Blessed be he
that invented pudding

When we speak of pudding we will all, British or not, think of a sweet course concluding a meal. But the term ‘pudding’ has only been connected to this last part of the meal since the twentieth century. In its early days, pudding started out as a savoury dish which was mostly meat-based, such as a haggis or a sausage.

The etymology of the English word pudding leads in several directions. A very possible explanation for its ancestry is the Latin word botellus, meaning sausage, from which very likely came the French word boudin. Another option is the West Germanic stem pud which meant ‘to swell’, or the Westphalian dialect puddek meaning ‘lump’. One that is very close is the Low German pudde-wurst which was the word for their black pudding.

Basically, pudding is the name of a mixture that is prepared either in animal skins like a sausage or haggis, wrapped in a pudding cloth or in a vessel such as a tray, pastry casing or mould. In A Book of Cookrye from 1584 (by A.W.) we find recipes for puddings made in vegetables, much like the Mediterranean stuffed vegetables we know today. There have also been medieval recipes for fish, game or large birds prepared ‘with a pudding in their belly’, which can be compared to the stuffing for a Christmas turkey. The word pudding has an ambiguous nature as it also refers to the intestines of a man or animal in some old texts. This could very well be the reason why pudding is named as it is, as the earliest ones were prepared in intestines – indeed, some still are – and became filled puddings.

To explain how the pudding evolved from being a savoury sausage-like preparation to being a synonym for all kinds of sweet stuff, we have to take a journey through Britain’s rich culinary and cultural past. Pudding is one of the most characteristic dishes of British cuisine. It has been favoured for so many centuries that we see it pop up in literature throughout the ages.

Quite extraordinarily, it would be a Frenchman visiting England in the 1690s who would write about the British pudding in a lyrical manner:

Blessed be he that invented pudding, for it is a Manna that hits the palates of all sorts of people; a manna better than that of the wilderness, because the people are never weary of it. Ah what an excellent thing is an English pudding! To come in pudding-time, is as much as to say, to come in the most lucky moment in the world. Give an English man a pudding, and he shall think it a noble treat in any part of the world.

Francois Maximilian Misson, Mémoires et observations faites par un voyageur en Angleterre, 1698

So what is a pudding?

Let us first take a look at what we categorise as puddings today. Although the term ‘pudding’ has become synonymous with dessert in Britain, not all puddings are desserts, while all desserts are puddings in the modern sense of the word.

Boiled and steamed puddings

Early puddings are, as I explained, sausage-type dishes, which were usually boiled, then often smoked, or roasted. They were either made with meat, blood or entirely from rice, spelt or other grains stuffed into some kind of intestine or cloth bag. These puddings were always flavoured in one way or another, either using herbs or spices. Later, candied fruits, fortified wines and liqueurs were added and the puddings nearly all lost their meat contentsEntryName. Steaming them in a basin or mould became the favoured method over boiling, when the technique was developed. Today’s steamed puddings are usually made of a sponge cake batter, or a rich fruitcake batter and are made either in large pudding moulds, or small individual ones. Savoury versions still exist under the name haggis, blood pudding and white pudding. Dumplings are also puddings.

Baked puddings

Baked puddings are those in which the pudding mixture is placed in either a bowl or tray, which is sometimes prepared with a layer of pastry, making it more of a tart or a pie. Today, most tarts and pies are considered ‘pudding’ as they fit into the dessert category. They are of course all baked.

Bread puddings

Bread puddings are made by including bread – stale or fresh – as a primary ingredient. Some previously named types of pudding can also contain breadcrumbs, but that doesn’t make them bread puddings. In a bread pudding, the bread is usually, but not always, left whole and often acts like a crust encasing some kind of cream or egg mixture or fruit. Bread puddings are often baked.

Batter puddings

These are made by making a light pancake-type batter which is then baked or fried in butter or fat. These can be Yorkshire puddings, but also fritters.

Milk puddings

The sweet and delicately flavoured puddings made with animal milk, almond or oat milk include creams, custards and ice creams.

Jellies

These are sweet puddings set with either vegetable or grain starches, or animal-derived gelatine. They are often boldly coloured and shaped in a mould for dramatic effect. They can encase fruit and in medieval times they often encased meat or fish, much like aspic, although they are no longer known as jellies.

The early years

To talk about the prehistoric settlers of England we must refer to archaeological finds and their different interpretations – therefore much is based on speculation. It is hard to get a complete picture as small animal and fish bones may have decayed completely, leaving us to think that some animals weren’t eaten. Also, vessels made out of certain materials might not have survived because they were less sturdy, which makes us wonder what was used and how they made them and if they existed or how common they were. Grimston Lyles Hill made the earliest ceramics in Britain, dated to around 4000 BCE. Pots of this ware were found throughout Britain, so it is likely a trade was established. Again, the way these pots were used in cookery is uncertain. Archaeologists have suggested a method with ‘pot boilers’: stones that were placed in the fire and then added to the liquid in the pot to warm it. Others have said the pottery vessels were fired in such a way that they could have been placed on the embers of a fire directly to cook meals, without them breaking. Whatever happened, we know for certain that there was a culture in cooking. Quite extraordinarily, while I was in the final stages of writing these pages, scientists found evidence of wheat in Britain 8000 years ago. This suggests the grain was traded with people from the East, long before it was grown by the first British farmers. In ancient times man had to rely largely upon hunting and gathering, but things changed once he was able to farm, raise cattle and establish trades in food.

We don’t know if these prehistoric people made puddings. I can only assume they did, as no part of an animal would be wasted and stuffing intestines or skins with blood other foods such as offal, berries and grains seems like a very logical thing to do.

British cuisine evolved from the same place as French, Italian and other European cuisines: Ancient Greece, Rome and Persia. But, as you may expect, due to climate, type of soil and taste, it evolved differently.

The very first time that a pudding appeared in European literature was in Homer’s saga The Odyssey in about 800 BCE. This story from classical antiquity tells of the Greek hero Odysseus (known as Ulysses in Roman myths) and his journey returning home to Ithaca after the fall of Troy. Assumed dead during his 10-year absence, his house was filled with suitors hoping to marry his wife, Penelope. The men competed for Penelope’s hand while also taking advantage of her hospitality by feasting on meat and drink. One of the passages speaks of preparing black pudding: ‘there are some goats’ paunches down at the fire, which we have filled with blood and fat, and set aside for supper.’ (Translation by Samuel Butler, 1900.)

Roman puddings

When the Romans arrived in Britain around 43 CE many things changed: Beef and pork were the preferred meats of Roman Britain, and also a part of the rations of a Roman soldier. Consequently, cattle-rearing and other forms of meat farming became more regulated. New animal species, vegetables, herbs and fruit trees were introduced and a new system of farming brought in, creating enclosures around farmsteads. Some of those enclosures were leporaria or ‘hare gardens’, and deer parks were established too.

The Romans also brought with them one of the first sets of recipes: De Re Coquinaria, a cookbook credited as a kind of homage to the gourmet Apicius, is a set of 10 books on Roman cookery believed to date from the late fourth or early fifth century CE. The topics vary from ‘The Careful Housekeeper’ to ‘The Fisherman’. The number of different spices and herbs used in the recipes of this book is significant. It is commonly assumed that Europe was introduced to spices during the Crusades. It is true that the Crusades had an impact on the people’s taste for exotic flavours, but spices and aromatics were introduced by the Romans centuries before.

In Book II, titled ‘The Meat Mincer or Minces’, we find a number of recipes for minced meat and seafood dishes, stuffed animal intestines and the first instructions to make sausages. We also find the first recipes for a black pudding and a white pudding; the black pudding using blood, cereals and spices and the white pudding sometimes entirely cereal in composition or using white meats such as chicken, pork or pheasant. It shows that this part of the gastronomy was favoured and not feared, whereas we now often find guts and offal unappetising.

Botellum sic facies
sex ovi vitellis coctis, nucleis pineis concisis cepam, porrum concisum, ius crudum misces, piper minutum, et sic intestinum farcies. Adicies liquamen et vinum, et sic coques.

The first black pudding recipe, as given in Apicius: De Re Coquinaria

It is believed that the Celtic Britons ate differently from the Romans, even after years of Roman occupation. Not only did the Roman villas have much better-equipped kitchens (the Romans introduced the first ovens to England), there was also a difference in taste. The Romans preferred beef and pork, while the remains of Celtic victims of the Roman invasion – buried with joints of mutton in Maiden Castle in Dorset – tell us that mutton might have been prized enough to be deemed an important burial gift. The Celts also continued to speak their own language and live with their own traditions.

