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Void (voidee)

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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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. ↩
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English Gingerbread Old and New

Posted September 2014 
by Stephen Schmidt 

This post originally appeared on the Recipes Project blog, on December 21, 2012, and was reposted on the New York Academy of Medicine blog “Books, Health and History” on February 5, 2013.

Food writers who rummage in other people’s recipe boxes, as I am wont to do, know that many modern American families happily carry on making certain favorite dishes decades after these dishes have dropped out of fashion, indeed from memory. It appears that the same was true of a privileged eighteenth-century English family whose recipe book now resides at the New York Academy of Medicine, under the unprepossessing title “Recipe book : manuscript, 1700s.” (MCS title: English Receipt Book Headed “Wines, Sweetmeats, & Cookery,” mostly 1700 – 1740.)  The manuscript’s culinary section (it also has a medical section) was copied in two contiguous chunks by two different scribes, the second of whom picked up numbering the recipes where the first left off and then added an index to all 170 recipes in both sections. The recipes in both chunks are mostly of the early eighteenth century—they are similar to those of E. Smith’s The Compleat Housewife, 1727—but a number of recipes in the first chunk, particularly for items once part of the repertory of “banquetting stuffe,” are much older. My guess is that this clutch of recipes was, previous to this copying, a separate manuscript that had itself been successively copied and updated over a span of several generations, during the course of which most of the original recipes had been replaced by more modern ones but a few old family favorites dating back to the mid-seventeenth century had been retained. Among these older recipes, the most surprising is the bread crumb gingerbread. A boiled paste of bread crumbs, honey or sugar, ale or wine, and an enormous quantity of spice (one full cup in this recipe, and much more in many others) that was made up as “printed” cakes and then dried, this gingerbread appears in no other post-1700 English manuscript or print cookbook that I have seen. And yet the recipe in the NYAM manuscript seems not to have been idly or inadvertently copied, for its language, orthography, and certain compositional details (particularly the brandy) have been updated to the Georgian era:

25 To Make Ginger bread

Take a pound & quarter of bread, a pound of sugar, one ounce of red Sanders, one ounce of Cinamon three quarters of an ounce of ginger half an ounce of mace & cloves, half an ounce of nutmegs, then put your Sugar & spices into a Skillet with half a pint of Brandy & half a pint of ale, sett it over a gentle fire till your Sugar be melted, Let it have a boyl then put in half of your bread Stirre it well in the Skellet & Let it boyle also, have the other half of your bread in a Stone panchon, then pour your Stuffe to it & work it to a past make it up in prints or as you please.

English Recipes for "Wines, Sweetmeats, & Cookery," 1700 - 1740

English Recipes for “Wines, Sweetmeats, & Cookery,” 1700 – 1740

From the fourteenth century into the mid-seventeenth century, bread crumb gingerbread was England’s standard gingerbread (for the record, there was also a more rarefied type) and, by all evidence, a great favorite among those who could afford it—a fortifier for Sir Thopas in The Canterbury Tales, one of the dainties of nobility listed in The Description of England, 1587 (Harrison, 129), and according to Sir Hugh Platt, in Delightes for Ladies, 1609, a confection “used at the Court, and in all gentlemens houses at festival times.” Then, around the time of the Restoration, this ancient confection apparently dropped out of fashion. In The Accomplisht Cook, 1663, his awe-inspiring 500-page compendium of upper-class Restoration cookery, Robert May does not find space for a single recipe.

