To speak then of the outward and active knowledges which belong to our English housewife, I hold the first and most principal to be a perfect skill and knowledge in cookery, together with all the secrets belonging to the same, because it is a duty really belonging to a woman; and she that is utterly ignorant therein may not by the laws of strict justice challenge the freedom of marriage, because indeed she can then but perform half her vow, for that she may love and obey, but she cannot serve and keep him with that true duty which is ever expected.
It is with these forthright words that Gervase Markham opens the section on cookery in The English Housewife. This was first published in 1615, just after the end of the Tudor period, but Markham was born in 1558 and was very much a child of the Tudor era. In terms of his day he was quite right. Keeping the family fed was the major part of a Tudor woman’s work.
The women themselves would have agreed with this view. A good example of this can be found amongst the surviving letters of the Johnson family, who were well-to-do merchants in the mid-sixteenth century. In 1545 they took a new apprentice, by the name of Pratt, who was sent to live at the Johnson’s home at Glapthorne Manor in Northamptonshire. Unfortunately, young Mr Pratt was not pleased with his lot and soon his mother was rushing to see John Johnson in London. After the interview John wrote to his wife Sabine who was at Glapthorne:
Your young gentleman, Master Pratt, hath complained by his letter to his mother that he lacketh both meat and drink, as well as his breakfasts, as also at meals not sufficient. All your menservants have been of counsel with him, for they be of no less opinion, declaring that your bread is not good enough for dogs, and drink so evil that they cannot drink it but are fain when they go into the town to drink to their dinners. If ye know they complain with cause, I pray you see it amended: if they complain without cause, let them seek new masters and boarding.
Sabine’s reply, after questioning the servants, was as follows:
As for Master Pratt’s complaint, I can find nobody in fault but himself, and he doth deny that he did write any such things but lack of meat and drink. If three meals a day and four in summer be not sufficient, I would his mother had him, that she might feed him every hour. I will have all my house to say with me that he had his breakfast, his dinner and his supper all well eaten.1
Just to prove her point, she sent a batch of bread she had made by the carrier who was to take the letter, which she intended to be given to Master Pratt’s mother as proof of her abilities. Tactfully, John never passed the bread on, but this shows how important a woman’s skill in the kitchen was to her. Sabine Johnson would allow no gossip in this respect. Even important ladies, such as Lady Elinor Fettiplace, part of whose receipt book has been published,2 showed a very personal interest in cookery. Lady Fettiplace not only recorded many recipes in her own hand, but also annotated her book with little notes, just as many keen cooks annotate favourite recipe books today. ‘Two or three spoonfuls of water’ is changed to ‘four’ and there is advice on how to improve a dull sauce recipe: ‘You most put som whit win in to the gravi with the venygar.’
For the majority of the population food was very simple. Bread and pottage were the order of the day. Pottage was rather like porridge, with vegetables and, if you were lucky, meat. Most people could not afford to eat meat every day, so the nourishment came from the grain, usually oats or barley. At the lowest end of the scale, therefore, actual cooking would not take long. Pottage is not only a useful meal for making a little go a long way, it is also very easy to cook. Once the ingredients were set to cook in a cauldron over the fire they only needed the occasional stir, so the cooking didn’t interfere with other work.
Bread could be more of a problem. It is not particularly time consuming to make, but it could be difficult to cook, as many houses did not have ovens. Ovens were expensive to heat, and had to be built into a brick or stone wall, something that was clearly impossible in tiny labourers’ cottages which were usually built of wattle and daub. In towns, where houses tended to be long and narrow, sometimes even the wealthier merchants had no oven, as the houses were not wide enough to accommodate one. You could improvise by turning a pot upside down over the bread and covering it with hot coals, but the usual answer was to pay to use either the baker’s oven or the local communal one. Even in London, where there were plenty of bakers who would bake for you at a price, there were also communal bake houses. This was not surprising, considering the amount of bread that had to be cooked. The surviving accounts of great houses suggest that people ate between two and five pounds of bread in a day. Little wonder that at the great meeting of the English and French kings at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520, where some twelve thousand people had to be fed, a huge brick bread oven was built especially for the purpose. It can be seen on the painting made to commemorate the event, which now hangs at Hampton Court.