Cattle-rearing must have provided the Celtic Britons with most of their meat, but hunting, fishing and foraging would still have provided them with a lot of their food, especially for those who did not have access to farmyard animals or money to purchase meat. Castorware pottery from the Nene Valley in Northamptonshire of that time is illuminated with hunting scenes of dogs pursuing deer or hares, which is either because hunting was common, or they tried to copy the natural or mythical world scenes on much of the pottery imported from Gaul.

Cauldrons, though produced since the late Bronze Age, began to be manufactured on a much larger scale so that they became more widely used. But one single pot was usually all people had to cook all of their food in and, for centuries to come, this would hardly change for regular folk.

Some of the recipes for Roman sausages and puddings hardly change at all over the next few centuries and it’s hard to believe that the Celtic Britons didn’t cook puddings or sausages before the Romans came; however, we do not have written proof, only speculation and logical thinking.

Making puddings gave people the opportunity to cook something else along with the main dish they were cooking in their one pot. Animal intestines would provide the vessel in which they could stuff the minced offal, offcuts of meat and blood left over from slaughtering. This they would have flavoured with herbs, usually sweet ones, and the odd bit of pepper or any other spice they were lucky enough to get their hands on.

Adventus Saxonum 410 CE

When the Romans retreated from Britain after nearly 400 years of occupation, the Saxons, Angles and Jutes began to arrive with their boats from the areas around South Denmark. The Venerable Bede, a monk from the then Kingdom of Northumbria, wrote that their nation came to Britain, leaving their own lands empty. The invaders were referred to as Anglo–Saxon, and called themselves Englisc, from which the word English and England derives.

A lot of them were already in Britain under the ‘Foederati’ or ‘Treaty of Alliance’, where tribes who were neither from Roman colonies nor beneficiaries of Roman citizenship would provide warriors to fight in the Roman armies in exchange for certain benefits. In short, they were mercenaries. During these treaties the tribes often rebelled, and there was a constant threat from northern tribes such as the Picts and the Scots. As a result, Hadrian’s Wall was built by the Emperor Hadrian as a military defence from these barbarian northerners and other invaders from the sea.

When the threat became too large, the Romans retreated and left the Britons to the mercy of the invaders. Roman cities decayed, their villas and farms were abandoned, imported animal breeds merged with the native ones and the vulnerable ones were killed. Cultivated plants and herbs previously grown on Roman estates started to grow wild and so the land became richer as fruit trees and crops were able to grow outside their enclosed orchards. The population of England shrunk drastically after the Romans left, leaving much of the arable land deserted and prone to being consumed by woodland again, where wolves and bears were lord and master.

Because we have no recipes other than a few medical texts that give instructions for food for invalids, it is not certain whether the puddings and sausages of the Romans were still being made, or if they were ever popular with the Britons and later the Saxons. What remained of Roman cookery were most likely those dishes that were easiest to prepare, that had been around before but were adapted and those that were most favoured. But surprisingly little else remained.

Other works that give us some glimpses of daily life in Anglo–Saxon England are Aelfric’s Colloquy (translated by Ann Watkins), which took the form of a dialogue game for young monks and novices to practise Latin. The pupil has to explain the duties of the working day acting as a farmer, hunter, fisherman or cook, but sadly no puddings are mentioned.

The Monasteriales Indicia (Debby Banham, ed., 1991) is a book with a monastic sign language used by Catholic monks during times when the Benedictine Rule forbade them to speak. These signs not only give us an insight on what was eaten in the monasteries, but they also provide clues as to how some foods looked. For example, the illustration in the Monasteriales Indicia of the sign for bread shows us that bread in that period was only the size of a circle one could make by putting one’s index fingers together and doing the same with the thumbs. Of course this doesn’t tell us what regular people ate, as monastic food was very different and often much richer. Sadly again, there was no illustrated sign for a pudding, but that doesn’t mean there were none.

The Viking Age

The Vikings were raiders or pirates from Scandinavian countries. In 793 CE a few boats arrived and Vikings raided the abbey on the holy island of Lindisfarne in Northumberland. This was recorded in the Anglo–Saxon Chronicle, an account of events in Anglo–Saxon and Norman England. The Vikings weren’t planning on staying, they initially just wanted to plunder and take riches back to their homelands across the sea; however, many did stay eventually as some were looking for land to farm.

The Vikings coming to England were mostly Danes. They chased away or massacred the Saxons, as the Saxons had done to the Britons earlier, though genetic research shows that in some areas these different peoples remained to live with their own kin. No entire tribe of people was completely wiped out, as was previously assumed of the Saxons and the Britons.

The colonisation of England had begun and the new invader charged the Anglo–Saxons ‘Danegeld’, or tribute, a kind of tax paid in order to keep their villages safe from being ravaged. The wealth of the Saxon nobles declined because of the Danegeld. Trade and commerce, including that of spices, is believed to have nearly disappeared during this time and the land was struck by decades of floods, snow and frost.

Cooking would still have been done in the one cauldron over an open fire. The Danes would also have brought with them the culinary traditions of their homeland. They introduced more fish to the diet of the English and developed the fishing trade further. Exact accounts of what was eaten are as good as nonexistent so we have no way of knowing that they would have made puddings, but again I’m inclined to believe they did.

The Norman Conquest

William the Conqueror’s invasion of England in 1066 destroyed England’s links with Scandinavia, and brought the country in closer contact with the continent, in particular France. William wanted to know the exact value of the riches of England so he ordered the compilation of a survey giving him information on who owned what throughout the country, and who owed him tax and how much. This record, now named The Domesday Book, was compiled around 1086. It also noted how many farm animals, ploughs, mills and so on that each manor or village had. The Domesday Book therefore gives historians a detailed picture of what life was like in England in the eleventh century.

The Norman nobility developed a rich and lavish cuisine. They brought with them the recipes and ways they had adopted and adapted from the Mediterranean areas they conquered, such as the Arab cuisine they savoured in conquered Sicily. The spiced foods of Persia were so loved by the Anglo–Normans that naturally they brought more influences and spices back with them to England during the Crusades. The spice trade was very important and pepper was often used as currency, and later as spice rents. During the reign of King John, the royal accounts listed pepper, almonds, cumin, rice, cloves, ginger, saffron and nutmeg.

It is important to note, though, that the elite had been using many spices in their kitchens since Roman times, although they temporarily disappeared during the rule of the Danes.

Pudding or pudingis

The earliest recipes we have all come from the kitchens of the elite, and the ones we can date most accurately are those of Alexander Neckham. Around 1190, Neckham wrote several works but in his Nominibus Utensilium he gives an insight into the upkeep and the design of an Anglo–Norman manor house or castle. He gives us some of the first actual recipe instructions: slicing vegetables, how to prepare fish and a list of domestic utensils such as pots and pans.

When talking about the kinds of preserved foods used to fill the castle storehouses, Neckham states some of the following foods: ‘vino, pernis, baconibus, carne in succiduo posita, hyllis, salsuciis, tucetis, carne suilla, carne arietina, carne bovina, carne ovina et leguminibus diversis’.

The three words that were of interest to me were ‘hyllis, salsuciis, tucetis’: translated into Anglo–Norman French in Thomas Wright’s Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English (1857) to ‘aundulyes, saucistres, pudingis’. But Wright’s book is known to be one of the least reliable sources with often flawed and misleading translations. The Neckham text was used as a Latin learning text for centuries, so there are many translations or ‘glosses’ of his words. Often, however, different scribes give different or several glosses.

Although I was excited to finally find an early reference to the word pudding, I discovered that the gloss ‘pudingis’ for the Latin ‘tucetis’ is not correct. Help came from a man named Dave Rainer who is able to read medieval Latin. He kindly provided me with his own translation of Neckham’s words. Still of particular interest to me were those three words, which he translated to ‘small sausages, large sausages, preserved beef’. So I had found an early twelfth century record of puddings after all. These puddings, or sausages as they most likely were, were probably of the smoked and cured kind as the text does refer to foods suitable for a castle storehouse.

City food differed from that in the country as towns, short of arable land, could not feed themselves and relied on imports. In great cities like London, public eating-houses were established. William Fitzstephen, cleric and administrator to Thomas Becket (who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1162), wrote about these in his description of London:

There is also in London, on the bank of the river, amongst the wine shops, which are kept in ships and cellars, a public eating-house; there every day, according to the season, may be found viands of all kinds, roast, fried and boiled, fish large and small, coarser meat for the poor, and more delicate for the rich, such as venison, fowls and small birds. If friends, wearied with their journey, should unexpectedly come to a citizen’s house, and, being hungry, should not like to wait till fresh meat be bought and cooked.

