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Stephen Schmidt

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. ↩
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On Adapting Historical Recipes

Posted March 2019 
by Stephen Schmidt 

By Stephen Schmidt       

Martha Washington manuscript, Historical Society of Pennsylvania

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

One evening last November, the Culinary Historians of New York sponsored a panel discussion on the work of culinary historian Karen Hess, in celebration of her 100th birthday. Karen Hess, who died in 2007, came into public awareness with the publication of The Taste of America, in 1978, which she wrote with her husband John Hess. The book became notorious for its caustic, sometimes unfair attacks on the era’s bestselling historians and food luminaries. But its basic argument—that the quality of American cooking, far from improving over the centuries, had actually declined—was compelling. To make their case, the Hesses drew on hard evidence in the form of historical recipes, which they quoted, visualized step-by-step, and, in some instances, seem to have made. To the extent that historical recipes reveal what people of the past actually cooked and ate—a fraught question, I realize—the Hesses’ argument seemed incontrovertible.

Karen Hess

Younger people may find it hard to believe how revolutionary such an approach was at the time the Hesses published. In 1979, when Barbara Wheaton, author of the groundbreaking Savoring the Past (1983), wrote about her experience in preparing a roasted peacock redressed in its plumage for a medieval banquet, many people thought she was daft. Culinary history, especially American culinary history, was then almost exclusively treated as a popular subject, mostly in works that were essentially cookbooks expanded to include some historical material. Few writers of these works even cited historical American recipes, much less attempted to make them. And those few who did recreate historical dishes, or claimed to, professed varying measures of befuddlement, amusement, and alarm at the recipes’ instructions, which obliged them to “adapt” the recipes more or less to point of erasure. Many mid-twentieth-century popular evocations of the American past seem sentimental, patronizing, and biased by today’s standards, but evocations of historical American cooking seem shockingly so. Books that dealt with historical cooking dished it up as quaint and fun but ultimately just old-timey women’s work—a subject that no one could take entirely seriously.

Martha Washington manuscript, Historical Society of Pennsylvania

Very much of its time is Marie Kimball’s The Martha Washington Cook Book (1940), which purports to elucidate the meals and entertainments of George and Martha Washington, as revealed by a handwritten cookbook that Martha Washington owned and eventually passed down to her granddaughter. Kimball tells us that this cookbook was authored by Martha Washington’s first mother-in-law, Frances Parke Custis, and comprises “a collection of the favorite dishes and ‘rules’ of the Washington household.” Actually, the manuscript was compiled by an unknown person of a privileged English family around 1675, and was subsequently brought to this country by unknown means, whereupon it somehow fell into Martha Washington’s hands. The first lady is unlikely even to have recognized most of the recipes, much less used them, because by the time she married her first husband, Daniel Custis, in 1750, the Restoration-era cooking that the manuscript outlines was thoroughly outmoded. The bulk of Kimball’s book comprises over one hundred pages of recipes supposedly culled from the manuscript. “It has been necessary, of course, to make some adaptation” of the recipes, Kimball writes, since the recipes yield “appalling” quantities, and “some of the recipes are scarcely in accordance with modern taste or practice.” Kimball’s ignorance of the recipes is almost hilarious, as when she defines “suckets of long bisket” as “a variety of crouton.” (They were long comfits, perhaps of candied citrus peel.) In any event, “some adaptation” is a considerable understatement. A number of the recipes appear to be simply Kimball’s own creations. Others bear titles and some random ingredients imported from the manuscript’s recipes but produce entirely different dishes, invariably bad ones. At the end of her recipe for Quince Pie, an utterly bowdlerized version of a recipe that does appear in in the manuscript, Kimball suggests omitting the pie’s top crust in favor of a topping of whipped cream. “Martha Washington did not do this,” Kimball writes in all seriousness—as if Martha Washington, much less the actual author of the book, did any of this.

In 1980 Karen Hess published Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery, her first solo book and arguably her masterwork. The book is not a riposte to Kimball’s, which Hess does her best to “ignore,” but it does, by its brilliant example, expose the attitudes that underlay Kimball’s book and the many others like it, as well as the misconceptions that these books promoted. Hess presents a verbatim transcription of the Martha Washington manuscript, with commentary following each recipe, in which she explains unfamiliar terms and procedures, fills in gaps in the recipe’s instructions, describes the recipe’s variants, antecedents, and later forms, and explores the recipe’s possible meanings to the people who created it. In some instances she submits recipes to trial and reports her results. In the end, we gain a concrete sense of how one privileged Restoration English family cooked and ate, knowledge that is crucial to us because, as Hess states, English cooking is the “warp and weft” of our own. This is more obviously apparent in American cookbooks written before the Civil War, which are replete with recipes copied verbatim from English works, but it is still true today, even as myriad diverse culinary influences have been brought to bear on our daily cuisine. Bacon, barbecue, ham, meatloaf, macaroni and cheese, candied sweet potatoes, sandwich bread, ketchup, biscuits, muffins, cornstarch puddings, fruit pies, sweet potato pie, lemon meringue pie, and butter cakes all have links to historic English cooking. And that is hardly an exhaustive list.

Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery, by Karen Hess

Today, many culinary historians ground their work in the close study of historical recipes, following the example of Karen Hess, Barbara Wheaton, and other pioneering recipe scholars. But the unhappy truth is that much of the culinary history most visible to the public follows in the tradition of Marie Kimball’s book: mangled “adaptations” of historical recipes falsely presented as a “taste of the past.” The enormous public interest in food now impels all sorts of people to adapt historical recipes, some for their own purposes, and some for the purposes of an organization that employs them. In effect, historical recipes have become a tool of business in the broadest sense of the word, and when the claims of business and scholarship compete, business usually wins. Meanwhile, the hive of this activity is cyberspace, where historical recipes, like everything else, are dragged through the muck of blithe ignorance, self-dramatization, unrelenting solipsism, vulgarity, and shameless pandering endemic to the realm. ‘Truth is the debt we owe to the dead,’ said Voltaire, supposedly, but the only debt many online adapters owe is to their own interests. They profess to “update” historical recipes toward the end of making them more palatable, or more healthful, or more practical to cooks today, when they are actually rewriting the recipes from top to bottom. It is galling when these persons claim or imply that their handiwork serves some historical purpose. But there is no point in fulminating against these bad recipes—Karen Hess’s fulminations got her nowhere. The more useful response is to ignore them and create better work.

And that is what many of today’s online historical recipe adapters would like to do, if they only knew how. Herewith I offer some tips on the endeavor for the benefit of non-specialists. I will focus on the fine seventeenth-century English cuisine outlined in the Martha Washington manuscript, but my advice applies to historical Anglo-American cuisine of any period.

 

2.

Let’s first set the terms—at least as I see them.  As Karen Hess acknowledges, in adapting historical recipes for today’s cooks, revisions are sometimes unavoidable—and they are fine as long as they respect the intentions of the original recipes. For example, Karen disliked the “sliced nutmeg” called for in many seventeenth-century recipes. I don’t mind it, but I don’t think you would be violating a recipe if you grated the nutmeg instead. Many seventeenth-century puddings made with a pound of butter taste little different when made with only half as much. Likewise, some of the dozen or more ingredients called for in a seventeenth-century “pie of many things” can be omitted—indeed some, such as cow’s udder or cockscombs, must be. But there is a difference between updating a historical recipe to make it feasible—and updating it to the point that it becomes a contemporary recipe with old-timey affectations. If you puff up a batch of Portugal cakes with baking powder, which people of the day had never heard of and would have regarded as an adulterant if they had, you cannot call your recipe Portugal cakes. Likewise, if you decrease or omit the sugar in the pungently spiced, syrupy-sweet banqueting wine called hippocras, you are no longer making hippocras. Hippocras was a medicinal wine, and in the medical thinking of the day, the sugar it contains was an indispensable drug, both unleashing the curative properties of the spices and conveying a potent cure of its own.

That said, let’s proceed. I will assume that you already have a particular seventeenth-century recipe in your sights and that, if it is a manuscript recipe, you have already transcribed it verbatim. I now present my process of adapting historical recipes in four steps.

 

Step One: Look at Multiple Contemporaneous Recipes for Your Dish or Conceit

Before you can adapt a seventeenth-century recipe, you need to discover what your recipe is telling you. And you also need to discover anything that your recipe is not telling you but that you need to know in order to recreate the dish in modern terms with reasonable faithfulness. The quickest and surest way to make this discovery is to examine a number of contemporaneous recipes for the dish or conceit you are working with. Whatever is unstated, unclear, unknown, or possibly erroneous in your particular recipe will likely be elucidated in others.

Examining multiple recipes will often reveal the meaning of strange words and phrases in your recipe that are not defined online or in any dictionary. I think most contemporary readers will be stumped, as I once was, by the term “hard lettuce,” which turns up in a dozen recipes for so-called “boiled meats” and meat pies in Hannah Woolley’s The Queen-like Closet (1681). If you patiently page through all of Woolley’s recipes for boiled meats and meat pies, towards the end of the book, you will finally come to a recipe titled “To boil Chickens with Lettuce the very best way,” which reveals what hard lettuce is. The crucial sentence reads, “Take good store of hard Lettuce, cut them in halves, and wash them . . .”  Lettuces that can be cut in halves through their hard cores are head lettuces, like today’s Boston or Bibb lettuces—as opposed to leaf lettuces, the kind that make up mesclun. A few pages further on, your new-found insight is corroborated by the recipe “To make a Lettuce Pie.” The crucial sentence here reads, “Take your Cabbage Lettuce and cut them in halves.” A cabbage lettuce, obviously, is a lettuce that looks like a cabbage because it grows in a head. In the course of perusing multiple recipes, you will also begin to pick up seventeenth-century culinary language. “Boil” usually means simmer; “sifted” often means grated; “temper” means mix; meats can be “fried” in wine or water; and “bake” does not always mean in an oven. “Gravy” is the juice that runs from rare-cooked meat, and “sauce” can mean an elaborate garnish that is practically a separate dish.

Cracknels, A Collection of Choise Receipts, 1680 [manuscript], New York Academy of Medicine

Examining multiple recipes will also help you to fill in those many matters that historical recipes, maddeningly, leave unsaid because they were obvious to people of the day—the quantities of ingredients, the cooking times and temperatures, and the size, shape, preferred texture and color, and serving temperature of the thing. A few years back I was slated to give a talk at an esteemed institution and was asked to provide half a dozen recipes for little cakes (think cookies) that could be served at the end of event. The organizer of the event wanted one of these cakes to be cracknels. This institution, like many others, was forbidden by contract to allow any entity other than its in-house caterer to prepare food that would be served on the premises. I told the caterer that he absolutely had to roll the cracknels dough paper-thin, as my adapted recipe stated, for this is what makes cracknels crackling crisp, as they are meant to be. I had a feeling that the caterer would find this troublesome and wouldn’t do it, and he didn’t. He formed the dough as a log and cut it in slices perhaps around 1/4-inch thick, which he presumably thought was thin enough. Do I need to tell you that the result was something quite other than cracknels—and not especially worth eating? Obviously, that evening’s cracknels debacle was no one’s fault but the caterer’s. But an unwary cracknels adapter could well make a similar mistake if he or she relied solely on a recipe that does not mention the critical rolling. Many recipes for cracknels don’t. Likewise, most seventeenth-century recipes for jumbles, Shrewsbury cakes, rusks, Prince bisket, and the multifarious gingerbreads give little or no indication of the usual size and shape. Only by looking at multiple recipes will you discover the essential clues.

Old-Style Cracknels, John Murrell, A Deligtfull Daily Exercise (1623)

I will add a caveat. A cracknels sleuth may come across a recipe that says to form cracknels in the shape of a cup or bowl and immerse them in boiling water before baking them. These alarming instructions do not indicate an unsuspected elision in the many other cracknels recipes that the sleuth has perused. Rather, they pertain to an older, pan-European form of cracknels that remained current for several decades as modern, distinctively English cracknels evolved. If you suspect a like complication in the dish you are working with, you should search the dish in sources predating and postdating the source of your recipe. There are not many such recipes, thank goodness. More often, recipes follow different patterns because the dish was extant in variations. Most seventeenth-century English fricassees, for example, are “white” because the meat is “fried” in liquid, which is to say, it is actually poached. However, there are also fricassees that entail true frying (as the French word “fricassee” connotes), resulting in browned meat in a brown sauce. (These fricassee variations persist to this day.) Likewise, most of seventeenth-century banqueting creams exist in variants with respect to the manner of thickening, whether by heat, acid, rennet, gelatin, whipping, churning, or some combination. Recipes for “Portugal eggs” and “Spanish eggs” are crazily variable for a unique reason. The terms came to denote several quite different Iberian sweet egg dishes that presumably were brought to England by Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese queen consort of King Charles II—as well as far-flung variations on these dishes dreamt up by English cooks.

Eggs in the Portugal Fashion, Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook (1665)

Eggs the Portugal Way, John Nott, Confectioners’ Dictionary (1723)

 

Eggs the Spanish Way, John Nott, Confectioners’ Dictionary (1723)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A final caveat: There are some things you will never discover no matter how many recipes you look at. What, for example, is that “bundle of sweet herbs” that turns up in recipe after recipe? Sweet herbs comprised most of the common herbs in use today, except for basil and tarragon. But did certain dishes generally take more of some sweet herbs and less of others, as is true today? We will likely never know.

 

Step Two: Adjust for Seventeenth-Century Ingredients and Cooking Technologies

Many seventeenth-century recipes call for ingredients that are now hard to find or unavailable. For some of these you can suggest substitutes: candied chestnuts for candied eryngo roots; lemon juice for verjuice; granulated yeast plus water for ale yeast (I’ll discuss equivalents in my next blog post); a sweet orange and a lime for two bitter oranges (as nineteenth-century cookbook author Eliza Leslie does in making orange pudding). Others such as pickled samphire, certain organ meats, and ambergris and musk must be omitted. Omissions do not matter much unless there are many of them or they are the principal feature of the dish, as in a mugget pie (bovine umbilical cord). In that case, you need to move on to another recipe.

A more important ingredient consideration is discrepancies between old and modern foodstuffs. Some of these are clear-cut. Cream and milk were raw and reacted differently to heat, acid, and whipping than our pasteurized product. (A few banqueting creams and syllabubs are impossible to reproduce for this reason.) A dozen seventeenth-century eggs weighed around one pound, while it takes only eight of today’s “large” eggs to weigh as much. Thus the eggs called for in a seventeenth-century recipe should be reduced by about one third in an adaptation. (Sometimes the arithmetic is awkward and you will have to approximate.) Other discrepancies are hazier. I assume that, like eggs, seventeenth-century farm-raised meats, fruits, and vegetables were around a third smaller than ours. I confess that I don’t actually know anything about seventeenth-century animal breeds, and I should ask people who do. (There are some.) The typical size of seventeenth-century fruits and vegetables is probably anybody’s guess. Also a guess is the taste and texture of seventeenth-century meats and produce. Karen Hess believed their flavor was more intense, but I think this may be a sentimental generalization. Revived varieties of “heirloom” apples often prove to be dry, sour, woody, and generally unpleasant. Since you cannot know these things there is no point obsessing over them.

Wheat flour presents special complications. Seventeenth-century English wheat flour had less protein than our all-purpose flour and was therefore less absorptive, despite the specks of germ and bran likely present in even “the finest white flour,” which had the opposite effect. Thus in adapting recipes, relatively low-protein all-purpose flours, such as Gold Medal and Pillsbury brands, are wiser choices than Hecker’s or King Arthur, which are very nearly bread flours even though they are labelled “all-purpose.” I start be adding whatever quantity of flour the original recipe calls for and hope that the dough or batter will cooperate. If it doesn’t, I make adjustments. Unfortunately, absorption is not the only wheat-flour issue. When a recipe specifies flour by a volume measurement—that is, a peck, a gallon, a quart, or a pint—the recipe may intend the understood weight of the flour when measured by the old dry peck, which was 14 pounds (and thus 7 pounds to a gallon, 1 3/4 pounds to a quart, and 14 ounces to a pint). Or the recipe may intend the volume of the flour when measured by the ale or wine quart, which was the same as the modern American quart: 32 cups to a peck,1 16 to a gallon, and 4 to a quart, and 2 to a pint. There is a big difference between the dry-peck weight and the liquid volume measure. While a quart of flour by the peck weight is 1 3/4 pounds, a quart of flour by liquid volume is only 1 to 1 1/4 pounds depending on how settled the flour is in the measure. In adapting old recipes, Elizabeth David hews to the peck weight (which she reckons at 12 pounds, yet another complication!). Karen Hess adapts by the liquid quart. They are both right. Seventeenth-century cooks followed both systems. A few recipes specify the system to be used, stating “by weight” or else giving the measure in “ale pints” or “wine quarts.” And sometimes you can deduce the system from context, as you can in Constance Hall’s extraordinary helpful 1672 table of pastry recipes. If your recipe provides no explicit clues, begin adapting by volume. If your dough turns out to be soup, you know that the original recipe meant weight.

Finally, unless you happen to be a hearth cook, you cannot know the particular tastes and textures of foods cooked at the fireplace using seventeenth-century cooking equipment. Karen Hess claimed that meat roasted in or in front of a fireplace attained a fabulous thick, dark crust, while meat roasted in a gas or electric oven emerges gray and steamy. Perhaps she was right. Nineteenth-century American cookbooks show that some households continued to roast meat in the fireplace many decades after they had otherwise given up cooking at the hearth in favor of the stove. But whether or not fireplace-roasted meats were superior, there is no point in trying to replicate them in a modern stove oven because it cannot be done. And in case you regret being unable to reproduce the taste of smoke in your adapted recipe, don’t. Seventeenth-century fireplace foods did not taste of smoke, or at least were not meant to. I have read that fireplace-cooked meats tasted delightfully “barbecued” or “grilled” and that hearth breads like muffins tasted smoky. This is nonsense.

 

Step Three: Check Your Adaptation for Modern Biases and Assumptions 

I am assuming that by now you have a draft of your adapted recipe before you. Now you must ruthlessly examine it for any modern biases or assumptions that you may have brought to it. I am particularly prone to importing modern notions into an adapted recipe when attempting to wriggle out of something in the original recipe that I don’t want to do—like boiling turnips or spinach for an hour, or using the entire “peel” of a lemon or orange (including the bitter white pith), or deliberately curdling eggs (even when I know that curdling is the point, as in a posset or certain cheesecakes). You may also be led astray by some insidious miscue embedded in the recipe. A recipe titled “in the French style” may tempt you to cram your adaptation with butter, or drown it in wine, or shower it with herbs, or somehow make it “fancy.”  These are all mistakes. Whatever “French” connotes in your recipe, it does not connote what it does today. The same is true of recipes described as “Italian,” “Dutch,” or “Spanish.” The same goes for “best” and “newest fashion.” These terms could mean anything—or possibly nothing other than the egotism or marketing eagerness of whoever wrote the recipe. Think of how many recipes today are touted as “best,” “ultimate,” “perfect,” “the only recipe you need,” or whatever. Whether or not we today understand the rationales behind such boasts (and often we don’t), we can be certain that culinary historians three hundred years from now won’t have a clue.

Especially insidious are those seventeenth-century recipes that go by names familiar today, such as stew, roast, pudding, pie, tart, pasty, biscuit, custard, and cake. Although the names are the same as ours, the dishes are quite different. Sometimes we don’t grasp these differences, and sometimes we do, at least sort of, but they seem so wrong to us that we smudge them over with our own notions when adapting the recipe. The following recipe from Hannah Woolley’s Queen-like Closet tempts me to fall into this particular pit, although I hope to have avoided doing so in my (untested) adaptation.

 

Hannah Woolley, frontispiece of “The Gentlewoman’s Companion” (1673)

To stew a Loin of Mutton

Cut your meat in Steaks, and put it into so much water as will cover it, when it is scummed, put to it three or four Onions sliced, with some Turneps, whole Cloves, and sliced Ginger, when it is half stewed, put in sliced Bacon and some sweet herbs minced small, some Vinegar and Salt, when it is ready, put in some Capers, then dish your Meat upon Sippets and serve it in, and garnish your Dish with Barberries and Limon.

