CHAPTER 6
A civil war, the execution of a monarch, a short-lived republic which thrived for only eleven years, the return of the Stuart monarchy, a bloodless coup and an exiled King: all these dramatic events affected the food the British ate and were to sharpen the differences between ourselves and the continent. Under the Stuarts before 1640 the English ruling class aped Spanish, French and Italian fashions and ideas, for it was sympathetic in every way, including its cooking, to Catholic Europe. ‘By the 1620s and 1630s, England seemed to be moving steadily nearer to a system of government modelled on that of Richelieu, with absolute authority and aristocratic privilege centred on a glittering court.’1
After 1688, the year of the Bloodless Revolution when William of Orange became King, we led Europe, though not necessarily in our cooking, despite its admirers. In all else, however, much of our strength in politics, culture, literature, military and naval expansion had been laid down in policies brought about by the Civil War and the Interregnum. It was because of this that we were to become the first industrial power of Europe. It was because of this that our diet, our recipes, and the daily food we ate became firmly recognisable as our own for better or worse.
Civil War
Essentially, the English revolution was a bourgeois revolution: it increased the power, wealth and importance of the bourgeoisie; and it created a particularly rich and varied diet for a people not concerned with weight gain, and who saw fatness and physical size as a sign of a profitable existence. Except for Holland, whose commercial prowess was always in competition with our own throughout these years, the substantial influence of the bourgeoisie in the other European countries was to occur 200 years later. How did a war, which is generally considered destructive to almost the whole of society, benefit the middle classes, who had not necessarily fought for the Parliamentarians anyway?
The explanations for the Civil War have been grossly simplified and given religious labels, when in fact at the heart of the dispute were money, commercial trading and land. Under the first two Stuart Kings the issues of land and the monopoly system were at the centre of social unrest and discontent, for land meant food and your family’s survival, while the monopoly system, which touched every aspect of life, kept power, patronage and commercial wealth within the monarchy and the immediate court circle. The social mobility that the commercial age of the Tudors had started made government uneasy and suspicious; the rapid enrichment of capitalists and the fluctuations of the market, which led to unemployment and social unrest, caused great unease among the nobility, who sought to control it by granting privileges and placing hindrances in the way of mobility and freedom of movement and contract.2 So at the beginning of the Stuart period governments thought it their duty to regulate industry, wages and working conditions. They tended to slow down industrial development by controlling it through guilds and monopolies. The industries that held these court-granted monopolies, like the drapers of Shrewsbury and Oswestry, the shoemakers and glovers of Chester, and the metallurgical industry around Birmingham, were unsurprisingly Royalist in the Civil War. The nobility who had been refused under the monopoly system became Parliamentarians. The monopoly system made the market inflexible, unable to react to the demands of a free market. Monopolies were only available to those with influence at court; the producers of rock salt, for example, had to bribe courtiers to get a charter of incorporation, and thus the courtiers acquired control of a new company.3
Butter, currants, red herrings, salmon, lobsters, salt, pepper, vinegar, wine and spirits, and every other foodstuff imaginable, were owned by different monopolies which blocked anyone else attempting to trade or produce the goods. Not only the food, but the clothes, the soap, starch, feathers, lace, linen, leather, and gold thread were monopoly-owned; so were the lute strings which played the music, the Bibles and Latin grammars, the coaches and sedan chairs, and even the mousetraps and lighthouses. In 1621 there were 700 different monopolies. They affected the life of hundreds of thousands of Englishmen and by the end of the 1630s they were bringing nearly £100,000 a year into the Exchequer. Business could not endure to be bled in this way; increases in the price of the produce only caused a decline in sales and added resentment and rage when it was known that not only the monarch was enjoying a percentage but so were, as happened in the soap monopoly, foreign Papists. In 1664, when a Bill before Parliament proposed to revive a pin monopoly, a member declared that the late King had lost his head for granting such patents and the Bill was allowed to drop. The Civil War was about trade and commerce. Religion gives convenient labels to a ragbag of resentments; it is commercial injustice that makes men fly to arms.
The struggle succeeded in wresting control of capital from the crown and allowed the entrepreneur to have a free hand. Of the salt industry, Professor Hughes said: ‘The first condition of healthy industrial growth was the exclusion of the parasitic entourage of the court.’4 Abolition of feudal tenures and the Court of Wards turned lordship into absolute ownership, so that lands could now be bought, sold and mortgaged, making long term investment in agriculture possible for the first time. This was the decisive change in English history that made it different from that of the continent. ‘A capitalist agricultural economy sprang ready-armed from the great manorial aristocratic system, opening a new chapter in the history of the rural world.’5 New farming techniques had been popularised by agricultural reformers in the Interregnum, so most of the obstacles to enclosure were removed. Parliament encouraged enclosure and cultivation of wastelands, it protected farmers against imports and authorised corn hoarding.6
Gentlewomen’s Secrets
How did the economic repression and the sudden social inflexibility before the Civil War affect what people ate? They heightened social aspiration. Of the twenty cookery books published in the first fifty years of the century, almost all are collections from titled ladies telling of their secrets, both in the kitchen and in the boudoir. Recipes, whether for food or for beauty, were medicinally geared towards health and vigour, as if the secrets of the nobility and how they retained their power were all due to potions and herbal remedies. The literate classes, finding their social mobility blocked or hindered in other ways, could at least dream in these pages of being rich and powerful. The cookery book almost immediately became a stimulus to fantasy.
When the Civil War broke out and the Interregnum began, the collection of recipes of a gentlewoman must have been even more treasured, possibly guiltily, as a memoir of a past age, which might not recur; hence the value placed upon these books was high. How far these recipes were slavishly followed is another question, for often they were too complicated for domestic use. Their advice must have filtered down in some form or other, however; many a housekeeper in an aspiring middle-class home must have instructed an illiterate kitchen staff of two or three young women on how to preserve and pickle the market produce, reading the sentences out slowly, repeating them, then going on to explain how to bone a fish or make a cake the way of a royal princess.
At the end of the century in 1698, Charles Davenant wrote: ‘There is no country in the world where the inferior rank of men are better clothed, and fed, and more at ease than in this Kingdom.’7 Davenant was not considering vagabonds and beggars, he was talking of clerks and servants. Perhaps he was noticing that a large social change had occurred. We had beheaded a king and created a republic, if only for a brief interval. But Davenant’s observation was a superficial one. Two years earlier, the engraver and statesman Gregory King (1648-1712) had estimated in his Natural and Political Observations and Conclusions upon the State and Condition of England the number of cottagers and paupers to be one quarter of the population, and labouring people and outservants to be another quarter; both groups, he estimated, had to spend more to survive than they ever earned. Half the population then were in permanent debt and poverty. They had barely enough to eat and were certainly almost illiterate and not likely to be reading any books, much less a cookery book.
The bourgeoisie, once they became people of property, inherited a horror of the ignorant, irrational populace. The poor were non-persons, they made no wills and left no inventories, their daughters had no dowries, they did not serve in the militia, but they could be conscripted into army or navy for service overseas. A Yorkshire MP, Captain Adam Baynes, speaking in Parliament in 1659, remarked: ‘All government is built on property, else the poor must rule it.’8
Some food writers in the past have indicted the Puritan movement as being the cause for the decline in quality of English cooking.9 This is a conclusion I cannot endorse. But the Puritan movement did affect our diet in a profound manner, for it was to abolish feudal tenures and arbitrary taxation, both of which hugely benefited the common man and therefore improved his ability to grow his own crops. Furthermore it established the sacred rights of property and gave political power to the propertied class. This was, of course, a huge boost to the middle classes and inflated their prestige and power. The Civil War thus eased the plight of the working class for a brief while, before the leviathan of industrial power was again to deplete it; but more particularly it strengthened the bourgeoisie and from that class were born throughout the next few hundred years women cookery writers – a phenomenon totally unknown in France, because of the dominance of the royal male cooks. Women see the providing of a hot meal quite differently from men being paid for their artistry; women see food in a far more pragmatic manner and would be liable to provide nutrition in all its appetising subtlety in a more direct manner. This gender difference was to be apparent in Britain in the centuries to follow.
The Puritan movement also improved the lot of working class women. In all the radical sects considered to be Free Spirits, which vied with each other for authority, there were many women preachers, equal in God’s eyes with the menfolk, for, it was said, does not Christ’s mercy affect women as much as men? Mrs Chidley in 1641 argued that a husband had no more right to control his wife’s conscience than the magistrate had to control his.10 Also, within these sects there was greater sexual freedom: divorce was approved of, changing partners and even sleeping with two women at once were not considered great sins. In this period there was a breakdown in the Church courts and so freedom was enjoyed from moral supervision; men and women freely met together and publicly denied the existence of heaven and hell, of the devil, of a historical Christ, and of the after life. They rejected a state church, its clergy and its tithes. Hence the sensual aspects of food and drink were as much enjoyed as other pleasures. In fact the Free Spirits sometimes gave a religious and metaphysical significance to food: ‘One of them took a piece of beef in his hand tearing it asunder and said to his companion: “This is the flesh of Christ, take and eat.”’11 This could also have been a blasphemous joke, of course, many of which were enjoyed at the time. For a short while ordinary people were freer from the authority of Church and social superiors than they had ever been before or would ever be again until recent times.
The most important manifestation of new thinking, however, was by the Levellers. Their name was given to them by their enemies to suggest that their aim was to ‘level men’s estates’. They originated around 1645 in the midst of the Civil War when they demanded that sovereignty and real power should be transferred from the crown to the House of Commons. They put forward a plan of economic reform to benefit small property holders: the abolition of all trading monopolies; the reopening of all enclosed land; the security of land tenure; the abolition of tithes; and the complete freedom of religious worship. Sadly, such radical energy and imaginative exploration were suppressed in the 1650s by Cromwell who feared their anarchy. Some of the Levellers’ ideas were taken up by the Quakers.
Surely within this ferment of ideas there should be a person who would represent new thoughts upon food itself. Thomas Tryon was born in 1634, a few years after Charles I dissolved Parliament. He rose from the rural working class and educated himself to become an author of fifteen books.12 He propounded the goodness to health of a vegetable diet and his work and ideas were to influence both Benjamin Franklin and the poet Shelley. What is interesting is that established ideas about food were being questioned, and new answers were being discovered. They had little influence at the time, but they were far from being suppressed, for Tryon was published and read. Within a new and changing social order people were intrigued.
The Bedford Kitchen
Throughout the Interregnum, the old aristocracy kept a low profile, clinging to what was left of the old established values. The Earl of Bedford at Woburn House concentrated on his estates and led a modest life (we have his household accounts) with his expenditure on food being carefully controlled. His estates brought in an income of £8,500; £1,000 came from the sale of wood, malt, tallow, sheepskins, hay and other produce and the rest from rents and fines. In April 1653 he spent 4d on scurvy grass for putting into the children’s ale (a common practice in the spring when signs of scurvy were liable to show) and two years later for Lady Anne, aged five, he spent 1s 4d on six sweet oranges and some cherries.
During the Interregnum economies were a necessity; the kitchen fed forty staff as well as the family, the Earl and Countess and their nine children. In 1653, 1654 and 1655 the food cost £280, £260 and £310 respectively. They ate venison from the deer park, rabbits and an occasional hog, while fish came from the Woburn ponds. Cattle were driven from markets at Luton and Leighton Buzzard and meat cost £45-£50 per year. From the Earl’s other estates small game birds would be sent, including knots and dotterels (two wading birds still in existence but now uncommon), which were tame enough to be easily snared, and snipe and larks were bought from the markets. They got through a prodigious amount of butter, 30 lb a week, which was bought from six different tenants at 6d a pound. Though in 1654 butter was bought from Hackney, which cost 10d a pound. Farmers’ wives supplied cream and eggs; in 1653 cream cost 3d a pint. Fruit and vegetables came from the Woburn gardens but artichokes (costing 3d each), spinach, turnips, beans and peas, salads, herbs and potherbs were bought from the markets. In the summer they bought strawberries and cherries, apricots, quinces (seven for a penny) and apples.