William Fitzstephen, A Survey of London, 1598

We find some more clues to the gastronomy of Anglo–Norman England in the thirteenth century Treatise of Walter of Bibbesworth. This was a book written in verse in the 1230s to help a widowed English mother teach her two children the then-fashionable French of the nobility. The work is of significance as it shows that the mother’s language in the early thirteenth century was English and not French and that it is possible that the usage of French was already declining in popularity and only being taught to use in matters of managing an estate.

Bibbesworth’s poem suggests that the term haggis – a stuffed stomach of a sheep, filled with kidneys, heart, suet and herbs – was commonly known in English and French of that time as there are no glosses provided for the word. Haggis is the pudding that would, centuries later, become the national treasure of Scotland and be dubbed a ‘Scottish dish’.

By the 1280s the eating-houses had moved away from the Thames and towards the centre of London, where they remained, and we find references to commercial cooks, cook-shops and street sellers. The Norwich Leet Roll of 1287–88 (William Hudson, ed., 1891) mentions a mustard-seller, and sellers of pork sausages and puddings: these would most likely have been meat puddings like haggis.

The Forme of Cury

The fourteenth century started with one failed harvest after another, causing the Great Famine. The year 1348 marked the arrival of an even greater evil, the Black Death. Two years later the disease had wiped out nearly half the population of England. The social change in the aftermath of the Black Death, and the further crippling high taxes resulting from the Hundred Years’ War with France, led to the Peasants’ Revolt. The peasants were angry that they had to suffer so that the elite could wage war and feast in their great halls.

Ten years after the Revolt a book was compiled by the master cook of King Richard II. We know it today as The Forme of Cury: ‘the method of cooking’. The book, of which there are a number of different incomplete vellum manuscripts, is the earliest surviving book on cookery in the English language. It is considered one of the most important manuscripts of the Middle Ages, along with the earliest French recipe collection Le Viandier and the Latin Liber de Coquina. All three recipe collections have quite a few near-identical recipes.

The Forme of Cury is, however, not a cookery book as we know them today. Most common dishes would not feature in this book as they were considered to be general knowledge in the kitchens. Before the early eighteenth century, cookbooks weren’t seen as collections of instructions but as aide-memoires for seasoned cooks, to help them recall the more elaborate, uncommon and complicated dishes that didn’t appear on the dining table on a regular basis.

This book also doesn’t tell us anything about what the ordinary people ate, as this was court cookery at its best. The recipes in The Forme of Cury appear luxurious and feature Blank Mange, a dish of significance that would become a favourite pudding during the course of the centuries, up to the present day. Baked custards, either with meat or without, were also featured and also the first rice pudding. Another great pudding was a Sambocade an early cheesecake flavoured with elderflower. For fritters, which are batter puddings very popular with the rich crowd of the Middle Ages, The Forme of Cury gives several recipes.

Many people picture medieval food as unsophisticated and plain, but the recipes and ingredients of The Forme of Cury have an exotic and elegant feel. Remember that the Romans brought aromatic spices and herbs to England. And when the Normans invaded they brought Arabic influences to English shores from occupied Sicily and southern Italy, which was ruled by the Arabs prior to Norman rule.

We can see that Arabic influence in some of The Forme of Cury’s recipes. Professor Melitta Adamson notes that the recipe called ‘Maumenee’, can also be found in Liber de Coquina where it is called Malmoma and presumed a variant of blancmange by its editor. The Arab name for this dish is Ma’muniya; it is a sweet porridge thickened with white meat, rice flour, almonds, spices and coloured with saffron. Looking at the ingredients it does seem like a blancmange; however, these dishes weren’t European versions of Arab dishes, they were merely inspired by them. The close relation between the dishes in name, could have been a coincidence. As you can see, English cuisine is clearly fusion by nature so couldn’t have been anything but imaginative and rich. Tasty too.

Medieval feasting: a dinner theatre

By the fifteenth century, more manuscript recipe books were written, or more survived, and therefore we have more data to interpret. These writings, however, are mainly focused on the food of the elite, while peasants would mostly have survived on their daily pottage which was made with grains or pulses and flavoured with herbs.

Meals of the upper class were not defined by a system of courses as we know them today. Nor was division made between sweet and savoury. Meat dishes often contained sugar and dried fruits, and sweet puddings could contain some form of meat or fish, often used as a thickener. Savoury meat puddings were made in intestines, but so, too, were custards and rice puddings.

The bills of fare in the early texts described that the dishes were placed on the table in banquet style, with each course containing vegetables, grains, fish, meat and sweet dishes for the guests to choose from. The food would be eaten off a ‘trencher’ or ‘manchet’, a thick piece of bread serving as a plate, or from a communal vessel. For the latter, a strict etiquette was followed.

In 1407, for the installation feast of the Bishop Clifford, a spectacular jelly was made in the shape of a castle with a devil and a priest in the midst of a custard-filled moat. Theatrical ornate creations like this accompanied every course and were called ‘subtleties’.

To give you an idea of these elaborate meals, the following dishes are those served to King Richard II on a feast at the Bishop’s place of Durham in London in 1387, according to Thomas Austin in Two Fifteenth-century Cookery-books (1888): The first course was venison with furmenty (a pottage made of cracked wheat), a meat pottage, boars’ heads, roasted haunches of meat, and roasted swans and pigs. Finally, there was also a custard tart called a crustade lumbard in paste and a subtlety, which is sadly not described. The second course was a pottage called gele (probably a slightly set stew with meat or fish), a pottage de blandesore (a white soup), roasted cranes, pigs, pheasants, herons, chickens and bream. There were tarts, carved meats and roasted two-year-old rabbits and another subtlety. The third course consisted of almond pottage, Lombardian stew, roasted venison, chickens, rabbits, partridge, quails, larks, payne puff (a fritter), a jelly, long fritters, and, lastly again, a subtlety. After great feasts, all leftovers would have been put into alms vessels and distributed to the poor.

A variety of dishes were presented at meals so that each diner could eat according to their own ‘humoral temperament’. The four humours of Hippocratic medicine were based on the assumption that the world was made up of four elements: water, fire, air and earth, which were connected to our body’s wellbeing. These elements stood for four temperaments: sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholic; each corresponding to one of the body’s humours: blood, yellow bile, phlegm and black bile. They were believed to be created by the body when food was digested. This could either provide good humoral balance, which meant that you were healthy, or could make the body out of balance, which meant you were unwell. This holistic approach, with links to Ayurvedic medicine, was adopted by Greek, Roman and Persian physicians.

Beasts & wonders

The medieval food of the rich was highly extravagant and decorative in order to impress and entertain guests. Not only were tables adorned with imposing subtleties shaped like castles, eagles and other grand creations, centrepieces such as peacocks, swans and other large animals were often sewn back into their own feathers after roasting so that they appeared alive. Sometimes an entirely fictive creature would be created by sewing parts of different animals together. One of these curious dishes, ‘the cockatrice’, is one of the most intriguing dishes dating from this period.

One recipe for a cocatrice (translated by Constance B. Hieatt in Cocatrice and Lamprey Hay, 2012) instructed the cook to recreate this fantastical creature by sewing five different parts of animals to each other: a pig’s head, the forequarters of a pig, the hindquarters of the cock, the forequarters of a cock (strangely used in reverse order) and the hindquarters of a pig. The pig’s head has to come first and the last part should be the pig’s tail.

Imagine your dining table with this creature staring you in the face! It might sound like a strange thing to do to a main course but I find it highly inventive and it shows how much effort was put into a feast. Heston Blumenthal constructed a fire-breathing cockatrice for one of his television programs. The guests were entertained and intrigued: a meal like this certainly wouldn’t be boring!

Another theatrical aspect of the dinner table was the illusion dish, designed to fool either the eye or the palate. These elevated the cook to the status of an artist. To serve one thing under the guise of another was something that would continue to feature in English cuisine in the centuries to come.

But often these illusion dishes were also there to solve the problem of fasting days. Imitations such as a blancmange made of fish instead of capon are simple examples but certainly not the most inventive. Fish meat was also moulded to look like meatloaf, roast beef or game birds.

Eggs in Lent is a dish of counterfeit eggs, made of almond cream in real eggshells. This mid-fifteenth century recipe is from Thomas Austin’s Two Fifteenth-century Cookery-Books compiled from several manuscripts in 1888.

