egyptian motifs. He produced moulds embellished with such motifs as the Nile crocodile, the sacred musical instrument known as a sistrum, funeral urns, lotus flowers and dozens of other ancient Egyptian symbols. Below is a selection of some of these unusual moulds.
Early nineteenth century Wedgewood mould with Egyptian motif. Photo: Mike and Sue Witts
A couple of months ago, I was called upon to produce a full Regency ball supper for a forthcoming BBC documentary called Pride and Prejudice, Having a Ball. The programme celebrates the bicentenary of Jane Austen's wonderful novel by attempting to recreate the Netherfield Ball at Chawton Hall, her brother's home in Hampshire. It will be screened here in the UK fairly soon on BBC2. As this was meant to be a recreation of a Regency ball, I decided to have at least one ancient Egyptian themed dish on the supper table. So I used a mould in my collection which turns out the curious jelly below. In classical Greece this ram's skull was known as an agricranion, but in this version the skull is surmounted by a sacred lotus flower, so Wedgewood's designer probably concocted it from an Egyptian image he had seen somewhere or other. I cannot guarantee if you will see this colourful dish on the table in the programme, as I have no control over how it will be edited. Besides, across the first course and the dessert there are over 71 different dishes served out in a full scale à la française supper, so if you blink you will probably miss it anyway. Once the programme is aired I will post some details about the food and table setting that I am sure will be missed in the narrative.
As the nineteenth century rolled on, culinary Egyptomania continued and was particularly well expressed in a number of pharaonical ice creams. Ice cream pyramids, obelisks and even sphinxes appeared on the scene. In my own collection I have a couple of obelisks complete with hieroglyphics and the two small sphinx moulds below.
Nineteenth century three part ice cream moulds. Being an Italian, Jarrin specialised in ices and a whole chapter is devoted to them in his book. He even had his own ice house in Cromer Street near Kings Cross. When he went bankrupt in 1828, he owned £200 of pewter utensils.
I mentioned at the beginning of this post that I acquired Jarrin's Egyptian mould in a group of others. The remainder are unsigned, but Jarrin had a distinctive carving style and I suspect that some may also be by his hand. One of these allows a crown to be made out of sugar paste by flexing the sugar pressing round a former into a circle, a common technique that was also used to make three dimensional sugar baskets. I thought at first this may have been for making a royal crown for the top of a twelfth cake. But on the verso of the same mould - it is carved on both sides - there are some large ostrich feathers. In fact it was actually designed to make a sugar Prince of Wales feathers ornament.
One of Jarrin's contemporaries, the Yorkshire confectioner Joseph Bell, actually illustrated a cake surmounted by a sugar paste Prince of Wales feathers in his ATreatise of Confectionery (Newcastle upon Tyne: 1817). Bell's cake is decorated with swags and drops, garter stars and patriotic emblems in the form of the flowers of England, Scotland and Wales. I own plenty of Regency period moulds for making all of these ornaments, with the exception of the lion and the unicorn. But I expect one day they too will turn up. When they do, I will make the cake for you.
By the way, the ghost of Joseph Bell's daughter Eleanor is said to haunt the beach at Scarbororough, where he had a confectioner's shop. In 1804 she was tragically murdered and her body left on the beach at Cayton south of the town. Her killer was never found. More on her distraught father Joseph, another forgotten British 'food hero' in a later post.
For information on the influence of the Egyptian style in Europe, see Patrick Connor ed., The Inspiration of Egypt: Its influence on British Artists, Travellers and Designers,1700-1900 (Brighton Borough Council, Brighton, 1983); and Jean-Marcel Humbert, Egyptomania: Egypt in Western Art, 1730-1930 (Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, 1994).
Agnes Marshall's Parisian Cucumber Cream servedon a base of nougat paste and pistachios glazed with boiled sugar. The highly realistic cucunber is flavoured with finely chopped angelica, pistachios and maraschino or noyeau.