The fish they ate was usually pike and perch from the ponds, but sides of salt fish were eaten by the staff, and flounders, herrings and whiting were bought in. Occasionally a barrel of oysters would be sent from London, and in March 1655 three lobsters, costing 8d each were eaten.
After the Restoration in 1660 all economic caution waned; by 1668 kitchen expenditure had risen to £870, four times the amount of the decade before. By 1671 it had zoomed up to £1,465, but this expense now included the household at Bedford House in the Strand. Keeping a servant was estimated at a cost of 10s a week. A prodigious amount of beef was now eaten; six or seven bullocks arrived almost every month, driven over from the Thorney estate in the fens. Following the Dutch example, this estate had been drained, a process begun thirty years earlier. Thorney supplied all the corn needed at Woburn, as well as oats and hempseed. The Flemings also introduced coleseed (Brassica arvensis which we now know as rape), which when crushed was made into a cake for feeding cattle, while the oil, colza, was used for lighting. The rich natural resources of the Fens also ensured a supply of fish and birds: fat swans, quails, knots, dotterels, ruffs and reeves were sent to Woburn for the table. Nevertheless, the breeding of cattle was now seen as important as the growing of corn.
At Woburn improvements to the gardens and orchards began in the 1660s, producing cherries, mascelline13, apricots, violet musk peaches and Roman nectarines. Many different vegetables were also grown from seeds taken from the gardens of other more enterprising gentry or from the seedsmen in the Strand.
Their groceries came from Nathaniel Child. The largest expenditure in October 1671 was upon sugar, on which they spent £5 12s for 2 cwt at 6d per pound. In November they bought more sugar, both refined and powdered. From 1670 the accounts show the occasional purchase of small quantities of coffee for the personal use of the Earl and the Countess; for the same year there is a mention of the purchase of a coffee pot, a china dish and nine shillingsworth of coffee. In the following year a coffee set was bought for the Countess so that she could entertain her friends. Dried fruit, currants, raisins and prunes were ordered from Nathaniel Child, but the range of spices was small. A medieval noble would have considered the Earl’s kitchen to be impoverished, having only mace, cloves, nutmegs and ginger. But this is an example of what was happening within the English kitchen; the Earl, whether he knew it or not, was in fact reflecting the staples of a bourgeois home. These few spices would remain constant within English cooking for the next few hundred years, except for the influence of the Anglo-Indian dishes and ketchups, which would start to infiltrate English society the following century.
The Rise of the Market Garden
In the 1590s immigrants from the Low Countries showed how market gardening could be a profitable venture and the Gardeners’ Company received its first charter in 1605. In addition to Kent, other areas around London became centres of fruit and vegetable growing: Westminster, Lambeth, Battersea, Fulham, Putney and Brentford and towards the Thames estuary, Whitechapel, Stepney, Hackney and Greenwich. The districts were chosen for their easy access to the river, for night soil (sewage) was used to fertilise the gardens; barges would unload the dung, then take on board the produce. There were also market garden centres in Surrey and at Colchester and Sandwich, both busy ports with daily goods being sent by sea to London. It became a profitable venture because the London middle classes were aware that the gentry were eating fruits and vegetables cultivated on their country estates, which were not available to them.
Vegetable gardening was now fashionable with the upper classes; a walled garden that grew fruit and vegetables was essential on the country estate. When the nobility moved to London in the winter much of their country produce was sent to them weekly, and market gardens around London could also supply them daily. The fashionable vegetables were artichokes, asparagus, cauliflowers, cucumbers, French beans (the haricot beans from the New World which were first eaten in any quantity in France), green peas (as opposed to the dried pea still eaten by the poor), lettuce, mushrooms and spinach. In the country house garden with glasshouses and hotbeds, the gentry could grow oranges, peaches, apricots, grapes, melons and figs. Market gardens did not try to compete; in the summer they could provide soft fruit, such as strawberries (which were still small), gooseberries, and red, black and white currants. In 1629 John Parkinson, the King’s herbalist, first mentions the black currant, suggesting that both the fruit and the leaves should be used in sauces eaten with ‘meates’. Francis Bacon wrote: ‘The standards to be roses, juniper, holly, berberries (but here and there, because of the smell of their blossom), red currants, gooseberries, rosemary, bays, sweet briar, and such like’.14
Root vegetables were a staple food of the poor, but in the winter, when other vegetables were scarce, they were also eaten by the middle classes. They were very cheap, roots, cabbages and beans came to London by the cartload costing 2d to 6d. Roots were also being fed to cattle, however, so they were a despised vegetable and the cookery books tended to dismiss them altogether. An aldermanic report of 1635 speaks of 24,000 loads of roots (carrots, parsnips and turnips) being sold annually in London and Westminster.
By the middle of the century the market gardens around London needed a labour force of 1,500 people to supply the green vegetables. Satisfying the tastes of the gentry proved to be hard work. In 1675 John Worlidge was delighted to discover that if you took up the old roots of the asparagus at the beginning of January and planted them on a hotbed you could have asparagus as early as February.15 However, in these gardens it was the staple vegetables like cauliflowers and cabbages that took up the most space, though there were some under glass, so that they were ready early in the year. Other favourite crops were radishes and carrots. Fast-growing crops, such as lettuces and radishes, were planted in rows between slow-growing ones like cauliflowers and celery. Thames water was used for irrigation, although sometimes this could be a health hazard. An outbreak of contagious spotted fever in 1623 was put down to the plentiful supply of cucumbers, which to bring them on were over-watered from Thames ditches which were low because of lack of rain. Human excrement as well as animal dung was used as a general fertiliser and to build up the hotbeds. These too, were copied from the walled gardens of the gentry; essentially a hotbed was a pile of dung covered in a thin layer of soil, and the whole covered in glass. One gardener bought 600 loads of dung annually from town for his nine acres of land.16 It worked miraculously; tender salad plants could be raised in the winter and sent to market. Market gardens boosted the production of glass and London became the centre of its manufacture until the nineteenth century. At Michaelmas gardens could still produce onions, corn salad, spinach, artichokes, celery and asparagus. Melons too needed hotbeds; the Neat House gardens became famous for their melons as early as 1632 and they remained their speciality for the next hundred years. The market gardens made extra money by opening to the public and serving beer, and those next to the Thames became popular ones to stroll in. In August 1666 Pepys took a party on the Thames and visited the Neat House: ‘I landed and bought a million melon.’
All this garden produce went by barge on the Thames to Covent Garden; in the early morning the Thames upstream would be full of gardeners’ boats going to the various street markets of London. Produce for the markets further from the river went by cart into London; in the evening the same cart would return with dung. It was usual for women to be selling at the stall, while the men acted as porters moving the produce in their huge round baskets, often balanced upon their heads, a familiar sight at Covent Garden until recently.
Of course, London retailers also bought produce from much further afield than the market gardens: cheese came from Suffolk, apples and cherries from Kent. ‘The corn growers of Cambridgeshire, the dairy farmers of Suffolk, the graziers of the south Midlands, all looked to the London market as the hub of their economic universe.’17
The Accomplisht Cook
Robert May was born in the year of the Armada, his father was a cook and the family known Catholics. Robert rose to be a cook to Royalist nobility – they all fought on the King’s side in the Civil War – and worked for them throughout his whole life. In his preface to The Accomplisht Cook May says that ‘God and my own Conscience would not permit me to bury these experiences in the Grave.’ So his life’s work, the food and recipes the book contains, is given a religious significance, which, I believe, has been overlooked. Aged fourteen he was sent to France to be a kitchen apprentice and stayed there for five years. When he returned he joined the Worshipful Company of Cooks, which had been incorporated in the fifteenth century and was apprenticed to the cook at the Star Chamber, the food of which we have already examined.
May’s collection of over 1,300 recipes18 was published in 1660, the year that Charles II returned to the throne, and for May such an event must have been a celebration of immense jubilance. For though the King had to pretend to pursue Protestant policy, all knew that he and his family had strong Papist sympathies and a love of France and French cooking. The food they ate was imbued with it. In May’s recipes we see a world where the Reformation had never happened, for it recalls medieval food with clarity. May’s five years in France must have helped immeasurably, for there, without the traumatic experience of a Reformation, the same recipes were being prepared and cooked as the nobility had eaten for hundreds of years. The French influence may also be seen in his nine recipes for snails and the one for baking frogs. Indeed, May does not hide it, but says in his preface: ‘As I live in France and had the language and have been an eye witness of their cookeries as well, as a peruser of their manuscripts and printed authors whatever I found good in them I have inserted in this volume.’ It was expected of Stuart noblemen that they should keep open house in the country and be lavish in their hospitality; also the French influence upon the aristocrat demanded conspicuous consumption as part of his role. May’s book reflects what must have been uncomfortable demands upon him; it sometimes veers from the occasional simple rustic dish to the lavish spectacle feasting of a medieval monarch.
The medieval influence is most clearly seen at the beginning of May’s book, entitled ‘Triumphs and Trophies in Cookery to be used at Festival Times’: here a ship is made from paste with flags, streamers and guns, or a castle with battlements, portcullis, gates and drawbridges. The perfect spectacle, May suggests, was a pie containing live frogs and another full of live birds; a galleon and a castle, complete with guns, and a stag with an arrow in its side, all made of confectioner’s paste. The guns have trains of real gunpowder and the stag is full of claret:
Being all placed in order upon the Table, before you fire the trains of powder, order it so that some of the Ladies may be persuaded to pluck the Arrow out of the Stag, then will the Claret wine follow as blood running out of a wound. This being done with admiration to the beholders, after some short pause, fire the train of the Castle, that the pieces (guns) all of one side may go off; then fire the trains of one side of the Ship as in a battle … to sweeten the stink of the powder, let the ladies take the (blown) egg shells full of sweet waters, and throw them at each other. All dangers being seemingly over, by this time you may suppose they will desire to see what is in the pies; where lifting first the lid of one pie, out skips some Frogs, which makes the Ladies to skip and shriek; next after the other pie, whence comes out the birds; who by a natural instinct flying at the light, will put out the candles: so that what with the flying birds, and skipping frogs, the one above, the other beneath, will cause much delight and pleasure to the whole company.19
This extraordinary mixture of spectacle, magic and theatre remained unchanged in court circles for two to three hundred years – May is at the very end of it. One wonders at the hardiness of the women content for their silk, satin and lace to be besmirched with coloured sugared water and slimy frogs, and defecating birds flying in their panic into intricate coiffures. The rough and tumble of this entertainment is not to present taste, but there can be little doubt that in May’s time it was still popular as otherwise he would not have made reference to it. This medieval spirit permeates the book in its instructions on how to bake lampreys or the number of almond recipes, or make marrow pies and medlar tarts. This is firmly from an era of pre-Reformation cooking, recalling an age in which the world was secure beneath the yoke of Rome. May even looks back on his youth before the Civil War with nostalgia: ‘Then was hospitality esteemed, neighbourhood preserved, the poor cherished and God honoured; then was Religion less talked on, and more practiced; then was atheism and schism less in fashion: then did men strive to be good, rather than to seem to.’
May’s recipes for turbot and halibut, which since Roman times had been eaten only by the elite, illustrate this courtly and complicated manner of cooking. The fish is poached in half white wine and water, with added sliced onion and ginger, mace, cloves, thyme, rosemary, bay leaf, lemon or orange peel, and finished off with butter, more spices and barberries. Compare this method with Patrick Lamb’s recipe , who was the official court cook to five different English monarchs.
