Manuscript Cookbooks Survey
  • Databases
    • Manuscripts
    • Kitchen Artifacts
  • Blog
  • Adapted Recipes
  • History
  • Glossary
  • About
    • About Us
    • About the Project
    • Institutions
    • Contact Us

Meals and Parties

What, Exactly, Was the Tudor and Stuart Banquet?

Posted August 2019 
by Stephen Schmidt 

Banqueting House at Lacock Abbey

By Stephen Schmidt

Henry Frederick

By the time he died in 1612, at only age eighteen, Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, had already amassed impressive collections of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and books. His goal as a collector was to show Europe that a strict Calvinist Protestant, such as he was, could also be a proper Renaissance prince, as much a lover of learning and the arts as any Medici duke. Likely also part of this project was a 448-page manuscript recipe book, now held at the Lilly Library, that Henry Frederick commissioned. This book seems odd to us today, in the same way that many Tudor and Stuart recipe manuscripts do. The bulk of the culinary recipes are given over to preserving (preserves, conserves, marmalades, candied fruits, and fruit jellies), and most of the remaining culinary recipes cover sweets of various kinds: candies, sweet syrups (to be diluted with water to make drinks), sweet gelatins, and biscuits and individual cakes. The clue to the book’s seemingly peculiar slant appears at the end of the volume, in a four-page list of “Severall sort of sweet meates fitting for a Banquett.” Henry Frederick’s book is mostly concerned with the conceits of a specialized type of early modern English banquet, one that consisted entirely of sweets. Although banquets were customary following important dinners, they were far more lavish than desserts, as we now think of them. They were more akin to meals of sweets, and they were often staged as stand-alone parties.1

A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen, first published in 1608

Banqueting stuff was not ordinary food. Besides being delicious, banqueting stuff was believed to boost wellbeing, facilitating the digestion, quickening the mind, and reviving the libido after a rich meal and enhancing various other bodily functions. In addition, banqueting stuff was extremely expensive due to the costliness of sugar, its prime constituent, and its manufacture was difficult, requiring great knowledge and skill, a refined sensibility, and a deft touch. Thus banqueting stuff radiated an aura of exclusivity. Its recipes were popularly understood to be “secrets” kept under lock and key in the closets, or private sitting rooms, of high-ranking ladies and gentlewomen, who relegated the chores of ordinary cooking to their servants but happily prepared banqueting stuff with their own hands, regarding the task as “a delightful daily exercise”—as John Murrell titled his banqueting book, published in two editions, in 1617 and 1623. It makes perfect sense that Henry Frederick thought to commission a book containing the best and most fashionable banqueting recipes. That he had intimate knowledge of this recherché repertory proved his mettle as a great Renaissance prince and future English king.

 

The evolution of banqueting

The kernel of banqueting was a post-prandial custom ratified by Thomas Aquinas, the famed theologian, in the mid-thirteenth century: the consumption of “sugared spices”—perhaps similar to the candy-coated fennel and cumin seeds set out at Indian restaurants—after meals in order to promote the digestion. According to humoral theory, which then governed European medicine, the spices were “hot” and “dry,” while the sugar candy that coated them acted catalytically to speed and intensify their warming, drying effects. Thus they cleared the stomach of the cold, damp humors that supposedly filled it after eating, hindering its function, and the stomach, now warmed, could do its job. Sugared spices were medicines—they were prescribed by physicians—but they were also pleasant, which begged the question of whether they could be legitimately consumed during the many fast days of the Christian calendar. Aquinas decreed that they could, for, he wrote, “Though they are nutritious themselves, sugared spices are nonetheless not eaten with the end in mind of nourishment, but rather for ease in digestion; accordingly, they do not break the fast any more than taking of any other medicine.”2

Candied fennel seeds

During the next three centuries, the little service of sugared spices was expanded in different ways throughout Europe to include various other articles consisting of a “warming” substance coated with or cooked with sugar. Perhaps Aquinas might have drawn the line at the more indulgent of these add-ons (like marzipan), but the medieval elite who could afford such things had little difficulty justifying them. After the West assimilated Islamic medicine, in the late twelfth century, sugar became the most pervasive, most broadly efficacious drug in the medieval European pharmacy, and so anything principally constituted of sugar was very nearly a medicine. Strange as it seems to us today, there was then no clear conceptual distinction between confectionery and preserving, on the one hand, and sugared drugs, on the other. Apothecaries sold, and physicians prescribed, sugar, sugared spices, candied lemon rind, and all sorts of other sugared dainties, including, in those lucky places that knew it, marzipan. Fondant, taffy, and even the fanciful sugar statuary bought out between courses at feasts were all considered medicines, their recipes recorded in medical manuscripts, not in cookbooks.

Pewter Spice Plate, early 17th century

In the well-to-do households of medieval England and northern France, the little service of sugared spices evolved into an after-dinner course consisting of the sweet spiced wine called hippocras (after the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates) and sweetened, spiced iron-baked wafers. This little course, eerily suggestive of the Christian communion sacrament, might also include plain and candied spices, but in the greatest households, the spices were served separately, in a different space, in a repast called a voidee (pronounced VOY-dee). The word is from the French voidée, meaning “cleared,” and it referred to the fact that the voidee took place after the great hall, the scene of dinner, had been cleared of people. The voidee was a veritable feast of sugar. It featured additional hippocras, plain spices (presented on ornate gold or silver spice plates in the palaces of royalty and nobility), and all manner of comfits,3 which were passed in a painted wooden coffer called a drageoir: candy-coated spices, seeds, and nuts; candied citrus peel, plant stalks, roots (like ginger), and nuts; and crystallized flower petals and herb leaves. A voidee of sorts might also be served to honored guests in their bedrooms, after the great hall had been cleared for the night. One such fortunate guest was the Burgundian nobleman Lord Gruthuyse, who stayed the night at Windsor Castle following a feasting for King Henry IV, in 1472. The lord and his servant were shown to a resplendently decorated sleeping chamber and a hot bath in an adjoining room. “And when they had ben in theire Baynes as longe as was there plesour, they had grene gynger, diuers cyryppes, comfyttes, and ipocras, and then they wente to bedde.”4

While Lord Gruthhuyse’s bedtime sugar snack was lavish compared to the little nibbles sanctioned by Aquinas, it was certainly no banquet—nor could it have been, for many of the sugary conceits of banqueting had yet to be invented. Medieval cooks to the elite added sugar to all sorts of dishes, including many where we today would not expect to find it, like fish stews or pastas. But medieval cooks used sugar in very small quantities, as a seasoning, typically to intensify the savor of so-called sweet spices such as ginger and cinnamon and to moderate the heat of hot spices such as pepper, cloves, and cubebs. Thus, very few medieval dishes tasted perceptibly sweet and even those that were sweet were by no means “sweet dishes” in modern terms—that is, dishes that tasted primarily of sugar. In the medieval West, sugar was conceptualized as a medicine and a seasoning. Before sweet dishes could emerge, sugar had to be reconceptualized as a thing that was also eaten, a food.

Ludovico Trevisan (1401-1465), Martino’s ruthless and fabulously wealthy employer (by Mantegna, ca. 1469)

This reconceptualization got underway in the fifteenth century, among a circle of elite Italian cooks, particularly the renowned Martino da Como and his acolyte, Bartolomeo Sacchi (known as Platina), who, in 1474, published many of Martino’s recipes in De honesta voluptate et valetudine (“On honorable pleasure and health”), Europe’s first printed cookbook. In many recipes, Martino merely seasoned (or sprinkled) his dishes with ” a little” or “a lot” of sugar, in the medieval manner, but in some recipes, such as those for “white foods” and tarts of pumpkin, almonds, rice, and marzipan, he called for sugar by the half pound or the pound, making these dishes aggressively sweet. Bartolomeo Scappi’s magisterial cookbook of 1570, Opera di Bartolomeo Scappi , took Martino’s new thinking about sugar a giant step forward.5 In addition to seasoning many meat, vegetable, and pasta dishes with as much as half a pound of sugar, Scappi outlined many dishes in which sweetness was the predominant taste: fruit pies and tarts; sweet custards and cream dishes; all sorts of biscotti and cakes; and pastry-like conceits that made use of candied fruits or marzipan. In short, Scappi presented a repertory of sweet dishes.

Bartolomeo Scappi (1500-1577)

Interestingly, Scappi placed a number of his recipes for sweet dishes in the final chapter of his cookbook, which covers cooking for invalids and the sick, likely because he believed these dishes were healthful. However, Scappi clearly did not believe that sweet dishes were merely health foods, for he makes liberal use of them in his dozens of luxurious dinner and supper menus. These menus open with platters of candied fruits and then unfold in alternating “kitchen courses” and “sideboard courses,” the former comprising hot dishes such as roasts and meat pies, the latter cold dishes that are more or less equally divided between pungent/salty offerings like salads and smoked or dried fish and sweets such as sugared clotted cream, sweet biscuits and cakes, and marzipan fancies. In a nod to the old ways, the menus conclude with a little service of candied spices, perfumed toothpicks, and, charmingly, small bunches of flowers. Like the ancients, the Renaissance Italians viewed dining as an opportunity for pleasure, so it is unsurprising that sugar, one of the most pleasing foods to the human palate, assumed a more central role in Italian cooking.

