One afternoon in May 1667, Samuel Pepys and his wife, Elizabeth, were on their way home after failing to pay a social call on Pepys’ boss, Sir George Carteret, Treasurer of the Navy. Sir George had already sat down to his meal when the couple arrived at his house and Samuel thought it would not be a good idea to disturb him. He returned with some trepidation to his wife awaiting him in their carriage, aware that his decision would annoy her. That morning they had fought over Elizabeth’s desire to wear fashionable ‘white locks’, which were artificial curls of hair mounted on wire and that Pepys detested. Perhaps he was jealous of the attention she attracted from other men when she wore them. He was still recovering from a bout of jealousy over her relationship with her dancing master. During the argument Elizabeth had been reduced to tears and had voiced her suspicions of Mrs Knipp, one of his mistresses. ‘By and by’, as he put it, they patched up their quarrel and he gave her ‘money to buy lace, and she promised to wear no more white locks while I lived; so all very good friends as ever’.1 Still wanting to make amends, in the carriage on the way home he hit upon the idea that they could take dinner at a French eating house, or ‘ordinary’, as they were known, run by his periwig maker, Monsieur Robins. On making enquiries, they were directed to an ‘ugly street’ in Covent Garden where they found Monsieur Robins standing in the doorway of his establishment. Within moments the Pepyses had been ushered in and were seated at a table set for dinner. Pepys was mightily taken with the ‘pleasant and ready attendance’.2
The first course was a potage: chicken simmered in a bouillon of herbs, salt and pepper, served on a slice of bread, the whole smothered with the cooking liquid and garnished with capers and mushrooms.3 This liquid starter was typical of the French cookery all the rage at the time among London’s fashionable elite. In the last half of the seventeenth century, French high society invented a new way of eating. Rather than all the dishes being placed on the table at once, the food was served in courses, each accompanied by a different, complementary wine.5 This was a novel experience for the Pepyses, whose idea of a ‘specially good dinner’ was a leg of veal, a knuckle of bacon, roast capons and sausages ranged on the table alongside a few sweet dishes such as fritters and fruit.6 The new French cookery, as defined in its manifesto, The French Cook – published in 1653 by La Varenne, the kitchen clerk of a Burgundian nobleman – replaced medieval abundance with refined moderation.7
POTAGE OF CHICKEN GARNISHED WITH ASPARAGUS
After the chickens have been properly trussed up, blanch them well and put them into a pot with lard on top. Fill your pot with your best bouillon and season the chickens with salt and a very little pepper.
Do not let them cook too much. Dry your [slices of] bread, simmer them and garnish them with your chickens, with asparagus that has been broken and a few fricasseed mushrooms, cockscombs or tidbits from your chickens, a few pistachios and mutton stock. Garnish the rim of your platter with lemon. Then serve.
SQUAB IN RAGOUT
Pluck them dry, clean them out and sauté them in a pan in plain or clarified lard. Put them into a pot with good bouillon and cook them with a bouquet of herbs. When they are cooked, garnish them with their livers and veal sweetbreads, with everything seasoned with salt and spice. Then serve.4
Less was turned into more by the care and attention lavished on each dish. A cook of the new school might spend hours reducing meat to produce a delicate jus in which to poach a chicken. The newly invented raised stove gave off a gentler and more regular heat than a fire and allowed for the concoction of emulsified egg yolk and cream sauces.8 The cook’s ultimate aim was to stimulate the appetite by bringing out the flavour of the meat with one or two choice ingredients.9 The pigeons à l’esteuvé the Pepyses were served after their potage was just such a ragout. The pigeons had been well seasoned with salt and pepper and sautéed in lard before being placed in a pot with a little stock and a few herbs and vegetables and then (with the lid tightly closed) set to braise on hot coals inside a metal oven or estuve. Garnished with slices of liver and veal sweetbreads, they would have been exquisite.10