May is not alone, however, for all the recipe books published in his lifetime are influenced by the early Stuart court of James I and his son, Charles I; though published after the Civil War and the Interregnum, in the midst of the Restoration period they still recall a golden age that is inherently medieval. Hannah Woolley wrote several cookery books which went into many editions and sold well into the next century; she was clever and cultured and worked hard to improve herself. Speaking French fluently, she read aloud French plays to her master, Sir Henry Wroth, and became stewardess to his wife after first being their cook. They were Royalists and Hannah boasts of having cooked a banquet for King Charles I. In 1661 she wrote her first book, The Ladies Directory; it begins, as so many of the collections do, with a section on preserving and candying: apricots in jelly, white quinces (to keep them white they were boiled fast and quickly in pippin water, which is of jellying quality), a conserve of red roses, a paste of plums, almond gingerbread, gooseberry custard, cherry water and naturally, almond butter. There are marmalades of damsons, warden pears and quinces. There are syrups for colds, coughs and an aqua mirabilis, which was sack and aqua vitae mixed with many spices – altogether nearly 200 recipes.
The next section, called ‘The Exact Cook or The Art of Dressing all sorts of Flesh, fowl and fish’, begins with recipes for pickling both cucumbers and purslane. Then follow recipes to stretch and clean sheep’s guts, soaking them in water for nine days, but one must be sure to move them about to make them easy to fill. There is no logic in the order of recipes (as there was in May): we go from orange pudding to making French Bread (a brioche, in fact, made with eggs and milk). A chicken pie is seasoned with nutmeg, sugar, pepper, salt and raisins. A herb pie is made with lettuce, spinach and flavoured with butter, nutmeg, sugar and salt; when cold clotted cream, sack and more sugar are added – almost an exact medieval recipe. Plaice and flounders are poached in white wine flavoured with lemon, salt, cloves, mace and small onions. There is a pie of eels and oysters, one for hare, pumpkin and lamb, others for steak, neat’s tongue, venison, calves’ foot and pig. There is even a recipe for a potato pie (but this would have been the sweet potato); Hannah adds marrow, cinnamon, sugar, mace, white wine, butter and yolks of eggs. Chickens and pigeons are boiled with a sauce of gooseberries or grapes. She tells us how to pickle oysters, to make a trifle, a lemon syllabub and cabbage cream. This is stunning cooking but almost unchanged since 1400. A modern version of the recipes, including all the beef stews, in which Hannah specialises, was published in 1988.20 Its author and his friends delighted in the flavours of fruit and savoury mixed, which in some cases are similar, if not identical, to the series of bruets in An Ordinance of Pottage discussed on page 88. Later in her life Hannah went on to cook for another Royalist family, that of Sir Henry Cary.
Another greatly successful book was The Queen’s Closet Opened, which has a portrait of Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I, as frontispiece. This was printed by Nathaniel Brook in 1655, and purports to be transcribed from Her Majesty’s own receipt books by W.M., one of her servants. The sub-title is ‘Incomparable secrets in physick, preserving and candying and cookery’. The volume consists of three books: ‘The Pearle of Practice’, ‘A Queen’s Delight’ and ‘The Compleat Cook’; the last was sometimes published by itself. The title page boasts that the recipes stem from Italy, Spain or France (the Queen was French and spent most of her life there in exile). Indeed on page 5 we are told how to dress a pig in the French manner: it is chopped up and boiled in white wine, and flavoured with nutmeg, anchovies, elderflower vinegar and butter. A capon larded with lemons is flavoured in a medieval manner, and cooked with verjuice, white wine and a bundle of herbs; but beef marrow, mace and dates are added and the broth is thickened with almonds. This clearly informs us that the rather complicated cooking of an early period continues in a royal household, unlike the simplicity of Lady Fettiplace. A recipe for boiled pigeons is fairly simple: they are stuffed with parsley and butter, placed in an earthenware dish with more butter and baked; then parsley, thyme and spinach are chopped small and added to the dish; the sauce is thickened with egg yolks and verjuice and the pigeons are served in the sauce on slices of bread. You may learn here how to prepare and dress snails, a long and complicated recipe as the snails are boiled for hours, then minced and turned into a soup; there is mention of one clove of garlic with onions as flavouring with lemon and herbs.
The French influence (or, as I hope I am making clear, the medieval and Roman Catholic) continues in the anonymous The Accomplished Lady’s Delight (1675). The third section is ‘The Compleat Cook’s Guide, or, directions for dressing all sorts of Flesh, fowl and Fish, both in the English and the French mode, with all sauces and sallets and the making Pyes, Pasties, Tarts, and custards, with the Forms and Shapes of many of them’. A sauce for a shoulder of mutton is made from oysters, herbs, white wine, nutmeg, mace and lemon. If you have no oysters use capers instead. A leg of mutton is stuffed with herbs and egg. A boiled chicken is cooked with a small piece of mutton, and lettuce, marigold leaves, spinach and endive. Flounders are cooked in the French fashion, it tells us, in white wine, verjuice, mace and rosemary. Yet this recipe is again a medieval English one.
The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby (1669) is the work that Robert May most admired. One feels that the title and religious faith of the author influenced May’s opinion. Digby (1603-1665) even fought a duel in Paris in defence of Charles I; he was chancellor to Henrietta Maria and pleaded Charles’s cause with Pope Innocent X; he also discovered the necessity of oxygen to the life of plants. The most striking aspect of Digby’s book is the huge number of recipes for making drinks, as if this were his first priority, which it may well have been: there are fifty recipes for making meath, another fifty for metheglin (fermented herbal drinks with honey), in addition to recipes for hydromel, stepony, bragot, strawberry wine and cock-ale.
Queen Henrietta Maria began her day with a light broth and Kenelm Digby gives us a recipe. It was made with lean veal, beef and mutton boiled with a hen; then an onion, perhaps even a clove of garlic, parsley, thyme, mint, coriander, saffron, pepper, salt and a clove were added. This is boiled together then poured on toast and stewed again until the toast has amalgamated with the broth; this is repeated until you have a good potage. However it is not yet finished, for then you can add parsley roots, leeks, cabbages or endive and in the summer you put in lettuce, purslane, borage and bugloss. A Bouillon de Santé, the good Digby suggests. Then Sir Kenelm recommends finishing the breakfast with two poached eggs with a few collops of bacon. Little did he know that this simple postscript to the broth with its involved cooking and many ingredients would in a further 300 years become the only British meal worth praising throughout the world.
Digby’s recipe for an ‘Ordinary Potage’ is also worth glancing at, for there is little ordinary about it. First, a leg of beef and scrag end of necks of veal and mutton are boiled in a ten-quart pot filled with water. (This was begun at six in the morning to have the soup ready by noon.) It is skimmed, and two or three onions in quarters, half a loaf of light French bread and the bottom crust of a Venison Pasty are added. (See below.) This will all dissolve in the broth. Season with salt, pepper and a few cloves, then add borage, bugloss, purslane, sorrel, lettuce, endive and whatever else you like! After three hours boil a hen or a capon in it. Then slice some French bread and toast it in front of the fire; lay the slices in a chafing dish and pour some of the broth over; then lay the hen over them with the herbs and roots about it; let it cook a little longer, then squeeze some orange or lemon juice over (or put some verjuice in it) and finish with perhaps adding two or three egg yolks to the broth.
No ordinary person, of course, would ever be able to sup from such a dish; but perhaps within the ranks of the nobility such a soup would strike them as ordinary. To make a barley pottage, according to Digby, barley is added to this broth and then poured over the capon, hen, mutton or veal. There are several recipes for potage de santé, which are all based on a broth of boiled chicken and meats with herbs.
The old end of a venison pasty, too dried out to enjoy by itself, would give the broth a much desired spicy tang. Both the bread and the pasty thickened the broth slightly; obviously the liquid was reduced, for Digby mentions that the Queen’s light broth ‘was boiled to less than a pint’. A nourishing broth had more meat bones in it, with bones broken so that the marrow spilt out; it was allowed to jelly, the fat skimmed from the top, and the dregs removed from the bottom; then the melted jelly was served with a yolk of egg beaten with orange juice added. This sounds something akin to nectar. This food is not for mere mortals; it was eaten at court and at the homes of the great Catholic families if they were still in funds. The food of the rising middle classes, the people who crowded the streets of London and other growing towns, was plainer, quickly and easily cooked, or supplied by the cookshops which they could eat there or take home.
It is interesting to see that a peasant staple dish – pease pottage – appears under the name of Lord Lumley, who was one of Robert May’s employers and patrons. His recipe, made with the inevitable dried peas, has as flavouring coriander seed, onion, mint, parsley, winter savory and marjoram. It is strained, then a great deal of butter is added and finally it is seasoned with pepper and salt. Pea soup appears by this time to be a quite classless dish: Pepys enjoys it and Mrs Pepys makes a point of ordering it at a particular eating house; and Evelyn gives two different recipes. The dish that had kept the peasants from starving has now become a favourite throughout society, and henceforward no cookery book was ever without a recipe for it.
New Beverages
In 1637 at Oxford John Evelyn wrote in his diary:
There came in my tyme to the College one Nathanial Conopios, out of Greece, from Cyrill the Patriarch of Constantinople, who returning many years after was made (as I understand) Bishop of Smyrna. He was the first I ever saw drink coffee, which custom came not to England till 30 years after.
Paris had tasted its first cups of coffee in 1644 but it was not until 1650 that the first coffee house in England (and only the second in Europe) was opened at Oxford, advertised as ‘a simple Innocent thing, incomparable good for those that are troubled with melancholy’. But from the very beginning coffee houses proved to be centres of intellectual debate, visited by writers, scholars, wits and politicians. At Oxford the coffee house was run by Jacob the Jew, who benefited from Cromwell’s toleration of religion. This was the Interregnum when England was enjoying its first open society and there was much for intellectuals to debate. Oxford was somehow politically tainted, however, for it had been the centre of the Royalist faction and London, the Parliamentary base, needed its own coffee house.
Daniel Edwards, a merchant from Turkey who married the daughter of a London alderman, one Hodges, drank two or three cups of coffee a day and it was he who set up his Turkish servant, Pasqua, to provide coffee in a shed in the churchyard in St Michael’s Cornhill. Pasqua recommended coffee as a digestif, which should be taken at three or four in the afternoon after dinner as well as in the morning. He claimed it would prevent drowsiness and so make one fit for business. As this was one claim that customers found was astonishingly true, coffee drinking became an almost overnight success. Seeing this, Alderman Hodges turned the shed into a house and with his coachman, Bowman, became partners of Pasqua and Edwards. Coffee houses quickly became centres of radical discussion to discuss the merits and flaws of the Republic.
An advertisement of 1662 extols the virtues of a coffee powder costing from 4s to 6s 8d a pound; various types are praised, such as a Turkish berry and an East Indian berry. They also sell ‘chocolatta’ at 2s 6d a pound, sherbet flavoured with lemons, roses or violets and ‘Tea according to its goodness’. By 1675 London was thought to have 3,000 coffee houses, but this was an absurd exaggeration; an early London Directory for 1739 listed 551 houses, 144 of them within the City. However, it seemed that more coffee was drunk in London than any other city in the world, and coffee houses had now spread into the provinces as far north as York. Women, brewers and innkeepers disliked them, complaining bitterly of the ills the beverage caused. In 1674 The Women’s Petition Against Coffee Houses alleged that ‘Coffee makes a man barren as the desert out of which this unlucky berry has been imported.’21
Each coffee house had its own distinct character and different type of customer, whether they were lawyers, writers or politicians. After the Restoration, however, their radical character disturbed the monarch; in 1675 Charles II attempted to suppress them, because of ‘the multitude of Coffee Houses lately set up and kept within this Kingdom, and the great resort of the idle and dissipated persons in them, having produced very evil, and dangerous effects’. When it was passed, the law caused such fury that it was never enforced. Coffee houses were far too important: they were the first men’s clubs, ‘penny universities’ that disseminated the latest news and gossip, discussion groups and reading libraries. On the corner of Bow Street in Covent Garden stood Will’s Coffee House, which was termed Wits’ Coffee House and patronised by both Pepys and Dryden. Defoe thought that the best company generally went to Tom’s or Will’s Coffee Houses. Addison and Steele, Pope and Swift went to Buttons. Coffee houses also became centres of commerce; both Jonathan’s and Garraway’s served for three-quarters of a century as England’s main stock exchanges; Virginia and the Baltic doubled as the mercantile shipping exchange and Lloyd’s Cafe became the world’s largest insurance company.