Sixteenth-century Europe was primed to fall for Italy’s new ways with sugar, and not only because the Renaissance Italians were then Europe’s tastemakers. Starting in the early fifteenth century, Spain and Portugal had established sugar plantations on four Atlantic island chains stretching from the Iberian Peninsula down to the African Equator. By the last third of the century, the islands had swung into full production, and sugar, historically an expensive and even scarce commodity, had become almost cheap, leading to increased sugar use among the elite and diffusing use downward. During the sixteenth century, the new European demand for sugar caught up with the increased supply, causing prices to edge upward again, but higher prices, instead of tamping down demand, only spurred the Portuguese to produce still more sugar in their new slave-driven sugar ventures in Brazil.

“Still Life with Dainties . . .” Clara Peeters, 1607 (Note Peeters’s “banquet letter”–see footnote 1)

Europe had developed a raging taste for sugar, and a host of new factors—the European discovery of the Americas, the maturation of the shameful slave trade, and the quasi-industrialization of sugar refining in Spanish-controlled Antwerp—had created a market capable of satisfying it. Still-life paintings produced across sixteenth-century Europe tell us that hippocras, wafers, fancy comfits of all sorts, preserved fruits, fruit pastes, Italian biscuits, large and small cakes, and fruit tarts had become customary among the European prosperous. Sugar had been reconceptualized. As a French commentator exclaimed, with a touch of horror, in 1572, “people devour it [sugar] out of gluttony. . . . What used to be a medicine is nowadays a food.”6

 

The Tudor and Jacobean banquet, 1535-1625

The Tudor and Jacobean English were especially susceptible to the new sugar craze that the Italians had unleashed on Europe, for they were besotted by Italy and keen to imitate Italian fashions. The English nobility and gentry routinely sent their sons to Italy as part of their education—much to the consternation of scolds like Tudor historian William Harrison,7 who viewed Catholic, putatively licentious Italy as “the sink and drain of Hell”—and they boasted of their likeness to the Italians in manner and dress, however far-fetched such claims may have been.8 During the reign of Elizabeth I some three hundred Italian books were published in England, including English translations of Secrets of Alexis of Piedmont (1558), which gave instructions for tableware made from sugar paste, preserves, and sweet wines, and Epulario, Or, the Italian Banquet (1598), a cookbook containing many of Martino’s recipes as rendered by Platina. Elizabeth herself favored the Italian language above all others, even employing an Italian master and bidding foreign dignitaries address her in Italian. Shakespeare set ten of his plays in Italy, which he may have visited.

The Renaissance English imported many sugared elements of the Italian dinner into the English dinner, but it was a specialized sweets-centered Italian meal called a collation that particularly gripped the English imagination. Scappi’s twelve collation menus (one for each month) proceed in three courses, the first consisting of candied or syrup-preserved fruits and nuts, sweet biscuits, and marzipan, the second a mélange of pungent savory foods and sweet dishes (similar to the sideboard courses of dinner), and the third the same but also including fresh fruit and Parmesan cheese. Scappi’s collations are not merely meals. They are early-evening parties that are staged in some pretty spot outdoors during the spring and summer months—Scappi suggests a vineyard or a garden—and include a theatrical performance or other entertainment.

The early English banquet, which emerged around 1535 and ran through the death of James I, in 1625, was proclaimed by its participants and cookbook authors as a repast of sugared medicines–that is, essentially an expanded voidee, and as such traditionally (and safely) English. However, as everyone had to have known, banqueting was actually a voidee reimagined as a Renaissance Italian collation, and critics looking to ferret out insinuations from decadent, depraved Italy had no difficulty finding them, starting with the banqueting houses.

Paul Hentzner (1558-1623)

Theobalds Palace, recreated model–sans banqueting house

Most privileged English had to content themselves with banqueting in their dining parlors. But, when the occasion demanded, the super-privileged could conduct the affair in a specialized banqueting house. These houses variously perched atop towers, or jutted from manor rooftops, or were nestled in a leafy bower on the manor grounds, providing banqueters with the delightful natural views enjoyed by diners at an outdoor Italian collation, without the risk of being rained on in perpetually rainy England. If the views included formal gardens, which they often did, banqueters even saw what the Italians saw, for the gardens were Renaissance Italian imports. Even more Italian than the views were the banqueting houses themselves, including one that Henry Frederick surely knew, at Theobalds, a palace outside London, which Henry Frederick’s father, James I, visited frequently and eventually acquired. When Paul Hentzner, a German tourist, toured the gardens of Theobalds, in 1598, he stumbled upon a “summer house” whose ground floor featured life-size statues of the twelve Roman Caesars set in a semicircle behind a stone table. Crossing by a “little bridge” to an adjoining “room for entertainment,” Hentzner saw “an oval table of red marble,” which can only have been a banqueting table carved in an ornate Italian style.9

Marble table in Lacock counting room

Theobalds was demolished during the Interregnum, but Italianate banqueting houses, or the remnants of them, still survive in several stately houses in the UK, including Lacock Abbey and Longleat, both of which I visited during a recent trip to the UK. Located in the top story of a tower, the Lacock banqueting house is now occupied by bats and can no longer be toured. But the “counting room” on the tower’s second story, once used for the display of precious goods, is open to visitors, and I was told by a docent that its marble pedestal table, carved with classical motifs around the base, is similar in style to the banqueting table in the top story. Befitting their different functions, the two rooms are otherwise quite different. The walls of the counting house are thick and have just a few narrow windows, while the walls of the banqueting house are thinner and filled with windows, enlarging the room and giving it 360-degree views.

Lacock Abbey tower, with banqueting house at top and counting room below

Longleat, astonishingly, boasts seven rooftop banqueting houses, several of which I was privileged to see. They are intimate spaces that could accommodate no more than six or eight seated at a table. The windows have been bricked up, the interiors have been painted over, and all furnishings have been removed, but the Italian influence is nonetheless unmistakable. Four of the houses are domes, a characterizing feature of Renaissance Italian architecture. Looking out over the Longleat rooftop, one can almost imagine seeing the skyline of Venice in miniature.

Longleat rooftop

Longleat banqueting house interior

Banquet table with marchpane centerpiece by Ivan Day

The bill of fare of the Tudor and Jacobean banquet particularly featured the conceits of the voidee and thereby retained the voidee’s underlying medical justifications. The early banquet always included hippocras and nearly always included wafers, and its most numerous dishes were the nutraceutical conceits of the voidee, namely plain and candied spices and sugared plant materials of all kinds. However, Italian borrowings were numerous, and while most of these had therapeutic value, they strike us today as more geared toward pleasure than cure. Of special importance was the Arabic confection marzipan, a favorite of the Italians since the thirteenth century but unrecorded in England until 1492, where it came to be called marchpane. Any banquet worth its sugar featured a marchpane centerpiece. As typically outlined in period recipes, a marchpane was a thin disc of white-iced marzipan about fourteen inches broad that was decorated with comfits and, on important occasions, surmounted by fanciful sugar statuary. In rarefied precincts, it could be grander still, like the marchpane created by the remarkable food historian Ivan Day, which consists of a marzipan knot garden filled with fruit-preserve “flowers” and a banqueting house in sugar paste. (The footed dishes in the photo are likewise of sugar paste, as is the playing card.)  The Tudor and Jacobean English also worked up tinted marchpane as “bacon and eggs” and other cunning knickknacks, and they doted on the new-fangled baked marzipan cakes that the Italians called macaroons.

Jumbles

Another favorite Italianate banqueting cake was jumbles, from the Italian gemello, or twin. As made in the banquet’s first iteration, jumbles were formed by tying ropes of sugary, anise-flecked dough into elaborate knots, making cakes that resembled pretzels (hence the name) but tasted much like soft German springerle (which may well derive from the same Italian source). Also from Italy were the spice-studded (and thus putatively healthful) banqueting bisket breads, whose Latin-derived name denoted that they were baked twice, first to set the dough or batter and then, at a lower temperature, to render the bisket, or biscuit, dry and crisp through and through. The favorites were “prince bisket,” a precursor to today’s lady fingers (and sponge cake), and “white bisket,” essentially hard meringue with anise seeds. Less favored was the rock-hard “bisket bread stiff,” which was essentially the same as today’s classic Italian anise biscotti and which was surely consumed the same way, first dipped in sweet wine to soften. The Italian banqueting conceits popularly known as kissing comfits are familiar today from the line in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor: “Let the sky rain potatoes . . . hail kissing comfits and snow eringoes . . . .” Kissing comfits were little slips of hard sugar paste imbued with musk, a glandular secretion of an Asiatic deer believed to be an aphrodisiac. The preserved sweet potatoes and eryngo roots (sea holly) referenced in the line were believed to have the same warming effects on the nether regions. One suspects that Aquinas would not have approved.

Sugared fruit preserves were not specifically Italian but they were starring attractions of the Italian collation, so they inevitably became star attractions of the early English banquet too.10

Quince paste (membrillo)

The fruit most commonly preserved throughout early Europe, including England, was quince, in part because quince was believed to have many health benefits, and in part because its high pectin content made possible all manner of jellied conceits. Whole quince and quince pieces preserved in thick syrups appeared on early English banquet tables in myriad hues, from gold, to rosy pink, to ruby red, depending on how the fruit was cooked. Even more fashionable was the quince preserve called marmalade, which the English initially imported from Portugal, where it was invented (and hence its name, from the Portuguese marmelo, or quince), but which the English soon learned to make themselves. Like modern quince paste, often called by its Spanish name membrillo, quince marmalade was a smooth, stiff confection that could be picked up with the fingers, not a nubby bread spread. It was sometimes put up in matchwood boxes, to be served in cut pieces, sometimes “printed” in fanciful individual molds, and sometimes squirted in pretzel-like knots. Quince jelly, or quiddany (from the French cotignac), too, was a stiff confection and was often printed. There were also quince “pastes,” quince “cakes,” quince “chips,” and still other types of quince preserves, whose methods are mostly opaque to me. By the seventeenth century, all of these conceits had come to be made with innumerable other fruits, including oranges, which were worked up into a marmalade that had the same smooth solidity as its quince forebear. So fond were the English of these sugared fruit delicacies that they devised a specialized implement to consume them: the sucket fork (from succade, candied citrus peel). It had fork tines at one end and a spoon bowl at the other, facilitating both the spearing of solid preserves and the scooping of wet preserves and their ambrosial syrups.