For many years a favourite dish of mine has been a 'ragoo of cucumbers', a lightly cooked cucumber stew, a variety of recipes for which are included in most English cookery books of the eighteenth century. I frequently serve it to guests who attend my courses. All appear to enjoy it immensely, but often express surprise that the English once had a variety of cooked cucumber dishes. Nowadays, cucumber is rarely used in this country outside a few Michelin starred restaurants other than as a raw salad ingredient. So they are even more surprised when I explain that cucumbers in Georgian England were often preserved in sugar syrup as a 'wet' sweetmeat for the dessert course. In the late Victorian period they were even used to flavour ice creams and sorbets. Some ice cream makers took this to extreme lengths, even moulding their cucumber flavoured ices into the form of trompe l'oeil cucumbers, so realistic that they were barely discernable from the real thing.
This recipe is one of a number for cucumber ices in Agnes Berthe Marshall, Fancy Ices (London nd 1890s)
Mrs Agnes Berthe Marshall, the great entrepreneurial London based cookery teacher of the late Victorian period, not only offered a number of cucumber ice cream recipes in her books, like the one above for Parisian Cucumber Cream, but also sold life size cucumber moulds in her showroom in Mortimer Street. I recently acquired one of these moulds and have 'test driven' it a few times in the process of replicating some of her cucumber ice recipes.
A page from a Harton and Son ice cream mould catalogue (second half of the nineteenth century). Harton and Son were an important London pewter manufacturer who specialised in making novelty ice cream moulds. Among the ice creams illustrated on this page is a cucumber mould.
When they are both full, the two halves of the mould are closed tightly together, the pins inserted and any excess ice cream wiped off. The seams of the mould are then sealed with butter or lard to stop the ingress of any saline solution, and the mould wrapped in brown paper. This little 'parcel' is then plunged into a bucket of ice and salt and left to freeze for about three hours. The finished ice is removed from the mould by dipping it into cold water for about 11 seconds. The brown paper stops pieces of ice from freezing onto the mould.
A popular small mould used as a garnishing ice was in the form of a pickled cucumber or gherkin. An ice made from such a mould is one of the garnishing ices here embellishing this large water ice in the form of a beehive.
The Burghley Nef. Nautilus shell with parcel-gilt silver mounts, raised, chased, engraved and cast, and pearls. France 1527-1528 Courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum
Christmas is a time for celebrations and parties, though the style of our entertainments has changed over the centuries. In the past, the really big day for a blowout was the last day of the Christmas holiday - Twelfth Day. Almost half a century ago I came across the passage below in Robert May's The Accomplisht Cook (London: 1660) for a twelfth day entertainment. I was in my early teens when I first read this hilarious account of a slapstick performance at the end of a great Jacobean feast and it really fired my schoolboy imagination. Since then the passage has been much quoted and with its pies full of skipping frogs and flying birds, is the sort of thing that reinforces the modern reader's conception of early modern period dining as a 'Baldrick-style' free for all. If you have never come across it before, please read it now. It is great fun.
From Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook (London: 1660)
Just the sort of thing that television producers of 'food history' programmes and tabloid journalists love. Though in in my view this kind of thing can act as a serious distraction, because it tends to reinforce the 'four and twenty blackbirds' stereotypical perception of British food history, when the truth about our gastronomic past is much more complex.
However, when I was in my mid-twenties back in the 1970s, I actually had a bash at re-staging the whole thing, not to celebrate twelfth day, but for a friend's twenty-first birthday party. With three pet canaries (unharmed) and five frogs from my father's pond (slightly puzzled by the experience but who lived to tell the tale) I made some hollow pies according to May's instructions as temporary homes for these creatures. I proceeded to construct a paste-board (cardboard) armature in the form of a ship's hull and covered it with pastry. I furnished it with cannons made out of kickses (hollow cow parsley stems) and foolishly charged them with some homemade gunpowder. The rigging I made from twine and the sails from wafer paper. I also constructed a castle out of pastry and armed it with the same kind of ordinance. The pastry stag proved more difficult, but I owned a copy of Conrad Hagger's marvellous Neues Saltzburgisches Koch-Buch published in Augsburg in 1719 and made a seated pastry stag along the lines he illustrates. I concealed a pig's bladder inside the stag, which was half filled with red wine and tied with cord so it did not leak.