Coffee cost 1d or 2d a cup; you could stay as long as you wished, read papers, chat to friends or do business. At first the coffee was served straight without additions, though one could add honey, cloves, ginger, cinnamon and spearmint if inclined. Within two decades milk, cream and sugar were also offered to soften the bitterness. House rules forbade swearing, gambling, quarrelling and profane language and all clients were considered to be equal. These limitations, so readily accepted by the clients, proved to be the beginning of a civilising process within society. By the 1690s alcoholic drinks were also on sale in the coffee houses as well as tea and chocolate, though these already had a feminine image. By the turn of the century coffee had begun to appear not only in the most aristocratic of households but also in the wealthiest. We have seen that the Bedfords had some as early as 1670; now the affluent urban households drank coffee at breakfast and after dinner. At breakfast it took over from ale or wine and the meal of meats, game and fish that was served with them; now a variety of breads and preserves were on offer. In 1685 powdered coffee for domestic use was being sold at 3s a pound and Thomas Garwar, the proprieter of the Sultanese Head, was warning his customers that the powder ‘if kept two days looseth much of its first goodness’, so he advised buying beans and to grind them in a mill whenever needed.22
Tea’s feminine image was partly because it was introduced to England by Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese Queen to Charles II; it was also associated with a panoply of china and porcelain, teapots and tea dishes, gilded mahogany tea-tables and silver teapots, tea-kettles and tongs, cream jugs and tea-spoons which all involved a tea ceremony from the lady of the house at the centre of a circle of friends. Tea drinking was not the instant hit that coffee had been, it took a much longer time to become the staple beverage of the nation (See Chapter 8). From the beginning, however, it was helped upon its way by medicinal claims on its health-giving properties.
Chocolate was introduced to France in 1615 and from there it moved slowly across the Channel until by the 1650s it was served as an alternative in the coffee houses. Two of them, The Cocoa Tree and Whites, specialised in the drink, but it never caught on with any enthusiasm, possibly because it was too thick to drink easily; the butterfat content made it particularly viscous so that it needed constant stirring.
Samuel Pepys
We can gather a vivid impression of what people ate in the seventeenth century from the diaries of Pepys, and a glance at the two food books of Evelyn. We have already said that the recipe books that stemmed from the court and the nobility are aspirational. We have seen, too, that the recipes are complicated and owe much to medieval traditions; they also undoubtedly have a symbolic reference to what was still considered by many to be the one true religion. With the Restoration, French dishes had become fashionable, but they had the associations of Stuart royalty and Roman Catholicism to which courtiers were sympathetic, if not secretly devoted. Samuel Pepys was not a Catholic, but because he was ambitious and mixed constantly with the gentry, he had to be diplomatic. The bourgeoisie was largely Protestant and mercantile, however, and the food they wanted to eat throughout the day had to be convenient, so that it fitted into a busy commercial life. What is perhaps not too surprising is how commerce reacted to the demand, for London was now crammed with eating places.
Tavern food was hugely popular. Pepys visited over 100 in Westminster and London alone. Of the inns, strong-water houses and varied eating places, the most popular were taverns, where you could get a private room and have a pot-boy bring in the food and drink; the room would have a fireplace, table and chairs. The food would be brought in from a cookshop or a market stall, and you could entertain friends, write letters and do business with tradesmen. Naturally Pepys used the coffee houses too. In 1664 he met Sir William Petty at one, where they conversed about waking and dreaming and how one could possibly tell the difference.
Pepys mentions eating game most frequently, followed by poultry, then beef; he appears to eat less of pork and mutton and veal, and marrowbones, tongue and tripe only occasionally.23 The game was largely comprised of venison and Pepys at times got sick of it. When Lord Sandwich gave him ‘half a buck’ Pepys passed it on to his mother ‘to dispose of as she pleased’. Poached venison and game birds were sold openly in the London market and they were often on the tavern menus; Pepys ate the venison there in a pasty.
Dinner at the King’s Head at Charing Cross, one of the most fashionable of taverns, cost 2s 6d; here the food was roasts and pies, vegetables were boiled and then served with butter. There were more modest eating houses called ordinaries, where a meal of two courses would cost 1s. Pepys used the Cocke at the end of Suffolk Street where on 15 March 1669 he began with soup and went on to roasted pullets. A month later he and his wife were dining there again when his wife had a strange desire to partake of their green pea soup. This favourite soup had many different versions: in 1694 Ann Blencowe adds spinach, sorrel, cabbage, lettuce, chervil and endive to hers, as well as mint, butter and strong broth.24 Thickened with the dried green peas, this would have been a marvellously tasty and nutritious dish of a fetching green hue. The soups made at the cookshops would have been almost a meal in themselves, based as they were on meat, poultry bones and ham hocks, with vegetables and herbs added.
This is not convenience food as we know it today, synthetic and chemically flavoured pre-cooked in a million portions; the dishes were individually cooked from a wealth of fresh foods, bought in the market that morning. They were certainly reasonably priced meals based on meat, soups, vegetables, puddings and bread, washed down with ale, beer or wine. They owe nothing to court medieval tradition and everything to a busy, small Tudor kitchen. These meals were more than adequate, more reminiscent today perhaps of an unpretentious restaurant sited near a cattle market. The meat was nearly always beef, cut in thick slices with a sauce made from the drippings and the stock from boiled mutton, beef or chicken. The most common vegetable would have been cabbage boiled in the mutton stock, drained and served with butter. ‘Five or six heaps of cabbage, carrots, turnips, or some other herbs or roots, well peppered and salted and swimming in butter’, the French refugee author Henri Misson wrote in 1690. The bread would have been wheaten; loaves cost depending on the size anything between a halfpenny and twopence.
Boiled suet puddings had been a staple of the rustic kitchen. As a flavoured suet with dried fruits, mixed with eggs, curds or cream, tied into a sheep’s stomach and hung in a slow boiling cauldron with the rest of the meal, it could be left for the day. These too were made at some of the eating houses; the pudding cloth came into use at the beginning of the century and boiled puddings of various kinds became commonplace. May gives recipes for puddings made from bread, rice and oatmeal, flavoured with cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and currants, all of which are baked. Then there are the savoury and blood puddings, which are made in animal guts and boiled. He uses a cloth for making various other sweet puddings made from bread, flour, cream and eggs, which are all boiled. Pepys does not mention eating these, but generally he ends his meal with a fruit tart and sometimes a syllabub or tansy.
Cheese came in many varieties; great quantities of it were brought to London by barge down the Thames from Gloucestershire and Wiltshire with bacon and malt. There was Stilton carried down from Huntingdonshire, called the English Parmesan, which according to Defoe was brought to the table ‘with the mites and maggots round it, so thick, that they bring the spoon with them for you to eat the mites with as you do the cheese’. Pepys never mentions this experience so perhaps it was not so common fifty years earlier, but he would have eaten Cheddar, which Defoe describes on a visit to the village, which had a large green or common on which the whole herd of cows belonging to everyone fed.
The milk of all the town cows is brought together every day into a common room, where the persons appointed, or trusted for the management, measure every man’s quantity, and set it down in a book; when the quantities are adjusted, the milk is all put together, and every meal’s milk makes one cheese, and no more; so that the cheese is bigger, or less, as the cows yield more, or less milk. By this method, the goodness of the cheese is preserved, and, without all dispute, it is the best cheese that England affords, if not, that the whole world affords.25
Defoe goes on to explain that the people who have only one cow and less milk have to wait longer to be paid, for they wait until their share amounts to one whole cheese. Cheddar was sold for 6d to 8d a pound. Pepys might also have eaten a cows’ milk cheese from Cheshire, mentioned in the Domesday book, or Eppynt from north Wales, which was kept for two to six months before being eaten, and which came to be called Caerphilly; then there were the great cheeses that stemmed from the medieval monasteries of Yorkshire: Swaledale, Wensleydale and Coverdale. Dutch and Italian cheeses were popular too, Parmesan was perhaps the favourite: so precious was it that Pepys buried his with the wine in the garden when the Fire of London appeared to be getting near his home.
Dairying and keeping pigs went together because the pigs were fed on the skimmed milk and whey, so dairy farmers also produced much pork, ham and bacon. All farmers, however small they were, kept a few pigs, as they were obliging animals that ate all the scraps and could forage on the common and in the woods. It was these modest farmsteads that suffered so brutally when the enclosure acts, which had begun in Tudor times, began to bite, for once the woodland was cultivated and the common land was hedged by the local landowner there was nowhere for the pigs to forage. Pigs were also fed on the waste products from distilleries and piggeries were now found near breweries around the outskirts of London and other towns.
Of the butcher’s meat, Pepys’ favourite was roast beef, but it was a dish too good to be eaten alone at home. The meat Pepys ate came from animals that might well have started their journey to London from as far afield as Scotland, or Wales. They were driven near to London where they rested and grew fat. St Faiths was a little village north of Norwich where the Scottish cattle were fattened. Defoe describes it: ‘These Scottish runts coming out of the cold and barren mountains of the Highlands feed so eagerly on the rich pastures in these marshes that they thrive in an unusual manner, and grow monstrously fat; and the beef is so delicious for taste, that the inhabitants prefer them to the English cattle, which are much larger and fairer to look at.’26 Defoe estimated that there were 40,000 of these cattle fed in England every year, most of them in the marshes in the triangle of Norwich, Beccles and Yarmouth. Large quantities of Lincolnshire and Leicestershire sheep were kept in the Essex marshes near Tilbury, and fattened in the autumn for the Christmas market. The greatest sheep fair was held annually at Weyhill near Andover where the downs appeared covered in the animals; Defoe was told by a grazier that there were around 5,000 sheep sold at the fair.
Beginning in the autumn turkeys and geese were driven down from Norfolk and Suffolk, feeding on the harvest stubbles as they walked. ‘They have counted 300 droves of turkeys pass in one season over Stratford Bridge on the River Stour,’ Defoe noted. The bridge forms the boundary between Suffolk and Essex. He went on to say that the droves generally contained 300 to 1,000 birds and to mention that lately the farmers had invented a carriage (Defoe is writing in the 1720s) with four storeys of cages on each cart to carry the birds in. The carts were driven by two horses and by changing the horses they travelled by day and night, so that they bring the fowls as much as 100 miles in two days and a night. Pepys was given a turkey as a gift five times, four of these at Christmas, for turkey was already a Christmas dish; in all, seventeen turkeys are recorded as being eaten by him. Rabbits were purchased from farmers’ wives at Stocks and Leadenhall, or simply from the poulterers in Newgate Market. Pullets, which were served roasted, are mentioned frequently. Roasting is obviously the preferred method of cooking, followed by making pies, tarts and pasties. He enjoyed a sauce invented by the Duke of York (the future James II) who had got it from the Spanish ambassador, ‘made from parsley and dry toast beat in a mortar together with vinegar, salt and a little pepper’.
We gain some idea of what a celebratory dinner might be for a comfortably off middle-class family if we look at the menu that Pepys provided in 1663 for his annual anniversary of his operation of cutting the stone, which had taken place on 26 March. (The removal of a bladder stone was a common one, but dangerous and exceedingly painful.) There were eight guests and the ten of them ate a ‘Fricasse of rabbets and chicken – 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 Lampry pie, a most rare pie – a dish of anchovies – good wine of several sorts; and all things mighty noble and to my great content.’27 At first glance this seems a great deal of food: there are two roasts, mutton and lamb and perhaps five roasted pigeons, but between ten people, over conversation and wine, it would go quickly. It was customary to serve boiled meats first, then the roasted, then the baked and finally the pies, tarts and dishes of fruit and sweetmeats. As to the rest, such as the fricassée, this would probably have been the simplest form of made-up dish, as they had only the one cook who must have been worked off her feet that evening; she had to serve at the table as well, for she had no temporary cook to help her, as had happened on other anniversaries.