Pewter Sucket Fork, London, ca. 1690

Rounding out the fare of the early banquet were several sweets that had long been part of elite English fare. These included the highly esteemed sweetened animal gelatins, called jellies, which typically consisted of a clarified calves’-foot stock flavored with spices and wines and/or citrus juice. Calves-foot jellies were sometimes colored and, in palaces, they were fancifully molded and turned out, but most banqueters encountered them as described in a banqueting cookbook of 1608, “cut . . . into lumps with a spoone.” There was also a specialized jelly called leach (from a French word meaning slice), which was creamy and rose-water-scented and was set with the new-fangled isinglass, made from sturgeon swim bladders.  A favorite banqueting stuff “used at the Court and in all Gentlemen’s houses at festival times,” as Hugh Plat wrote in Delights for Ladies, his banqueting cookbook of 1609, was gingerbread. The common sort, called colored gingerbread (because it was typically tinted rusty-red with ground sandalwood), was made by boiling bread crumbs, wine or ale, sugar and/or honey, and an enormous quantity of diverse spices into a thick paste, which was then printed in elaborate molds and dried to a chalky-chewy consistency. Colored gingerbread originated as a medicine, and it tastes like one: its spicing is almost caustic. In the late seventeenth century, as the banquet petered out, colored gingerbread waned, its name assumed by early forms of today’s baked molasses gingerbread, which came to England from the Netherlands or France.

“Making of cheese,” from a 14th century copy of “Tacuinum Sanitatis,” an Islamic health handbook translated in Sicily. The book glosses fresh cheese as “moist and warm.”

In The English Hus-Wife (1615), Gervase Markham’ closes his banquet menu with fruit, both fresh and cooked, and cheese, either aged (like Parmesan, a favorite Italian import) or fresh cheese (think ricotta, though true ricotta is made differently), which English banqueters liked cloaked with thick cream and sprinkled with coarse sugar.  If the banquet were simply a glorified voidee, fruit and cheese would never have found a place in it, for no medical authority, I believe, would have claimed that these foods served to open up, fire up, and clean out the stomach, as the voidee was supposed to do.11 Fruit and cheese belied the banquet’s spiritual proximity to the Italian collation, a meal geared more to pleasure than to cure.

 

The later Stuart banquet, 1625-1700

In 1600 England imported only about one pound of sugar per capita annually, and most English people consumed far less sugar than that, if any at all.12 Sugar was very expensive, and only the wealthy could afford to use it. And so they did, liberally, especially when they banqueted, and not only because they believed that sugar was healthful and because they really liked it, but also because they delighted in the conspicuous consumption of a substance denied to most. The snob value of sugar began to falter in the 1630s, when the new English sugar colony of Barbados, dependent, as all European sugar colonies were, on the brutal exploitation of enslaved Africans, began to swing into production. By the time of Charles II’s ascension to the throne, in 1660, the price of English sugar had fallen to a small fraction of what it had been in 1600. As prices fell English sugar consumption rose in tandem and, critically, much of the increased consumption occurred within the middling classes.  Thus Hannah Woolley, who styled herself as cookbook author and behavior advisor to the rising professional and merchant classes, provided a range of banqueting plans, from deluxe to cheap, in The Queen-like Closet (1672). “I am blamed by many for divulging these Secrets,” she wrote, referring to the highly privileged, who wished to keep banqueting secrets to themselves, “and again commended by others for my Love and Charity in so doing; but however I am better satisfied with imparting them, than to let them die with me. . . . ”

Once the hoi polloi were able to scrounge enough sugar to banquet, the elite who set banquet fashions began to lose their appetite for unremitting sugar meals. By the last third of the seventeenth century,  the syrupy hippocras was often replaced by lighter fruit and flower wines, and the sugared medicinal tidbits that once covered banquet tables were relegated to a side dish or two. Marchpane, if served at all, came to the table as little knickknacks bought from a comfit-maker; the ancient spice bomb called gingerbread dwindled toward extinction. Hostesses retained their affection for fruit preserves, gelatin jellies, and biskets, but these “ate” differently now, for they were paired with sweet dairy dishes called “creams” and “butters” and with buttery little cakes that we today would call cookies.13

“. . . Dance Around the May Pole,” Bruegel

England had long been a dairying culture, and milk, butter, and cheese had long been staple English foods. This being the case, it seems unsurprising that dairy foods  gained favor at banquets, for all long-enduring foreign fashions eventually begin to naturalize in conformance with native tastes. Tudor and Stuart literature contains many references to dairy foods as the stalwart fare of country folk.  In his 1542 health manual, Andrew Boorde describes cream eaten with berries as a “rural man’s ‘banquet’” (although he decries the combination on health grounds, claiming that “such banquets have put men in jeopardy of their lives.”) Fresh fruits, cream, and local iterations of butter-rich cakes were typical treats of outdoor country festivals like May Day, which Robert Herrick frames as an idyll of “Cakes and Creame” in his famed poem “Corinna’s Gone a Maying.”

Illustrated second course showing barley cream at right (18th century)

The elite, meanwhile,  enjoyed sophisticated dishes called creams in the lighter, sweeter, generally more delicate second course of dinner, which intermixed savory morsels like roasted songbirds, sauced lobster meat, and prime seasonal vegetables with creams and other sweets like gelatin jellies and fruit tarts. Some diners partook only of the savory dishes or only the sweet, while others first nibbled on a bit of lobster and peas and then filled a fresh plate (begged from a waiter) with a fruit tart and lemon cream. Since the elite English were already accustomed to eating creams at dinner, the inclusion of creams in banqueting was logical. Hostesses just had to make sure that the creams served in the banquet were “contrary from those at dinner,” as Hannah Woolley advises her readers in The Queen-Like Closet.

Shrewsbury Cakes, which were marked with a comb (courtesy Susana Lourenco)

Buttery little cakes had begun to steal onto the banqueting scene even before the cachet of sugar had waned. In The English Hus-Wife, Gervase Markham outlined both the then-conventional sugary anise jumbles cribbed from Italy and “finer jumbals,” which he extoled as “more fine and curious than the former, and neerer to the taste of the Macaroone.” The groundbreaking feature of these “finer” jumbles was not the pounded almonds but the “halfe a dish of sweet butter” (six ounces, probably) they contained, along with “a little cream.” In modern terms, Markham’s almond jumbles were rich, crumbly butter cookies. John Murrell finds room for almond jumbles in several otherwise sugary banquet bills of fare set forth in the 1623 edition of A Delightful Daily Exercise for Ladies and Gentlewomen. Murrell also includes two other cakes of similarly buttery composition, Counties Cakes and Shrewsbury Cakes, both of which were regional specialties. By the mid-seventeenth century, butter-laden jumbles—typically sans almonds—had almost completely routed their sugary, anise-flecked Italian predecessors at banquets, and Shrewsbury cakes had become banquet staples. The name “counties cakes” disappeared, but “sugar cakes” “fine cakes” and simply “cakes,” likewise banquet standbys, were much the same thing. In the late seventeenth century, the banquet incorporated a startling novelty: the currant-studded Portugal cakes, likely named for the Portuguese queen consort of Charles II, Catherine of Braganza. While Portugal cakes were compositionally similar to the other buttery cakes, their slightly more liquid batter was beaten with the hand until light and fluffy and then baked in individual fancy tins, making, essentially, little currant pound cakes. Modern Anglo-American baking, with its buttery cookies (or, in England, biscuits) and buttery cakes, was emerging.

Christian IV of Denmark (1577-1648)

When, exactly, the creams and their firmer, spreadable cousins, the butters, joined banqueting stuff is a vexing question. No sign of this momentous occurrence can be gleaned from English cookbooks, either printed or manuscript, prior to the Restoration, in 1660. But other evidence suggests an earlier incursion. What, for example, was Shakespeare intending to convey in that curious line in Romeo and Juliet: “We have a trifling, foolish banquet toward”?  Context makes clear that the impending banquet is a sweets banquet. But do the words “trifling” and “foolish” merely mean silly, frivolous, idle—common period associations with banqueting—or are they also a play on the various creams called trifles and fools, which at some point indeed became banqueting stuffs?  The latter seems possible if John Harington’s hilarious account of a 1606 banquet masque at Theobalds is authentic. Staged in honor of James I and his brother-in-law, King Christian of Denmark, the masque was played by persons whose “inner chambers” were flooded with wine, one of whom tripped and deposited “caskets” filled with “wine, cream, jelly, beverage, cakes, spices, and other good matters” in King Christian’s lap, so soiling his garments that they “defiled” the bed to which the discombobulated sovereign repaired for a lie-down. Alas, we cannot place overly much faith in this cream-soaked story, for it is mentioned by no other Jacobean commentator.14 Henry Frederick’s recipe book is less than ideally helpful on this question. Its recipes for creams appear in a section headed “Cookery,” which contains both dishes served during the principal courses of the meal and banqueting stuffs.