The reason for its waning is not difficult to deduce. Bread crumb gingerbread was part of a large group of English sweetened, spiced confections that were originally used more as medicines than as foods. Indeed, the earliest gingerbread recipes appear in medical, not culinary, manuscripts (Hieatt, 31), and culinary historian Karen Hess proposes that gingerbread derives from an ancient electuary commonly known as gingibrati, whence came the name (Hess, 342-3). In England, these early nutriceuticals, as we might call them today, gradually became slotted as foods first through their adoption for the void, a little ceremony of stomach-settling sweets and wines staged after meals in great medieval households, and then, beginning in the early sixteenth century, through their use at banquets, meals of sweets enjoyed by the English privileged both after feasts and as stand-alone entertainments. Through the early seventeenth century banquets, like the void, continued to carry a therapeutic subtext (or pretext) and comprised mostly foods that were extremely sweet or both sweet and spicy: fruits preserved in syrups, candied fruits, marmalades, and stiff jellies; candied caraway, anise, and coriander seeds; various spice-flecked dry biscuits from Italy; marzipan; and sweetened, spiced wafers and the syrupy spiced wine called hippocras. In this company, bread crumb gingerbread, with its pungent (if not caustic) spicing, was a comfortable fit. But as the seventeenth century progressed, the banquet increasingly incorporated custards, creams, fresh cheeses, fruit tarts, and buttery little cakes, and these foods, in tandem with the enduringly popular preserved and candied fruits, came to define the English taste in sweets, whether for banquets or for two new dawning sweets occasions, desserts and evening parties. The aggressive spice deliverers fell by the wayside, including, inevitably, England’s ancestral bread crumb gingerbread.

As the old gingerbread waned, a new one took its place and assumed its name, first in recipe manuscripts of the last quarter of the seventeenth century, and then in printed cookbooks of the early eighteenth century. This new arrival was the spiced honey cake, which had been made throughout Europe for centuries. It is sometimes suggested that the spiced honey cake came to England with Royalists returning from exile in France after the Restoration, which seems plausible given the high popularity of French pain d’épice at that time—though less convincing when one considers that a common English name for this cake, before it became firmly known as gingerbread, was “pepper cake,” which suggests a Northern European provenance. Whatever the case, Anglo-America almost immediately replaced the expensive honey in this cake with cheap molasses (or treacle, as the English said by the late 1600s), and this new gingerbread, in myriad forms, became the most widely made cake in Anglo-America over the next two centuries and still remains a favorite today, especially at Christmas.

By the time the NYAM manuscript was copied, perhaps sometime between 1710 and 1730, molasses gingerbread was already ragingly popular in both England and America, and evidently the family who kept this manuscript ate it too, for the second clutch of culinary recipes includes a recipe for it, under the exact same title as the first. Remembering the old adage that the holidays preserve what the everyday loses, I will hazard a guess that the old gingerbread was made at Christmas, the new for everyday family use.

150 To Make Ginger Bread

Take a Pound of Treacle, two ounces of Carrawayseeds, an ounce of Ginger, half a Pound of Sugar half a Pound of Butter melted, & a Pound of Flower. if you please you may put some Lemon pill cut small, mix altogether & make it into little Cakes so bake it. may put in a little Brandy for a Pepper Cake

"Recipe book England 18th century. In two unidentified hands." Credit: New York Academy of Medicine

An interesting question is why the seventeenth-century English considered the European spiced honey cake sufficiently analogous to their ancestral bread crumb gingerbread to merit its name. It may have been simply the compositional similarity, the primary constituents of both cakes being honey (at least traditionally) and spices. Or it may have been that both cakes were associated with Christmas and other “festival times.” Or it may have been that both cakes were often printed with human figures and other designs using wooden or ceramic molds. Or it may possibly have been that both gingerbreads had medicinal uses as stomach-settlers. In both England and America, itinerant sellers of the new baked gingerbread often stationed themselves at wharves and docks and hawked their cakes as a preventive to sea-sickness. (Ship-wrecked off Long Island in 1727, Benjamin Franklin bought gingerbread “of an old woman to eat on the water,” he tells us in The Autobiography.) One thinks at first that the ginger and other spices were the “active ingredients” in this remedy, and certainly this is what nineteenth-century American cookbook authors believed when they recommended gingerbread for such use. But early on the remedy may also have been activated by the treacle. Based on the perhaps slender evidence of a single recipe in E. Smith, Karen Hess proposes that the first English bakers of the new gingerbread may have understood treacle to mean London treacle (Hess, 201), the English version of the ancient sovereign remedy theriac, a common form of which English apothecaries apparently formulated with molasses rather than expensive honey. I have long wondered what, if anything, this has to do with the English adoption of the word “treacle” for molasses (OED). Perhaps a medical historian can tell us.

Works Cited
Harrison, William. The Description of England. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1994
Hess, Karen. Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.
Hieatt, Constance and Sharon Butler. Curye on Inglysch. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
“Treacle, I. 1. c.” The Compact Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1991

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