Bread was more than the staff of life, it was also an indication of your station. At the bottom of the ladder came horse bread, made with dried peas that had been ground up to make flour. Usually this was – as its name suggests – fed to horses, but in famine years the poorest people could find themselves reduced to eating it. The next rung up was maslin bread, which was a mixed grain bread made from wheat and rye, or whatever grain grew best locally. It was a brown bread, and would certainly have sustained you through a day’s work. The best bread was, however, fine white bread called manchet.
Today, when the virtues of a high-fibre diet are well publicized, people are often surprised that white bread was so highly valued. There were various reasons for this. First of all, Tudor bread would have been much heavier than most modern bread. English wheat is naturally ‘soft’, that is to say, it has a low gluten content. It is the gluten in the flour that traps the bubbles of air given off by the yeast which makes it rise. Most bread flour we use today is imported ‘strong’ flour with a higher gluten content, so that our bread rises better.3 The brown bread would therefore have been quite hard work on the teeth, making white bread a pleasant proposition. The very fact that brown bread was more sustaining made the wealthier people less keen to eat it. Manchet showed that you had finer food to eat than bread to fill your stomach with – it was an elegant accompaniment to a meal. There was the added bonus that as the flour to make manchet had to be carefully sifted through a fine linen cloth it took a long time to make and was therefore expensive. In an age when it was important to make great display of your wealth it was a useful status symbol.
The hardest work in the kitchen came a little higher up the social ladder. The ‘middling sort’ of woman, for whom books on ‘housewifery’ began to be written towards the end of the Tudor period, had more work to do. These women were expected to provide far more than a simple pottage. They wished to live something near the life of the gentry but had only a servant or two to help them in the house. They had to know not only how to cook whatever food was needed, be it meat, fish or game, but also how to serve it as great store was laid by providing an elegant place setting. A good display at meal times was as important as the way you dressed – as was discussed in the Introduction. The family would lose face if the housewife could not present guests with a number of dishes, ranging from plain boiled and roast meats to fancy spiced sauces.
A feast that Markham suggests suitable for a household of this class consists of the following: a shield of brawn (the skin of a boar filled with jellied meat) with mustard, a boiled capon, a piece of boiled beef, a roast chine of beef, a neat’s (i.e. calf) tongue roasted, a roast pig, baked chewets (pies made with minced meat), a roast goose, a roast swan, a roast turkey, a roast haunch of venison, a venison pasty, a kid with a pudding in its belly, an olive pie, a couple of capons (Markham doesn’t specify how these should be cooked), and finally, a custard or doucet (spice custard pie). This was only to be the basics of the spread, and Markham goes on to say: ‘Now to these full dishes may be added sallets, fricasees, quelquechoses, and devised paste, as many dishes more, which make the full service no less than two and thirty dishes, which is as much as can conveniently stand on one table . . .’ These ‘sallets, fricasees, quelquechoses and devised paste’ were the finishing touches which every housewife would take great pride in, but which would take her hours to produce.
‘Sallets’ could include anything from a very simple vegetable dish such as boiled carrots to a magnificent dish produced only for show, such as the one suggested by Markham himself. This is to be made of carrots carved into the most elaborate shapes, such as birds and wild animals. Certainly as much care was put into the appearance of a sallet as to how it tasted, and flowers were carefully preserved in sugar or vinegar for decorating them when fresh ones were not available. Lady Fettiplace, for example, gives instructions for doing this. The ‘fricasees and quelquechoses’ were various dishes made in the frying pan, and included pancakes, fritters, and dishes made with meat such as veal toast.
‘Devised paste’ was in a class all on its own and brings us to the skill that was necessary to all ladies with any pretensions – that of confectionery. In the Middle Ages, when sugar had first been introduced into England, it was considered a medicine. It was thought to be especially helpful for the digestion and so began to be served at the end of grand feasts, usually in the form of candied aniseeds. As women were the doctors for their households, such sugar work naturally fell to them, as sugar was far too expensive to be left to the servants to handle.