 

To Stew a Loin of Mutton (adapted)

Have your butcher cut a side of lamb loin into six chops. Arrange the meat in two or three overlapping layers in a large pot with 2 medium onions, sliced, 3 peeled and quartered white turnips, 6 whole cloves, and 2 tablespoons thinly sliced peeled ginger. Add enough water to cover the ingredients, bring to a boil over high heat, and then turn the heat down to the point where the water gently simmers. Cook for 30 minutes, periodically skimming off any gray foam that rises to the top. Add 3 slices bacon, cut in 1-inch pieces, 1 or 2 tablespoons each minced thyme and rosemary, 1/4 cup white wine vinegar, and sufficient salt to season, probably about 1 tablespoon. Cover the pot, turn down the heat very low, and cook until the meat is very tender and nearly falling off the bone, 30 to 60 minutes longer. Add 1/3 cup large capers, rinsed of salt or brine. Cover a large, deep platter with thinly sliced white bread that has been dried in a slow oven until crisp through and through. Arrange the meat and vegetables on the bread and then, a little at a time, ladle on as much of the broth as the bread will absorb and the platter will hold. Strew the meat with scalded cranberries and thin lemon slices.

 

Like most historical recipes, this recipe requires some substitutions (for the mutton, seventeenth-century bacon, and barberries; it’s conceivable that Woolley’s ginger was fresh) and some guessing about quantities. But the more serious problem is that the dish runs counter to our expectations of a stew. We would brown the meat, and we would cook it in stock and/or wine. And, at the end, we would reduce the cooking medium and perhaps also thicken it with flour and butter, making a rich sauce or gravy. But that is not how seventeenth-century cooks typically made a stew. Recipe after recipe yields the same sort of dish that Hannah Woolley’s recipe does: boiled meat in a mildly acidulated broth served on dry bread. Robert May succinctly conveys the character of the dish when he writes, in his recipe for stewed lamb’s head, “serve it on carved sippets and broth it.” With a recipe such as this, we are liable to read right past the actual instructions and adapt the recipe as we would prefer it—and that would hardly constitute a “taste of the past.” For all I know, this dish may be more interesting than it reads on the page, although I confess that I am not eager to try it. If, for some reason, I absolutely had to adapt a period stew recipe, I would search for an outlier recipe that better conforms to modern stew standards.  Robert May has one in The Accomplisht Cook (1665): Stewed Collops of Beef.

Your adaptation is now done. You know what the original recipe says and you have written what it says in modern terms. But before you test the adaptation in your kitchen, you need to ask yourself if everything your adapted recipe says to do is actually practical for today’s cooks.  If it is not, you may decide to revise your adaptation at least slightly, even though this will likely mean changing the original recipe’s intent. How much you can change a historical recipe in your adaptation and still legitimately claim your adaptation as “a taste of the past” is a case-by-case decision. I offer the following test case.

 

Step Four: Make Judicious Practical Revisions in the Recipe before You Test It

The following recipe for a Dutch Pie is from “Cookbook of Ann Smith, 1698,” at the Folger Shakespeare Library. For the pastry, I used a recipe in Queen-like Closet (1681), by Hannah Woolley. Ann Smith’s recipe provides uncommonly precise ingredient quantities, probably because the dish is unusual (this is the only recipe I have seen), with an unusually high seasoning, and so a period cook could not wing it based on past experience.

 

To Make An Excellent Dish Called A Dutch Pye

Take A spesiall brest of Veale bone & roll Beaten & Lett it be seasoned 6 houres with these Following things Viz: 1/2 oz of nutmegs 1/2 oz of cloves & mace ye greatest part to mace & 2 oz of pepper one of them beaten & 2 large rasess of Ginger and 2 handfulls of Marjorum & Thyme and a handful of Salt the Like of sorrill & A Lemon ye rinde shread small & the juce Squezed in: all thesse must be well Beaten & mixed in together & 4 Anchoivess 1/4 of a pinte of white wine 3 Spoonfulls of venigur 3 youlks of eggs: The Venigur ye  wine the eggs Beaten together & putt into yor  meate Just before itt goes into the Paste, The other seasonings is to be putt in 6 houres before & putt into the Bakeing 3 lb of Butter & Cover itt over with Butter itt must be 4 houres A Bakeing att the Leastt The most Natturall way is to Eatt itt Cold.

To Make a Pasty of a Breast of Veal

Take half a peck of fine Flower, and two pounds of Butter broken into little bits, 1 egg, a little Salt, and as much cold Cream, or Milk as will make it into a Paste; when you have framed your pasty, lay in your Breast of Veal boned . . . .

 

To Make An Excellent Dish Called A Dutch Pye (adapted)

Remove the bones from a small half veal breast weighing 5 to 6 pounds. In a medium bowl, stir together 1 tablespoon grated nutmeg, 1 1/2 tablespoons ground ginger, 2 teaspoons ground mace, 1 teaspoon ground cloves, 2 tablespoons ground black pepper, 2 tablespoons whole black peppercorns, and 1 1/2 tablespoons fine-textured salt. Add the finely minced peel of 1/2 small lemon (including white pith), 1/4 cup chopped sorrel (or 1 tablespoon vinegar), about 2 tablespoons each chopped marjoram and thyme leaves, and 2 mashed anchovy fillets or 1 tablespoon anchovy paste. Spread this mixture evenly over the bone side of the veal breast and then roll the veal breast up. Refrigerate in a covered container for at least 6 hours or up to a day if more convenient.

Combine 30 ounces all-purpose flour (about 6 cups) and 2 teaspoons fine-textured salt in a large bowl. Have ready 24 ounces unsalted butter, softened to a clay-like consistency. Cut the butter into thick pats and rub it into the flour with your hands until it mostly disappears. In a small bowl, beat together until well combined 2 large eggs and 1/2 cup cold milk. Using a large spoon or rubber spatula, stir this into the flour/butter mixture until the dough gathers and then knead the dough in the bowl until smooth and cohesive.

Cut off one third of the dough (or 1 pound) and set aside. Roll the remainder into a 16-inch round on a well-floured work surface. Fold the dough in half, transfer it to a buttered 10- X 3-inch spring-form pan, unfold it to cover the bottom and side of the pan and then press it into place, flattening pleats in the wall and smoothing or patching any tears. Press the wall all around with your fingers to make it extend about 1/4 inch beyond the top of the pan. Fit the meat inside the crust. Beat together 1/4 cup white wine, 3 tablespoons vinegar, and 1 egg yolk. Pour this over the meat. Scatter 6 to 8 ounces butter, cut into bits over and around the meat. Roll the reserved dough into a 10 1/2-inch round. Place it over the top of the pie and press the edges of the bottom and top crust together with your fingers to seal. Trim the edge if necessary and flute. Cut four 1-inch slits at right angles in the center of the top crust to allow steam to escape. Place the pie on a rimmed baking sheet. Bake in the lower-middle level of a 325-degree oven for 4 hours.

 

In my adaptation, I cut all ingredients by half, and I guessed, as I had to, what is meant by “2 large races of ginger” (these are dried gingerroots), a “handful,” and a “spoonful.” I didn’t have sorrel and suspected that most people wouldn’t either, so I suggested replacing it with a little vinegar. The crust of this pie has to be thick, sturdy, and rather deep in order to hold the large piece of meat and the three pounds of butter. Since this pie bears a general similarity to a pasty, I thought it was justifiable to adapt it with a typical crust for a pasty, which has the advantage of being thick, sturdy, and also edible, unlike many of the thick, sturdy crusts for meat pies in the day. These adaptations, in my view, are minor, but I did significantly revise the original recipe on two points. The crust for this pie would likely have been “raised” with the hands, at least partially, and the pie would have been baked freestanding on a flat tray. I don’t trust myself to do this, and I doubt that most cooks today would want to try. So I rolled the crust with a pin and I baked the pie in a spring-form pan, whose sides and bottom can be removed after the pie is baked, providing the illusion that no pan was ever involved.

I have no reservations about how I handled the crust, but I am slightly less comfortable about my revision of the butter. I found the quantity of butter called for in the original recipe scary, and I did not see the point, so I adapted the pie with only a quarter as much. After I had tasted the pie (which was lovely and not nearly as spicy as I had expected), it occurred to me that if the meat had baked ‘covered over with butter,’ as the original recipe says, it might have had a different texture, like that of a confit or potted meat. And it dawned on me that possibly the purpose of the seemingly outrageous quantities of butter called for in many meat pie recipes of the period is precisely to make the pie meat long-keeping, in the manner of a confit. There is evidence that these pies were served and stored and then served again and stored again over a stretch of weeks. The only way to know if the full complement of butter promotes a different taste and texture in the pie is to try the recipe as written. Perhaps someday I will. And if the butter does prove to make a significant difference (and does not invite a butter-fueled oven fire or some other catastrophe), I may suggest that intrepid cooks consider trying the recipe that way.

A final word: I really liked this pie. But I don’t like every old recipe I test, and it is very hard for me to give up on a recipe that I’ve brought to the point of testing. Sometimes I don’t have to. For example, if I dislike a recipe I’ve tested simply because it has too much mace, I don’t have qualms about retesting it with less, especially if other recipes for the same dish call for less mace or indeed none at all. But sometimes I dislike an old recipe on multiple counts and I cannot possibly justify all the revisions I would need to make in order to make it palatable. When this happens to you, don’t torture yourself struggling to turn an unappealing historical recipe into a modern recipe you like. Just move on to another recipe.

 

What, if anything, do we really learn from recreating historical dishes?

One of the highlights of my undergraduate years was a poetry seminar I took with Adrienne Rich. She passed on to us three questions that a crusty, old professor of hers said should be asked of any piece of writing: What did the writer set out to do? Did the writer do it? Was it worth doing?  The same questions can be asked of historical recipe adaptation. What we are trying to do is clear: we are trying to recreate “a taste of the past.” Whether or not we have succeeded we will never know for certain because, unfortunately, there is no one to ask. Still, there are clues. As is often said, ‘the past is a different country.’  If your adapted seventeenth-century dish tastes just like a dish made today, you are probably not succeeding at your task. The dish should taste “foreign.” By “foreign” I don’t mean bizarre. Very few seventeenth-century dishes taste bizarre to a sophisticated modern palate—perhaps few dishes of any time do. To get in the proper spirit, strive to embrace the strangeness of the seventeenth-century repertory, as you would any foreign cuisine. If you do, once you have tried a few recipes, you will key in to the tastes of the day, which will give you a sense of when you are on the right track.

I’m interested in food, and I’m curious to know what it felt like to live three hundred years ago, including what dinner tasted like, so I don’t doubt that recipe adaptation is worth doing. Of course, we must grant that the seventeenth-century recipes we adapt were familiar to only a small cohort of privileged English people, and that some of these recipes, like Ann Smith’s Dutch pie, were probably obscure in their time and so may not reflect the cooking of even this small group. Nonetheless, our recreated dishes do give us at least a taste of that remote time, and they also reveal to us that that time still lingers. Seventeenth-century European visitors to England were struck by the enormous English fondness for meat and sugar. Tourists in America today come away with a similar impression of us.

Finally, you will hear some people opine that historical dishes cannot be recreated because ‘everything was so different then.’ This is silly. By that logic, you also can’t recreate your late Aunt Josie’s potato salad from a recipe card that she wrote thirty years ago. You don’t know the brands of mayonnaise, sweet pickles, sour pickles, mustard, and “seasoned salt” that she bought at her local Piggly Wiggly. You also don’t know what kind of potatoes she used, whether she boiled them whole or peeled and cut up, and whether she served the salad right after she made it or let it sit in the refrigerator for a few days. Indeed, the potato salad that you make following her recipe is not exactly the same as hers. Nonetheless, you have no doubt that it is Aunt Josie’s, even if it lacks her particular touch.

  1.  In theory, a recipe calling for “a peck of flour” should unambiguously mean the old English peck weight of the flour, or 14 pounds, since there was no “peck” liquid measure. However, this seems not to have been the case. In The Compleat Cook (1656), the recipe for Oxfordshire Cake calls for “a peck of flour by weight,” which must mean that “a peck of flour” was sometimes reckoned by the liquid quart, that is, 2 gallons, 8 quarts, or 32 half-pint cups. ↩
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When the West First Tasted the Cuisines of the East

Posted May 2018 
by Stephen Schmidt 

By Stephen Schmidt

MS Buhler 36, 15th century English cookbook, Morgan Library

Recently, the Manuscript Cookbooks Survey hosted a medieval English dinner for a committee of medieval and Renaissance manuscript scholars associated with the Morgan Library and Museum, in New York City. I was the cook. People often ask how any cook today can presume to reproduce medieval food as it was made in its time since most medieval recipes omit quantities of ingredients and provide only sketchy instructions with regard to procedure. The honest answer, of course, is that no cook can. A cook can only “interpret” medieval recipes using his or her intuitions. Mine are informed by reading I have done over the past few years about medieval Islamic culture, including its cuisine, and its impact on Europe. The extent of eastern influence on the cuisines of the medieval Christian West is controversial among medieval scholars. In Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (Yale University Press, 2008), Paul Freedman footnotes two authorities, one who sees extensive eastern influence and one who proclaims that “medieval [European] taste is not Arab.” I am not a medieval scholar. But, speaking as a cook, I taste the East and sense its technique in western medieval European cooking. And as a casual reader of medieval history, I see much circumstantial evidence that corroborates my culinary intuitions.

When a late fourteenth-century English manuscript cookbook known as Forme of Cury was first printed, in 1780, the myriad spices and the sugar with which its dishes are seasoned incited bafflement and revulsion in many readers—a reaction still echoed today in the seemingly unkillable myth that medieval spices served to camouflage the taste of rotten meat, as though the princes and wealthy merchants who, alone, were privileged to taste medieval haute cuisine had only rotten meat at their disposal. Still, we can hope that the myth, at long last, may be slain. As a guest at our dinner astutely commented, we have a greater openness to medieval European cuisines than did Americans in the past, for we are familiar with the headily spiced, subtly sweet cuisines of Thailand, India, Persia, Morocco, and Mexico—and we very much like them. I was delighted by this guest’s comment, for I felt she had intuited my interpretation of the dishes of our dinner. The cooking of the medieval Islamic world still survives today, to varying degrees, in most cultures that medieval Islam touched, and the contemporary cooking of these cultures informs my interpretation of medieval European recipes.

 

1.

Al-Wasiti, 13th century Baghdad library Muslim Heritage

The Golden Age of medieval Islam was forged during the ninth and tenth centuries in Baghdad, seat of the third Islamic caliphate. Baghdad’s many achievements in philosophy, science, medicine, painting, poetry, and music are largely attributable to its openness to diverse sources of knowledge, symbolized by the famed House of Wisdom, a network of academies that translated all of the world’s known learned manuscripts—Indian, Persian, Syrian, Egyptian, and Greek—into Arabic. The ancient, sophisticated culture of Persia, conveyed both through translated Persian texts and by the many Persians living in Baghdad, exerted particular influence on Golden Age Baghdadi culture, including Baghdad’s lush, fragrant, complex cuisine. High cuisine could flourish in Golden Age Baghdad because Baghdadi culture embraced pleasure. An early fourteenth-century Baghdadi cookbook, translated by Charles Perry as A Baghdad Cookery Book (Prospect Books, 2005), begins thus: “The pleasures of this world are six: food, drink, clothing, sex, scent, and sound. The most eminent and perfect of these is food, for food is the foundation of the body and the material of life.” Baghdad was sacked by the Mongols soon after these lines were written and all of its manuscripts thrown into the Tigris, so that the river was said to have run black with ink. But by this time, the culture of Baghdad, including its glorious cuisine, had been transmitted across the Islamic-ruled world, which stretched from India, across the entire Middle East and North Africa, and into Iberia. The Christian West tasted dialects of this cuisine when it came into contact with two Islamic cultures located within Europe itself, those of Spain and Sicily.

Cathedral of Toledo, principal site of Latin translations, Wikipedia

During what might be called the long twelfth century, Christian Europe, long an isolated, ignorant backwater of squabbling fiefdoms, was experiencing an economic and  political awakening along the Mediterranean, where long-dormant trading networks were being reestablished, leading to knowledge exchanges and  the emergence of vibrant cultures in northwestern Spain, Provence, and the Italian maritime city states. During this time, much of Islamic Spain and all of Islamic Sicily came to be ruled by Christian forces. The new Christian rulers of Spain and Sicily recognized that these advanced Islamic cultures provided useful paradigms for Christendom going forward and, for a time, protected and preserved them. Spain’s particular glories were its libraries, which held thousands of Arabic-language learned manuscripts, some original to the Islamic world, by its Muslim, Jewish, and Christian thinkers, and some penned by the great Greek savants of antiquity, which the Islamic world had preserved, in Arabic translations, but which the West had mostly lost. Modeled after the original Baghdad House of Wisdom, a series of projects to translate these manuscripts into Latin were undertaken under Christian auspices, first in Toledo and later in other Spanish cities, prompting scholars, prelates, poets, artists, and other would-be translators from throughout Christian Europe to descend on Spain in droves. Sicily, too, had manuscripts, and many came to Sicily to translate them. But more came simply to bask in Sicily’s luminous culture, particularly that of Palermo, the capital city, with its religiously diverse, polyglot population, its gorgeous mosques, churches, and palaces, and its artists, musicians, and poets.

Lusterware bowl, Persia, 9th to 11th century

Sadly, the lesson of social and religious tolerance that the West might have learned, particularly from Norman Sicily, was the one it most flagrantly ignored: the first of the murderous Crusades was inaugurated in 1095, and after 1250, Christian-ruled Spain and Sicily, too, descended into intolerance and persecution. (To be fair, much of the Islamic world had lost its tolerant luster by this time.) Still, the benefits of Islamic contact to Christendom were immense. The long twelfth century saw a flowering of western Christian culture now known as the Twelfth Century Renaissance, which launched the iconic achievements of the European High Middle Ages: the opening of the West’s first universities and medical schools; the building of the first Gothic cathedrals; Giotto’s stunning frescoes and altarpieces; and the rise of the Arthurian legend and other medieval narrative cycles that beguile us today with their themes of knightly chivalry and courtly love. Other than the universities and medical schools, which were indisputably spurred by the translations, it is unclear to what extent contact with Spain and Sicily fueled the Twelfth Century Renaissance. But that Christian Europeans were deeply impressed by Spain and Sicily and sought to assimilate their cultures is proved by the massive trade in eastern luxury goods that soon ensued, including silk brocade and other eastern textiles, intricately patterned carpets, iridescent lusterware ceramics, vividly painted tin-glazed pottery, clear glass mirrors, and paper (which was ever so much lighter than vellum, the only book material that Christian Europe knew). Eastern fabrics and carpets can be seen in many Renaissance paintings, as can a decorative (but meaningless) script that resembles Arabic, which Europeans believed was the language Jesus spoke.

In addition to ogling the luxury goods of twelfth-century Spain and Sicily, the Christian travelers tasted their cuisines. In the case of Spain we have some idea what this cuisine was like, for it is recorded in an exhaustive Arabic-language cookbook that was compiled around 1400 from earlier recipe manuscripts penned during the rule of Spain by the Moroccan Almohad dynasty, which roughly spanned 1150 to 1230. Translated into English, principally by Charles Perry, as The Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook, this book outlines a lush, sophisticated cuisine broadly similar to that of the Baghdadi cookbook but also incorporating dishes that originated in Morocco, Spain, and elsewhere. Unfortunately, there is no surviving manuscript record of twelfth-century elite Sicilian cuisine, but we know that it was Islamic-inflected, for a visiting Spanish Muslim scholar wrote, in 1184, that Palermo still retained a Muslim character and that the Norman king, William II, continued to rely on Muslims “to handle many of his affairs, including the most important ones, to the point that the Great Intendant for cooking is a Muslim.” Given the beauty of period Sicilian culture, we can assume that this cuisine was as sophisticated as that of Spain, if also different, as Sicily had a unique population and history.

Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (r. 1230-1250), whose Palermo court was said to be “Saracen”

One apparent consequence of Christendom’s culinary contact with Islamic Spain and Sicily was a new interest in, and respect for, cooking in the West. Other than a few recipe fragments, there is no surviving written record of what was cooked anywhere in Christendom prior to contact with Spain and Sicily. After contact, dozens of recipe manuscripts were written, first, around 1200, in the northern reaches of the Holy Roman Empire (perhaps inspired by the cooking of the empire’s court, which was located in Sicily between 1194 and 1250 and was widely alleged to be “Saracen”), and later in England, France, Italy, and Spain.1 While the cuisines outlined in these manuscripts are unique, they share enough similarities to be characterized as variants on a common haute cuisine of the late-medieval European privileged. This cuisine is by no means eastern. Relatively few eastern dishes turn up in medieval European recipe manuscripts.2 But an influential “foreign” cuisine does not make its impact primarily via recipes it leaves behind but by overlaying a native cuisine with new tastes, new ingredients, and new techniques. Christian Europeans appropriated those elements of Spanish and Sicilian cuisines that, for whatever reason, exerted particular appeal, and used them to transform their native cookeries.