Diagrams for making pastry deer from Conrad Hagger, Neues Saltzburgisches Koch-Buch (Augsburg: 1719)
We blew the insides out of a dozen eggs, melted candle wax over one of the holes, filled them with rosewater with a syringe and sat them upright in the salt sea around the pastry galleon and stag. All the pies, the stag, ship and castle were all gilded 'over in spots' as in May's instructions. Unfortunately, I overloaded the cannons on the pastry castle with too much gunpowder and when we lit the fuses, the shattered pastry battlements blew across the table, knocking one of the stag's antler's off. The cannons on the ship behaved a little better, though one of the sails went up in flames. Until then I did not realise how well rice paper burns when ignited. Fortunately a quick thinking guest, in the spirit of the occasion put the flames out by emptying a couple of rosewater filled eggs over the ship's rigging.
As to the frogs, when the lid of their pie was lifted, they refused to budge and despite the noise of the cannons just sat there looking comatose. May explains what should have occurred, 'Out skip some Frogs, which make the Ladys to skip and shriek', but this did not happen. The frogs having found a nice dark warm home, they decided to hibernate. The ladies present hardly noticed them. My friend Andrew's tame canaries did fly out of the pie and took off around the room, but failed to put the candles out. Andrew eventually coaxed them back into their cage. I do not think the 'blood stains' created by the red wine when it poured out of the stag were ever successfully removed from that rather expensive linen table cloth belonging to Andrew's mum. Forty years later I still feel guilty about it. Seen from today's point of view, the whole thing was ill-conceived and a health and safety nightmare. We were lucky that the house did not catch fire.
Examine this carefully and you will see that the pies and birds are gilded 'over in spots', just as Robert May describes in Triumphs and Trophies of Cookery. Jan Breughel the Elder, An Allegory of Taste (detail). 1618. The Prado, Madrid
Though terribly misguided, I must admit that my juvenile recreation of this event was a lot of fun. But the question I asked myself afterwards was did this sort of thing really happen at great feasts, or was it just something that May invented? He tells us that before the English civil war, 'These were formerly the delights of the Nobility, before good Housekeeping had left England'. But are there any accounts of events like this being held at court or in some of the great ducal palaces?
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The nef was an important symbol of status on the medieval table. From the Grimaldi Breviary. Ghent and Bruges 1515-20. Ms. Lat. I, 99. Courtesy of Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice.
There are some elements of truth in May's account, though we have to look to the European mainland to find the evidence. Take May's pastry ship with its firing cannons for instance. In France and the German speaking parts of Europe, there had been a custom dating back to the medieval period of embellishing the aristocratic table with a miniature ship called a nef, usually made of goldsmith's work. These frequently served as ceremonial salts and graced many a high status renaissance table. Good examples of these precious objects have survived, such as the Burghley Nef (1527-28) in the Victoria and Albert Museum, illustrated at the beginning of this post. In the second half of the sixteenth century, in German towns such as Augsburg and Ulm, clockmakers started turning their hands to making nefs which doubled up as table automata. Some even had crew members who climbed up the rigging or played musical instruments. Others were fitted with miniature cannons which could actually be loaded with gunpowder and fired, like the example below by Ulm silversmith Joss Mayer.
Table centrepiece or nef in the form of a galley by Joss Mayer (active 1573-1609) Ulm. Silver gilt. The guns can be loaded with powder and fired. Courtesy of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien.
Table centrepiece in the form of a ship. Hans Schlottheim (1544-1624). Silver gilt, brass, enamel with oil painted sails. A mechanism driven by a mainspring and fusee is concealed within the hull. Augsburg 1585. Courtesy Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Another remarkable survival of a nef style table automaton is also to be found in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It was made for Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612) by Augsburg silversmith and clockmaker Hans Schlottheim (1544-1624). A small statuette of the emperor stands on the deck. The ship's masts fly flags emblazoned with the imperial double eagle, so the vessel represents the Hapsburg Empire itself securely captained by Rudolf. The ship actually moves across the table as if putting to sea while miniature musicians play sackbuts and timpani, the finale being a salvo fired by the cannons. A marvellous video of the whole performance has been produced by the curatorial staff of the Kunstkammer in Vienna which I have included below. Please, please play it, as it is an absolute treat. And if you get a chance, visit the superb new Kunstkammer layout in the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum, where you will be able to see the real thing and a number of other remarkable table automata.