By the middle of the Tudor period sugar was relatively cheaper than it had been in the Middle Ages, but it was still not cheap. It cost about 9d a pound in 1547 at a time when a shipwright, a skilled man, was earning about 6d a day. Even by the early seventeenth century, when a mason, another skilled man, was earning 16d to 18d a day, single-refined sugar cost 22d a pound – and that was not the best quality.4 This made it too expensive for the working classes but cheap enough for the middle classes, and so it was the ideal status symbol. The ability to produce all kinds of confectionery therefore became a sign of breeding and the development of ‘banquets’ gave women a perfect outlet for their creative skills.
A banquet was not a meal in its own right, but the final course of a feast. Usually the banquet was only attended by a select few, and was often held in a separate room. The serving of sugar went beyond candied aniseeds and became, as the Middle Ages progressed, a whole course of sweet dishes and spiced wine, which, as it was so expensive, was served only to the top table. Medieval diners sat at trestle tables which were cleared as soon as the meal was over. In order to avoid the noise and bustle of this being done, it became usual to serve this course in another room. As time went on, this ‘banquet’ course was served in separate ‘banqueting’ houses, which were often built outside in the garden. (Henry VIII had no less than three at Hampton Court.) The food offered consisted of all manner of sweet dishes – candied fruit, marmalade (which was then often made very thick and cut into slices, as it still is in Portugal), sweet wafers, gingerbread, and a whole variety of items made with sugar paste sometimes even including the plates and cups used for this course, which could then be eaten afterwards. The sugar paste used was very like the fondant icing used today in cake decoration, and books from the time describe literally hundreds of different ‘deceits’ which could be made from it. An egg which breaks open to show a yellow yolk, ‘bacon’ made from strips of different coloured paste, fruit and walnuts – these are but a few examples.5
Cooking was not the housewife’s only part in providing food. There were various offices associated with the kitchen which she also supervised. Even women who could not aspire to producing fine sugar work had to know how to keep a dairy, for example. The dairy was especially close to a woman’s heart, as by tradition the profits from it belonged to her to do as she liked with.
From April beginning, till Andrew be past,
So long with good housewife, her dairy doth last,
Good milchcow and pasture, good husbands provide
The res’due good housewives know best how to guide.
Ill housewife, unskillful to make her own cheese,
Through trusting of others hath this for her fees,
Her milk pan and cream pot, so slabbered and sost,
That butter is wanting and cheese is half lost.’6
Certainly Sabine Johnson took great pride in her cheeses, and sent them not only to merchant friends at the Staple in Calais, but also to her husband and brother-in-law in London. ‘They two cheeses that be scraped on the oven I take for the best’, she wrote to her husband on one occasion, ‘but I would they were better; as so good as I find it in my heart to send to you.’7
Butter and cheese were a vital way of preserving milk for the winter. By the eighteenth century many ladies had very pretty ornamental dairies built, in which they played the dairymaid just as Marie Antoinette played at being a shepherdess. As a result, dairying has a rather ladylike image to us, but serious dairying is not for the faint of heart. For one thing, it was well understood even in Tudor times that the dairy must be kept spotless. The taste of dairy produce can easily be tainted, and dirt can also stop some of the processes working. Hours had to be spent scrubbing floors and scalding vessels – Markham recommends the scalding of all the vessels used in the dairy once a day. Much of the other work about the dairy was remarkably heavy too, such as churning butter. Even the lighter task of potting up butter for keeping or selling meant working the salt through the butter with your hands.
Despite the hard work, dairying was well worth the effort. The hard cheese that was made for keeping (and which was rather like modern cheddar) was considered so essential to the poorer people’s diet that sailors on the king’s ships were issued with 2 lbs of it on three days a week, and 1 lb another day. Soft cheese, which would be matured for a while, but not for as long as hard cheese, was also eaten in large quantities. Curd cheese (green cheese) was a third form of cheese which was not designed for keeping and had to be eaten quickly.8 The whey, known as ‘whig’, was not wasted, but drunk.