Early-modern English creams divide into two distinct chronological groups: those that emerged prior to 1600 (some, indeed, centuries earlier), and those that became current after 1650. Clotted, whipped, churned, and rennet-clabbered creams all belong in the pre-1600 group. The means by which these creams were given substance were simple, but the creams were not simple in look. The whipped cream called “snow cream” (an international favorite, also outlined by Scappi) was often draped over a rosemary branch stuck into a (cream-shrouded) bread loaf, and clotted cream, at some point in the seventeenth century, came to be sliced, overlapped on an inverted bowl, and sprinkled with sugar and rose water, making the charmingly named “cabbage cream.” Also predating 1600 were various cream custards, some smooth and some intentionally curdled, which often went by the name “cast cream,” as well as the so-called “Norfolk fool,” which consisted of smooth cream custard poured over sack-soaked bread toasts. This dish, no doubt, was a precursor of the later trifle, but, until around 1690, “trifle” designated cream clabbered with rennet. Finally, the early creams included a clutch of medieval dishes that the seventeenth-century English were beginning to refer to as fools. These were made by combining cream with cooked fruit pulp, with or without a thickening of eggs. Apple and quince creams were on the scene before 1600, and possibly gooseberry cream was too. Later, plum cream, apricot cream, and still others emerged.

Syllabubs by Ivan Day

The post-1650 creams included “sack cream,” “raspberry cream,” “orange cream,” and “lemon cream,” which were often made simply by clabbering raw cream with sack, pureed raspberries, or the juice of Seville oranges or lemons (all of which are acidic), but which sometimes involved cooking with eggs. Also part of the later group were the caramel-crusted cream custard called “burnt cream” (that is, crème brûlée), creams made by boiling cream with pounded almonds (“almond cream”), chocolate-flavored creams, and creams consisting of cream cooked with starch (“barley cream” and “rice cream”), some of which were made stiff enough to mold and turn out. A particularly fashionable cluster of late creams were actually jellies (and sometimes referred to as such) consisting of cream set firm with a bone stock or isinglass. These were sometimes served in slices, like the old leach (which was a precursor), sometimes molded in a V-shaped beer glass and turned out, making “piramedis cream” (that is, pyramidal), and sometimes molded in other forms and referred to as “blancmange” (which most Americans today know as panna cotta). Derived from an earlier libation of the same name, the creams called “syllabub” were various and sundry permutations of whipped and/or clabbered cream afloat on wine, cider, or citrus juice. Finally, there was the daring new cream of royalty and nobility that made its first appearance in England during the reign of Charles II. This was “ice cream,” which, as then made, was simply cream that was sweetened with a little sugar, flavored with orange flower water, and still-frozen in a deep pan before being turned out.

Francois Pierre de la Varenne (1615-1678)

There is a reason that the banquet was flooded with new creams after 1650 and became, essentially, a repast of fruits and creams eaten with biscuits and buttery cakes. In the mid-seventeenth century, the French became Europe’s new culinary tastemakers, displacing the Italians. French recipes and French culinary ideas invaded elite English cooking, inaugurating an English vogue for French cuisine that would endure for the next three centuries—along with a corresponding nationalistic culinary backlash. England received much of its first news of the new French cooking through three cookbooks associated with the revolutionary French chef François Pierre de la Varenne:  Le Cuisinier François (1651), of which La Varenne is indisputably the author, and two later works often attributed to La Varenne but likely written by others, Le Pastissier François (1653) and Le Confiturier François (1660). Cuisinier and Pastissier were both promptly translated into English, and the former became a runaway bestseller. Confiturier was not translated into English, but many educated English people of the day knew enough French to read it and no doubt did. The book revealed the secrets of the dazzling French collation, a derivative of the Renaissance Italian collation and thus a cousin of the English banquet. In addition to recipes for preserves, biscuits, macaroons, marzipan, and sweet beverages, which had long been the stuff of banqueting, the book included a chapter titled “Butters, Creams, and Dairy Stuff.” If the French featured dairy stuff at their collations, any bang-up-to-date English banquet hostess was sure to follow suit. Beyond simply ratifying a fashion for dairy stuff at banquets, the French contributed many specific dishes and ideas. The new butters seem to have been mostly French, although inspired by the medieval pan-European almond butter. Burnt cream and almond cream, too, are likely French (although some English people will argue about the former), and the white jellies and ice cream likely came to England under French auspices, although they are not French inventions. The molding and turning out of creams and jellies, which transformed the look of the banquet table, was popularized by the French, who molded and turned out all sorts of things. And beyond the dairy stuff, there were new French biscuits, forerunners of the eighteenth-century French biscuit craze that led the English to spell the word the French way while continuing to pronounce it as they always had. And let’s not forget lemonade, which La Varenne introduced to Anglo-America as a seventeenth-century French collation beverage.

Shortly before the turn of the eighteenth century yet another new-fangled French culinary idea, dessert, pervaded England. The word “dessert” fairly quickly routed the old word “banquet,” but not because early desserts were all that different from banquets in content. What had changed was the broader conception of sweet dishes. Through most of the seventeenth century, sweet dishes were considered special, so much so that even the elite often dispensed with a banqueting course at dinner on ordinary occasions. But as sugar became ever more affordable and familiar, the wealthier classes came to expect that any dinner should be “de-served” with a course of sweets. Which sweet dishes belonged to dessert and which were proper to the complicated second course remained wildly unsettled matters in England for next 150 years, but Americans had sorted things out by the end of the eighteenth century. As Louise Conway Belden points out,15 the mixed savory and sweet second course was problematic in America because it required servant waiters to change (and wash) extra plates, and American servants were perennially in short supply. So American hostesses made the second course entirely sweet (it was trending in that direction anyway by this point), and they added, on formal occasions, a little caboose course of fruits (fresh, preserved, and dried), nuts, candies, and liqueurs. Although the distinction was often lost, properly speaking, the little extra course was the actual “dessert,” while the second course was “pastry” or “pastry and pudding,” its primary constituents.

When the upper classes adopted the dinner service called “à la russe” in the late nineteenth century, the French iteration of the little extra dessert course arrived in America. It differed in many details from the earlier American version, but its principal conceits were the same: fresh and dried fruits, candied fruits and citrus peels, nuts, dragées and other confectionery, and liqueurs. At formal wedding dinners and holiday dinners a similar little dessert extra course is still brought forth today, bearing more than a little resemblance to the original Anglo-American sweets banquet.

 