Although made from precious metals with oil painted sails, Rudolf II's warship is highly reminiscent of May's more humble pastry version. May was born in 1588, just three years after Schlottheim made his ingenious galleon for the Hapsburg emperor. As a child apprentice cook he trained in Paris between 1598 and 1603 and it is possible that he may have come across similar table automata while in France. Fame of the remarkable example in Emperor Rudolf's kunstkammer had certainly spread across Europe by this time.
Conrad Hagger's designs for pastry stags were published much later - in Augsburg in 1719. Like May, Hagger was an 'old school' cook who worked for the prince archbishop of Saltzburg, a conservative ecclesiastical patron who presided over a table that was more in the style of a renaissance prince than of an enlightenment cleric. Remember, Augsburg, where Hagger's book was published, was also the town where Schlottheim fabricated his Schiffsautomat for the emperor's table.
So, we have parallels for May's cannon firing ship and his pastry stag, but what about the pastry castle and the pies filled with birds and frogs? Pies in the form of castles go back a long way. In the medieval recipe collection The Forme of Cury (1390s), there is a receipt for a complex pastry in the form of a battlemented fortress called a Chaselet (little castle). Each tower is stuffed with a different filling and presented to table ardent, that is flaming with burning brandy. William Rabisha in The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected (London: 1661) gives some very similar recipes, including this 'orangado pie' in the form of a castle,
An orangado pie in the form of a castle from William Rabisha, The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected (London: 1661)
These curious structures were also made out of sugar paste. The extraordinary mould below, which is in my own collection, was designed for making a battlemented gatehouse out of gum paste.
So what about the blind-baked pies filled with live birds? Well that is a very old joke, the earliest recipe in English being published in 1598 in a translation of Giovanne de Rosselli's Epulario,
Title page of Giovanne de Rosselli, Epulario quale tratta del modo de cucinare ogni carne, ucelli, pesci, de ogni sorte, e fare sapori, torte, e pastelli al modo de tutte le Provincie. (Venezia: 1555). Rosselli's work was first published in Venice in 1516. It heavily leant on the Libro de arte coquinaria by Maestro Martino, though its content varied in later editions with extra recipes being added by the publishers.
Here is Rosselli's original recipe, from which the English version above was translated. Per fare pastelli volativi literally means 'To make pies of flying birds'.
The original recipe in Italian for the pie filled with living birds from Giovanne de Rosselli, Epulario. (Vinegia: 1594).
So to sum up, May's extraordinary Triumphs and Trophies of Cookery passage contains elements of culinary extravaganzas from all over Europe. The eccentric live bird pies appear to have been based on the pastelli volativi of Renaissance Italy. The nef, which originally emerged in France was fiddled around a bit by the automaton makers of Augsburg, who added a few firing cannons and musical sailors for dramatic effect. The pastry stag featured at Imperial Hapsburg bean-feasts. Even May's use in the title of the passage of the word 'triumph' is a rare reference in English to the Italian name for an elaborate table ornament made of sugar - iltrionfo.
This kind of thing had died out in England well before the Civil War, though if Hagger's illustrations are based on actuality, similar entertainments were still being carried out in the Archbishop's palace in the Hapsburg city of Salzburg as late as the early eighteenth century. Four years after Hagger's book was published in Augsburg, John Nott in The Cook's and Confectioner's Dictionary (London: 1723) re-wrote May's text, presenting it as an antiquarian curiosity. Here is his version. He refers to the long dead May as an 'ancient artist in cookery'.