It is clear that one of these elements was the seasoning of foods with spices, sometimes in combination with sugar, a pervasive feature of medieval eastern cuisines and likewise pervasive in all manner of late-medieval European dishes, from meats, to fish, to vegetables, to pastas. Except for pepper, ginger, galingale, cumin, and fennel, all of the spices used in medieval English cooking first enter the written English record after the twelfth century, including both spices imported from the East (cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, mace, cardamom, cubebs, and grains of paradise), and those cultivable in England (saffron, mustard, anise, caraway, and coriander). Sugar was indisputably a gift of the Islamic world. Most of Europe had never heard of it until the opening of Toledo and Palermo in the late eleventh century.

Mortar & pestle with Arabic or Kufic script

Another transformative culinary element borrowed by the West from the East was almond milk, a critical ingredient in many medieval European sauces, stews, porridges, and still other dishes. Also inspired by the East, I believe, was the medieval European obsession with pounding foods to pastes in a mortar, the linchpin of innumerable sauces, porridges, pastry fillings, and forcemeats in the Andalusian cookbook, in which the word “pound” occurs 371 times. The mortar and pestle are ancient, nearly universal tools, and medieval European cooks surely pounded some foods long before contact with Spain and Sicily, as had the Romans before them. But I think it unlikely that early Christendom pounded on anything like the scale indicated in the later medieval recipe manuscripts, for pounding is time-consuming and laborious, and I doubt that early Christendom was sufficiently engaged in cooking to bother. Whatever the purely gustatory merits of pounding, there was likely a broader reason that the technique became so central to medieval European cuisines. As Paul Freedman suggests in Out of the East, pounding was indispensable to a primal project of medieval cooks, which was to disguise or transform foods and thereby invoke sense of mystery and wonder. Mysterious spicy sauces with pounded bases, reminiscent of “curries” and Mexican moles, were the most characteristic conceit of this project. But there were many others, including hash-like concoctions known as “mortar dishes,” meatballs coated in saffron-tinted batter and presented as “golden apples,” and forcemeat tarts suggestive of birds’ nests, with whole songbirds poking out.

Ibrâhîm ibn Abî Sa’îd al-Maghribî al-‘Alâ’î, 12th century book of simples Muslim Heritage

The eastern borrowings by the medieval West swell still more if recipes for confectionary and sugar preserving are included. In the medieval Islamic world sugar was not only a food but also the most potent and most used drug in the Islamic formulary. Thus many conceits that we today would define as confections or preserves were drugs or something close to drugs—we might call them nutraceuticals—in the medieval Islamic world. These conceits entered the Christian West through Arabic-language drug formularies and health handbooks (essentially herbals or books of simples) that were translated in Spain and Sicily. In the West, these conceits straddled the same odd conceptual fence that they did in the East, being both prescribed by physicians as well as eaten, particularly after meals, when they were believed to speed the digestion. Recipes for some of these nutraceuticals, including quince paste, fruits in sugar syrups, halva (made with starch or nuts, not sesame seeds), and marzipan (in Italian manuscripts), can be found in medieval European manuscripts primarily given over to food recipes. Most, though, are outlined in medical recipe books, including sugar work (fondant, taffy, and hard candy), gingerbread (nothing like today’s gingerbread), gum paste, dragées, candied citrus peel, and crystallized flower petals and herb leaves.

 

2.

The advent of the new haute cuisine in England can be dated with fair assurance to circa 1180, when a consortium of merchants dealing in the importation of spices and sugar was formed under the name of the London Pepperers and sugar is listed for the first time in the household accounts of the English king. Two English manuscript cookbooks, both in Anglo-Norman, were written in the thirteenth century, many more, in Chaucerian Middle English, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Many of the recipes in the English cookbooks also appear, in some form, in medieval French cookbooks, such as the famed Viandier attributed to the French court cook known as Taillevant. Given the international prestige of French cooking since the mid-seventeenth century, it is not surprising that many writers have assumed that the French developed these recipes and the English merely adapted them. However, there are many reasons to suppose that the exchange went in both directions.

The elite medieval English dinner was served in two principal courses or, on grand occasions, three, each typically comprising four to six dishes, though more, perhaps many more, if the dinner were a feast. In most surviving menus, at least half of the total dishes comprise plain boiled, baked, or roasted meat or fish, the larger, more substantial cuts featured in the first course, the smaller or more delicate ones in the second and optional third. In a manuscript penned around 1420, the more complex dishes of the cuisine are divided into three categories: pottages (potages), sliceable foods (leche metys), and baked foods (bake metys). By far the largest category, pottages were all dishes with a liquid or runny consistency, including thick soups, boiled foods served in their cooking broths, porridges (like blancmange), stews, sauced dishes on toast, aspics, and hashes. Sliceable foods comprised foods that had defined shapes, such as pastas, pancakes, fritters, blood puddings, haggis, forcemeats, and pressed-curd dishes. Baked foods were pies and tarts, whose tough crusts were considered mere baking containers for the filling and were often discarded or doled out to the poor after they were emptied. Only a few of the complex dishes occupied prescribed courses in the medieval English dinner. However, as a group, the progression of these dishes mirrored that of the plain meats and fish, in that the more delicate, often sweeter ones, such as small fowl, shellfish, fruited forcemeats, pancakes, fritters, and little custard tarts, tended to cluster in the second and third courses.

Following the two (or three) principal courses a little digestive course was served, consisting of the sweetened, spiced wine called hippocras and sweetened, spiced iron-baked wafers. After the wafers had been nibbled, a prayer was said and plain spices and so-called comfits were brought out, the latter comprising sugared tidbits such as candy-coated spices (or seeds or nuts), preserved ginger, candied citrus peel, and crystallized flower petals and herb leaves. In great households, the elite company retired to a specially designated room to consume the spices and comfits, where they enjoyed a voidee, so named because it voided, or cleared, the site of dinner (usually the great hall) of people.

Our Morgan dinner was based on an Eastertime menu that appears in MS Cosin V.III.11, now in the possession of the Durham University Library, in Durham, Britain. The advantage of this menu is that it is atypically scant in plain boiled, baked, or roasted meats, which no longer impress in today’s protein-plentiful world. Also, unlike most, this menu does not include any birds that we no longer regard as edible, such as swans (a particular medieval English favorite), herons, cranes, sparrows, larks, plovers, and pewits.

In Paschal tempe flesshedays

Þe fyrste cours: creteyne to potage & pygges in sawse sauge þerwith, smale felettes indorretes & þerwith cometh smale pertriche ibake & checkones. Þe ii cours: bruet saraseyns þerwith gele & capouns dorres, lechefres & small rost. Þe iii cours: dariol of crem & of refles togedere.

For various reasons, explained below, the menu that we actually served differed somewhat from the MS Cosin menu:

Feste for þe Morgan

Þe fyrste cours: creteyne to potage & pygges in sawse sauge þerwith, mouton with frumente, sawse camelyne, smale checkones ibake with black sauce. Þe ii cours: bruet saraseyns þerwith gele of fyssh, tart de Bry & blank maunger. Þe iii cours: dariolles & fretoure togedere, comadore & yrchon. Finis: ypocras & wafres, marchpane & confyts dyvers.

My source for the MS Cosin menu and many of the recipes I prepared was Curye on Inglisch, a collection of four medieval English recipe manuscripts, with extracts from several others, compiled and edited by Constance B. Hieatt and Sharon Butler (Oxford, 1985). I also used recipes from Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books, a collection edited by the English scholar Thomas Austin and published in 1888. Both collections include extensive glossaries of terms, which are erudite, clearly written, and extremely helpful. (Although written a century apart, the two books agree on almost all major points.) In addition, I consulted several manuscripts translated and extensively annotated by Terrence Scully, including The Viandier of Taillevant (University of Ottawa Press, 1988) and The Neapolitan Recipe Collection, a medieval Italian manuscript (MS Buhler 19) in the possession of the Morgan Library (University of Michigan Press, 2000).

Here are the recipes for the dishes we served (transcribed into contemporary English), with their sources and some brief notes. My interpretations of the recipes can be found here.

Craytoun

For to make craytoun (MS Douce 257; Hieatt): Scald chickens, then boil them. Grind ginger or pepper, and cumin, and temper with good milk. Add the chickens and boil them, and serve it forth.

Recipes called craytoun (in various cognates) turn up in both French and English sources. Scully derives the name from Old French cretonnee, meaning fried, but frying is not involved in this or most other variants. Oddly, the common element among the recipes, says Hieatt, is that most involve milk. The dish is suggestive of a cumin-scented curry. Perhaps this is coincidental, for I find no eastern precedent for the dish in the Baghdadi or Andalusian cookbooks. In the regrettably dark photo, the little dots are pomegranate kernels, a favorite medieval English garnish. This dish, like many others in this menu, is golden in color. Perhaps this has something to do with Easter, which is associated with the rising of the (golden) sun.

 

 

Pygges in sawse sawge

Pygges in sawse sawge (Forme of Cury; Hieatt): Scald and quarter suckling pigs and simmer them in water and salt. Drain them and let them cool. Grind parsley and sage with bread and the yolks of hard-boiled eggs. Add vinegar, leaving the mixture somewhat thick. Lay the suckling pigs in a vessel, cover with the sauce, and serve it forth.

Raw green sauces, all fairly similar, are outlined in medieval English, French, Italian, and Catalan manuscript cookbooks. There is also a recipe in the ancient Roman cookbook attributed to Apicius but none in the Baghdadi or Andalusian cookbooks, so perhaps the idea is western. This sage-intensive version is delicious and very much worth making. I substituted pork tenderloin for the pigs and decorated the dish with the whites of the eggs, a garnish suggested in several medieval English recipes.

 

 

To make frumente (Forme of Cury; Hieatt):  Bray clean wheat well in a mortar [to remove the hulls]; boil it in water until the grains crack. Drain it and let it cool. Mix it with good both and sweet cow’s milk or almond milk. Add raw egg yolks and saffron and salt it; don’t let it boil after the egg yolks are added. Put it in dishes with venison or fat fresh mutton.

Mouton with frumente

I find the smale felettes indorretes (fried pork fillets in a golden batter) listed in the first course of the MS Cosin menu a dull dish. So, for our Morgan dinner, I replaced it with another dish listed in the first course of several medieval English menus: roasted venison or mutton served with a creamy wheat-berry pottage. (My roast was lamb.) The name of the pottage derives from Old French froument, or grain. The dish is pretty, if rather bland, or so I thought (others liked it better). A recipe that I recently came across in a manuscript in the Folger collection supports my long-held suspicion that this pottage was the inspiration behind the dessert called barley cream, extant in England and America from the late seventeenth into the early nineteenth centuries.

Sawse camelyne (Forme of Cury; Hieatt): Take currants and shelled nuts [likely walnuts] and crusts of bread, and ground ginger, cloves, and cinnamon; bray it well in a mortar and add salt. Mix it with vinegar and serve it forth.

This delicious sauce was beloved throughout medieval Europe. It some households, it was set out at all dinners as an all-purpose condiment. I intended it for the lamb roast. It is also lovely with any cold meat. Hieatt believes that the name derives from Anglo-Norman canel, meaning cinnamon, though others connect the name to the sauce’s brown color, like that of a camel. This sauce is similar to several outlined in the ancient Roman cookbook attributed to Apicius, though none of the Roman sauces contain cinnamon, which Apicius seems barely to know. In contrast, there are 289 references to cinnamon in The Andalusian Cookbook.

Smale checkones ibake with black sauce

 

Black sauce for capouns y-rostyde (Ashmole 1439; Austin): Take capon livers and roast them well. Take anise, ground Paris ginger, and cinnamon, and a little bread crust [likely toasted] and grind them all together well. Temper it with verjuice and capon fat, and then boil it and serve it forth.

Instead of serving plain baked partridges and chickens in the first course, as the MS Cosin menu seems to indicate, we served Cornish game hens (likely similar in size to medieval chickens) with this piquant liver sauce. The anise-cinnamon seasoning, as well as the texture, color, and general intensity of the sauce, are suggestive of certain Mexican moles, but I do not find a similar preparation in The Andalusian Cookbook. Perhaps the sauce is western, for some versions call for blood rather than liver, and blood was forbidden in Islamic cooking.

 

 

Bruet sarcynesse

For to make a bruet of sarcynesse (MS Douce 257; Hieatt): Cut fresh beef into pieces and fry it with bread in fresh grease. Take it out, dry it [drain the fat], and put it in a pot with wine, sugar, and ground cloves. Boil everything together until the beef has absorbed the liquid. Boil almond milk and [whole] cubebs, mace, and cloves together. Add the meat and put it in a serving dish.

This rich, fragrant, gently sweet-sour “Saracen” stew strikes me as similar to Thai “Massaman” (Moslem) beef curry. In the making of both dishes, the braising medium is cooked down until the meat begins to fry in its own fat, whereupon almond milk or coconut milk is added to bloom a sauce. Both dishes have a similar flavor, despite the lemon grass and other Southeast Asian seasonings added to the Thai version. You don’t absolutely need the hot, astringent cubebs, but you do need almond milk, and the ersatz stuff in the carton will not do.

 

Gele of fyssh

Gele of fyssh (Forme of Cury; Hieatt): Cut tench, pike, eels, turbot, and plaice in pieces. Scald them, wash them clean, and dry them with a cloth. Place them in a pan and cook them in half vinegar and half wine. [Remove the fish from the broth] and pick out the bones. Strain the broth through a cloth into an earthen pan and add sufficient ground pepper and saffron. Bring the broth to a simmer and skim it well. When it is boiled [reduced sufficiently to jell], remove the grease. Arrange the fish on platters, strain the broth over them through a cloth, and serve the dish cold.

The gele listed in the second course of the MS Cosin menu could be either meat or fish in aspic. I chose fish for our Morgan dinner. Loosely following the recipe above, I poached salmon in white wine, white wine vinegar, and seasonings, and then stiffened the broth with packaged gelatin. The delightful pale garnish of paper-thin “leaves” of fresh ginger and slivered almonds, vaguely visible in the photo, is called for in a recipe for jellied fish outlined in Harleian MS 4016 (in Austin). Meat and fish jellies appear in many medieval European menus. The Neapolitan Recipe Collection shows that the fifteenth-century Italians were already coloring and (probably) sweetening jellies and molding them in elaborate shapes, sometimes omitting the meat. The English soon enough followed suit.

 

Tart de Bry

Tart de Bry (Forme of Cury; Hieatt): Make a crust one inch deep in a pan.  Mix raw egg yolks and ruayn cheese [a semi-soft fat autumn cheese, per Hieatt], and add ground ginger, sugar, saffron, and salt. Put the mixture in the crust, bake it, and serve it forth

In medieval English cookbooks, lechefres, listed in the second course of the MS Cosin menu, is sometimes a tart of ground dried fruits and sometimes a tart of cheese, although, as Hieatt points out, neither makes sense, as the title implies a sliced food that is fried. For our Morgan dinner I opted for a cheese tart and, for fun, used a recipe with the word Bry (Brie) in the title, which is virtually identical to the recipe for the cheese tart called lese fryes in Harleian MS 4016 (in Austin). According to Hieatt, the cheese intended may have been similar to modern Pont-l’Évêque, for which I substituted Saint Nectaire. A well-ripened Brie or Camembert will also work. The tart is a bit like a puffy cheese omelet in a crust. Medieval English cooks made pastry with pasta dough, and wresting an edible tart crust from pasta dough is, in my view, a fool’s errand. I use a modern recipe. Similar cheese tarts survived in the Netherlands into the seventeenth century and are depicted in period Dutch paintings. Dutch-American culinary historian Peter Rose covers the Renaissance Dutch cheese tart with whole almonds, a very nice touch.

Blank maunger

Blank maunger (Forme of Cury; Hieatt): Simmer capons, and then drain them. Grind blanched almonds and mix them with the capon broth.  Pour the almond milk into a pot [after straining out the almonds]. Add washed rice and let it simmer, then tear the breast meat of the capons in small pieces [strings] and add it, along with white grease, sugar, and salt. Let it simmer [until quite stiff]. Serve it forth, decorated with red or white anise comfits and almonds fried in oil.

Since I inserted a roast in the first course of my Morgan menu I omitted the smal rost (likely a pork or mutton leg, Hieatt speculates) listed in the second course of the MS Cosin menu and served blank maunger instead. This famous pottage (or one of its variants) appears in the second course of many other medieval English menus, and I thought that guests should have a chance to taste it. The dish is much like rice pudding, except not as sweet and with chicken in it. I adore it. Per the recipe, I garnished the dish with aniseed comfits, which are available from online Dutch import shops under the De Ruijter brand.

Dariolles

Dariolles (Harleian MS 4016; Austin): Take wine and fresh broth, whole cloves and mace, bone marrow, powdered ginger, and saffron, and let them boil together. Take cream (strained if clotted) and egg yolks and mix them together, and then add the liquid in which the bone marrow was boiled. Then make crusts of fine paste, and put the marrow into them [apparently unmelted marrow skimmed from the spiced liquid], along with minced dates and strawberries, if they are in season. Set the crusts in the oven and let them bake a little while, and then take them out, pour in the cream mixture, and bake them enough [until the custard sets].

Medieval English dariols were small custard tartlets of varying composition. The word, according to Terrence Scully, is French and designates a large pastry crust in medieval French sources. How it came to mean small custard tartlets in England is unknown. I had previously tried a very simple recipe for dariols outlined in Forme of Cury, which calls for a filling of cream, egg yolks, sugar, and a little saffron for color. The tartlets were perfectly nice but not terribly interesting, so for our Morgan dinner I followed the recipe above instead. The wine infusion imparted little flavor to the custard (even though I used quite a bit of spice), and the marrow was nuisance (as it always is). But I learned something very useful. I cut supermarket strawberries in pieces the size of fraises de bois and put three pieces in each tart shell, along with a couple of teaspoons of minced dates and some crumbled marrow, and then baked the shells until firmed and browned, as the recipe intends. To my surprise, the strawberries desiccated rather than dissolving into a pulpy mush, becoming little pinpoints of intense strawberry flavor in the bland, rich custard. Also unanticipated, the strawberries and dates were a lovely match. The lesson (which I often have to force myself to follow) is always to do what the old recipes say, no matter how weird or wrong it seems.

 

Fretoure

Fretoure (Harleian MS 279; Austin): Take wheat flour, ale yeast, saffron, and salt and beat everything together as thick as batters should be made on days when meat is permitted. Then take good apples and cut them in the proper way for fritters, and thoroughly wet them in the batter. Fry them in good oil, put them in a dish, sprinkle them with sugar, and serve them forth.

Hieatt speculates that the mysterious refles in the third course of the MS Cosin menu may designate some sort of fritter. If so, many medieval cooks probably chose apple fritters, which were great favorites throughout Europe. This is an excellent recipe.

Comadore

Comadore (Forme of Cury; Hieatt):  Take figs and raisins. Pick them [seed the raisins], wash them clean, and scald them in wine; grind them quite small. Dissolve some sugar in the wine used to scald the fruit. Strain the wine and mix the fruit with it. Peel some good pears and apples and take the best part of them [core them]. Grind them small and mix with the raisin mixture. Set a pot on the fire, add some oil, and pour the mixture in it, and stir carefully and keep it from burning, and add ground ginger, cinnamon, and galingale and whole cloves, cinnamon, and mace. Add pine nuts lightly fried in oil and salt. When it is fried enough, put it into a bowl and let it cool. When it is cold, cut it with a knife into small pieces the width and length of a little finger, and wrap it tightly in good pastry, and fry them in oil, and serve them forth.

Comprising only two dishes, the third course of the MS Cosin menu struck me as anticlimactic. So, for our Morgan dinner, I added two additional dishes, both typical in the third course of other period menus. Hieatt suggests that the dish called comadore may derive its name from the Spanish comedar, meaning glutton or ‘fit for an epicure.’ If so, the name is apt. These filled fritters are fabulous, something like crispy Fig Newtons with spices. The “good pastry” indicated is actually pasta dough, for which I substituted egg roll skins. Wonton wrappers might be better.

Yrchon

Farsur to make pomme dorryse and oþere þynges (Forme of Cury; Hieatt):  Take raw pork meat and grind it small. Mix it with eggs and strong spice powder, saffron and salt, and add raisins and currants. Make it up into balls, wet the balls well with egg white, and cook them in boiling water. Take them from the water and put them on a spit. Roast them well, strain ground parsley with eggs and a portion of flour, and let the batter run about the spit. And if you wish, use saffron in place of parsley, and serve it forth.