  1. The modern English word “banquet” is a French word derived from the Italian banchetto, or “little bench.” According to OED, cognates of the modern word entered English with three different meanings: a feast (first use 1483); a between-meals snack (first use 1509); and a repast of sweetmeats (first use 1523). These three meanings likely reflect the early use of banchetto in Italian, which, disappointingly, OED states “has not been investigated.” In most of Renaissance Europe cognates of “banquet” designated a feast, except in Holland, where “banquet” also referred to sweets banquets quite like those in England and where, even today, people are given their initials in chocolate, called “banquet letters,” on their birthdays. ↩
  2. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985), 99-101. ↩
  3. In medieval England, a comfit was any spice, seed, nut, flower, leaf, or other small plant material preserved in any manner with sugar. By the seventeenth century, the meaning of “comfit” had narrowed, so that the word denoted only articles encased in a hard shell of sugar candy, like today’s Jordan almonds. ↩
  4. William Brenchley Rye, England as Seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and James the First (London: John Russell Smith, 1865), xli-xliii, file:///C:/Users/user/Documents/Research/England%20as%20seen%20by%20foreigners,%20all.pdf ↩
  5. Terrence Scully, The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi (1570), a translation of Scappi’s original work with extensive commentary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). ↩
  6. Jonathan Hersh and Hans-Joachim Voth, Sweet Diversity: Colonial Goods and the Welfare Gains from Trade after 1492, 9 file:///C:/Users/user/Documents/Research/Sweet%20Diversity.pdf ↩
  7. William Harrison, The Description of England, ed. Georges Edelen (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2011). ↩
  8. Rye, England as Seen by Foreigners, xlix. ↩
  9. Paul Hentzner, Travels in England During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, 38 file:///C:/Users/user/Documents/Research/England%20as%20seen%20by%20foreigners,%20Hentzner.pdf ↩
  10. Fruit preserving came to New England early on. The English traveler John Josselyn reported of the women of New England, circa 1663, “Marmalade and preserved damsons is to be met with in every house….The women are pitifully toothshaken, whether through the coldness of the climate or by the sweetmeats of which they have store, I am not able to affirm.” Indeed, the banquet clearly came to New England too, in some form or fashion, for Edward Winslow, a passenger on the Mayflower who served several terms as governor of Plymouth Plantation and acted as the colony’s de facto ambassador to England, brought a set of banqueting trenchers from England to Massachusetts, probably in the 1630s. See Louise Conway Belden, The Festive Tradition: Table Decoration and Desserts in America, 1650-1900 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1983), 95, 126.  The two passages quoted by Belden occur in Josselyn’s Account of Two Voyages to New England Made in the Years 1638, 1663, first published in 1672. See pages 146 and 142 of the 1865 Houghton edition: https://books.google.com/books/about/An_Account_of_Two_Voyages_to_New_England.html?id=eIlDAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false ↩
  11. The little I know about humoral food beliefs mostly comes from Tacuinum Sanitatus, an Arabic health handbook translated into Latin, in Sicily, in the thirteenth century and highly popular in medieval Europe. The following edition, which I bought for a pittance online, has gorgeous color reproductions of original medieval illuminations: Luisa Cogliarti Arano, The Medieval Health Handbook, translated and adapted by Oscar Ratti and Adele Westbrook (New York: George Braziller, 1976). ↩
  12. C. Anne Wilson, ed., Banquetting Stuffe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991). ↩
  13. Some later Stuart banquets also included tarts filled with fresh cheese, called cheesecakes, and fruit tarts, but my impression is that both were more commonly served in the second principal course of the meal. ↩
  14. James Shapiro argues against the authenticity of this account in The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 (2015). To read the entire story, see Norman Egbert McClure, ed., The Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harington (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930), Letters 119 https://archive.org/stream/lettersepigramso00hari/lettersepigramso00hari_djvu.txt ↩
  15.  Belden, The Festive Tradition, 190-1. ↩
This entry was posted in Dessert, English cooking, French cooking, Italian cooking, Meals and Parties, Stephen Schmidt, Sugar, Sweets Banquet Tagged: A Collection of Choise Receipts  |   Adapting Historical Recipes  |   Ambergris  |   Amelia Simmons  |   American Antiquarian Society  |   Andrew Boorde  |   Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook  |   Atul Gawande  |   Banqueting houses  |   Banquets (sweets)  |   Barbara Wheaton  |   Boston Public Library  |   Bread  |   bread pudding  |   British Library  |   C. Anne Wilson  |   Catharine Beecher  |   Catharine Dean Flint  |   Charles Perry  |   Christopher Kemp  |   Clements Library  |   Collation  |   Cracknels  |   Custards  |   E. Smith  |   Edna Lewis  |   Edward Livingston Trudeau  |   Elaine Leong  |   Elinor Fettiplace  |   Eliza Leslie  |   Elizabeth Freke  |   Elizabeth Raffald  |   Emptins  |   English influence on U. S. foodways  |   Fannie Farmer  |   Flour Measure  |   Folger Shakespeare Library  |   Forme of Cury  |   Frances Trollope  |   French culinary influence  |   Fricassees  |   Georgetown University  |   Gervase Markham  |   Gingerbread  |   Hannah Glasse  |   Hannah Woolley  |   Henry Frederick (Prince of Wales)  |   Hilary Spurling  |   Hoppin Family Cookbook  |   Hot Bread Kitchen Cookbook  |   Italian culinary influence  |   Ivan Day  |   Johanna St. John  |   John Evelyn  |   John Murrell  |   Joy of Cooking  |   Karen Hess  |   La Varenne  |   Lacock Abbey  |   Longleat House  |   Louise Conway Belden  |   Marchpane  |   Maria Parloa  |   Maria Rundell  |   Marie Kimball  |   Martha Washington Cookbook  |   Martino da Como  |   Mary Cornelius  |   Mary Henderson  |   Mary Lincoln  |   Mary Randolph  |   Marzipan  |   Max Planck Institute  |   Medieval cooking  |   Medieval Islamic cooking  |   Molasses and treacle  |   Morgan Library  |   Mrs. (Elizabeth) Goodfellow  |   Mrs. Cornelius  |   Mrs. N. K. M Lee  |   Musk  |   Neapolitan Recipe Collection  |   Oysters  |   Patriotic cakes  |   Paul Freedman  |   Peter Rose  |   Portugal Eggs  |   quince  |   regional cooking  |   Rose water  |   Sandra Oliver  |   Sarah Josepha Hale  |   Scappi  |   scientific cookery  |   Service a la francaise  |   Service a la russe  |   Seventeenth Century  |   Sicily  |   Spain  |   sucket fork  |   Supper Parties  |   Sylvester Graham  |   Tea  |   Terrence Scully  |   The Recipes Project  |   The Taste of America  |   Theobalds Palace  |   Two Fifthteenth-Century Cookery Books  |   University of Iowa  |   Viandier of Taillevent  |   Void (voidee)  |   waffles  |   Waldo Flint  |   Yeast  |   3 Comments on What, Exactly, Was the Tudor and Stuart Banquet?  

A Boston Hostess Reveals Her Supper Secrets

Posted April 2016 
by Stephen Schmidt 
Merchant's House (1832), New York City. The Flints' home may have been similar.

Merchant’s House (1832), New York City. The Flints’ home may have been similar.

The Flints were a middle-aged, childless couple who lived in Boston, just off the northeast end of Boston Common, in the 1850s and 60s. Their home had front and back parlors, a dining room, and a large library, all nicely furnished, as well as bedrooms and sitting rooms on the upper stories. The Flints employed three fulltime servants: a cook, a maid, and a houseboy. Besides being a busy professional, Mr. Flint was active in his parish of the Episcopal Church and was a trustee and major supporter of the Boston Public Library. Mrs. Flint devoted much of her time and attention to staging elaborate company meals and parties. Some of these entertainments were occasioned by her husband’s involvement with the library, while others were purely social affairs. The guest lists at the library events were particularly elite, comprising physicians, judges, high political officials (including a former state governor), and prominent businessmen, but Mrs. Flint’s social gatherings were only slightly less glittering. Many of the same individuals who attended the library functions also showed up at Mrs. Flint’s Thanksgiving dinners and Christmas parties, along with the Flints’ close circle of family and friends. Catharine Dean Flint tells us all of this in her manuscript cookbook, which is in the possession of the American Antiquarian Society, in Worcester, Massachusetts, and which has recently been digitized, along with the rest of the impressive AAS manuscript cookbook collection. The Flint family papers and diaries, also at the society, give us a sense of how the Flints came by their wealth and social prominence. Catharine Dean Flint (1802-1869) was a daughter of a New Hampshire merchant; one of her sisters married a governor of New Hampshire, while another was the first wife of Stephen Salisbury II, a wealthy Massachusetts landowner. Catharine’s husband, Waldo Flint (1794-1879), was a Harvard-educated lawyer who served in various political offices before going to work for the Eagle Bank, of which he had become president by 1860.

Boston, Massachusetts 1860 City Directory Page 152, which lists Flint, Waldo, pres. Eagle Bank, 16 Kilby, h. [house] 6 West

Boston, Massachusetts 1860 City Directory Page 152 lists
Flint, Waldo, pres. Eagle Bank, 16 Kilby, h. [house] 6 West

In her cookbook Mrs. Flint comes across as a lovely person: even-tempered, self-effacing, warm, and reflexively kind. She repeatedly praises her three servants, her caterer, and even her caterer’s assistant by name, celebrates the confectioners who supplied her cakes (except for one that came under new management, whose cakes she describes as “miserable”), and revels in the intimate suppers she took with her friend Mrs. Gilchrist in the kitchen while her husband presided over his “library suppers.” Mrs. Flint’s deep affection for her husband is touching. About Mr. Flint’s 1863 library supper she writes, “The supper was said to be very nice & the guests said they enjoyed it. I thought so from the sound of their voices – Mr. Flint seemed well pleased, which pleased me.”

 

Mrs. Flint certainly did not mean to write an autobiographical cookbook. She revealed her personal story purely inadvertently, in the course of compiling notes on her various entertainments, which sprawl across over thirty pages of her cookbook. 1 Mrs. Flint kept these notes to record how she had managed these affairs and how she had judged their outcome, so that she would know what to do, and not to do, the next time she hazarded a similar event. In order to ensure that these notes were useful, she took pains to make them as detailed and specific as possible, which is why, inevitably, she ended up writing so much about herself.  This specificity and detail make Mrs. Flint’s notes enormously helpful in understanding antebellum meals and entertainments, which anyone interested in culinary history strives to do. The frustration of historical recipes is that they tell us only how the dishes of the day were prepared. If we want to know how people of the past, or at least a certain group of them, actually cooked and ate, we have to see these dishes in the context of their period serving occasions.

This post focuses on Mrs. Flint’s supper parties and sit-down suppers, which were her most frequent company entertainments and which, being “suppers,” albeit of different sorts, revolved around some of the same foods and observed some of the same conventions. 2

 

Mrs. Flint’s Supper Parties

The grandest supper party was the ball supper of the elite, which seems to have been the prototype of all antebellum American supper parties on whatever scale. Ball suppers were served very late, after the dancing was over, in a specially designated room whose doors were said to be dramatically “thrown open” at the appointed hour, to reveal a long white-cloth-covered table splendidly decorated with candles, flowers, and sugar sculptures and spread with a lavish buffet. In a cookbook of 1847, Eliza Leslie outlines a menu suitable for a ball supper. The bill of fare comprises an astonishing fifty-eight items: an abundance of cold dishes, as was typical for suppers (boned turkey in aspic, a ham, partridge pie, tongue, beef a la mode, chicken salad, potted lobster, pickled lobster, pickled oysters); a few hot dishes (creamed oysters in patty shells, fried oysters, turtle); twenty-two cold desserts (charlottes, blancmanges, custards, creams, jellies); ten ice creams and ices; six varieties of preserved fruit; and three very large cakes. 3 People worked their way through this feast with multiple changes of plates and silver, which waiters fetched for them from a separate table or sideboard. While there might be some chairs set against the walls of the supper room in which people could sit, most people at such affairs ate standing.