The third course was boeuf à la mode. Beef brisket casseroled in a mixture of wine and bouillon flavoured with onions, orange peel and bay leaf, it would have been familiar to the couple as it was part of Elizabeth’s domestic repertoire.11 Elizabeth was, in fact, of French origin, but the food they ate at home was decidedly English. The merry dinner they had with eight friends on 4 April 1663, for example, was a typically English celebration of abundance. To Samuel’s ‘great content’, they served ‘a Fricasse of rabbets and chickens – a leg of mutton boiled – three carps in a dish – a great dish of a side of lamb – a dish of roasted pigeons – a dish of four lobsters – three tarts – a lamprey pie, a most rare pie – a dish of anchovies – good wine of several sorts’.12 It was the elite of Restoration London, Pepys’ employers, who ate French food at home. They employed French cooks, and on several occasions Pepys mentioned in his diary being served ‘a fine neat French dinner’ or ‘a most noble French dinner’ at the houses of various lords of his acquaintance.13
A decidedly Francophile atmosphere pervaded the re-established royal court. Charles II, his French mother, and the royalist gentlemen who had fled into exile with him had spent many years in Paris. On his return to England, the king employed a French cook to make ‘Potages for Our Dyet’ and the rich and the fashionable were keen to emulate the court.14 French eating houses became part of the landscape of Restoration London. Throughout the latter half of his diary Pepys would regularly mention visiting French ‘ordinaries’ in Covent Garden, where he enjoyed the many-coursed dinners and the wide varieties of wine.15
In November 1665, Pepys was taken down into the hold of a ‘Dutch India Shipp’ that had been captured by the Earl of Sandwich. Here he crunched peppercorns underfoot and waded up to his knees through rooms full of nutmegs and cloves. He felt as though he were walking through piles of gold and marvelled at the way in which ‘the greatest wealth … a man can see in the world’ was scattered about in confusion.16 In London in 1668 a pound of pepper cost 16s. 8d, nutmegs were worth 13s. and cloves 8s. a pound. At the time a labourer would have earned about 5s. a week and a pound of beef cost around 3d.17 But within a decade the price of pepper had more than halved due to a struggle between the English and the Dutch East India companies. Both were determined not to let the other dominate the spice trade and consequently imported such large quantities of pepper into Europe that pepper mountains formed in the warehouses of London and Antwerp and the value of this once rare and precious commodity plummeted.18
In 1498, the Portuguese had discovered the sea route to India. When three years later seven Portuguese carracks returned to Lisbon from India’s west coast laden down with 100 tons of pepper, cinnamon and ginger, this was the first consignment of spices to reach Europe without passing through Arab hands.19 However, although they monopolised the sea route to the Indies throughout the sixteenth century, the Portuguese never imported enough spices for Lisbon to rival Venice as Europe’s spice entrepôt. Venice was only ousted from this position at the turn of the century, when between 1595 and 1601 the Dutch sent fourteen fleets to the East Indies. Their return with cargoes of spicy loot galvanised English merchants into action. In 1601, the English East India Company was formed, and two years later the merchant James Lancaster triumphantly unloaded a million pounds of pepper onto London’s docks – a quantity amounting to one quarter of the whole of Europe’s annual consumption. In the same year, the Dutch East India Company brought back another three million pounds.20 The contributions of both the Portuguese and the Levant merchants were now surplus to Europe’s requirements.
In England, pepper had always been the most popular of all the spices. If a poor man could afford to sprinkle something piquant over his potage, it was pepper that he chose. Many of the drowned sailors on the Mary Rose were carrying a stash of corns in their personal baggage or in their pockets; no doubt a grinding of pepper helped to make a mess of ‘poor John’ palatable.21 But now that their place of origin had been located and spices no longer came from beyond the known world, they had lost some of their magical aura. Their affordability meant that all classes of society could spice their ale or savour a meat pie fragrant with ginger and saffron, and so larding one’s food with cinnamon and cloves lost its ability to signal wealth and status.
