The eighteenth century saw the continuation of land enclosures; the process of agricultural improvement demanded it. Between two and three million acres of open fields, commons and wastelands were enclosed in the last half of the century. So huge and radical were these that, coupled with fast industrial growth in the new Midland towns, they were to change rural populations forever. Severe rural poverty and deprivation were caused, as we shall see, but these massive enclosures in themselves truncated the heritage of rural cooking, a loss that at the time no one noticed or thought worth commenting on.
Many observers then and later discussed the merits and disadvantages of the agricultural revolution, but none pointed out what it meant to the culture of English cooking. Every cuisine has its roots within the peasant traditions, which are constantly being replenished by ideas and practices that are forced to be creative within economic limitations. In such cooking there is a reliance on cereals, wild plants and game; many of these ideas are then filched by more affluent parts of society (see Beistyn, page 82) and this flow constantly replenishes a national cuisine. It is this profound enrichment from below that our national cuisine was now to lose.
It had already lost its head, both figuratively and literally: the court style and conspicuous consumption of France which it fleetingly looked as if we might possess under the early Stuarts, was lost when we executed a king. The Hanoverians, who were pawns in a Whig aristocracy, were unable to lead a developing cuisine, as they were simple honest trenchermen, eating like a country squire. However, the glories of the country estate were then worth hymning.
Enclosures
Land values almost doubled between 1700 and 1790 as vast expanses were brought under cultivation; the merits of the new, improved farming, using new technology like Jethro Tull’s famous seed drill had increased yield by almost half. Arthur Young spoke for many when he said that, ‘No small farm could effect such great things as have been done in Norfolk. Great farms are the soul of Norfolk culture; split them into tenures of a hundred pounds a year and you will find nothing but beggars and weeds in the whole country.’1 There were over 4,000 Acts of Enclosure in Britain between 1750 and 1850. As the fields were enclosed, woodlands and wastes disappeared and a new pattern of hedges, walls, fences and roads took shape. In the 1760s Smollett described it as ‘smiling with cultivation … parcelled out into beautiful enclosures’. Many a fortune was made out of the process: rent rolls rose and farm profits were boosted. Attacks were made upon the new farmers as ‘oppressors of the indignant many’ and Young himself came to feel that it led to human suffering; there is no doubt he thought that the poor were injured ‘and in some cases grossly injured’. Nevertheless he felt it was inevitable; the economy was expanding, the population rising, but, ‘In a great Kingdom there must always be hands that are idle, backward in the age of work, unmarried for fear of having families, or industrious only to a certain degree.’
At the end of the seventeenth century, Gregory King, author of National and Political Observations and Conclussions upon the State and Condition of England in 1696, had estimated that there were around 330,000 farmers. About half of them were tenants who farmed the land belonging to the great landlords and gentry. The rest were owner-occupiers, farming their own land and sometimes renting additional land from a landlord; these farmers probably had no more than twenty acres. Below these small owners were the cottagers and labourers. Because most farms were small they could be worked with the help of the farmer’s family and one extra labourer. The cottagers had the right to use the common for grazing a few beasts and for getting fuel; they also had a small plot of land where they grew vegetables and corn for making their own flour and bread. Once the common land and his own plots were enclosed and belonged to the local landlord the cottager had no fuel to light a fire; nor did he have land to grow vegetables and herbs or on which to graze his few animals. Many cottagers and farm labourers sold what they had and emigrated to America, others attempted to find work in the growing towns and cities in the new factories being built. There, under the slavery of long hours and pittance wages, their diet declined to bread, jam, tea and sugar.
The ruling classes, the nobility and the new rich had now absorbed most of the fertile land of England; the bulk of these large farms were still run by tenants and by the end of the century these constituted three-quarters of all farms in England. Arthur Young is vicious in his criticisms of these tenant farmers who make themselves ridiculous by aping the style of their landlords, buying pianofortes for their parlours and post-chaises for driving their wives to assembly rooms, placing their servants in livery, sending their daughters to boarding schools and their sons to university to be made parsons. By 1790 the landowners themselves had incomes of £10,000 a year (possibly £1,000,000 in today’s money), some a great deal more. As early as 1715 the Duke of Newcastle’s estates were bringing in £32,000, and by 1800 almost a quarter of England’s landed wealth was owned by peers of the realm. By the end of the century England’s population had risen to nine million, eighty per cent of whom still lived in the country. An anonymous rhyme summed up the horror of the enclosures for the rural labourer:
They hang the man and flog the woman
That steals a goose from off the common
But leave the greater criminal loose
That steals the common from the goose.