This is the first of five recipes in Cury outlining fanciful conceits made from fruited pork forcemeats: gilded “apples”(the pomme dorryse of the recipe title), a stuffed “cokantrice,” “hedgehogs” stuck with almond “quills” (the yrchon of our Morgan menu), “flower pots” planted with planted with “flowers,” and little “cloth sacks.” Except for the sacks, all of these conceits appear in the Viandier of Taillevent (although in somewhat different forms). Fruited, spiced meatballs are a feature of several contemporary Middle Eastern cuisines (though with lamb or beef, not pork) and also of contemporary Italian (especially Sicilian) cooking. (The canonical Italian cookbook author Artusi also has a recipe, which is adapted in Lynne Rossetto Kasper’s The Splendid Table.) This leads one to think that the idea originally came from Islamic Spain or Sicily, but I do not find a recipe in the Baghdadi or Andalusian cookbooks, and there are none in the medieval Italian manuscripts with which I am familiar (although the stuffing for a kid outlined in The Neapolitan Recipe Collection is similar). Wherever this forcemeat came from it is delicious.

Ypocras & wafres with marchpane

To Make Ipocras (Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook, 1665): Take a pottle [2 quarts] of wine, an ounce of cinnamon, an ounce of ginger, an ounce of nutmegs, a quart of an ounce of cloves, seven corns of pepper, a handful of rosemary-flowers, and two pound of sugar.

The MS Cosin menu does not indicate a final course of digestive sweets, nor do most other period English menus, probably because it was routine. The course always included hippocras, named for the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, the putative “father” of humoral medicine. Hippocras was made by steeping wine, typically white, with spices and sugar, which were thought to “warm” the stomach and thus facilitate digestion. The medieval recipes call for ground spices, which absorb a great deal of the wine and take forever to filter out. The seventeenth-century English, wisely, used crushed spices instead and so do I. Fresh ginger and dried rosemary leaves make perfectly fine substitutes for whole dried gingerroot and rosemary flowers. This is an irresistible after-dinner drink.

To make wafers (Gervase Markham, The English Hus-Wife, 1615): To make the best wafers, take the finest wheat flour you can get, and mix it with cream, the yolks of eggs, rose water, sugar, and cinnamon till it be a little thicker than pancake batter; and then, warming your wafer irons on a charcoal fire, anoint them first with sweet butter, and then lay on your batter and press it, and bake it white or brown at your pleasure.

Although wafers were as essential to the digestive course as hippocras, I have not found a medieval English recipe for them, perhaps because they were more often bought than made. For our Morgan dinner I followed Gervase Markham’s recipe in The English Huswife (1615). By Markham’s time wafers were customarily rolled, like those in the photo, but they may have been left flat in the Middle Ages. Wafers are lovely but they must be baked in an iron, either stove-top or electric, and are a tedious, finger-burning project.

The other sweet seen in the photo is marzipan, which entered the English language as marchpane (in various spellings). The earliest reference to marchpane cited by OED (from 1492) implies a particular marchpane conceit that was highly fashionable in England through the mid-seventeenth century: a thin cake about fourteen inches across, which was lightly baked, glazed with a white sugar icing, and often elaborately decorated. I formed the marchpane for our Morgan feast likewise. England and the rest of Europe learned about marzipan from the Italians, who loved it. The Italians got it from the East. It turns up in numerous guises, in meat and fish dishes as well as sweets, in both the Baghdadi and Andalusian cookbooks.

Did the medieval English privileged eat like this everyday? It’s a logical question to ask but not really the right question. Medieval meals were structured differently from ours. With a few exceptions (such as frumenty with venison or mutton), medieval dishes did not “go together,” as in a “main dish” and “sides.” Rather, dishes were perceived as separate, and people sampled only those that appealed them. (The phrase “þerwith cometh” on the MS Cosin menu likely indicates that two dishes were meant to be set on the table at the same time, not that they were meant to be eaten together.) In addition, only the lord and lady, their family, and honored guests were entitled to be served all of the dishes featured on surviving period bills of fare. Lower-ranking members of a household were served only the plainer, cheaper dishes, and the lowliest may have had to content themselves with gruel-like pottages and leaden dark breads. Needless to say, all seventeen guests at our Morgan feast were served all of the dishes (in two separate messes, to minimize the passing of heavy platters), and they proved to be hardy trencher-persons. A few even had second helpings of the apple fritters!

  1. A caveat: All forms of writing became more common starting in the twelfth century than previously. ↩
  2.  Blancmange (in various cognates), or “white dish,” was the most important of these dishes. Beloved throughout Europe, blancmange was a stiff porridge of rice (unknown in Europe prior to Islamic contact), teased poultry breast, and almond milk, liberally seasoned with sugar. Several variants on blancmange, some with explicit Arab links in their names, also abound in medieval English recipe manuscripts and feast menus. The dish is still made, in quasi-medieval form (with chicken), in Turkey today. And then there is pasta, which appears in many forms in medieval manuscript cookbooks, including English ones. There is persuasive evidence that pasta may be a gift of the East, although, if it is, it likely entered Christian European cooking well before the twelfth century. ↩
This entry was posted in English cooking, Medieval European cooking, Medieval Islamic cooking, Stephen Schmidt 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  |   8 Comments on When the West First Tasted the Cuisines of the East  

Homemade Bread, with Home-Brewed Yeast

Posted May 2017 
by Stephen Schmidt 

By Stephen Schmidt

 

Bread, adapted from Mary Randolph’s 1824 recipe

 

For the first two hundred years or so of European settlement, most Americans lived on isolated farms or in small villages, far from the nearest bakery. Thus, most substantial American homes were built with brick bake ovens, first and foremost for the purpose of baking bread, which most women did once or twice a week, typically on Wednesdays and/or Saturdays. A practice that originated in necessity persisted as a cultural habit to the end of the nineteenth century. By this time, forty percent of the American population lived in cities and towns, and yet nine out of ten American women (by many estimates) still chose to bake their bread at home, now in the convenient ovens of their enclosed iron stoves. There were probably still some women who clung to home bread baking out of fear that bakery white bread was adulterated with chalk, plaster, and other inedible materials, as Sylvester Graham had famously charged—and bakery bread did cost more, if only the materials were considered, than homemade. But reading between the lines of the nineteenth-century bread recipes, many of which go on for pages and frame home-baked bread as a sort of holy manna, I sense that home bread-baking became, over time, a typical nineteenth-century domestic value: something that a good Christian mother did for the health and comfort of her family. In Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt Book (1845), Catharine Beecher speaks of “sweet, well-raised, home-made yeast bread” as a “luxury” and a “comfort” enjoyed by only a lucky few, who “know that there is no food upon earth, which is so good, or the loss of which is so much regretted.” In The Boston Cook Book (1884), Mrs. Lincoln proclaims that “nothing . . . more affects the health and happiness of the family than the quality of its daily bread,” the home-baking of which “should be regarded as one of the highest accomplishments” of the housewife. With their hyperbole and their Biblical echoes, these recipes seem not to be just about the bread.

Prior to the 1870s, when Fleischmann’s yeast cakes became available, the yeast needed for this project typically originated as a semiliquid byproduct of brewing or distilling—in the case of brewing, either the foam that rose to the top of the barrel during fermentation or the residue left in the emptied barrel, which Americans referred to as “emptins.” To judge from the number of cookbook references, brewer’s yeast was the more common leaven, and “emptins” possibly the more common form, for the word is used to denote a variety of leaveners. However, distillers’ yeast was regarded as stronger and faster-acting.1 Antebellum cookbook authors do not express any preference for one yeast or the other with respect to the taste of the baked bread.

Top Yeast on Fermenting Beer

Charles Louis Fleischmann (1834-1897)

Women who lived close to a brewery or distillery could simply pick up yeast whenever they wanted it and use it straight, and this was the ideal way, according to the cookbook authors. In The Virginia House-Wife (1824), Mary Randolph advises, “Persons who live in towns, and can procure brewer’s yeast, will save trouble by using it,” sentiments echoed by Eliza Leslie, in Directions for Cookery (1837), who writes, “Strong fresh yeast from the brewery should always be used in preference to any other.” But many women could only procure brewery or distillery yeast periodically, and so they had to grow the yeast they bought into a larger batch and preserve this batch for some weeks or months. And thus we find many recipes for yeast in antebellum American cookbooks, both print and manuscript.

Maria Parloa (1843-1909)

Eight years ago I tried the recipe titled simply “Yeast” that is outlined in Maria Parloa’s New Cook Book and Marketing Guide (1881), after I had read about it in Sandra Oliver’s Saltwater Foodways, a fascinating study of nineteenth-century New England cooking on land and sea. The recipe calls for boiling two tablespoons of dried hops in two quarts of water, straining the infusion over six large finely grated raw potatoes, and bringing this mixture up to a boil. This is removed from heat, a half cup of sugar and a quarter cup of salt are added, and, when blood warm, also a cup of yeast—or, interestingly, “one cake of compressed yeast,” which suggests that many women of the 1880s found yeast cakes as hard to come by as their foremothers had found yeast from a brewery or distillery. The mixture is allowed to rise for five or six hours in a warm place. Then it is turned into a “stone jug,” corked tightly, and “set in a cool place.” I made a half recipe, using three 8-ounce baking potatoes and 1 teaspoon of granulated dry yeast (which is more or less equivalent to one half cake of compressed yeast). I got a total of three quarts, which I kept in a glass Mason jar in the refrigerator. I was able to make bread with this yeast from mid-April to mid-August—by which point I had used up the entire batch—using 1/3 cup of yeast to 14 ounces of flour, that is, flour sufficient for one standard loaf. Granted, by the time of my last batch of bread, the dough took some eighteen hours to rise to double in the bowl and another two hours in the pan. But this is only a little more time than Mary Randolph anticipates that it will take her bread to rise, including an initial setting of a sponge (which I did not do in making my own loaves).

Hop Plants

Maria Parloa’s yeast astonished me. I would never have guessed that a mere teaspoon of dry yeast could be stretched to raise twelve loaves, or some sixteen pounds, of bread. I was even more surprised that the yeast remained alive and active, if sluggish, over a period of four months. The secret to its longevity may have been the hops, an ingredient in most antebellum yeast recipes. (I got my hops from “hop tea,” which is sold at natural foods stores, in individual teabags.) David Yudkin, owner of Hotlips Soda, in Portland, Oregon, explained to me that hops is a mild antibacterial. In beer, it allows for yeast fermentation but suppresses other organisms, thus acting as a preservative, and it presumably does the same in homemade yeast. In fact, my batch of yeast had begun to smell sour as early as May, which suggests that organisms other than yeast were growing in it. However, these organisms did not kill the ferment and, just as importantly, their sourness was not imparted to the bread, a critical issue for antebellum bread bakers—more about this in a moment.

Hop Flowers, or Hops

 

I more or less forgot about my 2009 home yeast experiment until a couple of months ago, when I received an intriguing bread recipe from John Buchtel, Director of the Booth Family Center for Special Collections of the Lauinger Library, at Georgetown University. This bread was baked by one Brother Gavan, the head of the Georgetown campus bakery, around the time of the Civil War, and it was a large batch indeed, made with “a barrel of flour.” Assuming that the flour weighed around 200 pounds (196 pounds is the understood weight of a barrel today) and the dough was made up with 60% as much water by weight as flour (which is Mary Randolph’s hydration; Brother Gavan’s recipe is unclear on this point), the recipe yielded around 300 pounds of baked bread. The yeast used in this recipe captured my attention. It is made in two stages. First, “a quart of stock yeast,” presumably from a brewery or distillery, is fermented for 24 hours in a slurry of hop “juice” (made by boiling one ounce of dried hops in a gallon of water for half an hour), four ounces of wheat flour, and one ounce of malt flour (ground dried sprouted barley). This, strained, makes what the recipe refers to as “the yeast.” In the second stage, this yeast (measuring about one gallon) is combined with a “bucket of potatoes,” boiled and mashed (“skins and all”), four pounds of flour, and eight gallons of water, and this mush is allowed to “ripen” in a “tub of double capacity for . . . 12 to 13 hours.”  This, strained, is used to make a sponge, and the sponge, presumably with additional water, is kneaded up into the dough.

I assumed at first that only large-scale bakeries would make use of a two-stage yeast brewing process, whose point, I inferred, was to provide the yeast with two separate feedings, thereby growing a small amount of stock yeast into sufficient leavening for an enormous quantity of bread. But I had a nagging suspicion that I had seen similar recipes in home cookbooks too, and indeed I had. Here is one from the “Jane E. Hassler cookbook, June 1857,” a manuscript cookbook in the possession of the University of Iowa:

Fountain Rising

Boil a large handful of hops, in about 3 qts of water, several hours, put it boiling hot on about 1 qt of Rye flour. Taking care to wet every part, when cool enough, add some leaven to make it rise, 2 spoonful of salt, Ginger, and sugar each, when light, beat it down, and let it rise again. Cover it well from the air, and keep it in a cool place.

When you boil potatoes pour the water on some flour, and mash a few potatoes with it, when cool stir a large handful of the rising above mentioned, and then set your bread to rise with it afterwards.

This recipe calls for considerably more yeast food (rye flour) in the first stage than Brother Gavan’s recipe does, and it is presumably this food that keeps the yeast fed during storage, just as grated potatoes do in Maria Parloa’s recipe. Although the recipe does not say so, I assume that the second stage of Fountain Rising includes a fermentation period, during which the yeast gains strength by feeding on the potatoes. While not facing the Herculean task of leavening 300 pounds of bread, as Brother Gavan’s yeast must, Fountain Rising will have become fatigued if it has been kept for some weeks or months. The second feeding will revivify it, so that, with luck, it will raise the dough in something less than eighteen hours.

Many antebellum yeast recipes look much like Maria Parloa’s (albeit typically with mashed cooked potatoes rather than grated raw), a few like Fountain Rising. And there are many others too, some sustained with whole wheat flour or pumpkin, some without hops (which Beecher contends can give bread an unpleasant sharpness), and more than a few with ginger, which was perhaps believed to increase the liveliness of yeast because it is “hot.”2 There are also yeast “cakes,” which Mary Randolph, in common period fashion, makes by thickening a yeasted hop slurry with cornmeal to “the consistency of biscuit dough,” rolling and cutting the dough into “little cakes,” and drying them “in the shade, turning them frequently.” There are also recipes for (liquid) yeast that do not call for stock yeast, apparently relying on wild yeasts for leaven. Catharine Beecher outlines such a recipe in her cookbook of 1845, under the title “Milk Rising.” A similar recipe also appears in “American Cookbook, 1824-1855,” a manuscript cookbook at the University of Iowa:

Milk Emptins

Boil one pint of new milk then add one pint of water and stir in flour till about as thick as slapjack & let it stand over night & it is fit for use

I am curious about all of these yeast recipes, and I wish that I had the time and patience—and the yeast expertise—to explore them. But I don’t, so I will assume, on the basis of my yeast experiment eight years ago, that most of these recipes work, perhaps far better and far longer than I would think from reading them on the page. I am tempted also to assume that home-brewed yeasts imparted more or less the same flavor to antebellum bread that supermarket yeast imparts to bread today, for, in fact, the bread I raised with my home-brewed yeast tasted entirely familiar. But, obviously, I cannot make such an assumption because the original leaven in my home-brewed yeast came from the supermarket.

Barrel of Branded Flour

Unfortunately, this is only one of many assumptions that cannot be made in attempting to replicate the standard antebellum American white loaf. Indeed, it is probably an error to even speak of such a thing. Although there were flour brands as early as 1800, they were not graded by standard protocols, as all commercial flours are today, and people bought these flours on the basis of diverse criteria. (There is much advice on this score in the cookbooks.) And many women baked bread using local flour, perhaps ground from wheat grown on their family’s fields. So the flours that went into antebellum loaves must have varied considerably with respect to protein and starch content, moisture, grind size, and degree of bolting, resulting in rather different antebellum loaves. That said, based on my experience with adapting antebellum recipes generally, I suspect that antebellum flours, as a rule, had considerably less protein and absorptive capacity than today’s “bread flours” and less even than today’s higher-protein all-purpose flours. If this was indeed the case, relatively low-protein all-purpose flours (about 10.5%), such as Gold Medal and Pillsbury brands, should be as close to the mark as it is possible to come.

Additional difficulties in arriving at a standard antebellum white loaf are posed by the period recipes. Perhaps because flours varied so greatly, most antebellum recipes are maddeningly sketchy with regard to hydration, the crucial determinant of texture. Eliza Leslie’s directions are typical. She says only to add “as much soft water as is necessary” to mix the sponge and the remaining flour called for in her recipe into dough, which could imply a hydration anywhere between 50% and 65%. Making matters still more complicated, antebellum recipes call for wildly divergent proofing times, the critical factor for flavor. After kneading her sponge into dough, Leslie says to set the dough “in a warm place to undergo a further fermentation; for which, if all has been done rightly, about twenty minutes or half an hour will be sufficient.” A twenty- to thirty-minute rise does not strike me as even remotely sufficient, but, in fact, cookbook author Mary Cornelius, in the 1859 edition of The Young Housekeeper’s Friend, does not proof her dough at all. (Granted, Cornelius allows her sponge to rise overnight, which would have helped.) On the other hand, there is Mary Randolph. She allots around five to seven hours for setting the sponge (depending on the season) and she proofs the dough overnight.

Antebellum bread recipes stress two points in particular. First, the dough must be thoroughly kneaded (for as long as thirty minutes, says Leslie) in order that the bread be “white and light,” says Beecher. Second, as Mary Cornelius puts it, “Care is necessary that bread does not rise too much, and thus become sour.” Eliza Leslie says the same, and so does Catharine Beecher, adding that over-risen bread can “lose its sweetness” even “before it begins to turn sour.” Sourness being so abhorrent, all antebellum cookbook authors give directions for correcting soured doughs by kneading in a solution of water and pearl ash or saleratus, alkaline compounds more commonly used as baking sodas. Unfortunately, soda is damaging to the texture of bread, turning it crumbly and dry, like a baking powder biscuit, as Catharine Beecher acknowledges, writing, “Bread is never as good which has turned sour, and been sweetened with saleratus, as if it had risen only just enough.”3 Some culinary historians have written that antebellum American bread was a species of sourdough. These people are mistaken. The word repeatedly used in antebellum recipes to describe the desired flavor in bread is sweet.

Mary Randolph (1762-1828)

Those determined to make an antebellum loaf—if not a standard loaf and possibly not even a typical one—can find no better guide than Mary Randolph. Randolph provides proofing times for both the sponge and the dough, she specifies the hydration, and—miracle of miracles—she correlates the volume measure and the weight of wheat flour. And her correlation (one quart of flour weighs one and one quarter pounds) is precisely accurate for today’s all-purpose flour, which tempts one to think (perhaps wishfully) that her recipe, adapted with all-purpose flour, yields bread similar to the bread she baked.

To Make Bread

Mary Randolph, The Virginia House-Wife (1824)

When you find the barrel of flour a good one, empty it into a chest or box made for the purpose, with a lid that will shut close; it keeps much better in this manner than when packed in a barrel, and even improves by lying lightly; sift the quantity you intend to make up, put into a bowl three quarters of a pint of cold water to each quart of flour, with a large spoonful of yeast, and a little salt, to every quart; stir into it just as much of the flour as will make a thin batter, put half the remaining flour in the bottom of a tin kettle, pour the batter on it, and cover it with the other half; stop it close, and set it where it can have a moderate degree of warmth. When it has risen well, turn it into a bowl, work in the dry flour and knead it some minutes, return it into the kettle, stop it, and give it moderate heat. In the morning, work it a little, make it into rolls, and bake it. In the winter, make the bread up at three o’clock, and it will be ready to work before bed time. In summer, make it up at five o’clock. A quart of flour should weigh just one pound and a quarter.

Loaves Cast on Oven Floor

Randolph makes up her bread as “rolls,” by which she does not mean rolls as we now think of them but, probably, small eight- to ten- ounce round loaves, hand-shaped and baked free-standing, similar perhaps to the fine white loaves that the seventeenth-century English called manchet, or so Karen Hess speculates in her annotations to Randolph’s recipe in the 1984 South Carolina Press edition of Randolph’s cookbook. Historically, breads baked freestanding were typically cast from a peel directly onto the oven floor, which has led some authorities to surmise that the pan-baking of American bread came in with the introduction of enclosed stoves, whose slatted oven shelves made such a maneuver impossible. However, in The American Frugal Housewife (1833), Lydia Maria Child bakes her bread in pans—in a brick oven. So it seems that the stove oven did not usher in pan baking but sealed the transition to it, which had already begun by the time Randolph wrote.