Eyroun in Lentyn

Take eggs, and blow out that is within at the other end; then wash the shell clean in warm water; then take good milk of almonds, and set it on the fire; then take a fair canvas, & pour the milk thereon, & let run out the water; then take it out on the cloth, & gather it together with a platter; then put sugar enough thereto; then take half of it, & color it with saffron, a little, & do thereto powder cinnamon; then take & do the white in the nether end of the shell, & in the middle the yolk, & fill it up with the white; but not too full, for going over; then set it in the fire & roast it, & serve forth.

These illusory eggs would reappear in the eighteenth century as an impressive-looking pudding made to look like a hen’s nest with straw made of lemon peel and eggs made of flummery.

We find some more interesting pudding-related things in a cookery book written entirely in verse called Liber Cure Cocorum dating from around 1430, where we find the first recipe for a haggis. The recipe is simple and easily reproduced today; I am particularly fond of the usage of the fresh herbs. Haggis has strong ties with the puddings from Roman times and it appears it can be said that haggis was a type of pudding under which a number of variations existed. Just like there are a variety of different types of sausages.

In the Austin manuscripts (Two Fifteenth-century Cookery-books, 1888), we find a blancmange made with either fish or lobster for fish days. The church dictated fasting, which meant the abstinence from meat, for nearly half the days of the year, including every Friday, Saturday and often Wednesday as well as during Lent and Advent. Recipes would therefore often appear in texts alongside versions suitable for fast days. Often it would even just be a sentence added to the end of the recipe giving an option to replace some ingredients with others suitable for Lent.

Another significant moment for this century is the first time a written record can be found of the use of a pudding cloth instead of animal intestines to cook a pudding in. Up until very recently, it was assumed the pudding cloth first appeared in books at the start of the seventeenth century. People would, however, continue to prepare puddings in skins when they were available and one cannot forget that the skins were also used for their nutritional value. The use of the pudding cloth would allow the pudding dishes to evolve as they could be made more often and by those with no access to animals.

The food of the upper class remained highly spiced, as it had been since the Roman occupation, – and focused on sweet-and-sour flavour combinations. Sugar remained in use like spice and was used sparingly because it was so expensive. Common seasonings included verjuice, wine and vinegar in combination with honey, herbs and spices. Those spices were also used in the puddings, jellies and fritters.

The Northumberland Household Book, written towards the end of the fifteenth century (edited in 1905 by T. Percy), tells us exactly which spices, and how many of them, they bought in a year. The account lists pepper, mace, cloves, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, grains of paradise (a kind of pepper), long pepper, turnsole, saunders, ground aniseed, galingale, saffron and sugar. Dried fruits and nuts such as currants, prunes, dates and almonds were also named amongst them. Almonds were used as a thickener in puddings and also in soups, stews and sauces. Almonds were also made into almond milk, which was used in many dishes. Saffron was one of the most favoured spices and people experimented with growing it in various places in England; we can still see evidence of that in the town of Saffron Walden in Essex. In recent years saffron is being grown again in England on a very small scale.

The theory that food was spiced to disguise the flavour of rotting meat has been discarded in recent years. Those households that could afford precious spices would certainly have been able to afford fresh meat. In fact, when recipes constantly call for a clean bowl, or a clean pot, or give instructions to wash things very clean, it would be hard to believe they would have, at the same time, use a spoiled piece of meat.

The Reformation’s influence on food

The Tudor King Henry VIII was crowned in 1509 and the sixteenth century was a period of change in many respects. After four years on the throne he successfully invaded France, only to sign the Treaty of London in 1518, uniting the kingdoms of western Europe in the face of a greater threat, the Ottomans. Peace with France was, however, short-lived: it was France after all, and there was history.

Foods from the New World were introduced and graced the tables of the impressive feasts Henry VIII was famous for. Francesco Chieregati, a papal emissary visiting England, was particularly impressed with the English ways of throwing a party:

The banquet which followed in the Palace of Whitehall was on a magnificent scale; the gold and silver plate; piled on the sideboard was worth a king’s ransom, and every variety of meat, poultry, game, and fish was served at table. All the dishes were borne before the King by figures of elephants, panthers, tigers, and other animals, admirably designed.

Letter to Isabella d’Este, 1517

But the finest things in Chieregati’s eyes were the jellies made in the shape of castles, towers, churches, and animals of every variety, ‘as beautiful and closely copied as possible’. He must have been really impressed during his time at the court as he then goes on to state: ‘most illustrious Madama, here in England we find all the wealth and delights in the world. Those who call the English barbarians are themselves barbarians!’

The Church of England was established in 1534 when England broke away from the Catholic Church so Henry could marry the second of his six wives, Anne Boleyn. Henry became the head of the church instead of the pope in Rome. This initiated the English Reformation and resulted in the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The treasury gained great wealth from plundering the monasteries, and those who showed their loyalty to the king were rewarded with former monastic estates and riches. This created a new breed of elite: the wealthy middle class. As Protestantism took over from Catholicism, strict fast days were no longer fixed. This brought a change in the kitchen. Before the Reformation, dishes were more complicated, and one had to be able to cook grand dishes using fish on the many fast days. These ‘made dishes’ were now deemed deceitful and Catholic and French. Meat became favoured over fish and great efforts were put into properly roasting a joint. This proper honest English cooking, along with having the sovereign as head of the church instead of the pope, became a form of nationalism.

All the cooking was still conducted over a fire, or in front of it using the radiant heat. Roast beef. or any other roasted meat. would become a dish for which England would be famous for in the seventeenth century. The fast-day recipes were forgotten by many after the Reformation, as only those who remained Catholic would continue to cook according to the pre-Reformation style. Remarkably, cooking became a political statement. To cook in the old manner or even the French manner would have shown that you were Catholic and not loyal to the king.

It wouldn’t have mattered much to the peasants whether or not it was a fast day, they were lucky to have meat at all in their pottage, which had been their staple food for centuries.

Elizabethan Times

Elizabeth I was said to have such a sweet tooth that by the end of her life her teeth were black. This would have been the case with many of her contemporaries and, curiously, it became a sign of wealth. Highly refined white sugar arrived from the continent in the shape of cones called sugar loaves – these are still produced in Arab countries to the present day. The increase in the use of sugar brought a very big change in the eating habits. Sugar went from being used sparingly, like an expensive spice, to being liberally used in dishes such as sugared flower petals, comfits, and fruit roasted in syrup. Decorations and elaborate ‘subtleties’ made completely out of sugar, were made for the most lavish feasts. Although edible, they would not have been created to be eaten as they were in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they were meant just for show. A whole new profession, that of confectioner, emerged to feed the need for these imposing sugar creations. The term banquet came to stand for both the course itself and the sweetmeats served at it.

Elizabeth reintroduced Lent and fast days on which fish should be eaten, in order to save the declining coastal towns and fishing industry. She needed fishermen to maintain her naval fleet and the people were probably all too happy to be able to practise their fast days again.

Just over a dozen cookery books were printed in the sixteenth century and manuscript recipe books from this period are also very rare. Recipes in books remain spiced, but slightly less than pre-Reformation medieval recipes. From now on, recipes for haggis, black pudding and white pudding, cooked in animal guts, appear regularly. In A Book of Cookrye (by A.W., 1584) we find recipes for a pudding in a turnip, a carrot and a cucumber. These recipes can be compared to Mediterranean stuffed vegetables. Also in this book is the first recipe for Hogs Pudding, a dish popular in the West Country today. Thomas Dawson in The Good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchin (1594) gives us a recipe ‘To boil a conie with a pudding in his bellie’ which confirms the ambiguous nature of the word pudding. Another interesting pudding in his book is ‘To boyle a legge of Mutton with a pudding’. In this case the vessel is the leg of mutton: he instructs to remove the skin, parboil it, then mix it with suet, herbs and spices, currants and minced dates, before stuffing it into the leg of mutton and boiling it in broth. What an exotic sounding dish!

Dawson also gives us the first recipe for a trifle although at this time the method is more like that of another pudding, a fool. As there still wasn’t a method for preserving milk, the cream would go straight to the manorial estates for their puddings and tarts, and butter and cheesemaking remained the most important way to process milk. Sweet milk puddings such as flummeries and possets, which were flavoured, coloured and decorated with flowers and almonds, must have looked beautifully dainty on the table of the lord of the manor.

Recipes for tansies appear more often after their first appearance in 1430. They are intriguing because we have a similar dish in Flanders, the ‘kruidkoek’, which is still popular around the town of Averbode today. Tansies are omelette or pancake-style dishes which originally, as in the Flemish recipe, contained the bitter herb tansy. Interestingly, as with so many other puddings, the tansy wasn’t a pudding when it first started to appear in recipe books, but soon it started to be associated with being a sweet dish and recipes for tansy puddings were published.