For the fricassée the rabbit and chicken would have been jointed, floured, then fried in butter and when tender, wine, nutmeg and cream added. For our tastes the fact that the courses seem so similar (both courses have fish, pies and meat) seems odd. However, they would have arrived as they were cooked; the roasts would have been put on the table to pick at while another dish was still being finished in the kitchen. The lamprey pies were made in Wales and sent to London, the lobsters were bought already boiled and served cold. The pies also could have been bought ready made, for there were pork pies from the north, veal and ham pies from the midlands, steak and kidney pies, chicken pies, eel pies from the Lake District and venison and pigeon pies. Pie moulds made out of sycamore were made in all sizes, the pastry was wrapped around them, decorated, then the mould was lifted out and the centre filled. Flat pies were made in earthenware, slipglazed shallow dishes.
The year before Pepys had given his guests a brace of stewed carps, six roasted chickens, hot salmon and for a first course a spinach tansy and two ox tongues. The tansy was eggs and cream, with the juice of the spinach (to colour it) thickened with a little breadcrumb and flavoured with nutmeg. (Tansy leaves, a very bitter herb Tanacetum vulgare, once flavoured this dish. It was eaten for medicinal reasons and it was finished by being strewn with sugar.) In 1660 Pepys’ wife had had a new oven and he found her making ‘pyes and tarts’ but ‘not knowing the nature of it did heat it too hot and so did a little overbake her things, but knows how to do better another time’. A great deal of guesswork and experiment must have gone on when a wood-fired oven was new; only experience would inform the cook how the oven would work.
Over those few years after the Restoration Pepys records visits to taverns and cookshops where he ate various foods like gammon and cheesecakes; sausages washed down with raspberry sack; roasted pork, or ox tongue; he breakfasted on cold turkey-pie and a goose then later ate a venison pasty which he detected had been made from beef – Pepys was not pleased. Yet this was a common practice, and indeed Robert May gives instructions ‘to bake beef, red-Deer fashion in Pies or Pasties either Surloin, Brisket, Buttock, or Fillet, larded or not’. Seasoning it correctly might have been part of the secret; May tells you to add ginger, nutmegs, cloves and bay leaves.
At the Mulberry Garden in April 1663 Pepys is treated by a Mr Sheres to a Spanish Oleo which he finds a very noble dish; he is given one by the Spanish Ambassador a month later, but he did not think highly of it. The oleo (or olio) was a highly fashionable dish of the century; essentially, it was a spiced stew of various meats and vegetables, though this description makes it seem mundane, the very last epithet it should attract. It was immensely popular in Paris and had been brought over to England by Charles II; the dish stayed in favour until the end of the seventeenth century, and then seems to have passed away with the decline of the Stuart monarchy, although some of the cookery writers of the next century, with their eye on the nobility such as Charles Carter, include it in their books. The name derived from olio podrida, the Latin word olla meaning a cooking pot. The dish was a movable feast, as almost anything could be added: in May’s Olio Royal there is mutton, veal, twelve baby pigeons, eight baby chickens, a piece of larded bacon, a minced roast capon, oranges, mace, cloves, anchovies, nutmeg, beef marrow, sage and butter, together with artichokes, asparagus, skirrets, pistachios, sheep’s tongues, wine, carved lemons, spinach and parsley. He continues with a list of various garnishes, which include cocks’ combs. This indeed, is a recipe for royalty and it was unlikely to be anything like the one Pepys enjoyed. But May’s everyday recipe for the dish, which includes Bologna sausages, as well as root vegetables and cabbage, is also highly complicated. What was certain was that an oleo included different game birds, poultry and mutton or beef, with root vegetables, spinach and sorrel and depending on the grandeur of the company artichokes, asparagus, saffron and almonds could also be added.
How interesting that Pepys refers to it as ‘a noble dish’, for that is what it had become, a dish that in using all the most expensive ingredients was a luxury. Yet in essence this was a dish of the Spanish peasant, where anything available was put into a large cauldron and simmered for hours. John Evelyn gives two recipes for oleo: one, which he refers to as the French version, is merely an excellent pease pottage, flavoured with garlic, coriander, butter, parsley and onion. His ‘Spanish Olio’ is more recognisable, having beef, bacon, pork, a neck of mutton, a knuckle of veal, a pullet or three pigeons boiled with cabbage, ginger, nutmeg, cloves and turnips. These are modest recipes, eschewing the grandeur of May’s. Another earlier recipe is from Sir Kenelm Digby, and entitled ‘A Plain but Good Spanish Oglia’; it is the only one to mention Garavanzas (chick peas), which would have been essential to the original Spanish recipe. Digby also likes to add a venison piecrust to the stew; otherwise it is similar to Evelyn’s and must have been very like the one that Pepys ate.
Since Cromwell had banished them, Friday and Lenten fasts were no longer observed (except by the Roman Catholic families who were discreet in such habits) but Pepys and his milieu ate fish often. There were fishmongers like Pepys’ Uncle Wight who were often very wealthy men and their livery company was an important city company. The English and Scottish fishing fleets supplied London with herring, cod, ling and haddock, a portion of it always dried and salted. Shellfish was plentiful and cheap and Pepys frequently mentions eating oysters and lobsters. The most expensive fish were the freshwater varieties such as salmon, pike and perch, which had to be kept fresh in tanks and watercarts. Lobsters, crayfish and prawns were made into patties, mixed with egg, butter, minced anchovy (which were sent in barrels from Italy) and lemon, wrapped in pastry and baked. On a visit to Hungerford, Pepys eats eels, trout and crayfish straight from the river. On a dinner with Sir W. Batten he eats a ling and herring pie and remarks how very good it is; at Deptford he has some cod and prawns in Fishstreet. Were the prawns potted like shrimps? May has a recipe which uses wine, nutmeg, orange juice and butter. Possibly not, for Pepys would have been certain to have mentioned it. It was customary to treat unexpected guests with anchovies and wine at all times of the day; anchovies were always served at dinner parties among the dishes in the second course. Pepys often returned home with a barrel of oysters; oysters were eaten as snacks in the street and were often served as a preliminary appetiser to the main meal.
The main meal of the day was dinner, which was eaten at midday – Pepys notes: ‘At noon home to dinner’. If there were guests and some of them arrived late, as did happen, they sat down in the afternoon. Sometimes his own work kept him late and he did not dine until four when it would be at a tavern. Breakfast was a ‘morning draught’ of beer, ale or wine; solid food might be taken any time before eleven and would be cold meats, bread and butter. On several occasions he takes chocolate instead of ale, showing that he is in the midst of the transition between the medieval start to the day and what would be customary in the eighteenth century. Supper, taken almost any time in the evening, would also be a cold meal; meats cut from the carcasses of dinner, cheese, bread and butter. Entertaining at home is something that Pepys obviously enjoys, but it is quite informal; friends quite often just turn up and cards are generally played after dinner.
He entirely ignores fast days: in 1661 he records his intention of keeping Lent, but within a month he weakens, finding others who continue to keep it rather ridiculous. The Restoration court, in its fierce anti-Cromwellian stance and sympathy with France and Roman Catholicism, would want to observe Lent and other fast days, but it is too hedonist in spirit to care; Pepys who is Protestant is indifferent, so as we have seen, though fish is eaten and enjoyed, it is no longer eaten as food for fasting.
How very familiar this food is becoming: the medieval influences have waned, and are only discernible now in dishes such as the Tansy. The flavourings of spices are less, except for the Oleo, but spices are still expensive. This is cooking for an expanding class of bourgeoisie, a thriving commercial class eager for success and social position and not hidebound by too strict rules governing the way they dined. Yet certain dishes like venison are designed more for entertaining than are others, and there is an emphasis on a display of plate, folded napkins and what was to be worn when they visited the theatre or Hyde Park. It is a world we recognise very easily.
John Evelyn
John Evelyn (1620-1706) was an intellectual: his architectural and environmental treatises were prophetic; in matters of aesthetics he was a purist, so one would expect his tastes in food to be refined; he is the first writer on food to communicate ideals and to treat food as another cultural pursuit. His garden at Sayes Court was organised to give a mixed green salad every day of the year; he had a calendar drawn up to help the gardener, which was published in 1664 and went into ten editions. When Denis Papin, a refugee from Huguenot persecution and a member of the Royal Society, demonstrated his pressure cooker, the Digester, Evelyn gave an account of the meal they all ate: ‘This philosophical supper raised much mirth amongst us, and exceedingly pleased all the company.’
In 1685 he wrote to his sister warning her against ‘trash and sweetmeats which have chiefly been the cause of [his wife] Mary’s death. She eat those filthy things so constantly at My lady Falkland’s that it was impossible to overcome the tough phlegm that had bred in her.’ Nowhere in his writings are there the expressions of delight and greed that so humanise the diary of Pepys. Evelyn sees food much more as a scientist might, noting its characteristics, what affects it and how it flourishes. This is highly civilised food; he also sees very clearly the relationship between food and health, and his Acetaria is a prose hymn to salad growing and eating.
Evelyn was travelling in Europe through much of the time of the Civil War: he eats his first truffles in Vienne in France, and notes that in Bologna, apart from the famous sausages and great quantities of Parmesan cheese, they also sell botargo28 and caviare and how agreeable the smell in the streets was. In Venice he loves the small oysters similar to the ones at Colchester; in Paris for dinner at Lord Stanhops, while complaining at the amount drunk he also takes down a recipe for seasoning cherries (stewed in butter and sugar on white bread). Back home in Bristol he notes down the method of refining sugar and casting it into loaves, where the workers also fried eggs in the sugar furnace and drank them with Spanish wine. In Wiltshire he dined with friends at Hungerford and was fascinated by the way they speared the trout at night; the fish were drawn to a light at the stern of the boat. He had an excellent dinner there of pigeons, rabbits and fowl in abundance. In Colchester he observes the eringo industry where the giant roots were dug up on the seashore, then taken away to be peeled, cut and candied. Eryngium maritum (eringo) grows on the seashore and its phallic-like roots, when boiled, taste like chestnuts and was thought to be an aphrodisiac. The industry at Colchester was thriving until the nineteenth century when the inhibitions of that age made it unpopular.
In August 1668 at a reception given by Charles II for the French Ambassador, Colbert, he sees his first King-Pine: ‘His Majestie having cut it up, was pleased to give me a piece off his owne plate to tast of, but in my opinion it falls short of those ravishing varieties of deliciousnesse … but possibly it might be (& certainly was) much impaired on coming so farr: it has yet a gratefull acidity, but tasts more of the Quince and Melon.’ Ten years later he dines with the Portuguese Ambassador and finds the food disappointing: ‘Besids a good Olio the dishes were trifling, hashed and Condited29 after their way, not at all fit for an English stomac, which is for solid meate; there was yet good fowle but roaste to Coale; nor were the sweetmeates good.’ It is not the lack of meat that Evelyn complains of, but the way it is cooked in a sauce; one sees here clearly how he is associating a simple roast with an English style.
How much happier Evelyn is in 1681 when he stays at the estate of Mr Denzil Onslow at Purford where there was much company and an extraordinary feast. What made it so remarkable, he notes, is that everything came from the Estate: venison, rabbits, hares, pheasants, partridge, pigeons, quail, poultry and fresh fish. It was this relationship between the cultivation of a well-managed estate and the produce harvested from it that so fascinated Evelyn. In 1685 he stays with Lord Clarendon at Swallowfield in Berkshire where ‘the gardens and waters’ as elegant as ‘tis possible to make … with art and industry and no means expenses, my Lady being so extraordinary skill’d in the flowry part & the diligence of my Lord in the planting’. He enthuses over the orchards, the fishponds and the kitchen gardens and one can almost see him creating recipes from the produce he sees growing.