Enclosure turned land into absolute private property and quickened suspicion of both the law that enshrined that process and the justices of the peace who administered it; it was one more demonstration of Oliver Goldsmith’s dictim that ‘Laws grind the poor and rich men grind the law.’2
What happened to our heritage of rural cooking? The cottagers and farm labourers who moved to the industrial towns had no means to buy food or even cook it, so those habitual daily recipes which had been a central part of their life must have been lost within a few years. These people for the most part were illiterate, so the recipes that had once been passed on from generation to generation now vanished. No other European country suffered this experience, for the industrial revolution occurred later and in countries where the land mass was great, as in France, the rural traditions continued undisturbed. The dispossessed farmworkers who emigrated to the American colonies took their recipes with them; once there they must have used familiar techniques and skills on new and unfamiliar ingredients, creating new dishes.3 We can see in A Booke of Cookery and A Booke of Sweetmeats, which once belonged to Martha Washington, recipes that are wholly English and representative of the sixteenth century. Unfortunately these recipes are more characteristic of the landed gentry than they are of a labouring class.4 Some recipes in regions of Britain survived because they were from distant rural parts untouched by change and these recipes are discussed later. (See page 352 – Appendix II.)
Change and Display
English society was hierarchical and highly status conscious, but the status was not necessarily determined by birth; it was a society based upon achievement when status, honours, money and titles followed. It was charged throughout by the spirit of emulation, as are all successsful consuming societies. Not only did vast numbers of people achieve a station in life that was superior to that in which they were born, but also those people that stayed within the same stratum nevertheless emulated the life-style immediately above them. So in England the fashions of the aristocracy and gentry were copied by merchants, farmers and their families, even by their servants and labourers. The moralists were shocked that shopkeepers carried swords, servants wore velvet and a mere maid would powder her hair, while the labouring classes now insisted on eating wheaten bread. There was a flood of religious tracts complaining of the spread of luxury, indulgence and Godless existence where life and soul depended on what colour ribbon you wore and how many dishes at dinner you served. Nor did such tracts care for the new pursuit, the reading of novels, for their plots tended to revolve also on the spur of social emulation, so that after many vicissitudes the heroine must end happily married to a country gentleman, lord of many acres. Newspapers also fostered such ambitions: the first daily started publication in 1702 and by 1760 there were four daily London papers and six which appeared thrice weekly, as well as thirty-five provincial papers.
With so much money flowing in, the nobility spent lavishly on improving great estates, building palatial houses, landscaping parks, moving villages, buying elegant furniture, pictures and silver and buying wine for its cellars. Food was, of course, central to its wealth and enjoyment; meals occupied a good part of the day and night and the dining room became a significant room in the house with its own especially designed furniture. Before, tables and chairs had tended not to be permanent fixtures, but were set up or carried in from other rooms. Such an arrangement was no doubt left over from the days when medieval monarchs were always on the move and dined from trestle tables and benches covered in tapestries and cushions which could all be dismantled.
The food was now brought to the table by servants course by course, and the wine glasses were refilled by the butler at the sideboard. There were still two courses, while dessert was considered separate from the dinner proper as was the banqueting course of the previous century; the sweetmeats were now called confectionery. A soup tureen was laid at one end of the table as part of the first course for those people who liked to begin the meal with a bowl of soup. On the table would be a set of silver casters for sugar, pepper and mustard; later in the century cruet sets grouped together in a holder were made in silver, pewter and china. An epergne, which was an intricate piece of pottery with branches for dishes or candles and places for cut flowers, stood at the centre of the table; these were developed during the 1720s and they often held casters and cruets, sauceboats and spice boxes. This florid but often highly impressive centrepiece with its glass dishes could be changed throughout the meal.
An etiquette book of 1730 stated: ‘Coughing, yawning or sneezing over the Dishes should be carefully avoided; I have been oftentimes in pain to see People, not altogether unaquainted with the Rules of Good Manners, guilty of this Indecorum.’5 Forks had only two tines widely spaced; it is a sign of the growing refinement in food and table manners that as the cooked dishes contained smaller morsels covered in a sauce, a two-tined fork could not cope in spearing them. The knife, having a rounded end, served as a shovel, especially in the difficult art of eating peas, and such an act was then thought to be the height of good manners.