Seventeenth Century

England would see three monarchs and a republic in the seventeenth century. The Protestant King James I was nearly killed by rebelling Catholics in the famous Gunpowder Plot to blow up the House of Lords in 1605. The thwarted plot is still remembered every year on Bonfire Night, the 5th of November.

In 1625 Charles I succeeded his father, James I. Charles, probably in an attempt to bring his people together, married the Catholic Henrietta of France. But he was showing too much affinity with the Catholic ways, reintroducing several Catholic rituals. France was still considered synonymous with Catholicism, and therefore the enemy. Charles I was eventually beheaded for treason and Britain became a republic for a decade under the Puritan, Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell famously ‘cancelled’ Christmas and banished Friday and Lenten fasts, and their associated traditional dishes. The Puritans wanted a purer worship without rituals and icons and the festivities of Christmas and Easter were too lavish and Catholic for them. The Reformation and the Puritan rule changed English ways and food by making it more simplified and less extravagant.

Le Cuisinier François, written by Francois la Varenne, was the first French cookery book to be translated into English at the beginning of Cromwell’s Puritan rule in 1653. The book, however, essentially showed the dishes that had been known in pre-Reformation England as well. This gave English–Catholics the opportunity to eat like Catholics under the guise of French cuisine, with fast-day dishes and spices. French medieval food and English medieval food had been very much the same.

A sugar loaf in traditional blue paper is pictured with a sugar snapper to cut pieces of sugar from the cone, a ‘toleware’ spice dungeon and a matching nutmeg grater

France had remained a Catholic nation, and therefore the cuisine of that period changed little. The English Catholic gentry employed French chefs so that they could eat according to the Catholic ways without anyone suspecting they weren’t loyal to Protestantism.

Even back then, the French were chauvinistic about their cuisine. La Varenne stated in the dedication of his book: ‘Of all cookes in the world, the French are esteem’d the best.’ Ironically, many of the dishes in that book for which the author was credited had already appeared in English cookery books long before that time.

When Charles II was restored to the throne, English gastronomy of the upper class became even more influenced by the French. Charles had been living in exile in France and had developed a taste for French fashion and cookery.

Quite a number of British cookery writers still produced books with pre-Reformation recipes. Robert May’s book, The Accomplisht Cook, was published in 1660, the year of the Restoration, still holding onto the pre-Reformation medieval custom of using spices, dried fruits and candied peels and fish-day recipes. His book also has a huge number of pudding recipes in it. Hannah Wolley’s book, The Queen-Like Closet of 1670, was the first printed cookery book by a woman. It was also full of those types of recipes, as if the Reformation had never happened.

A great number of the cookbooks published in the seventeenth century were actually written by women. This was a phenomenon totally unknown in France at that time, when high-standard cookery was very much a male thing. In fact it remained fairly uncommon in France until the nineteenth century.

For our pudding, this century would mean even more evolution with more books published and written than ever before. The traditional white and black puddings would continue to pop up in books, as would the haggis, and new and exciting puddings would emerge.

An overview

1615

The first fool recipe is published in The English Huswife (Gervase Markham). It was then called a Norfolk Fool. Markham also gives us some of the first recipes for trifle and flummery in the same book, as well as a white-pot, which was a bread and butter pudding prepared in a pot, pan or dish. John Murrell publishes his ‘pudding in a frying-panne’ and a peculiar ‘pudding stued between two dishes’ in his book A Newe Booke of Cookerie. He is also the first to give a recipe for Cambridge pudding. He is the first to confine the puddings in his book into a pudding chapter.

1645

Colonel Norwood is the first to mention a Christmas pudding in his diary, ‘A Voyage to Virginia’.

1660

The earliest English ice-cream recipe is written down by Lady Ann Fanshawe in her manuscript recipe book. She calls it an Icy Cream. Robert May, in The Accomplisht Cook, tells us to mould jellies in scallops and other kinds of seashells and also provides us with templates for making tarts in fancy-shaped pastry casings.

1661

William Rabisha’s book The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected gives instructions to create a tart of jelly and leach. By the mid-seventeenth century isinglass, hartshorn and ivory were added to jellies to give them a firmer set, allowing for even more elaborate creations to be made.

1672

The first recipe for a Sussex Pond pudding can be found in The Queen-Like Closet, a book written by Hannah Wolley.

1681

A milk pudding called a syllabub and the gooseberry fool appear in a book called The Compleat Cook, by Rebecca Price. In this book we also find the first printed recipe for a Quaking Pudding and several other puddings.

1690

French visitor Francois Maximilian Misson raves about pudding in his Mémoires et Observations: ‘The pudding is a dish very difficult to be described, because of the several sorts there are of it; Flower, Milk, Eggs, Butter, Sugar, Suet, Marrow, Raisins, etc. etc. are the most common Ingredients of a pudding. They bake them in the oven, they boil them with meat, they make them fifty different ways.’

Pictured above: the kitchen of Cotehele Castle, Cornwall, England

Eighteenth Century

Plots and politics may hurt us, but Pudding cannot.

The Head of Man is like a Pudding: And whence have all Rhimes, Poems, Plots and Inventions sprang, but from that same Pudding. What is Poetry, but a Pudding of Words.

The Law is but a Cookery of Quibbles and Contentions. Some swallow every thing whole and unmix’d; so that it may rather be call’d a Heap, than a Pudding. Others are so Squeamish, the greatest Mastership in Cookery is requir’d to make the Pudding Palatable: The Suet which others gape and swallow by Gobs, must for these puny Stomachs be minced to Atoms; the Plums must be pick’d with the utmost Care, and every Ingredient proportion’d to the greatest Nicety, or it will never go down.

Henry Carey, A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling; its Dignity, Antiquity and Excellence with a Word upon Pudding, London, 1726

In this satirical political pamphlet the author displays a considerable knowledge of cookery in London and in general; he insinuates that to love pudding is to love corruption. It also shows how much pudding is intertwined with being English. This was a time of vast changes in the political and social landscape. Scotland and Wales joined England as Great Britain. Of course all these changes had an influence on diet.

Peasant cooking

Industrialisation and the increasing enclosure acts, which privatised common land that had previously been available to all, deprived most of the people of access to agricultural land and therefore delivered a giant blow to the peasantry and rural cuisine.

Those peasants who did have land, known as ‘yeomen’ since the sixteenth century, now became large landowners. The aristocracy became wealthier too. The regular people, often robbed of their land and villages, moved to the industrial towns. But there they were even more restricted in the ways they could feed themselves. They would be worse off because in towns they had no way at all of growing a few vegetables or keeping a chicken to sustain themselves. They now had little or no access to the food they were cooking with in the country, and as recipes in the working-class homes were transmitted orally from mother to child, a lot of these recipes were simply forgotten and knowledge tragically lost.

According to Colin Spencer (British Food, 2011), it was a devastation not yet seen in continental countries such as France or Italy, both praised for their peasant cooking. These countries didn’t see their open fields and common land divided and privatised so people could no longer farm, hunt and gather wild plants. If there is little or nothing to cook with, how can you pass on recipes?

Marxist historians have suggested that the rise of capitalism started earlier in Britain than in any other country because of the social changes induced by the enclosure acts. People increasingly had to depend on buying food at markets and the desire of obtaining commodities rose with it.

Ah, the French

Another influence on British cuisine of this period was the war with France … again. What demonstrated Britain to be a culinary nation was the fact that patriotism was still shown in the manner of cooking. Possession of French cookery books would show your allegiance to France and the Catholic faith. English–Catholics had always looked up to France, as it was a country where their faith was allowed to be practised to the full. Those of the elite who possessed French cookery books now hid them from sight and quintessentially English dishes such as roast beef and plum pudding became an absolute testimony of loyalty to king and country and appeared often in political cartoons of the period.

Many French dishes that had infiltrated the British cookery books remained in custom. So much so, that some of them disappeared from French cookery books entirely and became traditional British recipes. An example of this is the Tort de Moy.

Hannah Glasse made her dislike of French food clear in her book The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy (1747) while Eliza Smith, a few years earlier in 1727, had written The Compleat Housewife, a book which was very much pre-Reformation in its usage of spices and dried fruits in recipes. Mrs Raffald, 20 years after Glasse, didn’t mention French food or its influence in her book The Experienced English Housekeeper, but did mention a couple of dishes by their correct French name.