The relationship between the animal and the food was, of course, so much more intimate then, than now. In a letter from his wife, Mary instructs him:
When the next hog is killed, the butcher should cut a little more flesh to the chine, and not chop off the hog’s snout from the head. I shall be glad Margaret should send some part of the sauce when she sends hog puddings, spare rib and chine. Let the gardener know the apples were very well packed and kept from bruising, but he laid too much hay between the rows, so that we have fewer apples than he might have sent.
Was there no pleasing Mary, one wonders? There is evidence that Mary was a very good cook; what is more she believed in the efficacy of food in itself. She had commented to her husband when travelling down to Bath: ‘I find discreet hospitality assists very much towards governing the nation, for common people are led by the mouth with moderate management, and without a little popularity they are perfect mules and ungovernable.’30
Evelyn’s very personal manuscript recipe book was a collection he began shortly after his travels in France and Italy, which he added to at intervals throughout his life. He collected them from members of his family, and from friends: there is a gooseberry wine recipe from Sir Christopher Wren; from the English Ambassador in Madrid we learn how to make an air-dried sausage; from Lady Harrington, a cake; and from Lady Fitzharding, a recipe for puffs. This is a sweet pastry made with wine, milk and many eggs, cut into small pieces then fried in butter, and served strewn with more sugar (like a flavoured pâté a choux, fried instead of baked). A recipe titled Manjar Blanc, given to Evelyn by the Duke of Arcoat’s cook in Madrid, is our old friend mawmenny. This recipe owes much to the original one: the hen’s flesh is pulled into pieces like thread, then washed, then milk and rice flour are added with sugar, salt and orange flower water; it is boiled until it is thick, left to get cold, then sliced. In an earlier recipe for the same dish, Evelyn notes that it will keep for four to six days and is excellent food for a journey. What has been omitted from both recipes is all the extra spicing, and especially the ginger, which the original Arabic recipe once had. It is interesting, however, that it is still served to the nobility some 200 years after the Moors have left Spain. Other remnants of medieval cookery that Evelyn includes are almond cakes, puddings, custards and creams.
There are tips on how to spit-roast a turkey, and on how to bake venison or beef to keep all the year. They are cooked in spices and sugar and when tender placed in a pot with a weight on top, then covered and sealed with clarified butter. There are two recipes for neat’s tongue pies: in one the cooked meat is minced, mixed with beef suet. dried fruit, apple, rosewater and verjuice, aniseed and orange peel; in the second recipe the cooked meat is sliced, then marinaded in verjuice with nutmeg, mace and cinnamon, then placed in the pie with butter. There are recipes for stewing oysters, for making cheesecakes, syllabubs and cream tarts, for pickling capers, walnuts and mushrooms, and to make rice, oatmeal and bread puddings. All in all, it is an exciting collection, which could still be used today with very small adjustments.
That this collection includes medieval recipes owes more to Evelyn’s friends and colleagues, who all came from the nobility or foreign diplomacy, than to his own chosen style of living. For in his Acetaria, perhaps one of the finest books ever written on vegetables, he shows he is a sensitive cook, concerned never to ruin a vegetable, and critical of French methods of cutting vegetables into contrived shapes merely to adorn a salad. However, he still reviews plants and their effect on our health through the structure of the medieval four humours. Lettuce is cold and moist for example while fennel is aromatic, hot and dry. Small, young artichokes are fried in butter and served with fried crisp parsley. Cabbage must be moderately boiled, clary should be added to omelettes with cream, only young nettle tops should be used in soups, cucumbers should be dressed with orange or lemon juice and oil, salt and pepper, and boiled cucumber should be eaten with vinegar and honey. Sadly, he does not allow garlic into his salads, for it offends not only the ladies: it has by now become associated with the poor; garlic should be kept for northern rustics ‘especially living in uliginous and moist places’. He describes many different varieties of lettuce, a ‘dwarf kind, the oak leaf, Roman, shell, and Silesian, hard and crimp (esteemed of the best and rarest) with divers more’. He notes that three or four of these, with unblanched endive, succory and purslane, were the only salad ever served at the best tables.
Evelyn praises the Emperor Tacitus who was satisfied with a salad and a small chicken; frugality for Evelyn is equated with a natural appetite and an honest meal is defined as without so much as a grain of exotic spice. He wanted a salad to be composed harmoniously like music, counterbalancing natural flavours with judicious seasoning from a restricted range of condiments. He is, in fact, taking another step forward in defining an English temperament in food, though not necessarily British.
The Rise of Capitalism
In 1673 the French Ambassador had to leave his house because it was being knocked down to make way for new buildings. He looked in vain for new lodgings and found it difficult as most of the large houses had been torn down to make way for shops, or small lodgings for merchants; he complained there were very few to let and those that were charged exorbitant prices. In 1663 the mercers numbered only about fifty or sixty in the whole city, by the end of the century there were 300 or 400.
Becoming a shopkeeper, generally moving one rung up the ladder from a stallholder, was the quickest way to become wealthy. Shops of all categories came to dominate and devour the town. Luxury shops had walls covered in mirrors and gilded columns, bronze ornaments and candelabra and glass windows, which much impressed the French; they displayed the goods to the passers-by, but also kept the dust off. Defoe mocked fashion in the Weekly Review in 1708: ‘Such is the power of a mode as we saw our persons of quality dressed in Indian carpets.’ He was also amused by the fact that maidservants took to the cheap Indian carpets with great enthusiasm, which were then taken up by their mistresses, so that there was a general blurring of status.
London expanded rapidly, as it became the potentially attractive goal for labourers who were out of work, vagabonds and itinerants, uprooted from the countryside because of enclosures committed by avaricious landowners. The government’s policy on how to get rid of the malcontents was wishful thinking; an argument for colonising Ireland in 1594 was that the poor and seditious could be exiled there from the City of London, and exactly the same reasons were given a little later for colonising Virginia.
By the second half of the seventeenth century London was at the centre of world trade: the navy had been built up in the years of the Interregnum to become a strong trading force; and Britain, as the hub of a growing empire, like ancient Rome before it, began to think of the world as its larder – an attitude that would grow considerably throughout the next few hundred years. London had also become the nucleus for all the trading goods for the British Isles, as it held a virtual monopoly on all exports and imports controlling the production and redistribution over the island. There were over 1,000 miles of navigable rivers, and few people now lived more than fifteen miles from a road, which began to improve with the toll system. Defoe points out that once a manufactured product had been finished in some county outside London, it was then sent to London to a warehouse keeper who sold it either to a London shopkeeper who retailed it, or to an export merchant, or to a wholesaler who distributed it for retailing elsewhere in the various regions of England. As each middleman took his cut so the final price of the product rose. Defoe in The Complete English Tradesman, who saw only benefit and good come from such a system, explained: ‘The sheepmaster who shears and sells the fleece, and the shopkeeper who sells the cloth or clothes ready made, by retail, are the first and last tradesmen concerned in the whole trade; and the more hands this manufacture … passes through either in the workmanship or carriage, or sale of the goods … so much the greater benefit is that manufacture to the public stock of the nation, because the employment of the people is the great and main benefit of the Kingdom.’
Because of this affluence a new being stepped onto the stage – the parvenu. For the first time a poor man born of humble parentage could live very comfortably and occasionally amass a huge fortune. Great wealth could accrue through trade in the East India Company and the New World colonies. These new affluent middle classes brought a certain structure into the daily life of society, and the arrangement of our meals; breakfast, lunch and dinner became set within this century.
This was the century that saw the beginnings of consumerism: another familiar figure entered the world stage, the Joneses, the couple that everyone had to keep up with. Servants mimicking their masters is an age old phenomenon; one rank in society eager to join a higher one is just as old. This was the first time in history, however, that such a desire could be crowned with success. Social mobility could be achieved and to do so social imitation and emulative spending began on a scale never imagined before. The Joneses play a significant part in any history of food. At the end of the seventeenth century there was an explosion of industrialised objects.
Who bought the cottons, woollens, linens and silks of the burgeoning textile industries? Who consumed the massive increases in beer production? Who bought the crockery which poured from the Staffordshire potteries? Who bought the buckles, the buttons, the pins and the minor metal products on which Birmingham fortunes were built? Who bought the Sheffield cutlery, the books from the booming publishers, the women’s journals, the children’s toys, the products of the nurseryman? Which families purchased the products of the early consumer industries?31
All these goods were bought by the emerging middle classes, people neither very poor nor very rich, people who were benefiting from jobs in trade and merchandise, the more substantial farmers, the new engineers, clerks and accountants who were all part of the Industrial Revolution that had only just begun. In these last few years of the seventeenth century industry was creating thousands of non-essential goods, frivolities like pins, buttons, lace, brooches and toothpicks, flowering plants, novels, games and table ornaments. Food is the perfect commodity to show who you are, your social position, your wealth, taste and sophistication. The route which food was now to take was firmly in the hands of this new powerful class, unlike France where the development of what happened to food was limited to the royal kitchens and the ingenuity of the 1,000 chefs kept by Louis XIV: ‘The development of an absolutist court-society in England was nipped in the bud in the mid-seventeenth century, while that in France continued to develop for another century and a half.’32
Capitalism redefined gender. Our ideas of what is male and female were created in the seventeenth century: the female bimbo was born and the male chauvinist gained respectability. To be an entrepreneur you were bellicose and competitive, while your wife was a status symbol wearing the silks and satins that your commercial labours had won for her, living within a stylish house filled with elegant furniture which reflected on how astute and shrewd your business sense was. Before, as we have seen, the wives of country landowners were hard-working people running large estates and equal in business acumen with their husbands. Now the wives’ terrain was limited to clothes, food and entertainment, the genteel arts of embroidery and needlework. The accounts were the duty of a clerk, while farmworkers worked the scythes and winnowed the corn, jobs that a century before she had controlled and helped at. The sight of a slaughtered beast now made her faint; the art of stilling and making aqua vitaes was yet another duty that went to the housekeeper, as did drying fruits and making quince jelly and damson preserve, though she would express her delight when the finished products were displayed to her. She was no longer a skilled nurse who knew how to apply poultices and tie bandages, nor did she know a thing about the medicinal qualities of herbs that grew profusely around her in the woods and fields of her estate. She was a status symbol for her husband of leisure and wealth.
New Thoughts on Farming33
The spread of new crops and new systems of farming was led by a few gentleman farmers at the end of the sixteenth century, the grandsons and great-grandsons of the new minor nobility who swept in after the Wars of the Roses, and were intrigued by exploring ways to improve their estates and seeing them efficiently administered. They wrote books on husbandry, and this new literature opened men’s eyes to greater possibilities. English landlords and large farmers had seen that when food rose in price there was an obvious demand which would continue to grow, bringing with it new problems and benefits. These new writers finished up as farmers, eager to work the plough themselves and not just watch their servants doing so. Thomas Tusser farmed at Braham Hall in Suffolk. Gervase Markham was both scholar and soldier, yet valued being a husbandman most of all. He translated works from the French and German, he wrote carefully and clearly, and seemed always aware that the readers for whom he was writing were not accustomed to receiving instructions from books but by word of mouth. By 1637 this viewpoint and missionary purpose had become commonplace among writers in all branches of agriculture.34 In 1620 the ship Supply, taking stores to Virginia, included Markham’s works and others on husbandry and there was advise to guard the books well.
In 1616 Markham underlined the financial rewards to be earned by those who attended to the refined tastes of the well-to-do in foodstuffs. He wrote: ‘Such cooks as can contrive and make of some one stuff, either by adding of some few things (and those not costly), or else by their labour or manner of preparing many both pleasant and wholesome dishes, are had in high account and estimation.’