'Divertisiments' and 'diverting Hurley-Burleys' of this eccentric nature did take place at some European courts, though it is likely that many of the real triumphs of the table were made by the goldsmiths and clockmakers of renaissance Augsburg rather than pastry cooks. Below is another video of a remarkable table automaton made for the imperial Hapsburg kunstkammer, this time by the Augsburg goldsmith and inventor Achilles Langenbucher (1579-1650). He fabricated this wonderful triumphal car with Minerva in Augsburg in 1620. Like Schlottheim's Schiffsautomat, this Triumphwagen travels down the middle of the table, its two horses rearing up as it goes. Do watch it. Again, it is a remarkable insight into the lavish entertainment style of the renaissance Hapsburg emperors.
My favourite Christmas tipple - Punch Royal - but why the orange peel? Recipe and explanation below.
I was recently given a small job by a television production company to check the historical accuracy of the script of a programme about Christmas drinks. Though it only dealt with a limited number of period tipples, the show, which will be transmitted by the BBC over the holiday period, was fairly well researched and I only identified a few issues that needed changes. One of these was an erroneous statement that 'mulled wine' was first mentioned by the poet Geoffrey Chaucer in 1386. This was probably based on a search on Google which yielded information about the medieval spiced beverage hippocras, a cordial wine used as a digestive after a meal and as a celebratory drink at weddings and other important events. The researcher had come across this line from Chaucer's Merchant's Tale,
'He drynketh Ypocras Clarree and Vernage Of spices hoote tencreessen his corage'.*
She assumed that the word hoote (meaning hot) referred to the wine, implying that it was heated up before serving. Chaucer was in fact using the adjective 'hoote' to describe the warming nature of the spices as understood in the Galenic system of medicine - just as we would today describe ginger and pepper as being hot. He did not mean that the wine was served heated up. Although hippocras is almost certainly one of the the noble ancestors of our modern European mulled wines, glühwein etc., I have never come across any instructions in medieval or early modern period recipes to serve it hot. The overwhelming evidence indicates that hippocras was imbibed cold, though I don't suppose we will ever be totally sure about this. A number of Victorian and some latter-day commentators have assumed that hippocras was served hot on the basis of scant or no evidence.
Mulled Wine
Making assumptions about how our ancestors ate and drank based on the nature of our contemporary culinary practices is a common error. Food and drink in the past were often very different to our own, as was the culture that surrounded them. Take our modern understanding of mulled wine for instance. Although the word 'mull' starts to occur in the early seventeenth century, recipes for 'mulled ale' and 'mulled wine' do not appear in any frequency until late in the following century. Among the earliest to appear in print are these by the Manchester confectioner Elizabeth Raffald,
From Elizabeth Raffald, The Experienced English Housekeeper. Manchester: 1769)
With its egg yolks and slices of toast, as well as the method of pouring it backwards and forwards from one vessel to another, the mulled wine of Raffald's Georgian Manchester bears little resemblance to that served at the German style Christmas fairs that have been springing up all over England recently. Raffald gives a second recipe for 'mulled wine' which actually contains no wine at all, though I expect this is a mistake, as it is identical to other Georgian recipes for mulled milk, a kind of hot spicy custard served with toast as a supper dish. In 1795 Sarah Martin, housekeeper to Freeman Bower of Killerby Hall, Bawtry, Yorkshire, borrowed Mrs Raffald's book title in her The New Experienced Housekeeper (Doncaster: 1795). However, Martin did not steal Raffald's mulled wine recipe, as her version is distinctly different. Its most interesting feature is her very specific use of 'mull' in the context ''mull it backwards and forwards till frothed and smooth', indicating that the verb was being used to describe this action rather than meaning to heat.
From Sarah Martin, The New Experienced Housekeeper (Doncaster: 1795).