As spices fell out of favour, the complex, multi-layered tastes that had distinguished medieval and Renaissance cuisine all but disappeared from French and English cookery. The fashionable French cooking that the Pepyses sampled in Monsieur Robins’ Covent Garden ‘ordinary’ rejected spice mixtures on the grounds that they disguised rather than enhanced flavour. This style of cookery signalled its consumers’ elevated social position by using expensive perishable foods and placing fussy emphasis on the use of only the thinnest of asparagus stalks or rare varieties of fruits or vegetables.22 Meanwhile, as spices disappeared from English food, it became increasingly plain, dominated by roast and boiled meats, pastries and pies. These plain meat dishes were, however, always accompanied by pungent condiments: mustard, horseradish sauce, pickles or fruit jellies.23 Black pepper, the spice that had been treated with most caution by medieval cooks, also survived the expulsion of spices from savoury food. When Pepys dined with the Duke of Norfolk at Whitehall in February 1669, the duke served him the ‘best universal sauce in the world’, pronouncing with satisfaction that it could be eaten with ‘flesh, or fowl or fish’.24 It consisted of parsley and dry toast beaten together in a mortar with vinegar, salt and pepper.
Medieval cooks who associated black with melancholy preferred to use a combination of ginger and saffron known as ‘yellow pepper’. In the medieval cosmic view of the universe, golden, saffron-coloured food was considered to be nourishing because it was thought to be imbued with the vitality of the sun.25 But in the seventeenth century, black pepper rose to prominence as the everyday all-purpose spice. This may have been helped by the fact that it found favour with the new scientific dietary theory. Doctors such as Thomas Willis, a founding member of the Royal Society of London, re-envisaged digestion as a chemical process of fermentation rather than one of cooking aided by hot spices.26 Fashionable foods such as anchovies and oysters, mushrooms, asparagus, artichokes and fruit were all thought to ferment readily. It made sense in terms of the new science of digestion to season one’s food with pepper because in 1606 the pioneering French chemist Joseph Duchesne had concluded that its fiery taste was attributable to aronic salts, which were now identified as key in the process of fermentation.27 Virtually every recipe in the nouvelle cuisine cookbooks was seasoned with salt and pepper.28 It may have lost its glamorous aura as a rare and costly spice but black pepper’s recategorisation as salt’s partner meant that its position as a kitchen staple was secure.
Hippocratic dietetics regarded sugar as a perfectly balanced food, neither too dry nor too moist, too warm nor too cold, and therefore a sprinkling was thought to render any dish suitable for anyone from the choleric to the sanguine, the melancholic to the phlegmatic, the old to the very young.29 As late as 1730, the botanist Richard Bradley complained that it was still common practice in many parts of England for ‘good provisions’ such as bacon and eggs to be ‘murder’d in the dressing’ by strewing sugar over them.30 French cookery, however, eschewed sugar, as it dulled the appetite and this ran counter to its aim to stimulate the taste buds. The devotees of the new fashion began to serve sweet dishes in a separate, final course. Sugar at the end of a meal was thought to close the stomach and induce a feeling of satiation. Though spices were pushed out of savoury dishes, they retained a place in the sweet course and were redefined as suitable flavourings for desserts and cakes.31 This established a sweet-versus-savoury divide in cookery that has survived to the present day.
As spices were incorporated into England’s commercial empire they lost their high-status position in the culinary world and became mundane store cupboard staples. The English domestic market was not large enough to absorb the great quantities of pepper the East India Company imported and so it was re-exported to the Baltic and eastern Europe, where the middle classes still ate dishes so thick with saffron, pepper, cinnamon and nutmeg that Frenchmen dismissed them as inedible.32 In this way pepper stimulated the growth of the re-export sector, in the seventeenth century the fastest-growing sector of the English economy.
The proceeds from the sale of pepper on the Continent were used to buy Spanish silver reales. These were diverted into the East Indian trade, which was perennially short of cash.33 But East Indian trading patterns were far more complicated than a straightforward exchange of silver for spices. The Europeans who sailed to the Indies muscled their way into the liveliest commercial zone in the early-modern world. Diverse communities of Gujarati, Fujian, Arabian, Persian, Jewish and Armenian merchants lived in the ports dotted around the Indian Ocean and traded in a bewildering array of goods.34 Complex chains of exchange involved swapping Malabar pepper for cowrie shells in the Maldives and using these to buy rice in Burma to take to Malabar, where the harvest was small.