If we wish to see how the gentry aspired to eat, we can turn to The Complete Practical Cook (1730), in which Charles Carter, former cook to the Duke of Argyll, gives sample menus for dinners throughout the year, so that a nobleman might choose what he thinks fit. There are dinners for visiting royalty and even a banquet for a coronation. Obviously Mr Carter was ambitious, for though he had worked with English ambassadors abroad and the Duke of Argyll, he had not been cook to a king. His dinner for March has two courses and begins with a choice of crayfish soup with carp dumplings or a chicken soup; once these have been taken, the two dishes put in their place are a platter of stuffed pike, flounders and eels and a leg of mutton. On the sideboard there are a baron of beef and a venison pasty. Upon the table there are lobster patties, a fricassée of lamb, a roast turkey, a calf ’s foot pudding and a Westphalia ham pie (we must not forget that the Hanoverian dynasty was reigning and a taste for German foods was fashionable), as well as assorted spring salads. This is but the first course and when these have been tasted, they are taken away and a second course appears. We have green (young) geese and ducklings, asparagus, chicken peepers and squabs, buttered crabs and shrimps in their shell, a chine of salmon and smelts, gollard eels and a ragout of sweetbreads.
There is no dessert course given, but one menu later in the year suggests a centrepiece of a grand pyramid of sweetmeats and fruit, surrounded by pistachio cream, raspberry cream, iced chocolate cream, iced lemon cream, syllabubs coloured and syllabubs plain. Porcelain figures adorned the dessert course, half naked musicians plucking at their lutes, shepherdesses and lovelorn shepherds, cupids in fancy dress and strutting birds, all added to a remarkable display where how the food looked took priority over how it tasted. ‘How ravishing those eighteenth-century tables must have looked when the crystallised fruit, the oranges and raisins, the spun sugar confections, the trays of syllabubs, the pyramids of jellies, the dishes of little almond cakes shaped into knots and rings and bows, the marchpanes spiked with candied fruit, the curd tarts and all the sweetbreads were spread.’6
Breakfast was served at half past nine or ten with tea or chocolate and hot buttered bread, perhaps with cheese or toast. Toast was an English invention said to be necessary because the houses were so cold and the butter so hard that it was only on toast that it was spreadable. Carl Philip Moritz, a German pastor, was highly pleased at the invention; he wrote: ‘One slice after another is taken and held to the fire with a fork till the butter soaks through the whole pile of slices.’7 Dinner was served at about four or five and supper at ten; after the dessert had been served at dinner, the ladies retired to the drawing-room for tea or coffee, while the men remained to smoke and drink port, while also passing around the chamber pot which, when not in use, was housed in specially made cupboards.
Tables were spread with white damask or plain linen cloth and set with pieces of silver, or fine pewter in the more modest homes. Pewter was fairly cheap and once polished emulated silver in a satisfactory manner. The poor used wooden platters. The dinner tables of the aristocracy laid out with many silver dishes was a sight aimed to impress the diner and fill him and her with awe and respect for the magnificence of their hosts. ‘Often the table had a theme of gardens and landscapes; cottages thatched with vermicelli stood beside islands fashioned from meringues, sugar constructions of the Temple of Solomon overlooked ponds that reflected the moon and stars. These displays were either specially made or else hired for the evening’; later Wedgwood made many of the sugar paste figures into porcelain.8
The Technology of Cooking
One of the results of the industrial revolution, of iron smelting and the use of coal, was the emergence of technological innovations in the kitchen but they were slow to happen. It took time for anyone to consider whether the difficulties of cooking in front of an open fire could be modified.
The age-old method of suspending a cooking pot over a fire limited the meal to that one pot, though experience taught ingenuity. This recollection is from an Oxfordshire farm as late as the 1920s:
Somehow on a great black grate our mother concocted wonderful meals – tasty and filling. In a great oval pot that was suspended over a good fire she cooked hunks of fat bacon along with potatoes and cabbage. The vegetables were put in string nets to keep them separate. When they were cooked she would fish them out with the aid of a fork. Then into the same water and along with the bacon she would drop a suet pudding, perhaps a roly-poly or a currant ‘spotted dick’, and sometimes just a plain suet to be eaten with golden syrup on it as a special treat.9
The Ladies’ Dictionary of 1694 warned the gentry against entering the kitchen because the heat of the fire made servants hot and fretful. The open fire allowed boiling and roasting, but bread and pastries had to be baked. The beehive-shaped stone or brick oven built into the wall had been the answer for hundreds of years. (See below.) In the north of England, however, baking stones were used in the embers of a fire where a flat dough was cooked; these were generally unleavened coarse breads made from barley and rye; another method for making bread, which was thousands of years old and only disappeared in the nineteenth century, was to use baking pots – the iron pot was turned upside down over a heated stone placed in the embers of a fire. This was a particularly Celtic method, used in Wales, Ireland, Devon and Cornwall.