Our ancestors were very found of comforting winter nightcaps like these, particularly at supper. In a world without central heating or electric blankets, you can understand why these hot beverages were so popular before the dreaded ascent of the stairs to an often ice-cold bed chamber. The medical books of the eighteenth century are full of references to mulled wine, often combined with more powerful medicaments for treating all manner of disorders. Both Raffald's mulled wine and ale, with their fusion of egg yolks, spice and alcohol were really types of caudle, a beverage often consumed in a medical context. When cream or milk was added to the alchemical formula, these restoring beverages were usually called possets. Variations on the theme were legion, often requiring specialist cups or pots in which to to serve the drinks. Mrs Raffald instructs us to serve her mulled wine in a chocolate cup. The two examples illustrated below were made during her lifetime. They are both as far as you can get in terms of elegance from the utilitarian plastic cup out of which I drank some modern mulled wine at the marvellous Arundel Christmas Fair a few weeks go. When it comes to elegance the Georgians knock us in to touch every time.
Caudle or chocolate cup, cover and saucer of soft-paste porcelain painted with enamels and gilded. Derby porcelain ca.1770. Courtesy V&A. This set was made a year after Raffald's recipe for mulled wine was published.
Bishop, Lawn Sleeves, Cardinal and Pope
One hot spiced drink, which a few years ago we never heard much about, but which recently has practically gone viral on the web - there are that many postings about it and none of them terribly accurate - is 'Smoking Bishop'. If it sounds vaguely familiar, you may recall it as the Christmas draught that Ebebezer Scrooge promises to Bob Cratchitt towards the end of Charles Dicken's novel A Christmas Carol (London 1842). Scrooge says, 'we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob!'
However, I suspect that Dickens inadvertently coined the name 'smoking bishop'. I am pretty sure that the novelist's intention in using the word 'smoking' was to evoke an image in our mind's eye of a punch bowl emanating clouds of alcoholic steam. This was a great choice of adjective by a skilled wordsmith to create an atmosphere of warmth and good cheer. The drink was commonly known to one and all at the time as just plain 'bishop' and had been since at least the early eighteenth century. I have failed to find any instances of the usage 'smoking bishop' before 1841 when A Christmas Carol first appeared in serial form. A few of Dicken's contemporaries started to use the term in their books a few year's later - Charles J. Lever in Arthur O' Leary (London: 1845) and Henry Dier in Dustiana (London: 1850). But by then just about everyone in the English speaking world was familiar with the antics of Ebenezer and Bob and the name Smoking Bishop had been subsumed into the national imagination. No doubt one of you will write to tell me that you have found an instance of the name before 1841 and bang will go my theory! But that would be great. This is the reason why I write this blog. Let us together cut through the bullshit and celebrate the real truth about the history of our food and drink.
The earliest full recipe for bishop known to me (and it is just plain 'bishop') is to be found in a lovely and incredibly rare book first published in Oxford in 1827 called Oxford Night Caps. This little collection contains recipes for many of the so-called alcoholic nightcaps favoured at the time by the students and dons of the Oxford colleges. In his Year Book (London: 1832), the great Georgian antiquarian William Hone gives a very favourable review of this little forty-two page pamphlet, 'In the evenings of this cold and dreary season, "the dead of winter", a comfortable potation strengthens the heart of the healthy and cheers the spirits of the feeble'. In its pages are to be found numerous recipes for 'potations' such as Rum Fustian, Egg posset, Beer flip and Brown Betty.
Decorative title page of Richard Cook, Oxford Nightcaps (Oxford: 1827)
The author of Oxford Nightcaps, Richard Cook, opens his book with a discussion of the history of bishop. He suggests that 'it derives its name from the circumstance of ancient dignatories of the Church, when they honoured the University with a visit, being regaled with spiced wine'. He then gives the recipe below,
Probably the first published recipe for bishop from Richard Cook, Oxford Nightcaps. (Oxford: 1827).
Jonathan Swift wrote the couplet Cook quotes in 1738. It appears to contain the earliest mention of bishop. His complete poem consists of just four lines, so I will give the full version here,
Come buy my fine oranges, sauce for your veal, And charming, when squeezed in a pot of brown ale; Well roasted, with sugar and wine in a cup, They'll make a sweet bishop when gentlefolks sup. J. Swift, 'Women who cry Oranges' from Works. (London:1755) IV. i. 278.