Most antebellum American hostesses staged more modest supper parties along the lines of cookbook author Catharine Beecher’s plan of 1846, which Beecher describes as “a plain but genteel arrangement for company in . . . any of our larger cities.” 4 Beecher makes no mention of dancing, which was not always part of ordinary supper parties, and she states firmly that such parties should wrap up at a reasonable hour and should not entail outrageous amounts of food. Still, her plan basically follows that of the ball supper: a buffet set out on a table in an attractive manner and eaten standing. Beecher covers “a long table in the dining-room . . . with a handsome damask cloth,” sets a high flower arrangement or other “ornamental article” in the center, and places “champagne glasses with flowers at each corner.” If the party is small, Beecher thinks it sufficient to arrange “loaves of cake at regular distances” down the middle of the table and surround the cakes with preserved fruits, cold desserts, and lemonade. However, “if a very large company” is to be served and “a larger treat . . . required,” she writes, the large table should be supplemented by two smaller tables, one “furnished with sandwiches, oysters, salad, celery, and wine, and the other with coffee, chocolate, and lemonade.” Those fortunate enough to possess a very large table can arrange everything on it, she adds, with the sweet things in the center, the savory foods and wine at one end, and the lemonade and coffee at the other.

While Beecher goes into greater detail on the subject of supper parties than any other antebellum cookbook author, she leaves unsaid many things that we would like to know, because these things were common knowledge to her readers. Happily, Mrs. Flint tells us more than we would even think to ask in her notes on five “stand up suppers,” as she calls these entertainments 5: a party for eighty persons (fifty-four attended) staged in 1859; an 1863 all-gentlemen’s party for twenty-five members of “the parish committee”; and three Christmas parties, in 1862, 1863, and 1864, each for fifteen to twenty guests.  We almost feel as though we were there!

All of Mrs. Flint’s supper parties were rolled out similarly. Mrs. Flint’s cook prepared all of the savory foods for the party except the tricky dressing for the chicken or lobster salad, which was either made by Henry Smith, Mrs. Flint’s caterer and party planner, or else bought from a purveyor. Mrs. Flint always ordered all of the breads, cakes, and frozen desserts to be served from outside purveyors. The cakes and breads were delivered to the house in the morning or early afternoon of the party, the frozen desserts at about eight in the evening. Henry Smith and his assistant arrived at three in the afternoon and immediately began to move furniture. Mrs. Flint generally had the dining room table moved into the library, to serve as the supper table, and had the piano drawn to the center of the dining room, to hold the “silver tea set and china for tea & coffee.” However, for her small Christmas party of 1863 Mrs. Flint chose instead to set out the supper on the piano, in the back parlor (which seems to have been its usual place). For this event, Henry positioned her tea table in front of the piano, presumably as a staging area for tea and coffee, and placed a “small table” before the fireplace in some unspecified room, perhaps to hold plates, glasses, and silver, which likely could not have fit on the piano with the food. All this furniture rearranging seems strange to us, but people of the day happily staged company meals and entertainments in whatever space struck them as suitable for particular occasions.

Guests at the more formal supper parties were similarly attired.

Guests at the Flints’ more formal supper parties were likely similarly attired.

Guests arrived between 8 and 8:30 in the evening and were “received” at the door by Henry Smith, or by Henry’s assistant, or, on one occasion, by Henry and Mrs. Flint’s “new boy Frank,” who she remarks “did very well & improved by seeing Henry.” Typically, guests removed their coats in a room on the ground floor (I think the foyer), but at the very large party of 1859 guests were conducted upstairs, where Mrs. Flint’s houseboy, standing in front of her closed bedroom door, directed “the ladies & gents” to separate rooms where they removed their outer garments and freshened up. The ladies were “assisted” by Mrs. Flint’s maid, whose principal task was likely to help the ladies adjust their hair. In her behavior book, Eliza Leslie tells us that the complicated hairdos of the day, full of “false curls,” were prone to a sudden, mortifying collapse if so much as a pin had slipped out of place. 6

The light mixed cake was likely served in a cake basket.

The light mixed cake was likely served in a cake basket.

“As soon as friends arrived” at Mrs. Flint’s 1864 Christmas party—and at her other supper parties too, as her notes tell us—they were offered coffee, tea, and a choice of cakes, specifically “squares of frosted pound cake” 7 and what Mrs. Flint called “light mixed cake,” by which she meant some combination of almond macaroons, coconut cakes (coconut macaroons), sponge drops (individual dropped sponge cakes), and hard meringues. (She varied the assortment slightly from party to party.) This little repast, which was essentially an abbreviated version of the usual evening meal of the time, often referred to as “tea,” was old-fashioned in Miss Beecher’s view, and she was happy to dispense with it, as it entailed “labor and anxiety.” The “anxiety” was that the whole business was properly conducted by servants, which Beecher, rightly, was concerned that her readers might not have to spare. Beecher suggested that if this interlude simply had to be “resorted to” (perhaps in deference to tradition), the lady of house preside in a ceremonial fashion at the tea table, while the gentlemen “wait upon the ladies in the room, and then help themselves.” The Flints, of course, had plenty of help on hand, and so professionals did all. In her notes on her gentlemen’s supper party of 1863, Mrs. Flint remarks that Henry “would have liked to have Mary [Mrs. Flint’s maid] pour tea & coffee, which she might have done had I known it beforehand.” Presumably Mary was occupied on this occasion, and so Henry had to assume the duty. At the Christmas supper party of the same year, Henry’s assistant and Mrs. Flint’s houseboy “poured and passed coffee and tea.”

Supper was served between 9 and 9:30. Like Catharine Beecher, Mrs. Flint chose salad, oysters, and sandwiches as her savory supper items—but Mrs. Flint, unlike Miss Beecher, also tells us how she prepared these foods. Party salads in the day were meaty affairs. The favorite was chicken salad, which Mrs. Flint served at all of her supper parties except the very large one of 1859, where, for convenience’ sake, she had turkey salad instead and offered lobster salad in addition. No matter what their main ingredient, party salads were similar. They were composed of roughly two-thirds meat and one-third vegetable—chopped celery in the case of chicken or turkey salad, torn head lettuce in the case of lobster salad—and were dressed with a mustardy mayonnaise made with hard-cooked egg yolks. This dressing seems to have been the earliest iteration of mayonnaise in American home kitchens, and it is clear from period recipes that neither cookbook authors nor home cooks had a clue how to mix the eggs and oil into a smooth emulsion. Mrs. Flint wrote down Henry Smith’s assistant’s excellent recipe for the dressing in her notebook (see Adapted Recipes), but her cook seems to have been met with failure in making it and seems never to have been asked to attempt it again.

Stephen Salisbury II, Catharine's brother-in-law, attended many Flint parties

Stephen Salisbury II, Catharine Flint’s brother-in-law, attended many Flint parties, sometimes with his son, who later became a renowned philanthropist.

Mrs. Flint ordered “solid” (that is, shucked) oysters in the substantial quantity of one half pint (or slightly more) per person for all of her supper parties. At three of her parties, all of the oysters ordered were scalloped—that is, arranged in three or four layers in a dish, with buttered bread crumbs in between and on top, and baked. But at two of her parties, some of the oysters she ordered were served cold rather than scalloped, including at her gentlemen’s supper party, about which she notes “two gallons solid oysters—two quarts of them to be cold.” Our first thought is that the cold oysters came to the table raw, but this may not have been the case because then, as now, raw oysters were customarily served freshly opened and on the half-shell. I suspect that the cold oysters may have been pickled 8, for under the heading “Necessary to be thought of at Mr. Flint’s Suppers – Copied from Book of 1853” 9 Mrs. Flint lists cayenne pepper, mace, and nutmeg, all of which were required for pickled oysters—and for no other dish in Mrs. Flint’s supper-party rotation. Pickled oysters turn up frequently in accounts of antebellum American parties, including one penned in acid by Frances Trollope, an unsparing British observer of antebellum America’s “domestic manners.” “Their large evening parties are supremely dull,” Trollope wrote in 1832. “To eat inconceivable quantities of cake, ice, and pickled oysters—and to show half their revenue in silks and satins, seem to be the chief object they have in these parties.” 10

Unlike Miss Beecher, Mrs. Flint did not serve ready-made sandwiches at her standing suppers. 11 However, she did order “bread rolls” for all of her parties, and I believe that she expected many of her guests to cut the rolls in half and stuff them with the salads, which would be a convenient way to consume the salads when eating standing. And I suspect that the “oyster rolls” that Mrs. Flint ordered for two of her supper parties were meant to serve a similar purpose. Oyster rolls were generally used to prepare the dish then known, indeed, as “oyster rolls” (or sometimes “oyster loaves”), which consisted of hollowed-out rolls stuffed with creamed oysters. Cookbook author Maria Rundell, writing in 1807, tells us that hollowed-out rolls were “sold for the purpose” of making this dish. 12 However, since Mrs. Flint never mentions any oysters being creamed, I surmise that she set out the rolls as receptacles for the scalloped oysters, just as, I think, she set out the bread rolls for sandwiches, all in an effort to make things easier for her standing guests.