Ovens were of masonry, built into the wall in the shape of a beehive (most of the surviving ones in houses and cottages are now made into deep cupboards). Early in the morning on baking day a large fire was lit inside the oven (using whatever cheap material there was, gorse or broom bushes, dried turf) and allowed to rage away; then the ashes were swept away and the raised dough pushed inside. It was important for the oven to be completely sealed and the oven door had to fit exactly, and the difficulty was how to tell that the oven was hot enough. One method was to observe the colour of the bricks and how they changed; some threw a handful of flour against the side of the oven and if it burned in sparks the oven was hot enough. When built efficiently these ovens retained heat for twenty-four hours. The bread was baked first, when the oven was hottest, then the large meat pies and fruit flans, then the rolls, buns, cakes and biscuits; then when all the baking was done, pillows were dried and fluffed, and rose leaves and herbs dried for pot-pourri. Without thermometers cooks had to rely on habit and instinct (we have seen how Mrs Pepys with her new oven burnt the pies) and old recipes sometimes give rough guides, as in ‘not so hot as for manchetts’.10
Early in the century the iron-smelting industry had begun seriously in Wales; in 1720 John Hanbury was making tinplate at Pontypool. Tinplate rolling machines replaced the previous method of beating tin sheets with hammers, and methods of tinned iron improved. So did all the articles needed for pies, tarts and flans; there were nests of baking hoops, patty pans and paste cutters, rowel wheeled pastry jiggers, pastry moulds stamped with a design and tin baking sheets to place them all on. Biscots, biscakes, puffs, macrooms, whiggs, plumb cakes, seed cakes, queen’s cakes and all manner of meat, chicken, game and fruit pies, as well as a variety of breads were baked in the brick built ovens on baking day.
By the eighteenth century all the boiling and roasting was still done over an open fire. It must have been obvious to anyone walking through the kitchens that most of the heat from the fire was dispersed into the kitchen, or went up into the chimney and almost by-passed the piece of meat hanging there. Yet for over 150 years no one considered it. This was because women servants were in charge of the cooking and no gentlemen troubled to consider the issues within their working lives.
Spits in front of the fire held the roasting meats, but these had to be turned, either by a turnspit, a small boy who made sure the meat ‘was done to a turn’, or by dogs encased in a wheel who ran on the spot. This was not efficient either, because the dogs would hide or run away at any indication that roasting meat was on the menu. In large country houses there were a few experiments in turning the spit by a water mill method, but this could only be done if the kitchen was near or above a stream. Later in the century turning was done by a smoke jack which made the hot air from the fire do the work, or a wind-up jack which was operated by winding up a weight. The smoke jack needed a steady supply of ascending smoke to rotate a fan which caused the spit to turn. These could not have worked well because they were rare. John Evelyn came across one and wrote: ‘It makes very little noise, needs no winding up, and, for that, preferable to the more noisy inventions.’ The roasting time needed for the meat could be speeded up by a wooden screen lined with shiny tin in front of the spit to reflect the heat back to the meat. A roaster, a small tin machine that just fitted over the bars of the grate, was described as ‘convenient and effectual … has within itself a dripping pan … also a door at the back to open for basting and salting the meat.’11
The fat from the meat dripped down into a long, narrow, iron trough, and was called ‘dripping’; it was collected and stored in a greasepan and later used for making rushlights and candles. When coal began to supersede wood as fuel, a fire basket had to hold the coals. These were handy to perch trivets on for holding kettles and saucepans, which warmed on one side but not on the other, so had to be continually turned. Later in the century the various types of spit were superseded by a clockwork mechanism wound up by a key. With iron foundries eager to sell to the new rich, all sorts of appliances were invented, likely to appeal to the mistress who had rarely cooked in her life, but who would think it ‘just the thing for young Mary’: there was a hanging griller looking rather like a paper rack; a down hearth toaster for slices of meat or bread on a long handle which could be turned once one side was done; a griller with an adaptable support for a basin or plate; as well as pieces like salamanders which had been part of a kitchen since medieval times. An inventory of a farmer’s kitchen gives a surprising amount of cooking equipment considering his status: it included three different spits and two dripping pans, nine dishes of pewter, a large iron skillet and a smaller iron skillet, an old iron kettle and three iron porridge pots, as well as much else.