Cream was used for cooking by the better-off, and had a hundred uses. It was made into luxuries like syllabub; it went into a variety of both sweet and savoury puddings and was made into sauces. The poorer housewife would not have wasted her cream on such luxuries, but would have used it for making butter. The only time she would have eaten cream would have been on special days such as May Day when cakes and cream were served to people coming home from maying.9
One vital area of cooking that touched all classes was the preservation of food. The housewife’s life was a constant battle to preserve whatever was in season against the time when it was not. If the more genteel preserves involving expensive sugar were beyond many housewives, they still had the work of salting down meat for the winter. For many families the only meat they ate was that which came from the family pig, which would be killed in autumn before it began to need expensive winter feed. If the pork was salted hot, it took two ounces of salt for each pound of meat, plus another two ounces of saltpetre. If the pork was soaked in brine instead, then the brine had to be strong enough for an egg to float on it. According to my own experiments, that meant using at least five ounces of salt for each pint of water. No wonder salt was treasured.
The salt used for preserving was usually bay salt, so called because it was produced on the Bay of Bourgeneuf, although the same name was used for salt made all along the French Atlantic coast and in northern Spain and Portugal. Home production of salt had not been able to keep up with demand since the beginning of the thirteenth century, and Bay salt made up the difference. It was a dark salt, full of impurities as it was evaporated from sea water. It was preferred as not only did it cost less than the more carefully refined white table salt, but it was also better for preserving. Its coarser texture penetrated the flesh better than the finer salt, which tended to seal the surface of the meat without entering deeply.10 Either way, salting was not a pleasant task. Rubbing large amounts of salt into meat would certainly have taken its toll on the housewife’s hands.
Fortunately housewives usually had only to think of preserving meat, and not fish. Fish was usually bought in its cheapest form, as dried and salted stockfish. This was imported from Scandinavia, and sometimes even from Russia. It was said to last for up to four years and was very hard when taken out of its barrel. It had to be beaten with a wooden hammer for a full hour before being used, and then soaked in warm water for two hours before being eaten, and it could get very boring. It was usually put in pottage, or boiled and eaten with mustard or butter. In the previous century one schoolboy, fed up with the Lent fish diet, wrote: ‘Thou wyll not beleve how wery I am off fyshe, and how moch I desir that flesh were cum in ageyn, for I have ate non other but salt fysh this Lent, and it hat engendyrde so moch flewme within me that it stoppith my pyps and I can unneth speke nother brethe.’11
Considering that throughout the sixteenth century fish went on being eaten two days a week, by order of the church, it must have been a relief that fish didn’t have to be preserved at home. Wealthy people in any case ate fresh fish all year round. Anyone who owned an estate would have had their own fish ponds to ensure a steady supply. Fresh fish, though, was usually reserved for the family, their guests and more important servants. Lower down the scale the household had to eat stockfish unless they lived very close to the sea where fresh fish could be obtained cheaply.
Fruit and vegetables also had to be preserved. Some, like apples, could be stored in a cool, dry room often set aside for the purpose. Others, such as vital peas and beans, would be dried. This could be done before the fire, or, if you were lucky enough to have an oven, you could make use of the last heat of its firing for this purpose. Herbs, then as now, would be hung in bunches and left to dry.
Pickling was another alternative: this was done either in vinegar or in verjus, both of which were often made at home. Vinegar would be made from strong ale which was left in the sun until it was sour. In continental Europe verjus was made from unripe grapes but in England was usually made from the more freely available crab apple. The crab apples would be left to rot until they were black, and then mashed up in a long trough by beating them with wooden hammers. The resulting mash was then strained through a coarse cloth and put in barrels, together with a dozen handfuls of damask rose leaves for every hogshead of verjus.12
The Tudor housewife did not only have to keep her family supplied with food, but also with drink. It was generally acknowledged that sickness came from drinking water, and milk was only considered suitable for the very young or old and the sick. The alternative was to drink ale or beer. In Tudor terms these two drinks were basically the same thing, except that beer was brewed with hops and ale without. Instead, ale was flavoured with various herbs and spices – there were so many different recipes that every housewife seems to have had her own! Ale had been the traditional English drink for centuries, but did not keep as well as beer (the hops act as a preservative) and so was gradually dying out. Beer was especially useful on ships, as voyages were becoming longer so its longer life was vital. It was not everyone who looked favourably on beer, even so. Andrew Boorde, physician to King Henry VIII himself, wrote in his Dietary of Health that he considered ale the natural drink for the English and that beer was bad for the health.