Georgian splendour

The great dinners in Georgian England remained focused on spectacle. For the kitchen and the table, new items were developed as ironworking improved. Patty pans, cake hoops, pastry wheels and jiggers were being produced to aid the cook with his or her daily tasks. When a copper mine was discovered in Anglesey, frying pans began to be made in larger numbers.

Fragile glassware was made into elegant custard, syllabub and jelly glasses. The blancmanges, jellies and flummeries took on dramatic forms of temples and castles for which special moulds were produced by the Staffordshire potteries. Some moulds were large to impress and others tiny, to fool the dinner guests with their appearance, just like the subtleties from the Middle Ages. Some looked like playing cards, some like little fish in a pond of water. And some flummery puddings were even made to look like bacon and eggs, just like the ‘mock eggs’ for Lent in medieval times. Illusion and theatre was what mattered on the Georgian dinner table.

James Woodforde, who documented 45 years of his life starting from 1758 in The Diary of a Country Parson, mentions eating several types of puddings. Hash mutton with plain suet pudding, plum puddings with roast beef, pease pudding, batter pudding, boiled beef and suet pudding, rabbit pudding and black pudding. He also mentions a pike with a pudding in his belly, which tells us that the word pudding still means a stuffing too. He also enjoyed several sweet puddings: rice pudding, bread pudding, cherry pudding, a baked plum pudding, damson pudding, orange pudding, a number of fruit tarts, blancmange, puffs, fritters, creams and plenty of jellies. The puddings appear in each course, showing us that in the eighteenth century the pudding was still not considered only to be a dessert. In fact, they appeared mostly in the second course. This manner of courses, which each included sweet and savoury dishes as well as fruit at times, was called ‘service à la Française’.

For example, on Christmas Day 1774 the first course served to Woodforde consisted of roast beef, pea soup and orange pudding. The second course was roasted wild ducks, lamb and salad. The meal ends with ‘a fine plumb cake’. This was a modest meal as many other meals in his diary consisted of many extra dishes in each course. On another occasion, custard puddings were served along with the first course, and a trifle with cheesecakes, blancmange and raspberry tartlets as part of a second, and concluding the meal was simply fresh fruit.

Puddings stuffed in animal casings always had been cooked along with whatever else was in the solitary pot, but the wider use of the pudding cloth had allowed pudding to appear on the table more often. People would have either two courses or an accompaniment to their meat or pottage. Ordinary people saw those grand dinners their lords enjoyed and wanted to mimic that by creating a way to have more than one dish on the table too. Therefore pudding gave them a sense of luxury and became a much-loved and anticipated part of the meal. When the pudding didn’t contain any meat but only breadcrumbs or oatmeal, suet, spices (for those who could afford them) and raisins, it would be boiled, then cooled and often roasted by the fire. This plum pudding would be served before the meat or as a side dish. A man once told me that he and his family still ate a plum pudding this way in the 1970s!

Another popular pudding to make as an accompaniment to the meat was the Yorkshire pudding. These puddings were around for many years before they first made their appearance in print in Hannah Glasse’s book in 1747. Before Glasse mentioned the recipe in her book, they were known simply as ‘dripping puddings’. We find the first recipe for one of those in The Whole Duty of a Woman in 1737, where the anonymous author instructs to place the pudding under a shoulder of mutton instead of a dripping-pan. Dripping puddings were also popular in Scotland where they were called ‘fired puddings’; there they were often made of mashed potato, which had by this time become common, and milk.

Pudding chapters in books would now appear more often, and become larger and larger; however, sweet and savoury puddings continue to feature together in those chapters. Recipes for one type of pudding now also started to appear with two ways of preparation: boiled or baked.

Around this period the Swedish explorer and agriculturalist, Pehr Kalm, wrote in his account of his visit to England in 1748 (translated by Joseph Lucas, 1892) about the English love for pudding and roast meat. His words give us an understanding of the way puddings were eaten:

Puddings, being plain batter puddings or plum puddings, were prepared by either boiling them in skins or cloth in the pot along with the boiling meat, or roasted under the dripping of the joint of meat before the fire. It was the custom to have pudding and gravy as a kind of starter. It meant that, by the time the meat came to the table, one had already feasted on pudding; this made one joint of meat stretch for longer. Any leftover pudding could be saved, roasted the next day or enjoyed as a treat drizzled with honey, pudding sauce or the very precious sugar, if one was lucky enough to get it.

Victorian splendour: slums and starvation

Nineteenth century England saw a rapid growth of population and urbanisation, stimulated by the Industrial Revolution. The elite became wealthier and the poor became poorer. In many ways, the lower classes hadn’t been in this dire a situation since the Middle Ages. Peasant cooking had been largely forgotten and the daily pottage, which had sustained people as a staple food for centuries, had disappeared from the table. Eliza Acton noted in her book, Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845), that soups or pottage were hardly eaten. The poor didn’t have the means to heat up the dish, and often they didn’t have access to the ingredients to make a soup. This was an era marked by slum housing, hard labour, starvation and disease.

Street sellers of hot food, who had been around since medieval times, were there to feed those who had the money to purchase it but not the stove to cook it on themselves. In the book London Labour and the London Poor, Henry Mayhew interviews and lists the street sellers and the destitute of Victorian London. This gives us a unique insight into what the lower class were eating and what they paid for their food. Hot eels and pea soup, plum duff, meat pudding, tarts, savoury and sweet pies were sold on the streets from steaming baskets and kettles, ready to eat. Their customers were mostly fellow street sellers who had had a good day selling; and they were often young children who had been up since the crack of dawn in every kind of weather. When times were hardest, the meat in the pies and puddings of the street sellers and pie houses, was of questionable quality. It could have been spoiled, could have contained stray cats or, in the case of the tale of Sweeney Todd, even worse …

Changes in farming

Peasants in Georgian times would have been better off than people of a similar class living in towns, but this changed too. Tenant farmers no longer paid their farm labourers with room and board, they now paid wages under contract. Being paid a wage meant they no longer lived as a part of the household, they were now merely staff and were often worse off.

We can see this shift in culture in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Tess first works as a milkmaid and lives along with the other milkmaids in the farmhouse of their employer. Life is merry because the familial bond makes life more pleasant and there is a mutual respect between employer and employee. Meals are frequent and eaten together, and cooking would probably have been done together. Later, Tess finds herself working under contract for a tenant farmer: she receives a small wage, living conditions are bad and the work rough. Although she probably earns more money, she would have considered herself far richer before. Without any means to cook she now eats poorly in a pub, which probably would have cost her a fair penny too.

One of the reasons for this change in farming was the greater food demands from the bigger cities like London. This changed the nature of farming and was the origin of a modern problem, factory farming. Dairy farms changed the way they worked by making the cows have extra calves in autumn so they would have milk all year round. Steam power led to mechanisation that dramatically reduced the workforce. Gone were the days when farmwork was dictated by the forces of nature. The railways were developed to bring the produce to the cities, so that produce no longer stayed within the localities where it was harvested or caught.

Changes on the dinner table

Not only did farming change, food production in general experienced a major revolution. The technique of preserving food in glass and cans came into use and soon vegetables, meat and fish were canned. Originally canning was a solution to provide ships on long sea journeys with enough food, but it soon crept into the normal household too. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, as freezing techniques evolved, meat started to be imported from further afield. Additives such as chalk, powdered bones and ground stone were used to whiten flour because of a preference for using cheaper high-gluten ‘hard wheat’ from the US in combination with ‘modern’ milling techniques, which made the flour brown.

For the upper classes, the Victorian era was a slightly more pleasant time to live. These people were deeply religious and had a fear of experiencing pleasure or of expressing emotion because it was considered vulgar. The fashion was to show enormous restraint and this also expressed itself in the food. The Victorians were afraid of food that was too raw, too spicy, too delectable. The food had to look good, but the flavour was often secondary!

At the start of this century the theatrical banqueting style that had been popular for centuries (service à la Française) evolved into service à la Russe. Unlike the banqueting style, with service à la Russe the chef would have more control over what dishes would be combined. So as not to completely take the choice away from the diner, there were sometimes two or three options from which one could choose. Written menus became an absolute necessity for dining à la Russe because guests could no longer see the dishes on the table and needed to make a choice before the serving trays of food arrived. Later, this kind of service would evolve to the plated service we know today, where the chef has absolute control over how the food looks on the plate and how the items on the plate are combined. It is most certainly the case that this evolution is connected to the phenomenon of celebrity chefs. Before this, the cook was just a servant, but now chefs were brought in due to the reputation of their food. Those cooking for the monarchy and other influential people and societies would also publish their own books, and variations on their books for the lower middle class with less elaborate dishes.