Like the classic French baguette, Randolph’s bread is made with four simple ingredients: flour, water, yeast, and salt. This was typical—possibly even ubiquitous—in this country for all loaves simply called “bread” until around 1850, when water came to be replaced, at least in part, with milk. After the Civil War, small amounts of shortening and sugar were introduced, and today’s standard American “white bread” was born. Bread aficionados might enjoy baking my adapted recipe for Randolph’s bread side-by-side with a modern American white bread that includes milk but has a similar hydration, perhaps the classic Joy of Cooking White bread (which appears in all editions) or the richer Pullman Loaf from the excellent Hot Bread Kitchen Cookbook.4 While Randolph’s bread is a bit different from its modern counterparts—firmer and more cohesive, slightly less white in color—it has the same thin crust, the same small, tight crumb, and a similar flavor: unmistakably an American loaf.

  1. I gather from what I’ve read—and I am hardly an expert—that today’s brewery and distillery yeasts are different strains of the same organism. ↩
  2. Some contemporary research suggests that certain spices promote the growth of yeast, while others inhibit it. ↩
  3. The yeast, too, was supposed to be sweet, and, to keep it sweet, Leslie recommends recourse to pearl ash: “It is best to make yeast very frequently; as, with every precaution, it will scarcely keep good a week, even in cold weather. If you are apprehensive of its becoming sour, put into each bottle a lump of pearl-ash the size of a hazel-nut.” If yeast did turn sour, Beecher did not think alkali correction would help: “Sour yeast cannot be made good with saleratus.” As I have said, my sour-smelling home-brewed yeast produced perfectly sweet bread. ↩
  4. Correcting for the milk used in the modern loaves, which contains 15% materials other than water, their hydrations are approximately 68%, comparable to the hydration of Randolph’s loaf and promoting a similar texture. ↩
This entry was posted in Bread, Mary Randolph, Stephen Schmidt 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  |   1 Comment on Homemade Bread, with Home-Brewed Yeast  

Plum Pudding, Boiled—and Baked

Posted December 2016 
by Stephen Schmidt 

By Stephen Schmidt

Plum Pudding, or Christmas Pudding

Plum Pudding, or Christmas Pudding

On the evening of November 7, 1862, Catharine Dean Flint staged a formal company dinner for eleven people in her elegant Boston home. An elaborate affair by today’s standards, her dinner included two dessert courses, the first of which featured a plum pudding. When we hear the words “plum pudding,” we visualize a dense, dark, shiny mound that comes to the table dramatically wreathed in brandy flames. The British and Irish still serve plum pudding at Christmas today, albeit under the modern name “Christmas pudding,” but most Americans seem to associate it with English Christmases of the past, most famously, perhaps, that of the Cratchit family in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. It is indeed an old-fashioned pudding, nothing like the cold, creamy desserts that we call puddings today, but rather a sort of dense suet pound cake stuffed with raisins—the “plums.” It is served piping hot, with “rich sauce,” as most puddings once were served.

But this was not, in fact, the pudding that Mrs. Flint served at her dinner on November 7, 1862. Mrs. Flint wrote extensive notes about this dinner, as she did about all of her entertainments, in her manuscript cookbook, which is now in the possession of the American Antiquarian Society, in Worcester, Massachusetts. And in these notes Mrs. Flint remarks, approvingly, that the pudding was served turned out of “the dish in which it was baked.” Classic plum pudding, the kind that comes to the table in flames, is not baked: it is boiled in a cloth bag or, more commonly today, steamed in a ceramic pudding basin or in a fluted metal steeple mold. But American women knew another kind of plum pudding too, which was baked, and it happens that Mrs. Flint’s cookbook contains a recipe for the baked sort of plum pudding—an unusually firm baked plum pudding that proves easy to unmold from its baking dish.  The donor of the recipe, “Madam Salisbury,” was likely the mother of Stephen Salisbury II, a frequent guest in the Flint home.

Madam Salisbury’s Plum Pudding

Elizabeth Tuckerman Salisbury (1768-1851), by Gilbert Stuart (courtesy of Worcester Art Museum)

Elizabeth Tuckerman Salisbury (1768-1851), by Gilbert Stuart (courtesy of Worcester Art Museum)

Half a loaf of bread soaked two hours in one quart of milk. Butter the size of an egg. Two heaped spoons of sugar and seven eggs beaten with the sugar and strained on to the bread after it is cold. Pint bowl full of raisins – two tea spoons salt. One even tea spoon cloves a little cinnamon. Bake two hours.

Madame Salisbury's Plum Pudding

Madame Salisbury’s Plum Pudding

If you are wondering why plum puddings were once so highly esteemed, the simple answer is that, historically, raisins were special. When the English nicknamed raisins “plums” or “little plums” (which happened around the time of the Restoration, in 1660), they were affiliating the fruits with comfits, or dragées, which the English called “sugar plums.” Sugar plums were fancy and festive, and the English, historically, thought the same of raisins, both the large “raisins of the sun” and the small “raisins of Corinth,” which the English called “currants.”1 Writing in 1617, the English traveler and social commentator Fynes Moryson tells us that “the use of Corands of Corinth [is] so frequent in all places, and with all persons in England, as the very Greekes that sell them wonder what we doe with such great quantities thereof, and know not how we should spend them, except we use them for dying, or to feede Hogges.”2 In Moryson’s day, large and small raisins still found their way into many meat, poultry, and vegetable dishes, as they had since the thirteenth century. But the fruits were already beginning to be particularly associated with the many new sweet things then appearing on the scene, including sweet puddings, which were rapidly gaining favor with the English.

Although based on earlier precedents, boiled plum pudding, so named, did not emerge until the early eighteenth century. Through most of the century, it was, like other puddings, served in the first course of dinner, with the principal meats. And like several other raisin-rich comestibles—such as plum cakes (the ancestors of today’s fruitcakes and British Christmas cakes), plum pottage (a sort of spicy-sweet, fruited beef stew thickened with bread), and mince pie (from which Jack Horner extracted a plum)—plum pudding was a favorite at Christmas. The “Miss Caldwell cookbook, 1757-1790,” an English manuscript in the possession of the University of Iowa, showcases both plum pudding and smallish mince pies in the first course of a Christmas bill of fare, along with two other classics of the English Christmas feast: brawn (cold pickled pork) and “a sirloin of roasted beef.”  A number of other English manuscript cookbooks of the period outline similar Christmas dinner first courses.

Miss Caldwell Cookbook Christmas Dinner Bill-of-Fare, First Course

Miss Caldwell Cookbook Christmas Dinner Bill-of-Fare, First Course, page 124

Boiled plum pudding came to America early on—there are recipes in several eighteenth-century American manuscript cookbooks—and it duly shifted to the second course of dinner in the late eighteenth century, as it did in Britain. Still, American cookbooks imply that the pudding was never as wholeheartedly embraced in this country as in Britain. Harder-pressed American families—families whose circumstances were similar to the Cratchits’—seem rarely to have served it, even at Christmas. And while the American gentry did serve it, sometimes even apart from Christmas and New Year, many gentry cookbooks frame the pudding, in one way or another, as English, as though it were not fully naturalized here. Indeed, starting with Mary Randolph’s The Virginia House-Wife (1824), more than a few American cookbooks title their recipes English Plum Pudding. Perhaps America’s problem with the pudding was its abundance of plums, which made it expensive—or perhaps it was the booze, which many Americans already found objectionable by the 1840s. Or perhaps it was the suet, or beef kidney fat, which had to be cleaned and minced, a fiddly project that English women took in their stride but that American women seem always to have balked at. In addition, many American women no doubt shied away from the six-hour boiling, which someone (preferably “help,” which was always in short supply in America) had to supervise, shifting the pudding in the pot to maintain its round shape and topping up the water as it boiled away. Finally, there was the national “dyspepsia” crisis (or so it was perceived) of the antebellum decades and beyond, during which boiled puddings came to be considered unhealthily “rich” and “heavy.” In The Good Housekeeper, her cookbook of 1841, the redoubtable Sarah Hale warned, “As Christmas comes but once a year, a rich plum pudding may be permitted for the feast, though it is not healthy food; and children should be helped very sparingly.”

Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1879)

Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1879)

Enter baked plum pudding. Baked plum pudding was essentially a simple bread pudding dressed up a bit: enhanced with plums, obviously (which plain bread pudding in the day did not have), and served hot with a rich sauce (while plain bread pudding was served “cool,” say the cookbook authors, and sauce-less). Baked plum pudding was in multiple ways friendlier to American sensibilities than its boiled counterpart. It had fewer plums than the boiled article and so was cheaper. It did not have booze (except in a very few highfalutin recipes), and while some recipes, in a nod to tradition, do suggest that suet can be used (a dreadful idea, in my view, as suet never melts sufficiently, if at all, in a baked pudding), these same recipes invariably say that butter will do just as well instead, “if you choose.” And most recipes call for butter only—and not for much.3 Even children could be permitted to indulge. And of course there was no six-hour boiling to fret over. An hour or so in an oven (or a Dutch oven) and the pudding was done.

Baked plum pudding shows up in some nineteenth-century British cookbooks, but I do not sense that British women were nearly as fond of it, or as reliant on it, as American women were.4 Here it became not only an “every woman’s” alternative to boiled plum pudding on holiday tables but also, as Mary Cornelius tells us, an all-purpose company treat that could be served either as a dessert or as a tea cake. In the 1859 edition of The Young Housekeeper’s Friend, Mrs. Cornelius advises her readers:

These puddings are served with a rich sauce, if eaten warm, but are excellent cold, cut up like cake. People that are subject to a great deal of uninvited company, find it convenient in cold weather to bake half a dozen at once. They will keep several weeks, and when one is to be used, it may be loosened from the dish by a knife passed around it, and little hot water be poured in round the edge. It should then be covered close, and set for half an hour into the stove or oven.

Mrs. Cornelius provides two recipes for baked plum pudding. Her first recipe, she says, can be made with soda crackers rather than bread, in which guise it was often called cracker pudding. Most nineteenth-century American cookbook authors have a recipe for cracker pudding, including Fannie Farmer, who features it in her Thanksgiving menu under the name “Thanksgiving Pudding.” Mrs. Cornelius’s second recipe is thus:

Soak a pound of soft bread in a quart of boiled milk till it can easily be strained through a coarse hair sieve; then add seven eggs, two gills of cream, a quarter of a pound of butter (melted), a gill of rose-water, or some extract of rose, a little cinnamon or nutmeg, and a pound of raisins. For a small family, bake it in two dishes, an hour; and reserve one for another day.

Students of historical American cooking may think that they have seen this recipe somewhere else—and indeed they have. It is a paraphrase of the recipe called “A Bread Pudding” outlined by Amelia Simmons in American Cookery (1796), our nation’s first homegrown cookbook. As I’ve said, historical American bread pudding did not have plums, so Simmons’s title is something of a mystery.

Amelia Simmons's A Bread Pudding

Amelia Simmons’s A Bread Pudding

A Bread Pudding

One pound soft bread or biscuit [crackers] soaked in one quart milk, run thro’ a sieve or cullender [colander], add 7 eggs, three quarters of a pound sugar, one quarter of a pound butter, nutmeg or cinnamon, one gill rosewater, one pound stone raisins, half pint cream, bake three quarters of an hour, middling oven.

It turns out that Catharine Dean Flint copied Simmons’s recipe verbatim into her manuscript cookbook, so it may have been Simmons’s baked plum pudding, not Madam Salisbury’s, that Mrs. Flint served at her dinner of November 7, 1862. Which is better? I would give the edge to Simmons’s pudding, which is sweeter, richer, and softer than Madam Salisbury’s and has the lovely flavor of rose water (which, despite the large quantity, is subtle). Still, Madam Salisbury’s pudding slices beautifully and has an appealing spicy flavor, and it is sweet enough if you interpret her “two heaped spoons of sugar” liberally. Adapted recipes for both puddings can be found here. Those fortunate to be subject to a great deal of company, uninvited or invited, over the holidays may find it convenient to have at least one in reserve.

 

[NOTES]

  1. Currants, the berries, came to England in the sixteenth century. Initially, some English mistakenly believed that the berries, when dried, made raisins of Corinth. And so the berries, too, became “currants.” ↩
  2. William Brenchley Wrye, England as Seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and James I (London: John Russell Smith, Soho Square: 1865), 190. Retrieved December 3, 2016 from Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/englandasseenbyf00ryew ↩
  3. While classic boiled plum pudding requires an equal weight of fat to bread (and/or flour), baked plum pudding has only a quarter weight of fat to bread or less. ↩
  4. My hunch is that American baked plum pudding and British baked plum pudding evolved (fairly) independently. The American and British recipes differ in some details, and the uses of the recipes, as implied in the cookbooks, are also different. ↩
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When Service à la Française Met Service à la Russe

Posted November 2016 
by Stephen Schmidt 

By Stephen Schmidt

 

The library of Harewood House, Yorkshire, UK. Mrs. Flint staged her November 1862 in her home library, which may have been similar.

The library of Harewood House, Yorkshire, UK. Mrs. Flint staged her November 1862 in her home library, which may have been similar.

 Those who have read my post about Catharine Dean Flint’s evening parties and late-night suppers know that Mrs. Flint was an ideal hostess—someone who knew the latest fashions and whose entertainments were certainly stylish, but also someone who was secure in her sense that she knew best how to please her particular guests and so was not afraid to do things her own way. Mrs. Flint also had the perfect temperament for a hostess (and perhaps for anyone). When something went awry at one of her parties—when the silver arrangement was a tad too crowded, or the dessert display was awkward, or too many plates of scalloped oysters went uneaten—she did not let herself get upset. Instead, she wrote down what had gone wrong in a notebook so that she would know how to better manage things the next time.

Now in the possession of the American Antiquarian Society, in Worcester, Massachusetts, Mrs. Flint’s notebook tells us that she once again marshalled her formidable skills as a hostess—and displayed her equable hostess temperament—on the evening of November 7, 1862, when she staged a formal dinner for eleven people in the library of her fine Boston home. Sixty years old at the time of this event, Mrs. Flint had been schooled in a style of dinner-giving called service à la française but had lived to see a new style, called service à la russe, come into fashion. Mrs. Flint neither slavishly clung to the old way nor heedlessly embraced the new but instead merged the two styles, delightfully, into service à la Flint. As it turned out, there was a glitch in her November 1862 dinner, but, as usual, Mrs. Flint took it in her stride.

Second course by Elizabeth Raffald. 1769, with serving dishes specially shaped for specific table positions.

Second course by Elizabeth Raffald, 1769, with serving dishes specially shaped for specific table positions.

From the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries the Anglo-American formal dinner was served à la française, or French style. The antebellum American version of service à la française (which differed from the contemporaneous British version) entailed two principal courses, the first savory and the second sweet, plus a little caboose course called dessert. In her cookbook of 1846 Catharine Beecher lays out a typical French-style menu “for what would be called . . . in the most respectable society . . . a plain, substantial dinner.” Her first course comprises a soup, a fish dish, two principal meats (a turkey and a ham, a common choice), a game roast (ducks), a fancy side dish (scalloped oysters), several plain vegetables, and various sauces and condiments. By Beecher’s day, the first course had become, de facto, two courses, as the soup and the fish were brought to the table and served first—most diners ate one or the other, not both—before the rest of the course was laid on.1 Beecher’s second course features a pudding (hot, with a sauce, as was traditional), at least two unspecified pastry dishes (particular favorites were mince and apple pies), and one or more delicate sweet dishes selected from the family denominated custards and creams (which, confusingly, also included gelatin jellies). Her dessert focuses on fruit in various forms—fresh, preserved in syrup, candied, and dried—augmented by nuts, candies, and little cakes (such as macaroons and kisses).

When a dinner was served à la française, all of the items of each course were arranged on the table in a clever symmetrical pattern of top, bottom, middle, side, and corner dishes. There was nothing on the table other than the food, which, in effect, supplied the table decoration.2 Seated at opposite ends of the table, the hostess and host served the soup and the fish of the first course and the pudding and pastry of the second, while their guests served one another whatever dishes were nearest to them, helped by waiters who were standing by. Some guests not only had to serve but also slice or carve, for at French-style dinners roasts, birds, meat roulades, savory pies, and all else came to the table whole and intact. Fortunately, beasts requiring complicated dismemberment (like a roasted turkey) were typically set before the host, who was presumed to know how to dispatch them.

Catharine Beecher's First Course (after the soup and fish had been served and cleared)

Catharine Beecher’s First Course (after the soup and fish had been served and cleared). Beecher’s serving pieces are much simpler than Raffald’s, as is Beecher’s dinner.

 

Place setting for 12-course dinner a la russe

Place setting for 12-course dinner a la russe

By the 1860s, the rich and fashionable had abandoned service à la française in favor of service à la russe, or Russian service, and magazine writers, cookbook authors, and “behavior” experts were strenuously promoting this new serving style to middle-class women. While a French-style dinner was essentially a three-course buffet, a dinner à la russe was served in eight to fourteen separate small courses. In antebellum America, the more or less obligatory courses comprised, in the following order: raw oysters on the half-shell, soup, fish, croquettes or a creamed food in puff pastry, a roast with potatoes and a vegetable, game with salad (or salad only), a cold dessert, a frozen dessert with fancy cakes, and, finally, coffee. If a grander effect was wanted, other items could be grafted onto this basic template: an entrée (meaning a light meat or fish dish), and/or a vegetable, and/or a palate-cleansing sorbet could follow the roast; cheese and crackers could be served either following the game/salad or just before coffee; a hot dessert or a large cake could precede the cold dessert; and fresh, preserved, and dried fruit might follow the frozen dessert.3 It all sounds like quite a production, but in Practical Cooking and Dinner-Giving (1876), Mary Henderson opines that “it is very simple to prepare a dinner served à la Russe”—indeed, “after a very little practice it becomes a mere amusement.” Henderson’s nonchalance is less surprising than it seems. She presumes that many items will be purchased ready-made, either from a caterer or in cans, and that all of the cooking required will be done by servants, which any hostess who hazarded such a dinner would have had at the time.

Mary Henderson (1842-1931) was certainly one of the "rich and fashionable." Shown here is her Washington DC home (built c. 1889) shortly before it was razed in 1949.

Mary Henderson (1842-1931) was certainly one of the “rich and fashionable.” Shown here is her Washington DC home (built c. 1889) shortly before it was razed in 1949.

In addition to being served in many courses, Russian service differed from French in the way the food was presented. Each dish was sliced, sauced, and artfully arranged on a platter in the kitchen. A waiter then bore the platter to the table and offered it to guests one at a time, who helped themselves to as much as they wanted. There was never any food on the table except what was on the diners’ plates. But this does not mean that a table styled à la russe was unadorned. As Mary Henderson explains, “In serving a dinner à la Russe, the table is decorated by placing the dessert in a tasteful manner around a centre-piece of flowers.” By dessert she means “fruits, fresh or candied, preserved ginger or preserves of any kind, fancy cakes, candies, nuts, raisins, etc.”

Centerpiece with Flowers and Fruit

Centerpiece with Flowers and Fruit

Most cookbooks published after the Civil War—including Fannie Farmer’s hugely influential Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, first published in 1896—take it as a given that formal dinners staged in upper-middle-class homes were served à la russe. But given the complications of Russian service (notwithstanding Mrs. Henderson’s airy assertions) and its profound departure from tradition, one suspects that many women merged the two systems—as Mrs. Flint did, to charming effect.

The savory dishes of Mrs. Flint’s November 1862 dinner were served in the Russian style, but not consistently in accordance with correct Russian procedure. The first of the savory courses was the popular turtle soup (three quarts total, ordered from a purveyor). Mrs. Flint’s houseboy, Edwin, ladled the soup from a tureen that had been set on a small table before a window. Henry Smith, a caterer and party planner hired for the occasion, passed the filled soup plates to guests. The soup was served with sherry, as most soups were at the time. Champagne was drunk with the remaining savory courses, as was typical in the day even when red meats were on offer.

The next course was creamed oysters in puff pastry shells, or “oyster patties,” a clever choice, as the patties could stand in either for the second Russian course, which was fish, or the third, which was typically a sauced morsel in pastry. Mrs. Flint notes that there were eight patties altogether, arranged “four on a dish, each patty cut across.” The waiters must have struggled to serve the patties, as each held a generous pint of filling (four quarts of oysters having been ordered for the dinner), which must have threatened to spill out.