Beecher deployed large, fine cakes as the focal point of her supper table, as many antebellum American hostesses did. But Mrs. Flint instead decorated her table with an array of fancy molded frozen desserts. She was particularly drawn to frozen desserts associated with the new vogue for French cooking, such as frozen pudding (suggestive of rum-raisin ice cream), Roman punch (a citrusy, boozy tea sorbet), vanilla ice cream (which was considered fashionably French even though it had long been on the scene), and bombe glacée (typically vanilla ice cream encased in berry sherbet). In addition, she found room in her dessert display for three long-traditional iced favorites, pistachio, lemon, and pineapple ice creams. Mrs. Flint personally extricated these desserts from their molds onto serving plates, evidently not even trusting her cook to do the deed. So long as they made a splendid visual impact, she seems hardly to have cared if these desserts were eaten. “A good deal of ice left, but I think about the right quantity provided,” she notes about her Christmas party of 1863. Unfortunately, visual splendor was not always achieved. About her 1859 supper party for eighty she notes, “I should have liked four dishes instead of two of the Bombe Glace & Frozen Pudding, one quart in each – they were too large to look well.”

Modern bombe glacee,

Modern bombe glacee.

 

A dessert consisting of six rather incompatible flavors of ice cream and sherbet—and nothing else—would seem strange and unappealing to us today, but in Mrs. Flint’s day the difficulties of freezing endowed frozen desserts with a cachet that carried the day for such a notion. Frozen desserts were a passion in antebellum America—and a nightmare for most antebellum hostesses. Most women could not buy frozen desserts because they lived inconveniently far from confectioners and could not afford their wares anyway. So they made the desserts at home—assuming that they could find the ice, which in warm weather or warm places could be problematic. Women who did have ice (or freezing weather) and lots of help could theoretically prepare several frozen desserts successively using the same apparatus—Miss Beecher suggests a “tin pail” if no better device is at hand 13—and keep them all frozen, possibly even in fancy molds, until serving time. But for most women, the only convenient way to keep frozen desserts frozen until serving was to leave them in the freezing apparatus, which meant that they could offer only one paltry variety, in freeform, at a party. Mrs. Flint’s gorgeous display could be mustered only by a wealthy (and generous) hostess living in a sophisticated big city like Boston, blessed with fine confectioners aplenty—and even for Mrs. Flint freezing presented complications. She had to order the desserts to arrive at her home just before her parties began, for the obvious reason that she could not keep them frozen for long, no matter how carefully and thoroughly they came packed in ice.

At the all-gentlemen’s supper of 1863, guests found the chicken salad, in an unspecified number of “round dishes,” and the frozen desserts on the long sides of the supper table and the scalloped oysters, in four dishes, at the opposite ends. This was a supper party at which cold oysters were served, but Mrs. Flint says nothing about where they were placed, nor does she mention the bread rolls or oyster rolls. “Silver arranged very prettily,” she writes. Perhaps the silver was laid out on the supper table in a pretty but not entirely convenient manner, for she adds that she “would have liked my small table placed in front of the piano with some of the silver and viands upon it.” Mrs. Flint does not mention where Henry set out the dinner plates, wine glasses, napkins, and the bottles of hock (German white wine), sherry, and champagne that she ordered for the party. Perhaps she managed these things the same way for every party so there was no need to remind herself about them.

The old Boylston Boston Library that Waldo Flint knew,

The old Boylston Boston Library that Waldo Flint knew.

Mr. Flint’s Library Suppers

Every twelve to eighteen months, Mr. Flint presided over a sit-down supper for ten to twelve trustees and supporters of the Boston Public Library. Mrs. Flint did not attend “Mr. Flint’s library suppers,” as she calls them, even though women were sometimes among the guests—and even though it was typical in the day for wives to cohost otherwise all-male dinners staged for their husbands’ business associates. Perhaps even with all of the help that Mrs. Flint had at her disposal, these suppers required her personal supervision in the kitchen as they occurred. The library suppers were complicated, lavish productions, as their cost attests. Mrs. Flint records that she spent, on average, forty dollars on these suppers, which amounts to roughly $1,150 in contemporary dollars, or about $100 per person.

The sit-down suppers featured many of the same foods as the stand-up supper parties and were marshalled in a similar manner. The Flints’ cook prepared most of the savory dishes (starting a day in advance to dispatch the foods that would be served cold), while outside purveyors provided the breads, cakes, and cold and frozen desserts. As at the stand-up suppers, Henry Smith and his assistant arrived at three o’clock in the afternoon and immediately set to work rearranging furniture. The library suppers were always served in the library, so the dining room table and chairs had to be moved there. At the 1860 library supper (which Mrs. Flint writes “may serve as a guide” for all) the dining room was commandeered as a staging area for the waiters, the “tea service & coffee cups” laid out on the piano (which evidently was moved from its usual spot in the back parlor) and the “card table placed south of the piano for plates, spoons, forks, or whatever might be wanted.” The library supper of January 1861 also entailed extensive rearranging of furniture in the front parlor. Mrs. Flint’s notes on the matter are vague and hard to decipher, but it seems that some sort of book display was mounted on a “round table” and that “Mr. Flint’s green desk” and a “small sofa” were moved from their usual place. The reorganizing of the parlor was presumably undertaken to facilitate the business meeting that preceded all of the library suppers. These meetings started between seven-thirty and eight, but many of the participants joined in much later (if at all), and Mrs. Flint recorded the precise arrival times of these laggards in her notebook (at the request of her annoyed husband, one supposes). 14 The guests went to the table between nine-thirty and ten and got up shortly before midnight. The hour seems extraordinarily late, but most guests likely walked home on Boston’s gas-lit streets, which afforded an interval for digestion.

In writing out the menus for the library suppers, Mrs. Flint divides the main course (as we would call it) into two sections, which she heads “cold” and “hot.” She lists oysters under both headings in all of the supper menus, allocating one third of her oyster order for serving cold, the rest hot. My guess is that the cold oysters were pickled, though she does not say so. The hot oysters were scalloped and presented in two heaped dishes, one on each end of the table, except at the 1861 supper, where the hot oysters were creamed and served in puff pastry shells ordered from a bakery, making a popular period dish called “oyster patties.” Mrs. Flint ordered five or six quarts of oysters for every supper—or roughly one pint per person—but it is clear that she did not expect this staggering quantity to be consumed in its entirety, any more than she did the huge display of ices at her 1863 Christmas supper party. Her concern was that the oysters appear abundant on the table. About the 1863 library supper she writes, “The right quantity of oysters though nearly a quart left, of which Ellen [her cook] made a very nice pie.” 15

As superabundant as the oysters were, they constituted only a small part of the prodigious main course offered at all of the library suppers. At three suppers, the cold2016-4-23 OldDesignShop_TurkeyRecipesClipArtBoiled foods comprised a whole ham and four chickens. Another supper featured the same cold dishes plus lobster salad, and another tempted guests with four cold chickens with “celery dressed” and four cold geese (a rather strange idea, at least to most people today). The cold foods were paired with an equally bountiful array of hot items. At most suppers, Mrs. Flint served three or four hot ducks plus four hot grouse or partridges, though at one supper she offered instead a turkey (with deep-fried mashed potato balls) and six roasted pigeons. I suspect that the turkey was boiled, and that the grouse and partridges served at the other suppers were boiled too. The many hot birds on these menus would not all have fit in a period stove oven, and boiling was then a common way to cook poultry, at least of certain types. 16 Mrs. Flint served “bread rolls” at all suppers, as well as cranberry and currant jellies to  accompany the birds, and she mentions that the table was always set with castors (cruet sets) containing pungent catsups and store sauces. Still, the main courses do seem dull, not to mention rather too unremittingly focused on bird flesh. It is possible that the near absence of vegetables was a matter of period supper conventions; at dinners, multiple vegetable dishes were the rule.

Castors went out of fashion in the early 1900s

Castors went out of fashion in the early 1900s

I am puzzled both by the enormous quantity of food served in the main course of these suppers and by the repetitiveness of the cold and hot dishes. I wonder if perhaps the main course actually comprised two complete main courses for twelve, one cold and one hot, allowing each guest to choose either a mostly cold meal, as was typical for a stand-up supper, or a mostly hot one, as was typical for a dinner. But even if this was indeed the plan, the amount of food still seems excessive, for it seems unlikely that all twelve guests would hanker after the same temperature meal. Couldn’t Mrs. Flint have prepared each meal in a quantity to serve, say, eight people?  I would certainly think so, but then my sensibilities are likely very different from Mrs. Flint’s. What I consider simply sensible she might have considered an all-too-obvious ploy for thrift, any suggestion of which in an entertainment insulted the guests and shamed the host. Mrs. Flint’s notes speak her goal as a hostess clearly. She meant to lay a splendid table, both beautiful and abundant, not in order to “impress” her guests, which she never shows a need to do, but to cosset and delight them.

2016-4-23 charlotte3Seemingly patterned after the fancy new dinner service called à la russe, the final courses of the suppers were incredibly lavish.  On February 2, 1860, Mr. Flint’s twelve guests were confronted with one quart of charlotte russe, one quart of frozen pudding, three pints of Roman punch, three pints of vanilla ice cream, and two one-quart molds of calves’ foot jelly 17–which they were invited to consume with eighteen squares of frosted pound cake, twelve coconut cakes, and twelve macaroons. After diners had gotten down as much of this dessert as they could manage, the waiters cleared everything from the table, probably including the cloth—and brought on olives, cheese and crackers, oranges, raisins, English walnuts, and shagbarks. Finally, there was coffee. (At the 1861 supper there would also be cigars with the coffee—“for the first time,” Mrs. Flint writes in her notes.) Coffee was no doubt welcome after all that food, not to mention the hock, champagne, “brown Sherry,” “pale Sherry,” and Madeira that Mrs. Flint ordered for the 1860 supper (and all the others). She had “nearly 30 small tumblers [for] wine” on hand in 1860, suggesting that she expected guests to do some serious tippling.