English merchants soon learned that in order to succeed in this Asian trading world they needed to adapt to the existing patterns of exchange. Pepper grew in south-west India but cloves and nutmeg came from tiny islands in the Indonesian archipelago, where Indian textiles were more sought after than silver. The East India Company duly established trading posts, known as factories, at Surat and Masulipatnam on the west and east coasts of India. Employing Indian merchants as intermediaries, the factors used bullion to advance loans to the weavers who were contracted to supply a certain quantity of goods. They then stockpiled the calicoes, chintzes, ginghams, fine muslins and silks until the East Indiamen arrived bringing more bullion. The ships took the textiles on to Java, Sumatra and the Moluccas, where they were exchanged for spices. In order to sail home before the monsoon they had to set out by the end of December, and would arrive back in London in the summer with cargoes of spices to be auctioned to merchants engaged in the re-export trade with the Continent.
In the East, England’s empire was very much a trading empire, whereas in the Atlantic it was based on English settlements. By 1660, around 2,000 English, Scots and Irish were living in Newfoundland, while a population of about 60,000 Englishmen was settled on the North American mainland and another 80,000 were distributed across six Caribbean islands.35 The East India Company, by contrast, operated out of a chain of factories each inhabited by a handful of employees. Fort St George on India’s Coromandel coast attracted communities of skilled weavers to settle in the area and by the 1640s was surrounded by the thriving commercial community of Madras, home to Portuguese, Muslim and Armenian merchants, who brought with them trading connections that stretched across the Indian Ocean.36 In 1661, as part of her dowry, Charles II’s Portuguese bride, Catherine of Braganza, gave England Bombay, which was to become the Company’s most important port on the west coast, while the scruffy huddle of bungalows around Fort William eventually grew into Calcutta.37 These were to become British India’s three most important towns, though in the seventeenth century the factors were focused on conducting the Company’s business rather than on the acquisition of territory.
These Company employees also traded in their own right, often in partnership with Indian merchants, and participated in the local or ‘country’ networks that circulated camphor and ivory, hides and dyestuffs, elephants and parakeets around the Indian Ocean. They met in the coffee houses and taverns in the ports to exchange news about where Bengal silks were selling at a good price and what Surat factors would pay for betel nut. It was through the networks and connections forged by entrepreneurial Company officers that the East India Company was integrated into the commercial world of the Indian Ocean.38
Spices had brought the Company to India, but it quickly became more interested in the subcontinent’s textiles. These were popular in Europe, where they were at first used to decorate domestic interiors. Pepys bought his wife ‘a painted East India calico for to line her new study’.39 Gradually people began to use Indian textiles to make clothing; Elizabeth Pepys owned an ‘Indian blue gown which is very pretty’.40 The wealthy were enchanted by the exquisite hand-painted chintzes, while the poorer valued the calicoes because their vibrant dyes did not fade in the wash, besides being much easier to clean than woollens.41 By the 1660s, textile piece goods were the East India Company’s most important commodity, accounting for nearly three quarters of the value of their trade. Pepper now only accounted for 7 per cent of East Indian imports and had been relegated to the status of a ballast cargo, poured into the holds to help stabilise the ships. Calicoes also interlinked the Indian Ocean trading circuit with that of the Atlantic as the Royal East African Company began buying up Indian cottons in London and using them to purchase slaves in West Africa. By 1700, the ultimate destination of most East Indiamen was India and its textile markets rather than the Spice Islands.42
The arrival of Indian calicoes did not immediately stimulate a ‘calico craze’ among Europeans as has often been argued. In fact, the adoption of cottons for clothing was a gradual process, and East India Company directors clearly felt that in order to assure sales of their new commodity they needed to engage in large-scale promotion. In the 1670s, they ordered 200,000 ready-made calico shifts from their factory in Madras in order to introduce people to the idea that calico could be used to make underclothes.43 But by the last quarter of the century, if people had a little ready money, they might spend it on a printed cotton shawl that mimicked the design of embroidered silk but was far more affordable.44 By this time new consumables were arriving in England from the colonies in unprecedented quantities, and they might also have treated themselves to a pipe of tobacco, a dram of rum, or perhaps a twist of sugar and a few spices to liven up a suet pudding. Gentlemen like Pepys could sample the new colonial drinks in the London coffee houses, and from his diaries it is clear that both chocolate and coffee were by this time integrated into the daily lives of the middling classes. When he was breakfasting with friends, Pepys often mentioned drinking coffee or chocolate for his ‘morning draught’.45