There was also a change for our humble pudding. More books were being published and at lower prices, so they were no longer the privilege of stately homes and the elite. Not only would there be a pudding course at dinner, pudding chapters now appeared as standard in cookery books and were often very large. From the mid-nineteenth century there would be books entirely devoted to puddings. The manufacturing of pewter, copper and earthenware ice-cream moulds grew to create blancmanges, jellies and steamed and iced puddings in ornate shapes. The plum pudding took its iconic place at the Christmas feast, with its popularity shown in greeting cards depicting puddings as centrepieces on the festive table. This was before the Christmas tree appeared and became the symbol of the holiday season.

The pudding would continue to feature on satirical cards in which political feuds were addressed, just as in A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling nearly a century before.

Fancy Ices and inspiring women

A new kind of pudding was emerging, though it had its origins a few centuries earlier. Ice cream became popular in the eighteenth century when people experimented with technique and with flavours. From the nineteenth century these ices took on more impressive shapes thanks to the production of special pewter moulds, and ice-cream puddings were born. Queen Victoria’s chef, Charles Elmé Francatelli, created many majestic ice-cream puddings for the court. He published them in several of his books. Another significant Victorian cookbook author, Mrs Agnes B. Marshall, published two books on the subject of ice cream alone, The Book of Ices (1888) and Fancy Ices (1894). She sold the moulds she mentioned in the books in her shop and taught people how to use them in her own cookery school.

Another lady worth mentioning again is Eliza Acton. Her big volume Modern Cookery for Private Families was published in 1845 and was dedicated to the housekeepers of England. It became an enormously popular book until its success was smothered by Mrs Beeton’s clever publishers. The book was intended for the home cook and gives clear instructions and guidance, written in the most elegant manner. The book reads like a Jane Austen novel minus the mentions of handsome-yet-stern young men and rainy walks. A dish to use up leftover plum pudding she calls ‘The Elegant Economist’s Pudding’ and another is named ‘The Printer’s Pudding’. Just as wittily named are ‘The Young Wife’s Pudding’ or ‘The Good Daughter’s Mincemeat Pudding’. The 1855 edition of the book had added sections on ‘foreign food’, including many recipes for curry dishes and Jewish cooking.

Eliza Acton was progressive and made no secret about the fact that she disliked the food adulterations of that era. She was forward-thinking when she claimed that store-bought bread contributed to malnutrition. This inspired her to write The English Bread Book in 1857, which has become, just as her previously named book, a very rare find in the book store.

In this era a whole range of pudding books would be published, probably prompted by the number of different moulds that were being made, and also as testimony to the British love for pudding. Georgiana Hill published Everybody’s Pudding Book in 1862. Massey and Son published their Comprehensive Pudding Book around 1865. Mary Jewry had a pudding chapter in Warne’s Model Cookery Book, with one of them bearing my favourite name for a pudding: ‘General Satisfaction’.

New puddings came out of these books and steaming became the preferred method of cooking. The jam roll would evolve into the roly-poly pudding. The first recipes for spotted dick and treacle sponge pudding popped up and filled suet puddings such as steak and kidney pudding became increasingly popular. Blancmange would now be made with cornflour (cornstarch) and flavourings, rather than meat, fish and almond milk. This after some genius marketing from the largest cornflour brands, providing recipe books and moulds.

Mrs Beeton and clever marketing

Considered one of the most famous and influential English cookery writers, Isabella Beeton published the most iconic book on British food in history. But her book has also been partly blamed for giving English food a bad name. Her husband was a publisher and at his request Isabella, in her early twenties, started to write articles on cooking and household management for one of his publications. It was something she knew barely anything about but Isabella and her husband wanted to cash in on the fact that ladies weren’t mere ornaments anymore, they were now suddenly expected to manage the household and cook or at least brief the cook and staff. Those articles and supplements were then published as a single volume in The Book of Household Management in 1861.

Mrs Beeton died in her late twenties, before her book received any kind of recognition. She never gave cookery demonstrations to entire halls of people, as Mrs Marshall did, and in her lifetime she never had the status in British food that she is wrongly credited for today. She also wasn’t the first cookery author to list the ingredients at the beginning of each recipe. And according to Kathryn Hughes, – who wrote The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton in 2006 – many of her recipes were taken from other books.

So how is it that hers is still the best-known book on British food? The answer is a smart publisher. The notable Ward Lock bought the rights of the book from Isabella’s husband, Sam Beeton, after she had died at 29, and immediately started to edit and add to the book, to the extent that very little remained of the original. Mrs Beeton became a brand, and a brand that sold, although she didn’t have anything to do with it anymore.

But even before it was severely altered by Ward Lock, the book was flawed. Of course not all of the recipes in her original book were bad; in fact, some are simply delicious. But her recipes often failed or resulted in overcooked vegetables. She made a big thing about cooking with leftovers and gave it respectability, so much so that some restaurants of the time thought it was acceptable to start using old meat rather than fresh, selling it as a Mrs Beeton recipe.

How different British food would have been in the early twentieth century if Ward Lock had chosen another cookery writer to endorse! The entrepreneurial Mrs Marshall would have been a much more deserving recipient for this status, running her own cookery school and shop with kitchen appliances she designed; or Eliza Acton with her two delightful books about cookery.

Mrs Beeton’s book was published two years after Acton’s death and Jill Norman, in her introduction to the most recent edition of Modern Cookery for Private Families (2011), explains that when Eliza complains in her preface about other cookery writers stealing her recipes without any acknowledgement, Isabella Beeton would prove to be ‘one of the worst offenders’.

Twentieth Century

Although the nineteenth century had done a lot of damage to British cuisine, the disappearance of domestic servants in the twentieth century only accelerated its decline. The lady of the house now had to try to cook those often time-consuming and labour-intensive dishes herself. Boiling puddings was hardly ever done, and preference was given to steaming in basins or baking. Plum pudding would be for festive occasions only and black, white and haggis-type puddings could be bought from the butchers’ shops.

Powdered custard and blancmange, junket tablets and ready-made jelly packets took over from the real thing to aid convenience. They were boldly coloured and artificially flavoured; nothing of their ancestors’ delicacy and splendour remained.

A new development in the preparation of puddings came with the invention of a pudding basin by Grimwades pottery around 1911. This basin, named Grimwade’s Quick-Cooker, no longer required a pudding cloth and illustrated the need for a more simple form of cooking that people were searching for at this time. Grimwades and Brown & Polson created moulds with instructions to aid people who wanted to prepare dishes from scratch rather than using the prepacked processed powders on offer.

Wartime austerity

Two world wars didn’t help the quality of British food either. Imports were disrupted and rationing imposed into the 1950s for some products, which made it hard to cook as normal. Entire generations of people didn’t learn how to cook properly as so many ingredients just weren’t available.

Alarmed by malnutrition, the government founded the Ministry of Food and, for the first time in history, food was distributed fairly to all people from all walks of life. Booklets were published with recipes on how to cook with war rations, and people were advised to grow their own vegetables. Contradicting Mrs Beeton, who instructed people to cook vegetables to a mush, people were told to cook vegetables briefly to retain as many vitamins as possible.

Ironically, research shows that the British people had never been healthier than during those years of war rationing. Because of new developments in science, nutrition could be monitored by the Ministry of Food and people were no longer starving in the streets while others feasted in their great glittering dining rooms. Deficiencies were countered by allowing only wholegrain bread and fortifying margarine with vitamins.

Although Spam, corned beef and other inferior canned meat products and packet shortcuts were dominating the food landscape of this time, quite a few great works were published on British food. First came Mrs C.F. Leyel’s extraordinary books – including Puddings: baked boiled, fried, steamed, iced (1927) – which would influence a young Elizabeth David. Then Florence White founded the English Folk Cookery Association, asking people to send in their traditional English recipes, the result being compiled into the book Good Things in England. Both of these ladies ignored Mrs Beeton’s book entirely. May Byron published her Pudding Book in 1917, as part of a series of books on cake, potatoes and so on.

In 1945 the Second World War ended and the women who had been working in the factories didn’t enjoy being placed back at the stove again; they wanted to keep their right to be independent and work. Often, those who had worked in domestic service before the war didn’t return to their jobs. Food rationing only formally ended in 1954, and some food production, such as artisan cheeses, would continue to feel the influence of the war for decades afterwards.

London Cordon Bleu

In the 1950s, Constance Spry and Rosemary Hume’s cookery book The Constance Spry Cookery Book was published. It was notable for including the recipe for Coronation Chicken that had been served at Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation lunch in 1953.