The brewing process was similar for both ale and beer. First the grain, which was usually barley, was malted. This meant that the grain was dampened, and left in a warm place until it began to sprout. It was then roasted to stop it germinating further. This malt was then added to boiling water which was flavoured either with herbs and spices (for ale) or hops (for beer). It was this boiling that made ale and beer safe to drink even when the water could not be trusted, although of course the Tudors would not have understood this. The resulting liquor was then barrelled, and yeast added so that it fermented.
A Tudor housewife would use her malt three times if she was making beer. (One of the advantages of brewing beer rather than ale was that the malt could be used more than once.) The first time it would be used to make strong beer. This could be very strong indeed, and could keep for up to two years. It would be drunk very much as we drink beer today, as would the weaker brew that would come from the second use of the malt. The third use would make small beer, which was very weak. It was far too weak to get drunk on, and everyone, from the highest to the lowest, drank this when they were thirsty. Not surprisingly, it was drunk in great quantities. Judging from the account books of the great houses, and from the ration handed out to the king’s sailors, a gallon a day was the norm. Great houses had specially equipped brewhouses, together with maltings for making the large amounts of malt this must have consumed. Even so brewing was such a simple process that it could be done over the household fire. The equipment was fairly cheap and ale and beer could always find a ready market as there was so much demand for the product. It was for this reason that licences to run alehouses were often granted to poor women who had no other means of supporting themselves.
Cider was drunk at this time, but only in areas such as Devon and Herefordshire where great quantities of apples were grown. Its quality was definitely variable at this time and it was not until the eighteenth century that English cider became generally esteemed. At its most basic cider was very rough indeed. Mead was still being made, but was not drunk in large quantities. It was kept for special occasions and even then richer people preferred wine.
Wine was an expensive luxury as it was imported. It was usually bought in bulk rather than in small quantities. Larger households would even buy it by the tun, a large barrel holding 256 gallons. The more expensive wines, the heavy, sweet wines known as Malmsey or Romney, were usually bought in smaller quantities. They came from as far away as Cyprus and cost twice as much as claret, so that they tended to be bought by the butt (usually half the size of a tun).
Both buying and looking after wine was an art. These were the days before corks, when wine scarcely lasted a year. The laying down of wine for future years, and the division of harvests into greater and lesser vintages was not a possibility in the sixteenth century. At this time, the wine trade centred around getting the new vintage home in time for the Christmas market, and getting rid of the previous year’s stocks before the new wine came home. Once a barrel had been tapped the air was allowed in and the wine would go off fairly quickly. The problem was how to make it last as long as possible. Vintners, of course, shared this worry and were always looking for ways of passing off bad wine as good. It took a skilled person to detect some of their tricks, and often skilled help was called in when buying wine to help detect fraud. Good wines and bad were often mixed, and vintners were so tempted to let customers taste one wine, and then sell them another that the law required them to leave the doors to their cellars standing open during business hours so that everyone could see exactly what was going on.
The housewife, though, was in a rather different position. What was considered dishonest in a vintner was considered good economy in a housewife. Markham thoughtfully provides a number of hints on how to make off wine palatable. He provides a whole section on the ‘ordering, preserving, and helping of all sorts of wine’. The housewife is to add a syrup made of damsons or black bullaces to claret that has lost its colour, and to add apples, or a herb called oak of Jerusalem to foul-tasting wine in order to restore its flavour. These are only two examples from a long list of instructions. Keeping wine was clearly a major headache.
In spite of the hard work of Tudor housewives it is a mistake to think that all food and drink was home cooked and prepared at this time. There were always plenty of cookshops in towns where food could be bought ready made. Food took time to prepare, so an unexpected guest could mean that a trip to the shop was the only quick answer. There was also always a floating population of people who lived in lodgings without cooking facilities – shipwrights and builders, for example, who followed work around the country – who could not cook for themselves. Even the well-off did not have everything made at home. Sabine Johnson bought her spiced comfits ready made. They seem to have cost about a shilling a pound, so were not cheap, but who can blame Sabine? The alternative was to spend three hours over the charcoal-heated chafing dish making them yourself, and even then you had to pay for the sugar. It’s good to know that there were at least a few short cuts for the hard-pressed housewife.