Tea was the last of the new colonial groceries to arrive on the English market. Garaway’s London coffee house began selling tea in 1658, and on 25 September 1660, Pepys mentioned sending ‘for a cup of tee (a China drink) of which I never drank before’.46 Tea was as yet a rare and expensive item. It reached London not directly through the English East India Company but via the Netherlands under the auspices of Dutch East India Company merchants, who acquired it from Chinese traders in Batavia. Pepys only mentions tea-drinking on a couple of other occasions, and on both of these it was drunk for medicinal purposes rather than for pleasure. In June 1667, he arrived home to find ‘my wife making of Tea, a drink which Mr Pelling the apothecary tells her is good for her cold and defluxions’.47 Tea might not have been a popular drink with the Pepyses, but it soon became fashionable among gentlewomen, who revelled in the beauty of the paraphernalia that surrounded its consumption: the lockable polished wooden tea caddies; the delightfully patterned china teapots; delicate porcelain cups and saucers; sugar bowls, silver strainers and silver spoons. In the last decades of the seventeenth century, two or three East India Company ships a year began visiting Canton in order to pick up supplies of tea, but the Chinese resisted Company attempts to set up a factory.
The English drank their tea heavily sweetened with sugar. Sugar bowls, tongs and small silver spoons for stirring the sugar into the beverage were essential items in the tea-making equipment that fashionable ladies kept in their closets.48 As sugar and spices ceased to play a role in savoury cooking, they became central to the ritual of afternoon tea. When a gentlewoman of social standing invited friends to take tea with her, she would place a bowl of sugar lumps on the table and serve sweet ginger biscuits or sugary cakes.49 It is unclear when the practice of sweetening tea became commonplace in England. It certainly was not an Asian habit. But the popularity of sugar may be a key to understanding why the English embraced tea. Just as with spices, no sooner had sugar become widely available than it fell out of favour with both cooks and the medical profession. Far from regarding it as a perfect food, late-seventeenth-century physicians saw it as a dangerous substance that heated the blood, and its unbridled consumption was blamed for an epidemic of tooth decay, corpulence and gout. Health manuals of the time suggested that one way of countering its harmful sweetness was to imbibe it in bitter herbal or fruit infusions. There was no explicit mention of tea in these tracts; however, sweetened tea would have complied with this advice.50 Tea-drinking may have been construed as a restrained and therefore legitimate way of consuming sugar. Over the next century, their use increased in tandem. Between 1663 and 1773, the amount of sugar consumed per head of the population increased twentyfold, while that of tea increased fifteenfold.51 As tea’s popularity grew, it was eventually to overtake textiles as the East India Company’s most valuable trading commodity.
When Britain was created by the Act of Union in 1707, it was in possession of a flourishing maritime trading empire. To contemporaries, empire meant more than just a scattered collection of Irish and American territories, West African and East Indian trading posts; rather, it was the web of trade that held them all together.52
England’s empire of trade reinvigorated its economy.53 In the seventeenth century, labourers worked harder in order to be able to buy the new colonial commodities, and in a virtuous circle, the more sugar they ate, the more money West Indian planters had to spend on English provisions and manufactures.54 By the end of the century, the American colonies were absorbing 10 per cent of English exports as the planters adopted an ever more costly ‘peacock wardrobe’ and filled their houses with mahogany sideboards, oak escritoires, japanned tea tables, damask bedsteads, silver tankards, spoons and fruit stands.55 Virtually every payment in the Atlantic trading world could eventually be traced back to sugar. Even the purchases of English goods by the mainland American colonies were at bottom funded by sales of salt fish and timber to the sugar islands.56
Meanwhile, another 30 per cent of England’s exports were in fact re-exports of colonial commodities: calicoes, pepper, tobacco, sugar and rice. The bullion obtained for these goods on the Continent financed yet more colonial voyages. Surpluses in one area of commerce compensated for deficits in another. Rather than narrowly weighing up the costs and benefits of one branch of trade at a time, English economic thinkers began to view the nation’s trade as a whole.57