By 1660 farmers were exploiting many more ways of making a living than at the turn of the century. They had discovered that efficiently reared swine, pigeons, turkeys, ducks and bees could all make money; that there were more profitable crops than corn, liquorice could earn £200 an acre, saffron £40, mustard £30, carrots on sand made many small fortunes. Coleseed when crushed for oil left a residue for making rape cake to be fed to milking cows. There was a passion for farming rabbits. It was reckoned that one could keep 200 couples worth £20 per annum at a cost of only £2.
After the Restoration, however, this spirit of exploration was tempered. The new edition of Ralph Austen’s Treatise of Fruit Trees was censored; no longer did it say that there was an urgent need to employ the poor and that this was a major justification in planting new orchards; now the prime consideration was the financial profit to the grower. The Royal Society was founded in 1659 and in 1662 John Beale proposed the growing of cider fruit all over England. In March 1663 Mr Buckland, a Somerset gentleman, proposed that potatoes be planted throughout England. Mr Boyle described how potatoes had saved thousands of poor from starving in Ireland. They were then being recommended as vegetables to make flour with; the flour could be mixed with wheat and be used in bread, cakes and pastry, while any over would probably do as a feed for poultry and other livestock. The committee agreed to urge all members of the Society who owned land to begin planting potatoes and persuade their friends to do the same. John Evelyn agreed to insert some instructions on growing them in a treatise he was writing on trees. When Evelyn’s Sylva was published it passed through many editions. He went on, encouraged by the Society, to write Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets, which drew on information given by Charles II’s principal gardener, Mr London. The Royal Society’s activities were limited in their impact, however; it only had around 200 members and most of them lived in London; they were aristocrats, courtiers, gentlemen, doctors, scholars and clerics, and when there was a lecture on agricultural matters the audience was tiny.
By the end of the century the range of topics covered in new books was impressive. Gentlemen now favoured orchards, vineyards, vegetable gardens, woodland plantations, deer parks, fishponds, rabbit warrens and dovecotes. The middle ranks of yeomen and husbandmen favoured orchards and hops, coleseed and dye crops, while smallholders turned to vegetable gardening, growing onions, artichokes, asparagus, saffron and liquorice, and some even that new vegetable – the potato.
After 1640 a growth in cattle droves with Scotland had begun, and briefly Ireland joined Wales as a source of supply for English markets. In the 1630s grain production hardly ever reached a surplus, but by 1750, the peak year, grain exports were one-tenth of the domestic output. There was a startling growth in imports of sugar, coffee and chocolate throughout the seventeenth century, and in the following century in tea and rum. Gregory King analysed the average household food expenditure of 1695 in percentages: the greatest amount, twenty-seven, was spent on ale and beer; twenty was spent on bread and cereals; meat took fifteen and dairy produce eleven; fish, fowls and eggs took eight and wine and spirits six; fruit, roots and garden produce accounted for five per cent, and the same was spent on salt, oils and other groceries.
Much of the new money and the variety of produce were due to new agricultural techniques and, with the increasing enclosures, the acreage in which to employ them. New plants also played their part. Many of the new ideas had been suggested in Cromwell’s time.35 In 1645 Sir Richard Weston described the field cultivation of artificial grasses and turnips in Brabant and Flanders in a circulated manuscript, which was then printed in 1650; its ideas were so warmly received that another printing happened the following year. The most influential change was to the fodder crops; two legumes, sainfoin and clover, and the turnip were introduced. Sainfoin, a perennial herb (Onobrychis sativa) was established in Worcestershire in 1650; clover was grown all over the south, and floated water meadows also began to be used. Dutch immigrants brought the turnip to Norwich soon after 1565, but by the end of the seventeenth century it was grown all over south-eastern England; in the following century it moved down towards Cornwall. The Norfolk four-course shift of wheat, turnips, barley and clover was used on new land enclosed by Acts of Parliament, which were at their zenith in the eighteenth century. Now all stock could be fed over winter; there was the forced grass from the water meadows, with the irrigation of streamside pasture; the harvest of sainfoin, clover and turnips increased the supply of feed and also gave more dung to the land. Both livestock, where there were advances in breeding, and cereal production rose steadily.
Farming was not without its snobbery; it was considered that many of the new farmers had risen from ‘servants of the lowest class and never had the opportunity to look beyond the limits of their immediate birth and servitude. Their knowledge is of course confined and the spirit of improvement deeply buried under an accumulation of custom and prejudice.’36
Cows’ Milk
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, towns began to grow enormously, and the milking of a dairy herd was done in their centres. Often the cows were driven around the streets and milked at the door, a practice that was popular as the housewife could clearly see that no water was added. The best milk in London was from the cows seen grazing in St James’s Park, where the milk could be bought and drunk on the spot. Asses’ milk was still considered the most efficacious, especially for invalids and young children. Whey and buttermilk were also popular drinks sold in the streets.
Women’s milk was still the most highly prized and wet nurses were employed for invalids and old people. Pepys tells of hearing a story from Dr Whistler on 21 November 1667: ‘… of Dr Cayus that built Key’s College: that being very old and lived only at that time on women’s milk, he, while he fed upon the milk of an angry fretful woman, was so himself; and then being advised to take of a good-natured patient woman, he did become so, beyond the temper of his age.’37 This story is told by Dr Thomas Moffett in Healths Improvement (1655) where he makes it clear that Dr Cayus sucked the woman’s breast. Moffett adds, ‘Similarly, what made Jupiter and Aegystus so lecherous, but that they were chiefly fed with goats milk?’ Obviously, the concept of ‘we are what we eat’ goes back centuries.
Cows’ milk was now used in puddings and desserts, ousting the use of almond milk almost completely, so there was a steady rise in milk consumption. Milk puddings, mixed then heated and baked with bread, sago, rice and oatmeal, sugar and spices, became almost a daily staple. The rich continued to use cream: cabbage cream was still a favourite, for it appeared in so many recipe books in much the same form as earlier. White leach, that medieval favourite, also remained popular: cream flavoured with musk, rose water mixed with isinglass or hartshorn to set it firm, poured into a mould and then sliced and decorated when served.
Other fruit creams appeared this century, which remain popular today, such as raspberry cream, where the juice of raspberries was mixed with beaten egg whites, sugar, cream and lemon. This simple recipe was made with gooseberries and currants, even sorrel; the recipe was akin to the ‘foole’ made with cream, egg yolks and flavouring. One recipe suggest sippets dipped in cream should be put at the bottom of the dish before the cream, egg yolks, rosewater, sugar and lemon are added, which makes the ‘foole’ into what would soon be called a trifle.
Other popular cream and milk drinks were possets, which could be taken hot or warm. They were sweetened and spiced, then curdled with hot ale or wine. There were rich ones made with cream and egg yolks with added sherry. Others, once fast-day drinks, were made with almond milk, and obviously so well liked that they were retained after the Reformation.
A Coronation and Patrick Lamb, Court Cook
An account of the feast at the coronation of James II appears in a book38 which is the history of the coronation itself; it has details of Their Majesties’ most splendid processions and their royal and magnificent feast in Westminster Hall. There were 145 dishes, but Their Majesties also had served to them thirty more, a mixture of hot and cold. The list begins with pistachio creams served in glasses, cold of course, as were the pickled oysters, salad, jelly, Portugal eggs, egg pies, a whole salmon, cold pheasants, pigeon pies, crabs, Dutch beef, scollops, salamagundy, botargo, sturgeon, cucumbers, periwinkels, gherkins, caviar, olives, prawns, samphire and Trotter pie. Of the hot dishes there were oyster pies, rabbit ragout, roasted capons, turkey chicks, ducklings, leverets, geese, beef à la royale, quails, three fawns, one larded, Bolonia sausages, mushrooms, veal, asparagus (the month is April so the asparagus was forced especially for the occasion), spinach tart and bacon pie. Of the sweet dishes there was cold blancmange in shells, gooseberry and taffata tarts, gooseberry and apricot tart, sweetmeats, mangoes, glasses of lemon jelly and cheese cakes. This impressive spread is reminiscent of Robert May and his uneasy combination of medieval splendour and rustic simplicity, for on the same table foods like caviare and black pudding nestle together.
Each ritual is painstakingly detailed:
Then 32 dishes of Hot Meat, brought up by Gentlemen Pensioners Bareheaded; which service should have been performed by Knights of the Bath, had any been created at this Coronation: After which there were brought up a Supply of 14 dishes more of hot meat by Private Gentlemen. Then followed the mess of pottage, or Gruel, called Dillegrout, prepared by Patrick Lamb Esqu; the King’s Master Cook, and brought up to the table by John Leigh Esqu; in pursuance of his claim as Lord of the Manor of Addington in Surrey.
Dillegrout was a white soup made from dill leaves; it was traditionally served because it was thought that William the Conqueror gave to his cook, Tezelin, the lordship of the Manor of Addington, as a reward for creating the soup. From then on dill was an important herb in the kitchen garden and used in soups and sauces.
Patrick Lamb was, as his frontispiece to his Royal Cookery or, The Compleat Court-Cook, states: ‘for near fifty years Master-Cook to their late Majesties, King Charles II, King James II, King William and Queen Mary and Queen Anne’. His book, published in 1710, contains: ‘the choicest recipes in all the several branches of cookery, viz. for making Soops, Biques, Olio’s, Terrines, Surtouts, Puptons, Ragoos, Forc’d Meats, Sauces, Pattys, Pies, Tarts, Tansies, Cakes, Puddings, Jellies, etc.’
In the preface there are certain explanations such as ‘Bisque is a soop with a Ragoo in it. Blanc-manger signifies white food, a sort of Jelly so called.’ (So this is what mawmenny has come to.)
Braise is a certain way of stewing most sorts of fish as well as flesh, which extremely heightens the tastes of them and is very much in vogue. The several ways of seeing it may be seen in the receipts. Court-Bouillon is a certain way of boiling any large fish. Entremets are the lesser sort of dishes that compose the courses. Hors-d’Oeuvres are the choice little dishes or plates that are served in between the courses at banquets and Entertainments.
A Surtout was a French dish; the word means overcoat, or a centrepiece on a dinner table, such as pigeons (though it could be any game bird) stuffed then larded with veal, wrapped up in paper (hence the overcoat), roasted then served with a ragout or coulis. On anchovies, he tells us that they are commonly eaten as a salad with sliced lemon, capers and olives, but he adds he also makes a ‘ramoulade’ from a coulis of anchovies which can be added to ragouts. A dictionary of 1725 gives a more detailed description of a ‘ramoulade’ as being chopped anchovies mixed with chopped parsley, capers, pepper, salt, oil, vinegar, lemon juice and nutmeg, to be sprinkled on fish.
Puptons (the word comes from the French pupe, meaning chrysalis or case) were a dish long gone out of favour, but they sound deliciously intriguing; you could make them from game birds, fish or even fruit. A forcemeat stuffing is made, which is used like pastry – hence it is wrapped like a chrysalis. It is bound with eggs, the pigeons are laid on it and then more forcemeat stuffing is laid over like a pastry covering and it is baked. Often puptons were made from various fish; a salmon and carp stuffing was placed at the bottom of a dish; this was layered with mushrooms and slices of salmon, crayfish tails and asparagus tips, then more stuffing covered it all; then it was protected with paper and baked. Before serving, the paper was peeled off, a hole was made in the centre and a crayfish coulis poured in. The fruit puptons seem to be less complicated; they could be merely an apple purée mixed with egg yolks, breadcrumbs, flavoured with sugar and cinnamon, baked slowly in a mould and then turned out.