In the middle of the century an iron oven with a grate underneath called a perpetual oven was made. (One was installed in Shipton Hall, Halifax, in 1750 for the Reverend John Lister, which cost him 4 guineas.) It nearly always had to be placed near the main fire as it shared the flue and chimney, so it appeared to be combined; hence the kitchen range was born. Soon after the kitchen range began to acquire side boilers for heating water and ovens for baking; these innovations came from the north of England, the centre of the iron industry. By then new smelting techniques made it possible to make iron thinner which gave lighter hollow ware, tinned on the inside, blacked and stoved outside. In 1763 a copper mine was found in Anglesea, and saucepans and frying pans began to be made of this much lighter and prettier material which was immediately popular. Earlier copper had been scarce and expensive and most of it went to make brass.
For the next fifty years various changes were made to the oven in an attempt to get it to trap and then regulate the heat, but no one understood the science of convection, so these experiments failed. In 1776, however, a British-born American, Benjamin Thompson, who had spied for the British in the War of Independence, returned to England and observed the extraordinary waste of heat involved. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and then, given permission by the Government, left for Munich and entered the service of the Elector of Bavaria where he stayed for fifteen years, finally being created Count Rumford, a count of the Holy Roman Empire. Having already contributed to science seminal theories on heat, he returned to England again in 1798 and founded the Royal Institution of Great Britain. He was again amazed and baffled at the inefficient systems of cooking. Writing on the imperfections of kitchen fireplaces ‘now in common use’, Count Rumford commented:
The great fault in the construction of kitchens in private families, particularly in Great Britain, is …. that the fireplaces are not closed. The fuel is burned in a long open grate called a kitchen range over which the pots and kettles are freely suspended or placed on stands … The loss of heat and waste of fuel in these kitchens is altogether incredible.
He summarised the inadequacies by remarking that ‘more fuel is consumed in it to boil a tea-kettle than, with proper management, would be sufficient to cook a dinner for fifty men.’ His remedy was that:
Each boiler, kettle, stewpan should have its separate closed fireplace. Each fireplace should have its grate for fuel and its separate ashpit closed by a well fitting door and furnished with a register for regulating the air intake.
The Count then invented a closed oven, a hollow sheet iron cylinder 18 inches in diameter and 24 inches long with a door at one end. This was set horizontally in brickwork and heated underneath by a small fire; it had a steam tube attached to the top of the oven to carry off steam which escaped in roasting. Count Rumford arranged a blind tasting of two roasts of mutton from the same carcass, one from his oven, the other roasted on a spit in front of a fire. His oven carcass was unanimously preferred. He went on to popularise James Watt’s steam engine, to invent the double boiler and the drip coffee pot, which was on much the same principle as our present cafetière except that there was a space beneath where it dripped through. The first patent for a closed kitchen range was taken out in 1802.
Poorer houses made do without this equipment, or even a spit; they hung the meat on a hook and chain which was twisted and it slowly revolved in front of the fire, but the cauldron, hung from another chain, remained the most common cooking utensil. Next to the fire in the farmhouse kitchen was the salt box; it was handy to dip into, and its position ensured that the contents were always dry. A knife box hung on a nail, the knife handles of bullock horn or buckhorn. Cooking implements hung above, skimmers, ladles, and a large fork for extracting a bulky piece of meat from the cauldron. On the mantelpiece were stoneware mugs, tobacco jars and beer jugs, brass candlesticks and possibly a pewter pepper pot and one or two horn mugs.
Tea Time
At the beginning of the eighteenth century tea-drinking belonged to the upper classes; it was a sign of their position and affluence for the clothes, china and furniture that accompanied the drink were elegant and highly fashionable. Queen Anne liked to take her Bohea12 cold with a little Bols13 added. From the beginning tea had been highly taxed: liquid tea sold in the coffee houses was taxed at 8d a gallon, but in 1689 this was replaced by a customs duty of 5s per pound on the leaf itself. By the end of the century tea had become a staple drink of the masses. It was a dramatic change, so how had it happened?