The library suppers seem strange to me in all kinds of ways, but because Mrs. Flint has shown me exactly how they happened, I know that they actually did happen—which is more than I can say about the meals and parties described in most antebellum cookbooks, behavior books, and novels, which are so general, or incomplete, or obviously filled with fantasy that I can’t help disbelieving that persons of that time, if returned to life, would recognize them. How typical Mrs. Flint’s suppers were of other suppers staged by persons of her time and place and social class I don’t know and may never know unless I find parallel accounts in other manuscript cookbooks. And perhaps I will. But I doubt I will find another manuscript writer as illuminating as Catharine Flint or as companionable.

 

Notes:

 

  1. The book also contains twenty pages of recipes, including five recipes copied from the second edition of Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery, 1796, two recipes copied from Eliza Leslie’s Seventy-Five Receipts, 1828, and many recipes contributed by friends. These twenty pages of recipes are written from the front of the book. The party notes are written from the back of the book going toward the middle, following four penmanship exercises (unattributed), a pasted-in newspaper recipe for black bean soup, and a handful of manuscript recipes. ↩
  2. Mrs. Flint’s cookbook also contains notes on a fascinating company dinner, which will be the subject of the next blog post. At some future point this blog will broach the complicated topic of antebellum “tea,” which could be a family evening meal, a company entertainment, or an evening party. ↩
  3. Eliza Leslie, The Lady’s Receipt Book (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1847), 392. Retrieved from Google Books April 23, 2016 https://books.google.com/books?id=D0MEAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Eliza+Leslie+Ladies%27+Receipt+Book&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjPh_7x8qTMAhVKVD4KHQrSBQEQ6AEINDAA#v=onepage&q=partridge%20pie&f=false ↩
  4. Catharine Beecher, Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt-Book, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1858). Reprint, With a New Introduction by Janice (Jan) Bluestein Longone (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2001), 241-2. ↩
  5. Mrs. Flint refers to her supper parties as “stand up suppers” in order to distinguish them from her “suppers,” which were sit-down meals. ↩
  6. Eliza Leslie, Miss Leslie’s Behavior Book (Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson and Brothers, 1859), 106. Retrieved April 23, 2016 from Google Books https://books.google.com/books?id=8eMwAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Eliza+Leslie+Behavior+Book&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjr8M3j-qTMAhVGHD4KHQ2mDgMQ6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q&f=false ↩
  7. In the North, pound cake changed little between its emergence in the early 1700s and the end of the nineteenth century. It remained a fancy cake that was baked as a large round or square and that, for formal evening parties, was typically covered with the usual brittle white icing of the era. When the cake was served in cut squares, it was fashionable in Mrs. Flint’s day to present the pieces in an artful stack on a cake plate or in a pierced-silver cake basket. ↩
  8. Eliza Leslie outlines two versions of pickled oysters. One is a mild pickle, which is meant for immediate consumption (although she says it is better if made a day ahead), and one a stronger pickle “for keeping.” See Eliza Leslie, Directions for Cookery (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1848). Reprint, with an introduction by Louis Szathmáry (New York: Arno Press, 1973), 57, 228. ↩
  9. Mrs. Flint makes a number of references to other “books” that she kept. ↩
  10. Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1901), 133. Retrieved April 23, 2016 from Google Books https://books.google.com/books?id=QFhLQZ0K67kC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Frances+Trollope+Domestic+Manners+of+the+Americans&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwirtsad76TMAhUGGz4KHYftDAMQ6AEIKTAC#v=onepage&q&f=false ↩
  11. Beecher does not have a recipe for sandwiches, but perhaps the sandwiches she has in mind are like the ones that Eliza Leslie says are “used at supper, or at luncheon.” Leslie’s sandwiches consist of thinly sliced ham or shredded tongue on thinly sliced bread, with butter and, if liked, “a very little mustard.” She says the sandwiches can be rolled up or laid “flat on the plates.” See Leslie, Directions, 123. ↩
  12. Maria Rundell, A New System of Domestic Cookery (London: J. Murray, Fleet Street, 1807), 22. Rundell was English, but her cookbook was extremely popular in antebellum America and was published in several American editions. Of course, most of the foods served at American supper parties were English, as were many of the conventions that governed these parties. ↩
  13. Beecher, 166. ↩
  14. The guests at an 1864 supper for associates of the Boston Public Library were particularly rude. Wrote Mrs. Flint: “7 1/2 the time fixed for meeting. At eight o’clock five had come.” Four more guests dribbled in between 8:25 and 8:50. Then, “just as the gentlemen were going to the table”—at 9:25—“Dr. M. & his father came.” Finally, at 10, “old Dr. Romans” straggled in. ↩
  15. She said much the same about the scalloped oysters served at her 1862 Christmas party—that “few” were “eaten” but “about the proper quantity provided.” She sent one leftover dish to a friend and served another at dinner the next day. ↩
  16. Mrs. Flint, in fact, served boiled grouse at an 1868 dinner party; her cook commented that the birds “would have been improved by boiling a piece of pork with them.” Boiled turkey and chicken are common in cookbooks of the early nineteenth century, when women cooked at the hearth, for boiling was far more convenient for hearth cooks than roasting, and both preparations are still seen in later stove-era cookbooks, if less frequently. But I have never seen a recipe for boiled grouse or partridges in any cookbook, of either the hearth or stove era, so Mrs. Flint’s predilection is fascinating. (I am assuming that the Flints had switched from hearth-cooking to the stove by the time Mrs. Flint’s cookbook was written, as most wealthy, urban, East Coast households had, though Mrs. Flint’s cookbook provides no evidence one way or the other. If the Flints’ cook in fact still toiled at the hearth, some of the cold birds may also have been boiled.) ↩
  17. An extraordinarily popular antebellum dessert, calves’ foot jelly was a spiced, citrus-infused wine gelatin made with clarified calves’ foot stock. I would assume that a professional confectioner of the 1860s would actually have made the jelly with prepared gelatin sheets, which were readily available by this point and much more convenient and reliable than the stock. ↩
This entry was posted in Meals and Parties Tagged: A Collection of Choise Receipts  |   Adapting Historical Recipes  |   Ambergris  |   Amelia Simmons  |   American Antiquarian Society  |   Andrew Boorde  |   Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook  |   Atul Gawande  |   Banqueting houses  |   Banquets (sweets)  |   Barbara Wheaton  |   Boston Public Library  |   Bread  |   bread pudding  |   British Library  |   C. Anne Wilson  |   Catharine Beecher  |   Catharine Dean Flint  |   Charles Perry  |   Christopher Kemp  |   Clements Library  |   Collation  |   Cracknels  |   Custards  |   E. Smith  |   Edna Lewis  |   Edward Livingston Trudeau  |   Elaine Leong  |   Elinor Fettiplace  |   Eliza Leslie  |   Elizabeth Freke  |   Elizabeth Raffald  |   Emptins  |   English influence on U. S. foodways  |   Fannie Farmer  |   Flour Measure  |   Folger Shakespeare Library  |   Forme of Cury  |   Frances Trollope  |   French culinary influence  |   Fricassees  |   Georgetown University  |   Gervase Markham  |   Gingerbread  |   Hannah Glasse  |   Hannah Woolley  |   Henry Frederick (Prince of Wales)  |   Hilary Spurling  |   Hoppin Family Cookbook  |   Hot Bread Kitchen Cookbook  |   Italian culinary influence  |   Ivan Day  |   Johanna St. John  |   John Evelyn  |   John Murrell  |   Joy of Cooking  |   Karen Hess  |   La Varenne  |   Lacock Abbey  |   Longleat House  |   Louise Conway Belden  |   Marchpane  |   Maria Parloa  |   Maria Rundell  |   Marie Kimball  |   Martha Washington Cookbook  |   Martino da Como  |   Mary Cornelius  |   Mary Henderson  |   Mary Lincoln  |   Mary Randolph  |   Marzipan  |   Max Planck Institute  |   Medieval cooking  |   Medieval Islamic cooking  |   Molasses and treacle  |   Morgan Library  |   Mrs. (Elizabeth) Goodfellow  |   Mrs. Cornelius  |   Mrs. N. K. M Lee  |   Musk  |   Neapolitan Recipe Collection  |   Oysters  |   Patriotic cakes  |   Paul Freedman  |   Peter Rose  |   Portugal Eggs  |   quince  |   regional cooking  |   Rose water  |   Sandra Oliver  |   Sarah Josepha Hale  |   Scappi  |   scientific cookery  |   Service a la francaise  |   Service a la russe  |   Seventeenth Century  |   Sicily  |   Spain  |   sucket fork  |   Supper Parties  |   Sylvester Graham  |   Tea  |   Terrence Scully  |   The Recipes Project  |   The Taste of America  |   Theobalds Palace  |   Two Fifthteenth-Century Cookery Books  |   University of Iowa  |   Viandier of Taillevent  |   Void (voidee)  |   waffles  |   Waldo Flint  |   Yeast  |   Leave a comment  

Search

 

Subscribe

 

Archives

 

Categories

 

 
Project of the Pine Needles Foundation of New York
Copyright © 2025 Manuscript Cookbooks Survey
All Rights Reserved
Library Website Design by Acorn Digital Marketing powered by CollectiveAccess 2025