Oyster Patties (courtesy of finecooking.com

Oyster Patties (courtesy of finecooking.com)

The third course may have been meant as the Russian roast course (which was the de facto Russian “main course”), but it was hardly a proper one. For one thing, the roast—a turkey “of nine or ten pounds”—was served in tandem with four boiled chickens, which had no place in this slot of a Russian menu. For another, the turkey was carved at the table by Mr. Flint, a violation of Russian protocol. As Mrs. Henderson explains, at a Russian dinner “the dishes are brought to the table already carved neatly for serving, thus depriving . . . the host of [displaying] his skill in carving.” However, hewing to the Russian style, both birds came to the table garnished with parsley, a new fashion that Mrs. Flint thought it worth her time to note.

While Mr. Flint was working at the turkey, Henry whisked Mrs. Flint’s chickens away and carved them in some unspecified place. Once carved, the birds were transferred to platters with their vegetable accompaniments, the turkey with deep-fried breaded mashed-potato balls, sweet potatoes, and squash; the chickens with boiled potatoes, sweet potatoes, and Matinas (a type of tomato, which may have been canned, considering the lateness of the season). The platters were then offered by waiters to the guests.  At her sit-down suppers, too, Mrs. Flint was wont to offer two varieties of poultry, one roasted and one boiled, apparently with the expectation that guests would choose one bird or the other, not both. My guess is that she assumed her dinner guests would do likewise. Why Mrs. Flint thought it a good idea to serve two similar poultry dishes simultaneously is a mystery. Catharine Beecher paired her turkey with a ham, which seems a better choice.

The savory courses of the meal concluded with a three black ducks and “celery dressed,” that is, some sort of celery salad. This was a classic Russian game course—if not, one thinks, really the right game course for this particular meal, considering the bounty of feathered edibles already proffered. And contravening Russian convention once again, Mr. Flint carved the ducks.

Elizabeth Tuckerman Salisbury (1768-1851), by Gilbert Stuart (courtesy of Worcester Art Museum)

Elizabeth Tuckerman Salisbury (1768-1851), by Gilbert Stuart, circa 1810 (courtesy of Worcester Art Museum)

The dinner now departed from Russian procedure entirely, in favor of a French-style second course constructed in the American way—that is, all sweet.4 Americans of the day sometimes called this course “dessert” (which was a bit confusing when a dessert of fruit followed) and sometimes “pastry and pudding,” after its principal constituents. At Mrs. Flint’s dinner, the pastry was apple pies, and the pudding was a hot plum pudding. By today’s definitions, the pudding was essentially a baked bread pudding with lots of raisins (the “plums”), not the classic, fancier plum pudding, which was boiled or steamed (now generally known as Christmas pudding in Great Britain and Ireland). Mrs. Flint had two recipes for the pudding in her notebook, one belonging to “Madam Salisbury,” who was likely the mother of Stephen Salisbury II, a frequent guest of the Flints, and the other copied from Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery, the first cookbook published by an American author, in 1796. Mrs. Flint observes that the pudding “was removed from the dish in which it was baked and placed on a small oval platter, which I liked.” This fashion had been abroad for some decades by 1862, but it seems to have been seldom done, so it is possible that Mrs. Flint had never seen it.5

Mr. Flint served the pies and Mrs. Flint served the pudding (which was surely accompanied by a sauce, although Mrs. Flint does not mention one in her notes). Since the pudding was hot, those guests who wanted both pudding and pie started with the pudding. Most guests, though, probably had room for only one or the other. Calves’ foot jelly, a spiced wine gelatin made with calves’ foot stock, “was passed around after the pudding and pies had been served,” says Mrs. Flint. The jelly was likely eaten off fresh plates supplied by the waiters.6

Finally, there was the dessert. In Miss Leslie’s Behaviour Book (1864 edition), American author Eliza Leslie recounts, in awed tones, a stultifying-sounding dinner à la russe staged for twenty-four in a grand English manor—waited by a butler and eight liveried footmen. The dessert that capped this extravagant dinner was essentially a Russian frozen dessert course yoked to a fruit course by dint of elaborate table setting. Mrs. Flint’s dessert was similar. First, the table was “entirely cleared, all the glasses removed,” Mrs. Flint writes.  Then new place settings were brought on, consisting of “white china plates, each containing [a] white tea napkin,” with a “silver knife, fork, and spoon & fresh wine glass placed before every guest.” That word “containing” points to the surprising purpose of the tea napkins, which was to muffle unpleasant scraping noises when plates of ice cream were laid on top of the white plates, as was soon to occur. Leslie explains: “Next a dessert plate was given to each guest, and on it a ground-glass plate [for an ice], about the size of a saucer. Between these plates was a crochet-worked white doyly . . . . These doylies were laid under the ground-glass plate[s], to deaden the noise of their collision.”

Henry set ice cream next to Mrs. Flint but he was the one who served it—“on red china plates” (perhaps rented, as Mrs. Flint’s party tableware sometimes

Finger bowl

Finger bowl

was), which were “placed on the white china, just as one places a soup plate on a dinner plate,” Mrs. Flint observes. After the ice cream had been eaten, the red plates were removed along with the tea napkins, and finger bowls were brought in and fruit was “distributed,” to be eaten off the white china plates. “The servants left the room,” Mrs. Flint writes, giving her guests an interval of privacy. As stylish as it was, this course, too, flouted proper Russian procedure, which decreed that the frozen dessert was to be served with fancy cakes. Mrs. Flint’s dinner did include cakes—squares of frosted pound cake, macaroons, and coconut cakes, all left over “from Wednesday,” when she had staged an evening party. But, following French custom, “coffee tea & cake [were] passed in the drawing room soon after we left the table,” Mrs. Flint writes.

Mrs. Flint’s notes tell us that this hybrid Russian-French dinner got off to a rough start. “Had I expected to have my dinner served in the way it was I should have had choice fruit & a few flowers, but I intended when I began my arrangements to have only my own people to serve it,” Mrs. Flint writes in her notebook. “Only fruit jelly & cranberry on the table when we sat down,” she continues. Clearly this was not the way the table was meant to look. What had happened?

For some reason that Mrs. Flint does not state, Henry Smith, assisted by his helper (described by Mrs. Flint as “a colored man”) and Edwin, ended up serving the dinner instead of Mrs. Flint’s  “own people,” and Henry apparently pushed the dinner farther in a Russian direction than Mrs. Flint’s people would have. I don’t know if Mrs. Flint’s people would have brought out the savory foods in a single French-style first course, although this seems plausible, as Catharine Beecher composes her first course of virtually the same savory dishes that Mrs. Flint serves. But I do think that Mrs. Flint’s people would have simply set the savory dishes on the table and let the diners help themselves, for this is how things were done at Mrs. Flint’s sit-down suppers. If this was indeed the usual procedure at her dinners, Mrs. Flint ordinarily saw, when she sat down, a soup tureen and soup plates, all ready for her to serve, at her end of the table. And in the center of the table she was probably used to seeing a set of cut-glass cruets, or “casters,” containing pungent catsups and store sauces, for she reminds herself in her notebook always to set casters on her supper table.

Casters

Casters

But at a Russian-style dinner there was never soup on the table, for the soup was served by the waiters, nor were there casters, for all dishes came to the table already sauced. A Russian-style table was supposed to be decorated with a centerpiece consisting of flowers and fruit, but it seems that Mrs. Flint only decided to serve the dinner à la russe at the last minute, and did not have a chance to order the “choice fruit” and “few flowers” that the centerpiece required. And so Henry had put only the two jellies on the table, hardly a welcoming sight for Mrs. Flint’s dinner guests as they sat down. Mrs. Flint seems to have been a little embarrassed by this incident but not discombobulated. She simply wrote down what had happened so that she could avoid having it happen again.

 

[NOTES]

  1. In the eighteenth century the entire course was on the table when diners sat down. The soup and the fish were eaten first and then replaced (or “removed”) by new top and bottom dishes. The obvious drawback to this plan was that the bulk of the first course was cold and sodden with condensation under its covers by the time diners got to it. ↩
  2. This was the case in middling households. However, in very elite households, the center of the table was elaborately decorated, at least on company occasions, with flowers, fruit, sugar sculpture, porcelain objects, candles, and still other things. These items might be arranged on a long footed silver tray called a plateau. Or they might be displayed in a silver epergne, a large bowl elevated on a tall stem and surrounded by smaller bowls supported by radiating branches. ↩
  3. A serious disadvantage of a fourteen-course dinner à la russe was its length. Mrs. Henderson rails against “fashionable dinners” à la russe that stretch three or four hours; she feels that “every minute over two hours” is unendurable. (Today’s plotters of “tasting menus” might take note!) ↩
  4. By the late eighteenth century, the American version of French service entailed an entirely sweet second course, while the British second course contained a mix of savory and sweet dishes, as was traditional. Some diners chose savory dishes only, others only sweet, and others sampled both (changing their plates, of course).  In Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), Frances Trollope, an Englishwoman who visited this country in the early 1830s, expresses surprise at the American way, which she disliked, as she did virtually everything about this country. ↩
  5. Baked plum pudding will be the subject of a forthcoming blog post, and adapted recipes for Madam Salisbury’s and Simmons’s puddings will be provided. ↩
  6. Although service à la russe was supposedly dreamt up in Russia, the fashion was identified with the French, and in Britain and America most of the dishes served at Russian-style dinners were either French or Frenchified. This was particularly true of the desserts, which meant that pastry and pudding were rarely served. A plum pudding might be permitted for a holiday dinner (likely renamed in French, as le pouding, on the menu), but as lowly and contemptible thing as apple pie absolutely never made an appearance. The extraordinarily popular calves’ foot jelly was acceptable for the Russian cold dessert course, but a brightly colored, fruit-flavored French jelly was preferable. ↩
This entry was posted in Service a la francaise, Service a la russe, Stephen Schmidt 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  

Trying to Make Sense of the Medical Recipes

Posted May 2016 
by Stephen Schmidt 

By Stephen Schmidt, with Elaine Leong

This post was written in collaboration with medical historian Elaine Leong and borrows from several of her online articles. Elaine received her doctorate in Modern History from the University of Oxford in 2006. She is currently in residence at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), based in Berlin, Germany, where she recently completed a book titled Treasuries for Health: Making Recipe Knowledge in the Early Modern Household. Elaine is also a collaborator in The Recipes Project, which hosts a fascinating, wide-ranging blog focusing on historical medical recipes. 

6th century copy of De Materia Medica by Dioscorides (40-60 CE), still a central text of early modern medicine

6th century copy of De Materia Medica by Dioscorides (40-90 CE), still a central text of early modern medicine

The 1916 autobiography of Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau1 reveals the astonishing recentness of effective medicines. In 1882 Trudeau established the first American tuberculosis sanitarium at Saranac Lake, New York, where patients underwent a “rest cure” in the cold, clear air of the Adirondack Mountains. Unfortunately, this cure worked only for some and usually only for a time, and by the 1890s Trudeau realized that the disease would only be effectively treated when the bacteria that caused it were identified and medicines against these agents were developed. Amazingly, some of Trudeau’s physician colleagues scoffed at the notion that bacteria caused tuberculosis—or for that matter any disease. Given this state of affairs, it is unsurprising that Oliver Wendell Holmes, a physician of Trudeau’s day (as well as a famed jurist), commented, “If we doctors threw all our medicines into the sea, it would be that much better for our Patients and that much worse for the fishes.”

I often think of Holmes’s pithy remark when reading early modern medical recipes, which appear in many early modern manuscript cookbooks and which were also compiled in manuscript books devoted solely to medical subjects. These medicines are compounded in diverse forms—spirits, wines, waters, syrups, electuaries, pills, salves, and poultices—and are purposed for a variety of conditions, some relatively minor, like chapped hands, pimples, or “surfeit,” and others grievous, like “cancer of the breast” or “the bite of a mad dog.” Some of these medicines seem harmless and pleasant enough to take, while others sound perfectly horrid, containing urine, animal parts, or substances now known to be poisons. As a culinary historian, I can make little of sense these medicines, and given how “unscientific” (and sometimes dreadful) they seem I assume that the persons who took them would have been better off if they had tossed them to the fishes.

Johanna St. John Her Book (Wellcome Library MS 4338)

Johanna St. John Her Book (Wellcome Library MS 4338, digital images)

But the women who made these medicines in their homes clearly thought otherwise. In October 1711, Elizabeth Freke (1671-1714), a gentlewoman living in rural Norfolk, spent four days compiling a room-by-room inventory of “some of the best things” in her house. Written in a notebook containing her memoirs and her culinary and medical recipes,2 Freke’s inventory lists not only jewelry, clothing, furniture, linens, and kitchenware among her “best things,” but also 200 bottles of homemade medicines, which she kept in five locked cupboards in her private sitting room: “several bottles of cordiall water 114 quarts; of pintts of cordy water 36. And of the severall sorts of sirrups is 56 quarts and pints.” Another English gentlewoman, Johanna St. John (1631-1705), placed a similarly high value on her medical knowledge in a will she wrote out a few years before Freke compiled her inventory. Contemporary readers find nothing surprising in the bequests of valuable possessions that St. John made to beloved heirs: her Bible to her eldest son, various pieces of furniture, paintings, and silver to her daughters and granddaughters, and small gifts of cash and linens to old, loyal servants. But we do find it somewhat odd that St. John also made space in her will for her two manuscript recipe books: a book of “receipts of cookery and preserves,” which she left to her “granddaughter Soame,” and her “great receipt book,” an alphabetically organized compendium of remedies, which she bequeathed to her daughter Cholmondley. Few people today think to preserve their personal recipe collections for posterity, but St. John considered hers gifts of great value.

Recipes had been written since antiquity. But the avid trading of recipes and the compilation of recipe books in English homes was a distinctly early modern phenomenon, promoted by England’s impressive literacy rate, including among women, and its relatively fluid society, where moving up by acquiring knowledge was a realistic possibility. A gentlewoman like St. John could find recipes from many sources. Quite possibly she had inherited recipe books from family ancestors, just as her descendants would inherit recipe books from her. Because she was a wealthy woman, she likely owned printed recipe books (then expensive) that she could copy, and she could readily borrow more such books from people she knew. Her family, friends, and acquaintances, too, had recipes. If St. John was like other gentlewomen, she collected culinary recipes primarily from those of her own social rank or higher, whose taste and judgment she respected—and she was particularly interested in culinary recipes said to originate with titled individuals, whose rank implied connections with the court, where fashions were set. St. John’s medical recipes may have been culled from a more diverse network, for cures that worked for the humble also worked for the privileged.

Johanna St. John Copyright Lydiard House / Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

Johanna St. John Copyright Lydiard House / Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

St. John was likely aided in her search for recipes by other members of her household. These helpers probably included some of the men of her family, for many early modern men were avid recipe collectors. The letters of the third Viscount Edward Conway (c.1623-1683) and his nephew Edward Harley (1624-1700) show that the two men extensively exchanged and discussed both culinary and medical recipes during the 1650s. And many men compiled manuscript recipe books, especially during the second half of the seventeenth century. Sir Peter Temple of Stanton Bury (1613-1660) created bespoke recipe books for his daughter Eleanor, and the manuscript cookbook of Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665) became a huge bestseller when it was posthumously published by Digby’s assistant in 1667.

Given the faith that St. John placed in her recipe books, we can assume that she submitted her recipes to proof. It is unlikely that St. John personally tried the culinary recipes she collected in the manor kitchen—her cooks would have done that. But she likely did test the medical recipes herself, if with the aid of servants, for medicine-making, with its expensive ingredients, complex procedures, and high stakes, was regarded as a gentlewoman’s personal responsibility. If St. John’s manor was like other fine homes, it was built with a designated stillroom, and this is where she prepared her medicines.3 The stillroom was equipped with apparatus for distilling spirits, wines, syrups, and waters (Elizabeth Freke, unsurprisingly, owned extensive distilling equipment) and a waist-high charcoal brazier, or chafing dish, for procedures that required heating. The stillroom was attached to a stove room, a small chamber outfitted with slatted shelves and some sort of furnace, to which items were remanded that required drying or that needed to be kept dry during storage. Once a recipe had been made, it was evaluated by the household collective. If the results were poor, the recipe was rejected. But if the recipe worked, it was judged suitable for inclusion in the household recipe book, perhaps with modification. The modification process can sometimes be glimpsed on the pages of recipe books, in corrections or comments inserted by the writer.

Woman distilling, frontispiece of "The Accomplished ladies rich closet of rarities," 1691, Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org A woman hard at work distilling. Scene opposite title page of "The accomplished ladies rich closet of rarities..." 1691 The accomplished ladies rich closet of rarities: or, the ingenius gentlewoman and servant-maids delightful companion. Containing many excellent things for the accomplishment of the female sex ... (1.) The art of distilling. (2.) Making artificial wines. (3.) Making syrups. ... (8) To make beautifying-waters, oyls, pomatums musk-balls, perfumes, &c. (9) Physical and chyrurgical receipts. (10.) The duty of a wet nurse; and to know and cure diseases in children, &c. ... (14.) The accomplished dairy-maids directions, &c. (15.) The judicious midwives directions, how women in travail before and after delivery ought to be used; as also the child; and what relates to the preservation of them both. To which is added a second part, containing directions for the guidance of a young gentlewomen. As to her behavior & seemly deportment / J. S. Published: 1691. Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Woman distilling, frontispiece of “The Accomplished ladies rich closet of rarities,” 1691, Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

Culinary historians can readily believe that St. John’s culinary recipes, if conscientiously tested and copied, actually worked—and still work today, as many early modern culinary recipes do, often in fascinating ways that confound contemporary expectations. But could any of St. John’s medical recipes possibly cure, given their “unscientific” basis? In her gloss of the Eleanor Fettiplace recipe book, dated 1604, Hilary Spurling speaks indirectly to this question.4 She notes that Lady Fettiplace mostly avoids the violent purges, caustic poultices, and poison-filled tonic waters sometimes prescribed in the day in favor of gentle palliatives such as ointments, scent bags, soothing compresses, and stomach-settling drinks, many of which may well have been helpful. In fact, a great deal of early modern medicine was directed at increasing wellbeing rather than effecting cures. Perhaps this was simply inevitable given the lack of medical knowledge in the day, but there was also wisdom in this approach, wisdom that has been lost today. As Dr. Atul Gawande reflects in Being Mortal, doctors today too often prescribe, and patients too often accept, last-ditch treatments that are as excruciating as they are hopeless, as though mortality were a disease rather than a human condition.

Even though I know almost nothing about the complex subject of medical history, I keep up with The Recipes Project blog, for which Elaine writes frequently, because early modern medical recipes share certain features with the culinary recipes and sometimes provide insights into them. A particular area of overlap between early modern food and medicine was the humoral belief system, which (to greatly simplify) held that wellbeing was a matter of maintaining the four bodily humors in reasonable balance and that virtually all ingestible substances had properties that affected this balance in some specific way. Although faith in this system was on the wane in the early modern period, medical recipes were still framed by it, and thus medical recipes sometimes reveal humoral thinking in early modern cooking. For the most part, it seems that early modern people—and even medieval people—more often honored dietary rules than actually observed them in their cooking and eating. While a few dishes scream their humoral scrupulosity—like cold, moist sea creatures doused with hot, dry spices—most dishes, and nearly all surviving bills of fare, appear to ignore humoral precepts, if not flout them.

Violet syrup, used both for cure and for pleasure. Credit: annewheaton,co.uk

Violet syrup, used both for cure and for pleasure. Credit: annewheaton.co.uk

But there were exceptions. Certain items produced in the stillroom had originated as medicines and still retained medical uses in early modern England and yet had come also to be served as foods and drinks. Elizabeth Freke’s more pleasant cordial waters and syrups (assuming there were some) fell into this category. So did a number of other articles common in early modern English recipe books, such as candy-coated spices and nuts (comfits), spiced sugar candies, fruits and plant materials preserved in sugar syrups, fruit jellies, fruit conserves, quince pastes, marmalades, and crumb gingerbreads. These articles contained a variety of putatively beneficial substances and were purposed to alleviate diverse conditions. But their most important “active ingredient” was sugar, which was regarded in the humoral system as almost perfectly balanced and was, for this reason, a prime constituent of many humoral medicines. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England these sugary conceits appeared as foods primarily at banquets, glittering meals of sweets that the elite enjoyed both after great meals and as stand-alone entertainments. Banqueting was a delicious, often drunken, sometimes lascivious indulgence that was meant to flaunt the consumption of expensive sugar. But banqueting also had a curative subtext (or perhaps pretext) in that it supposedly facilitated the digestion, sweetened the breath, and revived the libido after heavy eating and drinking. Certain sugar-laden “banqueting stuffs” were still considered nutraceuticals into the nineteenth century. In 1829, American cookbook author Lydia Maria Child wrote that “economical people will seldom use preserves, except for sickness.”