Rosemary Hume was a graduate of Paris cookery school Le Cordon Bleu, and she founded Le Cordon Bleu school in London. This was more a kind of finishing school for young upper-class girls than a serious education in cookery. Teachers often didn’t even comprehend the dishes they were teaching. Anne Willan, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the Oxford Food Symposium, writes in her book One Soufflé at a Time: A Memoir of Food and France (2013) that after she had finished her three-month course at London Cordon Bleu, she was hired as a teacher for the professional course and had to teach dishes she had never even made herself. Later she had to teach a pastry class when she had no clue at all about pastry and most of the dishes she had to prepare she had never even seen before. This makes me wonder about the quality of the education that was given at this otherwise respectable and posh school.

Rosemary Hume and Constance Spry made it clear that they preferred French cookery. In their recipes they use French names for dishes that could easily be British, and discard the many beautiful British recipes of the past. This produced a different reason for embracing French culinary cuisine, one we still know today: snobbery.

Meat for the masses

The common belief arose throughout most of Europe and America that we should eat more protein to remain healthy. As the demand grew, more meat needed to be produced, with catastrophic consequences for animal welfare and the rise of factory farming. More animals in tight living spaces meant that there was a greater need for antibiotics to control disease. Needless to say, the quality of meat declined, as did the respect for animals. Food production became increasingly mechanised and additives and preservatives became standard.

The popularity of supermarkets meant food had to be presliced and prepacked, creating more waste, and more need for plastic wrapping material. Fast-food chains popped over from the US and were embraced as new and exciting. Convenience food took over and more knowledge of cooking was lost.

The organic food and health food movement, which emerged in the 1960s, was a reply to the decline in food quality. People became concerned by one food scandal and health scare after another. Organic eggs and vegetables began to be produced on a small scale and free-range farms were once again founded and preferred by a select few. But the food quality continued to be influenced by an increasingly growing world population and the connected need for food.

Elizabeth David

For those who have never read any work of Elizabeth David, I can only tell you to go and buy one of her books immediately. Her writing in postwar Britain shows the longing for a full and flavoursome cuisine at a time when food culture in Britain had become bleak due to rationing. People increasingly stopped cooking from scratch because they lacked the knowledge and ingredients and the offering of convenience food was there. I guess the fussy overcomplicated dishes and French terminology in The Constance Spry Cookery Book didn’t help to get people cooking at home either.

The making of one of the greatest food writers started when a young David received a copy of The Gentle Art of Cookery by Hilda Leyel (1925) as a gift from her mother. She later spoke about this gift (as quoted in Artemis Cooper’s biography, 2011) saying, ‘I wonder if I would have ever learned to cook at all if I had been given a routine Mrs Beeton to learn from, instead of the romantic Mrs Leyel with her rather wild, imagination-catching recipes.’

David had started travelling around the continent just before the war and savoured the foods of the sunny Mediterranean. When she finally returned home after six years, she didn’t like the postwar Britain she found. Many vegetables and spices were simply not available in the 1950s and she had a dislike for things such as custard powder and other processed food.

Her first book was Mediterranean Food (1950), followed by French Country Cooking and Italian Food (both 1951), and Summer Cooking (1955). This showed that she missed the fresh fruit and vegetables she had access to when living abroad. Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen was her first book about English food, published in 1970. It showed that David had done years of research into the history of English food. Her next book – one I love dearly – English Bread and Yeast Cookery was of the same high standard, telling the history of wheat and milling, baking ovens and different styles of bread in Britain. The recipe section is a magnificent tribute to historical cookery writers such as Robert May, Hannah Glasse, Eliza Acton and many more. David shows that when before she might have preferred a more continental cuisine, knowledge of her own country’s food had won her heart.

Jane Grigson

Jane Grigson was a contemporary of Elizabeth David and she wrote fantastic books such as English Food (1974) and Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery (1967), which would be the first book by an English food writer to be translated into French. Grigson and David were the first to write about food in a way that felt like someone telling you a story rather than instructing you while relaying some facts.

For example, Elizabeth David’s introduction to a recipe for plum pudding in Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen (1970), tells the story of when she lived in Greece; the friends she had in the village requested first pickles and then a Christmas pudding, as it was one of the glories of Old English fare. She explains the pains she took to cook up this pudding, the time and the annoying little tasks like stoning raisins ‘as sticky as warm toffee’. Jane Grigson says of her trifle recipe (in English Food) that it is ‘a pudding worth eating, not the mean travesty made with yellow, packaged sponge cakes, poor sherry and powdered custards’.

These ladies’ paragraphs were full of personal opinions and emotions: they were storytellers rather than mere recipe writers. They were the first true food writers.

David and Grigson would be an integral part of a new movement in food, together with Alan Davidson and his wife. Davidson wrote the Oxford Companion to Food (1999), a massive volume of information beautifully crafted into clean short paragraphs of delightful prose. He was one of the founders of The Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, Prospect Books and the Petites Propos Culinaires (PPC), a journal of food studies. The Oxford Symposium still continues; PPC still appears three times a year and Prospect Books continues to publish facsimiles of historical works on cookery and new books on the subject of food history and the ethnology of food, thanks to Tom Jaine who took over the reins in 2000 after Davidson’s death.

We can only be thankful that these people had such deeply rooted passion for English food and food in general, that they have created a landscape of knowledge on which young people like myself – and many after me for decades to come – can build, .

What’s for pudding?

Although puddings have stayed a firm favourite for centuries, by the 1980s you would have to try hard to find a restaurant serving British puddings. A trolley with all kinds of French-sounding gateaus and sweets were the rule by then. But somewhere in the picturesque Cotswolds a couple called Keith and Jean Turner, started a peculiar club to revive the great British pudding: The Pudding Club.

Thirty years on, The Pudding Club continues to meet once a week and on that evening seven puddings are tasted. The couple have published several books, and even launched a pudding of their own brand in a supermarket. People attend The Pudding Club meetings from all over the country and all over the world. They can stay in pudding-themed rooms at the hotel that is the home of the club and promise to stick to The Pudding Club rules in true Fight Club style.

The 1980s was the time that celebrated the arrival of many kitchen gadgets. The microwave had aided the mother of the house in her task of making sure the family was fed, although she had been going out to work during the day since the 1970s. Ready meals were phenomena that followed. Whereas before people sat down together to eat, now more often they would warm their plastic container of ready-made curry, lasagne or shepherd’s pie, and eat it while the others were still waiting for theirs. Here lie the roots of eating in front of the telly and the declining importance that was given to the family dinner, during which people had conversations and thoroughly experienced the food on their table.

Special meals were prepared for dinner parties, and the new popular style ‘Nouvelle Cuisine’ was being mimicked in domestic kitchens by women desperately trying to impress family and friends. Fiddly French food was back, with overcomplicated dishes and tiny portions at premium prices. It is no wonder by the nineties people were sick of it and longed again for the proper honest grub of yesteryear: roast beef with Yorkshire puddings and gravy, honey-glazed vegetables, bangers and mash, proper pies and meat puddings with all kinds of fillings … Food that fills you up and nourishes the soul.

Modern British food

On modern British food, a whole new book can be written. Celebrity chefs like the rockstar-looking Marco Pierre White and British food advocate Gary Rhodes brought a breath of fresh air to modern British food in the nineties. Pubs started to offer great food and the gastropub phenomenon took off. In one of these gastropubs a young Jamie Oliver was helping out his parents in the kitchen for pocket money. At the turn of the millennium, Oliver became a new force in British food and showed his pride and belief in the nation’s gastronomy. He took people by storm worldwide with his new and fresh way of doing things and became the change British food was waiting for. British food was on its way to becoming cool again.

Today, restaurants proudly present you with their British food, which is, as you will know by now, fusion by nature. Chefs such as Heston Blumenthal have created a whole new restaurant concept around it, bringing dishes to the table that are inspired by historic British recipes. A small chain of country restaurants proudly presents a 20-mile menu, only using the food and drink from the surrounding landscape. Rare traditional breeds of farm animals have been revived and some saved from extinction. There are now more than 700 British cheeses, and the number is still growing. Craft beer breweries pop up everywhere and English sparkling wines can compete with any prosecco. Regional food, produced by the ever-growing group of passionate artisans, is what defines modern British food today.

British puddings are experiencing a revival too and are being noticed and respected again outside the family home. A dessert menu isn’t complete without a couple of proper old-school puddings. It is the dish this country has been praised for, for many centuries. It is quintessentially British in its every form.

It is the pride of British gastronomy.

It is pudding.

Pride and pudding.