A few other literary men also seem to have aquired a taste for bishop well before Dickens wrote of it. Boswell tells us that Dr Johnson was very fond of the beverage and Coleridge in one of his poems calls it 'Spicy bishop drink divine'. The ritual of making bishop, especially if you have an open fire, makes for a great kitchen performance. First a lemon has to be spiked with cloves and roasted in front of the fire. This not only releases a flood of essential oil, but also caramelises the surface of the lemon.
Roasting bishop - the clove-spiked lemon toasts in front of the fire
This done, some cloves, cinnamon, allspice, mace and ginger are added to a half pint of water and the liquid boiled until it reduces to half. The room slowly fills with the delicious fumes of roasting lemon and the simmering spices.
Boiling bishop - cinnamon, mace, ginger, cloves and allspice bubble in simmering water until it reduces to half.
Soon added to this is the perfume of the port as it bubbles in a saucepan. The alcohol fumes given off are ignited with a burning paper, resulting in a spectacular electric blue aurora borealis exploding above the pan. If you try this yourself at home be careful not to singe your eyebrows. The way to get it to work is to leave the lid on as the port simmers, light your paper and put it over the pan as you remove the lid and stand well back - pop goes the weasel! As so much of the alcohol is burnt off in this way, it looks like the Oxford scholars preferred their bishop quite weak, which I find rather surprising.
Flaming bishop - the excess alcohol burns off in a spectacular fireworks display
Some lumps of sugar are rubbed on the rind of a lemon and put into a jug or bowl and everything else added. Finally some nutmeg is grated over the surface and the hot bishop is ready to serve. Over to you Ebenezer and Bob!
'Spicy bishop drink divine' - the finished potation 'smokes' in front of the fire with its grate of nutmeg and roasted lemon.
Cook's recipe for bishop was quickly plagiarised, appearing word for word two years later in a rather silly book about food and drink called Apician Morsels (London: 1829) by one Dick Humelbergius Secundus. A slightly enlarged edition of Oxford Night Caps was then published in 1830. Fifteen years later Cook's recipe for bishop was also quoted exactly as it was first printed by the celebrated Victorian poet and cookery author Eliza Acton. Curiously she illustrates the recipe with an amusing engraving of some naked cherubs swimming in what resembles a baptismal font! This image has led to the absurd Wikipedian theory that bishop received its name because it was served out of a bowl in the shape of a bishop's mitre!
Cook's recipe quoted word for word in Eliza Acton, Modern Cookery (London: 1845).
As well as bishop, the gentlemen of Oxford University also enjoyed some other, closely related winter warmers. These were Lawn Sleeves, Cardinal and Pope. Cook tells us that these variants,'Owe their origin to some Brasen-nose Bacchanalians, and differ only from Bishop as the species form the genus.'
Lawn Sleeves was made with madeira or sherry rather than port. To impart a satiny texture, 'three glasses of hot calves-feet jelly' were added. Cardinal was made the same way as Bishop, but with claret instead of port. Pope was made with champagne using exactly the same method. Another variant called Cider Bishop was made with a bottle of cider, a pint of brandy and two glasses of calves-feet jelly. It seems strange to us today to add hot melted calves-feet jelly, but this also appears in a number of other Oxford nightcaps, such as Negus, Oxford Punch and 'Storative' (Restorative Punch). At this time, this crystal clear nutritious jelly could readily be purchased in a prepared block from the butchers.
A plate of prepared calves-feet jelly, a popular ingredient in punches and spiced wines. It was considered to be a restorative and an easily digested food for invalids, but was also appreciated for the satiny 'mouth feel' it gave to the finished beverage.
Wassail Cup or Swig
Towards the end of his little book Cook discusses the celebrated festive drink Wassail Bowl, which he tells us was known to the fellows of Jesus College as 'Swig'. In 1732 a former student at Jesus, the celebrated Welsh Jacobite Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn (1692 –1749), presented the college with a gargantuan silver punch bowl weighing 200 ounces.
Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn, (1692 –1749). Oil on canvas. Michael Dahl.