Indian candied fennel seeds, which are comfits

Indian candied fennel seeds, which are comfits

The compilation of household recipe books in early modern England shifted the paradigm of knowledge generation. Earlier, knowledge had been largely generated by a few genius actors (often supported by wealthy patrons) and by political institutions, the church, and learning centers such as universities and medical schools. Knowledge generation was largely top down. With the advent of recipe books, knowledge was also generated in fairly ordinary households, both through collecting, testing, and writing recipes and through manufacturing products from recipes, during which new ingredients and methods were pioneered. This knowledge was widely disseminated through English society when manuscript recipes were taken up by printed books, a collateral development of the early modern age. Printed recipes, in turn, cycled back to manuscript, where they were further refined before once again returning to print. This cycling between manuscript and print was partly responsible for the speeding up of culinary fashions that occurred with early modernity. From 1200 to 1500, the cooking of the English elites changed hardly at all to judge from manuscript recipe collections. But starting in the sixteenth century, culinary styles were revamped every forty or fifty years, ushering in new ingredients and techniques and of course new dishes. Thus culinary knowledge rapidly increased, even if, then as now, older culinary knowledge tended to be forgotten, at least temporarily, every time tastes and fashions changed.

While the culinary recipes teem with clever, delicious new discoveries and beg to be cooked from even now, the medical recipes, I admit, generally strike me as backward-looking and blind with ignorance, not only useless but terribly sad. I will read a recipe for lemon cream followed by a hopeless medicine for “bleeding in the gut” and think what a shame that the people who ate such a lovely thing often suffered so terribly and died so young. But medical historians tell us that early modern cures were not actually as mired in the past as they appear to the uninformed—and that the same early modern recipe explosion that woke up cooking also spread and reinforced the habit of scientific thinking. In fact, many scientific discoveries about the human body and the natural world had already been made by the end of the seventeenth century. It is a pity that it took so long for these discoveries to bear fruit as effective medicines.

  1. Trudeau, Edward Livingston, An Autobiography (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1916). The book was republished into the 1940s and is available in several contemporary reprints. ↩
  2. Commonplace Book of Elizabeth Freke, British Museum, Add MS 45718. ↩
  3. In more modest homes that lacked a stillroom and stove room, women produced whatever medicines they could and bought the rest from physicians, apothecaries, and freelance purveyors like Hannah Woolley (1622-c.1675), who is better known as England’s first published female cookbook author. The use of commercial medicines and medical services increased among all social classes during the early modern period. ↩
  4. Spurling, Hilary, Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book (New York: Elizabeth Sifton Books, Viking, 1986), 18-20. ↩
This entry was posted in Foods with Health Benefits, Medicine, Stephen Schmidt 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  |   1 Comment on Trying to Make Sense of the Medical Recipes  

When Did Southern Begin?

Posted November 2015 
by Stephen Schmidt 

Mary Randolph[1]

Mary Randolph by Saint-Memin, Virginia State Library

Published in 1824, Mary Randolph’s The Virginia Housewife was the first cookbook printed in the South and the most enduringly popular and influential southern cookbook of the nineteenth century, remaining in print, in various editions, into the 1860s and lending some of its particularly famous recipes to southern cookbooks published to eve of the First World War. In 1984 the University of South Carolina Press brought out a facsimile edition of Randolph’s cookbook, which contained a lengthy introduction and copious notes by the redoubtable culinary historian Karen Hess. I bought the facsimile Virginia Housewife in 1993, and over the years I went back to it many times, rereading Randolph’s recipes and trying to convince myself that Hess was right about them. Hess contends that Randolph’s cooking exemplifies “an authentic American cuisine,” but it didn’t look like that to me. I did spot some native southern inventions—a few of which are still known today, like beaten biscuits and hominy griddle cakes—but, for the most part, the book outlined the same cuisine that was in vogue among the privileged classes of the North in Randolph’s day: genteel English cooking interspersed with a few American dishes such as pumpkin pudding, soda-leavened gingerbread, and doughnuts. Hess, in fact, acknowledges Randolph’s pervasive Englishness; her notes are largely given over to tracing it. And yet she argues on various grounds that The Virginia Housewife shows this Englishness transmuted to a unique southern cuisine.

 

Third edition, prepared by Randolph the year of her death, at age 65

Third edition, prepared by Randolph the year of her death, at age 65

Two and a half years ago I came across a manuscript cookbook at the Clements Library, of the University of Michigan, at Ann Arbor, that immediately brought Mary Randolph and Hess’s commentary on her back to mind. Titled Receipts in Cooking, this manuscript was “collected and arranged” (says the title page) for one Mary Moore, in 1832. Moore hailed from somewhere in the Deep South, likely Georgia or Mississippi, but I would barely have guessed this from her cookbook. I could find only fifteen dishes peculiar to the South among the book’s eighty-four recipes. The rest, I knew, were common in the North too, for I had seen them repeatedly in antebellum northern cookbooks. And, like The Virginia Housewife, Moore’s sixty-nine nationally popular dishes were overwhelmingly English. Only seven were American specialties, such things as pumpkin pie, soda-leavened cakes, and cornbread.

The resemblance between Receipts in Cooking and The Virginia Housewife, it turned out, was not coincidental. Fifty-six of Moore’s recipes—or two thirds of the total—were copied, verbatim or nearly so, from Mary Randolph. I understood why nearly all of Moore’s distinctively southern recipes were taken from The Virginia Housewife, for it was the only available printed source for such recipes in 1832. But I wondered why fifty-seven of Moore’s English recipes were also cribbed from The Virginia Housewife rather than from one of the English cookbooks that supplied another fourteen of Moore’s recipes. 1  Was Randolph chosen merely out of convenience or sentiment? Or did she handle English cooking in uniquely southern ways, in which case Hess might be right?

In fact, Randolph’s interpretation of English cooking proved to differ in no significant way from that “A Boston Housekeeper” (Mrs. N. K. M. Lee), author of The Cook’s Own Book, published 1832, which contains all but four of the English dishes copied from Randolph in the Moore cookbook. Here, for example, are the recipes of Mrs. Lee and Mary Randolph (and Mary Moore) for beef olives, or stuffed beef roulades served in brown gravy. 2

Beef Olives

The Cook’s Own Book, 1832

Cut the beef into long thin steaks; prepare a forcemeat made of bread-crumbs, minced beef suet, chopped parsley, a little grated lemon-peel, nutmeg, pepper, and salt; bind it with the yolks of eggs beaten; put a layer of it over each steak; roll and tie them with thread. Fry them lightly in beef dripping; put them in a stewpan with some good brown gravy, a glass of white wine, and a little Cayenne; thicken it with a little flour and butter; cover the pan closely, and let them stew gently an hour. Before serving, add a table-spoonful of mushroom catchup; garnish with cut pickles.

 

Beef Olives

The Virginia Housewife, 1824

Cut slices from a fat rump of beef six inches long and half an inch thick, beat them well with a pestle, make a forcemeat of bread crumbs, fat bacon chopped, parsley a little onion, some shred suet, pounded mace, pepper and salt; mix it up with the yolks of eggs, and spread a thin layer of each slice of beef, roll it up tight and secure the rolls with skewers, set them before the fire, and turn them till they are a nice brown, have ready a pint of good gravy thickened with brown flour and a spoonful of butter, a gill of red wine with two spoonsful of mushroom catsup, lay the rolls in it and stew them till tender: garnish with forcemeat balls. (See adaptation.)

 

Elizabeth Raffald by Morland

Elizabeth Raffald by Morland

There are, to be sure, minor discrepancies between these two recipes, but these cannot be attributed to differences between northern and southern styles of cooking (not that the recipes imply such differences) but rather to the fact that the two authors worked off different English sources. I have not been able to identify the English source of Mrs. Lee’s recipe, but I know there is one, for Mrs. Lee explicitly acknowledges that she copied almost all of her recipes from previously published cookbooks, and there was no American cookbook yet in print in which she could have found her beef olives. I do know the English cookbook from which Mary Randolph paraphrased her recipe. It is The Experienced English Housekeeper, published in 1769 by Elizabeth Raffald, a fancy caterer and gourmet food shop proprietor. In editing out the phrases “penny loaf” and “tossing pan” Randolph has Americanized the language of Raffald’s recipe, and in substituting bacon and suet for marrow she has modernized it. I do not know the reason for Randolph’s other minor changes, but I do not believe that any were meant to make Raffald’s English recipe more southern American.

Beef Olives

The Experienced English Housekeeper, 1769

Cut slices off a rump of beef about six inches long and half an inch thick. Beat them with a paste pin and rub them over with the yolk of an egg, a little pepper, salt, and beaten mace, the crumbs of half a penny loaf, two ounces of marrow sliced fine, a handful of parsley chopped small and the out rind of half a lemon grated. Strew them all over your steaks and roll them up, skewer them quite close, and set them before the fire to brown. Then put them into a tossing pan with a pint of gravy, a spoonful of catchup, the same of browning, a teaspoonful of lemon pickle, thicken it with a little butter rolled in flour. Lay round forcemeat balls, mushrooms, or yolks of hard egg.

Although I sense the stirrings of “an authentic American cuisine” in The Virginia Housewife, I believe that Randolph’s cooking remains essentially English. Actually, Hess seems very nearly to believe the same. She declares that the “warp” of Randolph’s cooking is English, and she observes, correctly, that “there are English recipe titles by the score in The Virginia House-wife.” Hess would certainly know: she was, and still is, the greatest American scholar of early modern English cooking. “But there are surprises,” says Hess—by which she means, primarily, a weft of peculiarly southern non-English influences interwoven with the English warp, creating a unique southern cloth. But her thinking about these “surprises” is not always persuasive.

Popular historical accounts maintain that critical influence on southern cooking was exerted by the French—the Creole and Acadian French of Louisiana, the Huguenot refugees of the Carolinas, and, preposterously, Thomas Jefferson, who was not French of course, but who traveled to France, served French dishes and French wines at his dinner parties, and had a French maître d’ at the White House, and who, therefore, is inferred to have somehow introduced French cooking to the South, indeed to America. Hess is properly dismissive of all this, writing that Randolph’s French-titled dishes—and there are dozens of them, eleven of which show up in the Moore cookbook—had been naturalized in England for a century or more by the time Randolph outlined them (and Jefferson served them to his guests). Hess cites as an example Randolph’s recipe for beef à la mode, which had already made regular appearances in English cookbooks since the early eighteenth century. 3

But Hess, oddly, falls into a trap that popular historians have set. Rarely bothering to study period recipes, the popularizers endlessly repeat the tired wisdom that historical English food was “bland and boring.” Some of it was, but not all—not many of the finer dishes favored by the sophisticated and the privileged. So while Hess is correct to point out the Englishness of beef à la mode, she is in error when she then goes on to state that Randolph must have imported her particular “wonderfully redolent” recipe for this dish directly from a French cookbook. Randolph’s recipe calls for two heads of garlic, and according to Hess, English recipes for beef à la mode had been “innocent of garlic all through the eighteenth century.” In fact, Randolph copied her recipe, including the garlic, virtually verbatim from one of her favorite English sources, The Experienced English Housekeeper. In a similar vein, Hess seems to imply—her phrasing is not clear—that Randolph’s recipes for four especially sophisticated conceits, Fondus, Bell Fritters, Matelote, and To Fry Sliced Potatoes (authentic French fries, claims Hess), are likewise direct French imports. Actually, all of these dishes can be found in eighteenth-century English cookbooks, three of them in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, a cookbook that virtually every elite antebellum southern household owned. Generally speaking, Hess gives historical English cooking a fair appraisal, but her thinking here seems to have been infected by popular tropes.

Two other groups often imputed to have given southern cooking its unique character are American Indians and African slaves. Hess has little to say about Native American contributions, as these were mostly a matter of corn, and as crucial as corn was to the evolution of southern cooking, it was crucial to northern cooking too. Hess gives more consideration to the contributions of the enslaved, and justifiably so. She is right to point out African and African-Creole influence in southern dishes such as gumbo and pepper pot, as well as in typical southern foods like peanuts, sesame seed, watermelon, and yams. But Hess’s argument in favor of an African contribution to southern seasoning is dubious. Hess asserts that many of Virginia’s enslaved black cooks, having passed through the West Indies, picked up “tricks of seasoning from the exuberant Creole cuisines” of these places, which they then stirred into Virginian cooking pots. And thus, she writes, “Virginians had become accustomed to headier seasonings than were the English, or New Englanders, for that matter.” I am skeptical that “exuberant Creole  cuisines” existed in the hellacious West Indies at the turn of the nineteenth century or that slaves in transit were in a position to absorb seasoning tips. But beyond that, the problem is that Randolph does not season her food any differently from Mrs. Lee, Eliza Leslie, and other tony antebellum northern cookbook authors. Randolph does call for cayenne frequently, but so do her northern counterparts, for cayenne was beloved in England: Raffald’s reliance on cayenne in The Experienced English Housekeeper is almost compulsive.

 

2.

Whatever they may promise, most regional cookbooks deliver more or less the same recipes that can be found in many other cookbooks, for in truth most places do not possess distinctive cuisines. Still, people buy these books because, for various reasons, they are attached to the places these books celebrate. We assume today that southern women bought The Virginia Housewife to learn the secrets of southern cooking. But my sense is that antebellum southerners were barely aware of their cuisine as distinctively southern and that they bought—or in the case of the Moore cookbook, copied—Randolph’s cookbook primarily because it was of Virginia. Throughout the antebellum South, diverse though it was, Virginia was regarded as the cradle of the American republic and the South’s ideological and cultural lodestar, the exemplar of the highest-flown ideals of the southern way of life—as lived, of course, by its most privileged white inhabitants—ideals later popularly embodied in the phrase “southern hospitality.” Whatever the actual appeal of The Virginia Housewife was in its day, regional cookbooks whose pull was primarily their place were already on the scene by the time of the Civil War. A case in point is The Great Western Cook Book, first published in 1851, at the height of western migration. Most of the book’s recipes are along the lines of Soup à la Jardinière, Chestnut Stuffing, Veal Croquettes, and Charlotte Russe, fare more likely encountered in a New York townhouse than a wilderness log cabin. To rescue the theme, the publisher decorated the title page with a vaguely western-looking motif and inserted a few recipes with cornball “western” titles: Soup—Rough and Ready, Steamboat Sauce, and Sausages—Hoosier Fashion. Similar strategies are still deployed by publishers today.

grea001[1]I suspect that few in 1851 believed that The Great Western Cook Book typified western cooking or that there even was such a thing. But by the middle of the last century, the food publishing industry had managed to convince the public of the actual existence of regional cuisines that, in fact, the industry had largely invented. Famous, and appealing, examples of this sleight of hand are the five volumes in the Time-Life series “American Cooking,” published between 1968 and 1971. The general volume, titled simply American Cooking, and the southern volume are plausible, but the other three—The Northwest, The Great West, and The Eastern Heartland—make a far less convincing case for the distinctiveness of their respective cuisines. Actually, Time-Life would have us believe that there are twelve American regional cuisines altogether: the general volume delineates them in a color-coded map. Absurd though such formulations may be, they served clever marketing purposes. At mid-century, regional cookbooks endowed American cooking with a richness, diversity, and historical pedigree equal to that of French cuisine, thereby appealing to those alienated by the then-rampaging popularity of a foreign, highfalutin culinary fashion. Even more importantly, regional cookbooks materialized a dignified, wholesome American food culture separate from its modern mass incarnation, appealing to those who despised modern mass food as the degraded product of big business interests. At the risk of second-guessing Karen Hess, who is no longer living to speak for herself, I suspect that her notorious contempt for the national food scene of her time, in its diverse manifestations, lured her into framing The Virginia Housewife as embodying a more distinctive southern cuisine than it actually did.

Everyone would agree that by 1984, when the facsimile edition of The Virginia Housewife was published, southern cooking had long since coalesced into “an authentic American cuisine” with local variations. But the cookbooks tell us that this turning point came after the Civil War, when the humiliated South retrenched in self-flattering fantasies of the old southern way of living. As Eugene Walter, an Alabama native, observes in Time-Life’s American Cooking: Southern Style, the post-war South “took its tone, set its style, cocked its snoot, decided to become set in its ways and pleasurably conscious of being so. . . glamorizing its past and transforming anecdote into legend.” And among the old “rites and observances” to which the South clung, “none was more important than those of the table.”

The cooking of the antebellum South did change after the war, but not as much, and not in the same ways, as the cooking of the North. While the North borrowed liberally from the fashionable French cuisine of the Gilded Age and from the cooking of immigrant groups, the South tended to stick with dishes of the past, many of which were English: spiced beef (an iteration of beef à la mode), calf’s head variations, fricassees of all sorts, hashes and minces, meat collops, potted foods, drawn butter sauces, vegetable “mangoes,” multifarious pickles and ketchups, brandy peaches and other preserves, pones and other hot breads, pound cake, sweet potato puddings, boiled puddings, jelly cakes, cheesecakes (chess pies), syllabub, fruit and flower wines, and more. And while the North fell under the sway of so-called “scientific cookery,” the founding ideology of modern home economics, which taught a cheaper, simpler, lighter, plainer style of cooking, the South retained its allegiance to luxury, ostentation, richness, high seasoning, vinegar-sharpening, and tooth-aching sweetness. This is only part of a complex story, but it is the most crucial part: while the cooking of the North moved forward, becoming more modern and more distinctively American, the cooking of the South remained antique—and in many respects the better for it.

The astonishing southern cuisine that developed between the Civil War and the First World War was practiced by the extended family of Virginia Black smallholders into which the celebrated chef and cookbook author Edna Lewis was born in 1916. In What Is Southern?, an arresting essay that went unpublished until two years after her death, in 2006, Lewis answers her question with remarkable, resonant thoroughness, listing some four dozen dishes characteristic of  the South and not of the rest of the country. Edna Lewis’s southern is sometimes described as “refined” in contrast to today’s more typical downhome, deep-fried, barbecue-with-sides southern or its upscale restaurant correlative, summed up by one wag as “I don’t know what southern cooking is, but I always know there will be corn in it somewhere.” But Lewis’s own perspective is that her southern is not so much refined as old-fashioned, in danger of ‘passing from the scene’ unless deliberately preserved. It is hard to disagree with her. In our time, much of Lewis’s lovely southern—turtle soup with turtle dumplings, baked snowbirds, braised mutton, wild pig with pork liver and peanut sauces, potted squab with the first wild greens, and fig pudding—can only be cooked as historical reenactment.

  1. I was able to trace six of these fourteen recipes to three English cookbooks that were popular in this country and had been published in American editions: E. Smith’s The Compleat Housewife (1729), Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747), and the expanded edition of Dr. William Kitchiner’s The Cook’s Oracle (1822). I could not ascertain the origins of the remaining eight English recipes, but their language indicates with near certainty that they were indeed English and copied from print. ↩
  2. When this dish debuted in English manuscript cookbooks, in the fifteenth century, the word was “aloes,” from the French alouettes, or larks, which the rolls were thought, fancifully, to resemble. (Culinary historian Peter Rose tells me that the Dutch call a similar dish “little finches.”) “Aloes” became “olives” in the sixteenth century. ↩
  3. Randolph’s recipe To Harrico Mutton, which is copied in the Moore cookbook, illustrates the occasional complications of determining the origins of specific French recipes that appear in English-language cookbooks. Historically, this dish was known in France by two different names: “haricot” and “halicot” (both in various cognates). The latter name would seem to be more correct, as it derives, according to the 1984 Larousse, from the French verb halicoter, to cut in small pieces (as the ingredients in this dish are). But “haricot” (which now means green bean) is documented earlier, appearing in in the 14th century manuscript of Taillevent. When the English adopted the dish, in the sixteenth century, they called it “haricot” and I had always seen it thus in English and American sources into the 19th century. But I recently spotted the recipe as Hallico of Mutton in The Johnson Family Treasury, an 18th century English manuscript recipe book that has just been published (beautifully). Was “hallico” current in England in the 18th century? Or did the Johnson family get their recipe from a French source? ↩
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Ambergris, the Perfume of Whales that once Scented Foods

Posted July 2015 
by Stephen Schmidt 
"Windy Overlook" Wellington, New Zealand, Breaker Bay Elia Locardi, blamethemonkey.com

“Windy Overlook” Wellington, New Zealand, Breaker Bay
Elia Locardi, blamethemonkey.com

 

On Saturday, September 20, 2008, the excitement was beginning to grow on Breaker Bay, near Wellington, New Zealand . . . [A] crowd had gathered to investigate a strange object that had washed up ashore during the night. It was large, perhaps the size of a 44-gallon drum . . . No one had seen it arrive. It was just there on the sand . . . roughly cylindrical in shape . . . the color of dirty week-old snow.