Lamb gives seven recipes for artichokes: the bottoms could be fried in egg and breadcrumbs, then served with butter and lemon; or dipped in egg and flour, fried in butter and served with fried parsley; or boiled and eaten with nutmeg-flavoured butter. Very young artichokes could be cut in quarters, then blanched and served with pepper and salt; or boiled, then cooked in cream with chives and parsley, and the sauce thickened with egg yolks. A purée could be made from them, and they could also be pickled. There are four recipes for asparagus: cooked in cream and herbs, in broth with a mutton gravy flavoured with lemon, eaten with a butter sauce thickened with egg yolk or pickled.
Bain-marie was then a beef consommé, made from beef, veal and mutton, and a partridge and capon stuffed with rice; it was boiled slowly for five hours, then the broth was skimmed, sieved and served with crusts of bread. Beef could be braised, the fat cut away, larded with bacon, flavoured with spices, herbs, onions and mushrooms, then stewed in a tightly fitting pan and served with a ragout of cardoons, succory39 or celery, or of roasted onions or cucumber.
Beef is also stuffed before being roasted, stuffed with a salpicon, which is referred to as a sort of ragout. It is an amazing mixture of ingredients: ham, breast of chickens, livers, sweetbreads, mushrooms, truffles, cucumbers, chives, onions, and parsley, all minced and cooked with herbs, pepper and salt, bound and moistened with a coulis of veal or ham. The beef is stuffed between the skin and the bone and then sewn together. At serving the skin is taken away and the stuffing is eaten with a spoon.
A ‘cullis’, from the French coulis, was an incredibly strong broth, used, as it is today, as a finishing sauce, but also added to soups for extra flavour and as a thickener. Lamb gives many recipes for different kinds of cullis. Though they are all sieved they would have thickened very slightly as bread crusts were used in their making. His cullis for adding to flesh-soops was made from sirloin of beef roasted very brown then ground into a paste with a mortar with carcasses of partridges and other fowl, bread crusts cooked in a pan with added gravy and strong broth, seasoned with salt, pepper, cloves, thyme, lemon slices and basil, which is all boiled again for another two or three minutes, then sieved and added to soup with more lemon juice. Lamb places no reliance on verjuice, though it was added to eggs in one recipe before they were scrambled. Lemons are added for a huge range of dishes, however, either their juice or in slices; obviously enough lemons were now being imported from Spain and elsewhere to make verjuice almost redundant, although John Evelyn notes it as an ingredient quite frequently. There were cullis for partridge, ducks, capon and pigeons. A white cullis was made from a roast pullet, sweet almonds, veal, ham, onion, carrot and parsnip and the yolks of four hard boiled eggs mixed with good broth seasoned with truffles, mushrooms, leek, parsley and basil, all cooked and pounded together, and then sieved. There was another white cullis made from fish, and one made from vegetable roots to add to vegetable soups. The intensity of flavour, though there are no instructions for reducing the broth, must still have been astonishing, adding much greater depth to the dishes.
Lamb stuffs cabbage in a manner familiar to us with a stuffing made from bacon, veal, breadcrumbs and cheese. Cauliflowers were cooked quickly, then served with a butter, lemon and nutmeg sauce. A capon was braised with a cullis of crayfish, or a cullis of ham with a ragout of oysters. There is a ‘fricassy’ of chicken cooked in butter with mushrooms, truffles and cock-combs poached in strong broth, then finished with two glasses of champagne and thickened with egg yolks. Cocks-combs were much used in ragouts and bisques; they were also sometimes split, then stuffed and fried. They remained prominent in French cooking until the last century, when their use died out after the First World War. (Larousse comments: ‘Fleshy excrescence often voluminous, found on the heads of cocks. It is used chiefly as a garnish for entrées.’) They had to be prepared by washing the blood from out of them, blanched, skinned, then poached in a court bouillon for 35 minutes; then they were finally prepared and cooked in whichever manner selected.
Ducks are cooked with oranges, with succory, celery, oysters, cucumbers and olives and served with green peas. A daube is made with beef, green goose or veal, to be eaten cold. There are poached eggs on a bed of cooked lettuce with a cullis of crayfish. Egg yolks are beaten into a strong veal and ham broth, cooked in cream thickened with pounded almonds, poached over cucumbers and crayfish or celery. Crayfish is much used but nearly always as a cullis, in which the shells are broken and cooked with parsnip, onion, carrot and almonds. The crayfish themselves are also made into a ragout and are always an essential part of bisques.
If you compare Lamb’s recipe for turbot, which is poached in milk with a parsley sauce, with Robert May’s there is a remarkable difference: Lamb’s is simplicity itself, while May’s, with his addition of ginger, mace and nutmeg, is still clinging to medieval flavourings. The astonishing fact is that both were cooking for nobility, but Lamb cooked for succeeding monarchs; yet May’s dish is pretentious, while Lamb’s is simply plain good fare. True, Lamb does give a more complicated recipe where the turbot is stewed in a veal gravy with champagne, herbs, truffles, mushrooms, and a ragout of crayfish, but this owes nothing to medieval sources.
Truffle sauce is made from sliced peeled truffles poached in a light cullis of veal and ham then seasoned. An anchovy sauce is made from mincing the anchovies then heating them in a cullis of veal and ham. A poivrade sauce is made from veal stock, vinegar, leek, onion and slices of lemon boiled and strained, (a poivrade sauce, as defined by Larousse, now has many more vegetable ingredients, and this is the only instance where Lamb appears to have less).
As Lamb presides over fifty years of court cooking at the end of the seventeenth century and at the beginning of the eighteenth, his influence was huge. An examination of his collection impresses one with the vigour of his range and the delicate flavours and fine taste that his craftsmanship must have created; these are remarkable recipes which influenced the future of English cooking. A cursory glance at Hannah Glasse (see Chapter 8), writing only thirty years later, shows what a debt she must have owed to Lamb.
England is now less vulnerable than it was in the time of the early Stuarts; at the beginning of the eighteenth century its remarkable military successes under the Duke of Marlborough against the army of Louis XIV placed it in the forefront of Europe. Yet it was anxious about its religious role, after James II had attempted his Catholic coup, failed and had to flee the land; this new Protestant nation was paranoid about secret Catholics attempting to reconvert it. That these feelings touched and influenced cookery might seem to some readers to be extraordinary, but it did, as we shall see in Chapter 8. Already within the seventeenth century some of the gentry, who were either Catholic or sympathetic both to France and Papism, employed French chefs who naturally used French titles for their dishes, all of which were derived from medieval ideas common to both countries. Already, the idea that French food (still celebrating Papist traditions) was better than English food (imbued with Reformation independence) had taken root. The time has come to have a closer look at the issue.
La Varenne
The French Cook by La Varenne was translated and published in English in 1653, only two years after it had appeared in France. The dedication begins: ‘Of all the Cookes in the World, the French are esteem’d the best.’ The book was an immediate success in France, and no wonder with that chauvinist trumpet call; it went into thirteen editions in the next decade and was also translated into German. Food historians consider the book innovative and paramount in the French influence upon English cooking. The book’s appearance was all the more dramatic because it was published in France after a long gap of half a century when no cookery books appeared at all. However a number of English cookery books such as Sir Kenelm Digby’s, which detailed Court cookery and was much influenced by the French, were published, so we know something of what was happening at that time.
Varenne is misleadingly thought to have been the first cook to have made fricassées, hashes and braises popular, and more particularly to have created the made-up dish, as opposed to a plain roast, as the essentially stylish centre of a meal. He is also credited with introducing fungi and the bouquet garni into dishes. He was indeed the first to use flour as a thickening for a sauce, to have a recipe for an omelette and to have created caramel, and in his work culinary terms that have now become familiar were used for the first time: for instance, au naturel, au bleu and à la mode. He eschews most spices except for pepper which he uses a lot, and he never uses sugar in savoury dishes.
Innovative wizards do not suddenly appear, however; they develop ideas to which apprenticeship in their chosen trade has exposed them. We find Fynes Moryson, the observant Scots traveller, commenting, when in France in 1605-17:
Their Feasts are more sumptuous than ours, and consist for the most part of made fantasticall meates and sallets, and sumptuous compositions, rather than flesh or birds. And the cooks are most esteemed, who have best invention in new made and compounded meats.
So from the beginning of the seventeenth century court feasts had been served with made-up dishes and not roasts, and there had been stimuli for apprentices to invent more dishes.
We also know from English cookery books of the early part of the century, that fricassées, hashes and braises were well known, and that they were part of the repertoire of any skilled cook. Indeed, they were all well known methods which go back to at least the fourteenth century. Surely both French and English cookery must have continued with this tradition, even though in England after the Reformation the made-up dish had had Papist associations. Cooks had therefore turned to roasting and boiling, as a statement of belief throughout the Tudor period. In the seventeenth century under the Stuarts, however, this distinction had become blurred; cookery recipes from the court might have had Papist associations, but they were also touched with the royal aura, and so had enormous elitist attraction for a socially mobile society.
Varenne used flour in many ways throughout his cooking: he sprinkled flour on boiling liquid, he floured meat and vegetables before braising, and he used the fleur frite, which was to become the ‘roux’; he used lard instead of butter, mixed with flour to a paste, then thinned it down with stock and vinegar. Varenne also uses other thickeners, such as almonds and breadcrumbs.40 The English cookery books used everything except flour. Most particularly they seemed fondest of adding butter to the sauce and beating until an emulsion occurred; a wholly lighter sauce would then have been created, preferable for our own contemporary taste to a sauce made heavy with lard and flour. All the most courtly and French-influenced of the English cookery books ignore the flour-based liaison, which seems odd as they were basing their knowledge and recipes on French chefs and kitchens. It is not odd, however, if we accept that they tried the sauces and felt no enthusiasm for them. One practical reason for Varenne to have used them was that the made-up dishes displayed upon the table had to remain appetising for some length of time; a butter emulsion would have lost its liaison, while the flour sauces would have gelled and got thicker.
As for spices, Varenne never uses ginger and nor do the English, having fallen out of love with this spice at this time. Both Varenne and the English use pepper, however, but the latter use it more. Varenne used fungi in his cooking at a time when the English had never stopped using them. The innovations for which Varenne is praised had surely been common in French cookery practice for some decades before the book was published. Varenne obviously practised them, and then wrote them down.
The French/English controversy over who influenced what is an emotive one, because British gourmets have been placed in an invidious position for purely historical reasons (which will be explored later in this book); if they are devoted admirers of French cooking then inevitably they are placed in the position of disparaging British culinary art. Yet there were plenty of Frenchmen critical of their own cuisine; often the French cook started to speak like an Englishman. Take Nicholas de Bonnefon in his introduction to Les Délices de la Campagne (1654) who attacked the cooking of La Varenne: ‘… let the cabbage soup taste entirely of cabbage, a leek soup of leeks, a turnip soup of turnips, and so on, leaving elaborate mixtures of chopped meat, diced vegetables, breadcrumbs and other deceptions for the kind of dishes which are for simply tasting rather than filling oneself up on …’ Or there is L.S.R. who wrote L’Art de bien Traiter (1674), another attack on La Varenne: ‘Look at his shin of veal fried in breadcrumbs, his stuffed turkey with raspberries, his shoulder of mutton with olives, his ragout of tripe, his roe deer’s liver omelette, his ragout of chicken in a bottle … and any number of other villainies …’41 Less than a quarter of a century after La Varenne’s publication, Mennell writes, other writers are ‘pinpointing and deriding the medieval survivals and peasant like elements in La Varenne’s recipes’. Certainly that recipe for roasted turkey with raspberries is an absurd one, for the turkey is roasted in the normal way, then just before being served a few raspberries are thrown over it.
French cooking in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had the reputation of being fussy and fancy, drowned in sauces and over-spiced, but it is obvious that only some dishes fell into this category. In the seventeenth century certainly there were more similarities in both nations’ cooking than there were differences. As to La Varenne’s influence, it has been much exaggerated, for most of the innovations he is praised for already existed on both sides of the Channel, and as to one innovation that was to feature so largely in nineteenth-century British cooking, the flour-based sauce – well, we had the good sense not to use it at all for the next few decades.