Here is Cook's recipe for the swig that was once served annually at the Jesus Christmas feasts from Sir Williams-Wynn's enormous bowl, which holds ten gallons of the stuff,
Cook goes on to tell us that earlier versions of Wassail Cup had roasted apple or crab apples added to the mixture instead of toasted bread. He then gives recipes for both the well-known wassail cup variant Lamb's Wool and the lesser known Brown Betty. Sir Williams-Wynn's great silver bowl is actually a standard Georgian punch bowl. Earlier wassailers had drunk theirs from wooden bowls called mazers. In the cider drinking regions of England these were turned from apple wood and frequently ornamented with seasonal greenery and ribbons.
From Frederick Bishop, The Wife's Own Book of Cookery, (London: nd. ca.1850)
During the course of the seventeenth century, the wealthy drank their Christmas wassail, usually at Twelfth Day entertainments, from beautifully turned bowls made of lignum vitae and ivory, frequently adorned with silver bands and mounts.
Wassail drinking set. Lignum vitae and ivory. 1640-60. Courtesy of the V&A. The curious finial on top of the bowl is a box for storing the spices.
The form of the wassail bowl was imitated in some of the very earliest punch bowls, some of which had little spice boxes on top as well as the foot and stem typical of the wassail bowls.
Seventeenth century punch bowl in the form of a wassail bowl. Tin glazed earthenware and lignum vitae
During the course of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, ardent punch made from arrack, rum or brandy started to become as popular as the weaker native wassail drinks made from ale or cider. Usually erved hot in the winter months, by the 1780s it was also being chilled with ice, or even frozen into an alcoholic water ice for summer usage.
Punch Royal
My own favourite Christmas tipple is a drink I first came across in John Nott's The Cook's and Confectioner's Dictionary (London: 1723). Punch Royal is a delicious, but deceptively powerful potation based on brandy and lime juice. It contains no spice and has a lovely clean flavour. I always serve it to guests at my Taste of Christmas Past course in a punch bowl garnished with curling zests of orange peel. Here is Nott's recipe with a couple of others thrown in for good measure.
So why do I serve my punch royal with orange zests hanging over the rim of the punch bowl as illustrated at the beginning of this post? Well over the years I have noticed that many eighteenth and early nineteenth century images of punch drinking show exactly that. Here are a few examples.
Oranges peeled to make long zests for the punch bowl form william Hogarth, A Midnight Modern Conversation. Oil Oainting 1732. Courtesy Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
A definition of zest from John Nott, The Cook's and Confectioner's Dictionary. (London: 1723). In his comment below, Adam Balic offers some other definitions of the word with some fascinating thoughts on flaming zests to flavour these beverages.
These are just a few of the images in which I have noticed strips of orange zest hanging out of punch bowls, though none are 'several fathoms long'. There is a time span of nearly seventy years between the earliest and latest of these illustrations. I have often wondered what the purpose of this custom was. My pet theory is that these strips of what were probably bitter orange peel, would be hung in the punch to impart a nice citrus flavour. If it became too bitter, the peel was removed (rather like we may pull out a tea bag when the tea gets too strong) and thrown on the floor to join the discarded tobacco pipes, empty wine bottles and human debris who could not take their drink. But this is just a guess. It is still a mystery. So can one of you anacreontick enthusiasts out there enlighten me - but only if you have found some convincing evidence!
Can I draw your attention to the comment by the sharp-eyed Adam Balic, which he has posted below. Adam suggests that these early punch drinkers may have been flaming the zests of peel in the candle flames to flavour the punch in the way that it is sometimes done today in making a number of cocktails.
Whatever nightcap floats your boat this season, Plumcake and I say 'Cheers' and wish you all a Merry Christmas.
* Merchant's Tale. 365.
While we are on the subject of Christmas, Ivan was recently interviewed by Michael Mackenzie, the host of the excellent Australian ABC RN First Bite food programme. We chatted about the extraordinary phenomenon of Empire Christmas Pudding, the subject of which Ivan dealt with in a former posting on this blog. Click here to listen to the programme.