As the news media arrived and locals began breaking off pieces of the mass with garden tools, Christopher Kemp, an American biologist on an academic visit to New Zealand, watched the scene with growing amazement. Was it an aspect of New Zealand national character that made people act this way?

Then a rumor began to circulate. The mysterious object was ambergris.

9780226430362[1]Kemp had never heard of ambergris, and the spectacle on Breaker Bay prompted him to embark on an obsessive study of the substance during his two-year stay in New Zealand. He phoned, emailed, and flew across continents to pry whatever intel he could (often frustratingly little) from the shadowy global network of professional ambergris hunters and traders. He sniffed the stuff in museums and absorbed the wisdom of experts. And he combed remote New Zealand beaches, often by himself and sometimes for days at a time, in hope of finding treasure of his own, which, sadly, he never did. When he returned to the United States, Kemp wrote a brief book about ambergris titled Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris (The University of Chicago Press, 2012), which tells us what ambergris is, gives us a sense of its historical and current uses, and recounts, in lushly descriptive and often lyrical prose, the author’s dogged beach treks in search of it. For those curious about ambergris, a perfume ingredient that was once also used in food, the book is a marvelous find.

The original English word for the substance was simply “amber,” derived from the Arab anbar via the French ambre. When, at a later point, ambre/amber came also to designate fossilized resin, fragrant amber came to be distinguished as ambre gris, or gray amber, and hence the modern English word (whose last syllable is generally pronounced griss or greez). Sperm whales are the producers of the substance. The whales subsist on enormous quantities of squid, and an occasional unlucky animal (perhaps one in one hundred) gets squid beaks caught in its gut. As the mass grows, the animal secretes a fluid around it, transforming it into ambergris, much as some oysters turn sand grains into pearls, although in the case of whales, unfortunately, it appears that the mass eventually proves fatal. Ambergris can be harvested directly from its source—by the early nineteenth century, whalers knew that lean, sickly, torpid animals often bore the commodity—but, historically, it was far more commonly a thing that washed up on the shore, its origins mysterious. As Paul Freedman explains in Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination, some (including Marco Polo) knew that ambergris came from whales as early as the thirteenth century. However, this connection was only “dimly and inconsistently” understood by the world at large until two Massachusetts savants, in the 1720s, published separate papers conclusively proving the link, their expertise almost surely gathered by way of the Nantucket whaling industry.

Throughout its history, which reaches back to antiquity, ambergris has been used primarily in perfumes, in which it both functions as a powerful fixative, causing perfumes to linger far longer on persons, fabrics, gloves, or sachets than they otherwise would, and also contributes a fragrance of its own. Everyone who has smelled ambergris (unfortunately, I am not among the number) agrees that the fragrance is compelling, but no two people describe the fragrance in the same terms. Perfumers classify the aroma as “animalic,” which could perhaps encompass the scents that Kemp detected in a particular piece, which included cow dung, tobacco, rotting wood, drying seaweed, and open grassy spaces on a beach. But there are sweeter, lighter notes too, such as violets and vanilla. One of the reasons the fragrance is so difficult to pin down is that ambergris smells different depending on whether it has been expelled from the whale only recently (or indeed excavated from a whale carcass) or has been bobbing about on the surface of the world’s oceans for decades. When fresh it is distinctly fecal, as one would expect. When it has aged (and its key chemical component, ambrein, has oxidized into slightly different compounds), its aroma becomes complex—and magical. Its color and texture, too, change as it matures, from dark and putty-like to whitish-gray and barely malleable, like sealing wax.

floating gold, whale vomit, Paco Rabanne,Gucci parfume,Sperm Wha

 

Partly because ambergris is so mutable, beached blobs of sewer grease and other garbage are often mistaken for the real thing—as proved, alas, to be the case of the mass that came ashore on Breaker Bay in 2008 and caused so much excitement. The sovereign test is to probe with a hot needle: if the specimen is indeed ambergris, it will “melt into a thick, oily fluid the color of dark chocolate,” writes Kemp, and release an ineffable aroma. And you will be suddenly richer. The highest-quality white ambergris sells for $8,000 or more per pound in Europe, where it is in demand by many of the big perfume houses (although they are cagey about using it, likely because its possession and trade are illegal in many places, including the U. S. and Australia). This is not quite the present value of 24-karat gold but surprisingly close.

 

Ambergris was never nearly as common in cooking as in perfume-making, but its use in food was very early. I do not recall seeing it in Apicius, and I would be surprised to it find there, as it strikes me as out of sync with the usual Apicius flavor notes. But ambergris did play a part in medieval Arab and Indian cuisines, which adapted it from the court cuisine of early-medieval Persia, along with various other fragrances that modern Westerners do not expect to find in food: musk and civet (both animal-derived); roses, orange blossoms, and other flowers; aloe and sandal woods; and camphor. There is, for example, this recipe from the fifteenth-century The Ni’matnama Manuscript of the Sultans of Mandu (Routledge, 2012):

Boil the meat well, take it off [the fire], dry it, and fasten it to a wooden skewer. Mix saffron, white ambergris and rosewater together and rub it on the meat. Put it in a cooking pot and add rice. Put in fresh ginger, onions and salt and cook it. Serve it with good gravy.

Since ambergris was part of medieval Arab cuisine, it might well have entered the cuisines of the medieval European privileged, which incorporated many Arab influences. (How many is a matter of disagreement; my personal sense is rather a lot.) But I do not recall having seen it in any English or French medieval recipe manuscript. I would be curious to know if it appears in medieval Italian recipe manuscripts (which I have not studied), for Renaissance Italian court cooks used it in biscotti and other sweets, typically in combination with musk. By the seventeenth century, the French, too, had adopted it. In La Varenne’s Traité de Confitures (1650) ambergris—almost always paired with musk—scents diverse candied-fruit conceits, sugar-paste pastilles, pralines, marzipans, wines, and lemonade, as well as a preparation called “crème, autre façon,” which is basically our crème anglaise. La Varenne gives these directions for preparing both musk and ambergris for use in recipes (my translation). There were other ways, but this was a particularly common one.

Francois Pierre de la Varenne (1615-1678)

Francois Pierre de la Varenne (1615-1678)

To prepare your musk in the proper way, put it in a little cast-iron mortar, pound it with a pestle of the same material, mix it with a little powdered sugar, and after everything is well ground, put it in a paper so that you can make use of it as needed. You can prepare ambergris in the same way and even mix them together, to use as much for beverages as for preserves.

In due course, ambergris infiltrated English cooking by way of the Italians and the French, whose cuisines were much admired and emulated in early-modern England. Kemp cites a “curious lady” of the eighteenth century, who claimed to have read, in obscure sixteenth-century sources, that ambergris was “the haut-gout” of Tudor court circles starting in the early 1500s. Perhaps this was true (if so, the fashion would have been imitated from the Italians), but there is very little mention of ambergris in sixteenth-century English printed and manuscript cookbooks—and indeed there remains little until the time of the Restoration, in 1660, when cookbooks are suddenly redolent of the stuff. Robert May, in The Accomplisht Cook (1660, 1665), has some twenty recipes. Hannah Woolley, in Queen-like Closet (1672), has close to thirty. Woolley’s fondness for the material is interesting, for she addressed the upper-middling classes as much as she did the very wealthy. Perhaps ambergris was not quite as rare and expensive in seventeenth-century England as we might suppose.

Both May and Woolley outline ambergris-infused medicinal drinks (some of which were pleasant and were more enjoyed than “taken”) and both have hartshorn jellies (gelatins) flavored with the substance. But otherwise their recipes differ. Woolley focuses on ambergris-scented marzipans, preserved-fruit conceits, and sugar candies. May uses ambergris primarily in dishes involving eggs or cream or both: eggs poached in syrups, scrambled or poached eggs on toast (a rare non-sweet preparation), rich baked puddings, codling cream (apple fool of sorts), snow cream (a showy whipped-cream conceit), cheesecakes, and the mildly alcoholic hot custard beverage called posset. Manuscript cookbooks trend toward recipes similar to May’s, their most common ambergris vehicles being rich, custardy baked puddings of bread and/or ground almonds, most of which feature dried or preserved fruits (and sometimes sliced apples or cooked artichoke bottoms too), lumps of beef marrow or butter, and plenty of thick cream and eggs. The following recipe is typical except for the “green potatoes whole,” which I am going to guess were the cream-colored sweet potatoes of the day, harvested when tiny and then candied and tinted green to resemble candied citron.

 To make Almond Puddings

A Collection of Choise Receipts (New York Academy of Medicine)

Take two pound of Jordan Almonds and lay ym in cold water to Blanch, then beat ym very well wth 3 or 4 spoonfulls of Rose water, Put to your Almonds 3 or 4 ladles full of ye bread soaked in Milk, as for the Bread Puddings, then put in Cream & 7 Eggs, 3 of the whites taken out, Season it wth Sugar, Nutmeg, Orange or Rose water, some Muske and Amber grease—Put in green Potatus whole, & pretty store of Marrow in pieces.

15th-century woodcut of Siberian musk deer, whose musk gland supplies musk. Wikimedia Commons.

15th-century woodcut of Siberian musk deer, whose musk gland supplies musk. Wikimedia Commons.

It seems odd to us today that an “animalic” flavor, no matter how subtle, was once favored in rich baked puddings or any other sweet dish. But so it must have been, for musk, too, is animalic, and musk was not only used in most recipes calling for ambergris but also in many recipes on its own—most famously perhaps in the musk sugar candies (or “kissing comfits,” as Shakespeare called them, in reference to musk’s supposed aphrodisiac properties) that the Elizabethan English adopted from Italy and adored for sweets banquets. Whether used singly or in tandem, ambergris and musk were generally deployed in English recipes with rose water and spices—a combination of skanky, racy, and floral scents that sounds to us, rather precisely, like a recipe for perfume. The obvious lesson here is that tastes in seasoning diverge greatly across time—just as they do across cultures. A Dutch-born friend of mine finds the vanilla omnipresent in American foods (nowadays often in extreme concentrations) unpleasant. And I have been told by at least three French persons over the years that the cinnamon met with in American breakfast cereals, doughnuts, yeast breads, quick breads, desserts, and holiday drinks is, to their palates, bizarre and jarring.

In the end, the English predilection for animalic foods proved fleeting. Ambergris and musk appear in few recipes written after 1700. But they do appear in cookbook author E. Smith’s recipe for Whipt Cream (1727), which was copied by Hannah Glasse (1747), and, in turn, by Susannah Carter (American edition, 1772), and finally by Amelia Simmons, our country’s first native-born cookbook author, in her little cookbook of 1796. Served with pastry in the second course of dinner or with cake at evening parties, whipt cream was frothier and more evanescent than our whipped cream, with a winy tang.

 

Whipt Cream

Amelia Simmons, American Cookery, 1796

Take a quart of cream and the whites of 8 eggs beaten with half a pint of wine; mix it together and sweeten it to your taste with double refined sugar, you may perfume it (if you please) with musk or Amber gum tied in a rag and steeped a little in the cream, whip it up with a whisk and a bit of lemon peel tyed in the middle of the whisk, take off the froth with a spoon, and put into glasses.

One might have expected Simmons to have cut the fragrance from this recipe, as too outré and costly for a cookbook touted on the title page as “adapted to this country and to all grades of life.” But she not only left it in—she almost certainly did so intentionally, for she revised the original “ambergrease” to “amber gum,” which was presumably a colloquial American term at the time. It is just possible that ambergris was in wide culinary use by sophisticated American cooks circa 1800. After all, the precious commodity must have been brought in often by the whalers of the northern Atlantic seaboard, and it probably sold then for considerably less than the price of gold.

 

This entry was posted in Desserts, Seasonings, Stephen Schmidt 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  |   1 Comment on Ambergris, the Perfume of Whales that once Scented Foods  

The Fateful Meeting of the Old English Stirred Custards with French Crème Anglaise

Posted July 2015 
by Stephen Schmidt 

2015-5-23 Custards IMG_0616

In 1838, a well-to-do New York City woman, likely of the Hoppin family, recorded in her cookbook a dessert that she had served with great success to company so that she would remember how to serve it again. Consisting of two stirred custards—that is, saucepan custards—one made with the whites of eggs and the other with the yolks, the dessert played upon a white/yellow color scheme that was fashionable at the time in the serving of cakes. The writer’s extension of the conceit to the serving paraphernalia was typical.

When having company to dinner, as when the Whitneys were here for a dessert, make Lemmon Custards of the yolks of eggs, making them yellow, and take the whites of the Lemmon receipt with one or two more eggs for white boiled Custard seasoned with mace and orange peel pounded very fine and sifted so as not to speck them, and add a little cream. This is the answer instead of whips in the summer or any time. Put the custards into the low jelly glasses & serve them on the dinner table on the china custard stands, one white & one yellow, to look very handsome, or sometimes put the white custards in glass handle cups and set the yellow & white on the glass stand.

Hoppin Family Recipes, American, 1838-1841 (New York Public Library)

It is difficult for us today to grasp this dessert. We have never seen nineteenth-century jelly glasses, glass-handled custard cups, or custard stands, and we think of stirred custards as components of other desserts (like trifle or floating island) or as sauces, not as principal desserts. Above all, we are puzzled by the custards themselves, particularly the white one, made with egg whites. We do not understand how custard containing egg whites can be prepared in a saucepan. Won’t the result simply be a curdled mess? In fact, no. From the mid-1600s to the mid-1800s, the English-speaking world knew many stirred custards (or “creams,” as they were also called), both as desserts and as accompaniments to cake at evening parties. Many of these custards were thickened with whole eggs or with egg whites only, and when properly prepared these custards were perfectly smooth

Indeed, the most common type, plain stirred custard, or “boiled” custard—which was not boiled, of course; the name merely distinguished it from baked custard—was among this group. As originally made in Anglo-America, its basic ingredients were milk or cream, whole eggs, and sugar. But by 1884, when Mary Lincoln, the first principal of the Boston Cooking School, published her cookbook, the common wisdom on the eggs had shifted. “Boiled custard is much smoother when made only with the yolks of eggs,” Lincoln pronounced, dismissing traditional whole-egg boiled custard as inevitably lumpy. Regrettably, once egg white was deemed undesirable in plain boiled custard, all of the other traditional stirred custards that contained it fell under suspicion and, soon enough, these custards, too, were no longer made or even thought possible—and hence our bafflement at the Hoppin writer’s dessert.

Why did traditional whole-egg boiled custard disappear and take with it so many other lovely stirred custards? The term “crème anglaise” hints at the answer. This is the French name for plain stirred custard—and, nowadays, it is a typical American name for the custard too.*

Starting in the mid-seventeenth century, with the publication of ground-breaking cookbooks by La Varenne and other new-wave French chefs, (privileged) Anglo-America increasingly fell under the sway of Gallic culinary sorcery. Notwithstanding Franco-phobic pushback—and there was plenty of that—wealthy households on both sides of the Atlantic had adopted Frenchified (if not exactly French) fare for company occasions by the mid- nineteenth century (the English somewhat earlier than the Americans), and by the end of the nineteenth century, the upper-middle classes had followed suit. Meanwhile, French culinary ideas also permeated everyday cooking. French culinary signifiers like creaming, breading and deep-frying, patty shells, mayonnaise, meringue toppings, and many others are rampant in late-Victorian American cookbooks, especially in those of the influential Fannie Farmer, who was Mrs. Lincoln’s successor as principal of the Boston Cooking School.

Traditional boiled custard was swept up in this sea change. The French made plain stirred custard with egg yolks only, and since the French were presumed to always know best, the French way became the usual American way. To be sure, it did not help the cause of traditional whole-egg plain stirred custard that the custard is tricky, trickier than yolk stirred custard, which many home cooks find plenty tricky enough. Besides curdling at a lower temperature than yolk custard, whole-egg plain stirred custard has very little “tolerance.” While yolk stirred custard thickens gradually in a range of nearly twenty degrees, whole-egg custard only begins to thicken at around 160⁰F and then becomes as thick as it can get, without curdling, at 165⁰F. Just a degree or two beyond this point and—drat!—it’s ruined. Whole-egg stirred custard requires a knack that was quickly lost once the custard was no longer routinely made—and so the custard was deemed a bad recipe from the benighted (pre-French) past and was forgotten. This is a pity. Whole-egg stirred custard is perfectly smooth when carefully cooked, and to many tastes it is nicer than that made with yolks: thicker yet lighter on the tongue, with a delightful slippery quality.

An even greater pity is the loss of the many other lovely stirred custards that went to their grave along with traditional boiled custard, among them the Hoppin writer’s white and yellow desserts. Precisely how the Hoppin writer made her white stirred custard we cannot know, for she did not record the recipe in her cookbook. But we can speculate. Since she was after stark, unmistakably white custard, I would guess that she started with a recipe like the following (which was popular) and substituted whites for yolks and orange (and mace) for lemon. Apparently, she also replaced (most of) the cream called for in this recipe with milk. In testing, I discovered that this is possible but dicey, as milk, having less fat than cream, also provides less tolerance, making the custard more likely to curdle (or separate, which is what mine did, and which is less dire than curdling but still not what one wants). So I retested with cream and liked the result very much. My adapted recipe, “White Custard with Orange and Mace,” is posted in Adapted Recipes.

Lemon Cream

Eliza Leslie, Directions for Cookery, 1837

 Beat well together a quart of thick cream and the yolks of eight eggs. Then gradually beat in half a pound of powdered loaf-sugar, and the grated rind of three large lemons. Put the mixture into a porcelain skillet and set it on hot coals till it comes to a boil; then take it off, and stir it till nearly cold. Squeeze the juice of the lemons into a bowl; pour the cream upon it, and continue to stir it till quite cold. You may serve it up in a glass bowl, in glass cups, or in jelly glasses. Eat it with sweetmeats and tarts.

The Hoppin writer did not write down a recipe for her bright-yellow lemon custard, either, but again we can speculate. It could not have been simply the Lemon Cream above or some version of today’s plain stirred custard with lemon. Made with cream or milk, these custards would have been too pale in color to have cut it in her color scheme. She must instead have made one of the old water-based stirred lemon custards (or “creams”), many of which were thickened with egg yolks and/or whole eggs and were vivid yellow. (There was also a popular version with egg whites only, which is transparent. Amelia Simmons, our earliest published cookbook author, has a recipe that is very much worth making.) These custards were tremendously fashionable in Anglo-America from the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s. But the French did not know them, and what the French did not know, fashionable late-Victorian America tossed out. What a loss! Contrary to modern expectations (at least mine), water-based stirred custards can be cooked to a higher temperature and have greater tolerance than milk-based stirred custards—even when whole eggs or, indeed, only egg whites are used. And they are lovely.

Water-based lemon custards thickened entirely with egg yolks taste unpleasantly eggy to me—and perhaps they did to people of the past as well, for most recipes call for whole eggs or egg whites. So, while the Hoppin writer apparently prepared her yellow custard with egg yolks only, I would prefer the following delicious, decidedly yellow custard, which is made with whole eggs—and whose yellow can be intensified by the addition of one or possibly two (but, to my taste, not more) of the yolks left over from the white custard. For my recipe, see “Yellow Stirred Custard with Lemon” in Adapted Recipes.

Lemon Cream

Mary Randolph, The Virginia House-Wife, 1824

Pare the rind very thin from four fresh lemons, squeeze the juice, and strain it—put them both into a quart of water, sweeten it to your taste, add the whites of six eggs, beat to a froth; set it over the fire, and keep stirring until it thickens, but do not let it boil—then pour it in a bowl; when cold, strain it through a sieve, put it on the fire, and add the yelks of the eggs—stir it till quite thick, and serve it in glasses.

 

*Ironically, the term “crème anglaise” translates as “English cream,” not because the French believed that the custard was an English invention but because they perceived it as characteristic of the English. At least one other custard, now forgotten, also shows up under the same name in seventeenth-century French cookbooks.

This entry was posted in Desserts, French cooking, Stephen Schmidt 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  |   4 Comments on The Fateful Meeting of the Old English Stirred Custards with French Crème Anglaise  
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