The process had occurred fairly rapidly in the first few decades of the century: from London tea-drinking moved to the fashionable centres of Britain, to Bath and other spas, to York and Edinburgh, then to towns and lastly to the countryside. To avoid customs duty smuggling was rife and respectable people happily colluded with it. Sir Robert Walpole, the King’s principal minister, used an Admiralty barge to bring his smuggled wine up the Thames and was applauded. At his parsonage in Norfolk Parson Woodforde (see page 237) knew that a tap on the window at night meant the local smuggler had arrived. On 29 March 1777 he wrote:
Andrews the smuggler brought me this night about 11 o’clock a bagg of Hysons Tea 6 Pd weight. He frightened us a little by whistling under the Parlour Window just as we were going to bed. I gave him some Geneva and paid him for the tea at 10/6 per Pd.14
So much tea was smuggled into the country that in 1736 the tea dealers had petitioned Parliament, claiming that half the tea in the country had entered it illegally.
As the effect of the enclosures tightened upon society, those home-made effusions from wild currants and berries that were the source of so much home-made winemaking, dried up. In Manchester around 1720 society dispensed home-made wine at an afternoon call, but by the middle of the century they were offering tea. In June 1776 Parson Woodforde took on a new maid and as part of her wages (5 guineas a year) agreed that she was to have tea twice a day. His annual tea bill was £3 8s, but this did not include what he paid Andrews, the smuggler. In 1783 he notes that three of his neighbour’s maids took tea with their own maids that afternoon – a perfect example of the servants aping their betters which so many moralists complained was the ruin of the century. Parson Woodforde does not even think it worthy of comment, as it had become such common practice. In 1767 the reformer Jonas Hanway, who was an acute observer of the diet of working people, but a purist who hated spirits and thought butter a luxury, was horrified when he found that labourers mending the roads were clubbing together to buy tea-making equipment. He also noticed that a vendor sold tea to harvest workers.
From 1723 the Government’s response to the smuggling scandal was to lower the tax; it continued to go down gradually until the middle of the century, which allowed tea to become generally far more popular than hitherto. However, when coffee was becoming the staple drink among families in other European countries, why should tea appear to be taking the same role here? There were several reasons. France and Holland had direct access to their coffee supplies through their colonies in Java and the Antilles, while our trade interests were monopolised by the East India Company with its strong China connection. Here in Britain, the image of the coffee drinker had from the very beginning been a highly masculine one, bound up with politics and commerce, and was not easily assimilated into the domestic scene; similarly from the very beginning tea drinking had been a feminine pursuit associated with the decorative arts. Medical opinion approved of it too, as boiling the water destroyed the bacteria in a very dubious water supply. Tea could also be drunk without milk and the leaves dried and re-used; it had also by 1760 become widely available, and almost a quarter of all shops now stocked it. At Twining’s shop in London, customers could buy from a selection of blends that were mixed in their presence and offered to them for tasting. Tea, in being so acceptable to the growing bourgeoisie, gave respectability, sobriety and an air of authoritative security to the drink. The aura tea possessed was its most powerful attraction to the lower classes.15
At some time in the first half of the century it became usual to add sugar to hot tea, perhaps because the black Bohea and Congou teas were very strong and bitter. Certainly our sugar imports grew. Sugar consumption rose from 4 lb per person per year in 1700-10 to 8 lb in 1720-30 and to 11 lb in 1770-80.16 There is a direct correspondence between the tonnage of tea and the amount of sugar imported throughout. By the end of the eighteenth century we were the biggest importers of both in the world; the level of British consumption of tea was one quarter of the world’s supply. Milk was added to tea in the nineteenth century but it was not unknown before. Thomas Garway refers to it in his handbill of 1660, and Rachel, Lady Russell wrote to her daughter in 1698: ‘Yesterday I met with a little bottle to pour milk out for tea, they call them milk bottles, I was much delighted with them and so put them up for presents to you.’ The East India Company’s sales of oriental porcelain included milk pots, with or without covers, in 1706 but not earlier.17
It is not surprising that labourers now felt that sweetened tea gave them energy, so that it became very quickly a daily and addictive beverage, entrenched as a staple with their meals. By the end of the century when prices rose because of disastrous harvests, hot sweet tea was a necessity, drunk three times a day with the tea kettle kept simmering on the hob. Labourers were spending ten per cent of their budgets on tea and sugar and only 2.5 on beer. Jonas Hanway, of course, still thought that it was ‘pernicious to Health, obstructing Industry and impoverishing the Nation’.
The French and Hannah Glasse
By the eighteenth century there was a clear distinction in people’s minds between French and English cooking, though whether the gulf was as wide as people thought is debatable. Certainly in some respects the two styles were very different. The subject is further complicated by the fact that France itself was a highly emotive subject: the century had begun with the Duke of Marlborough winning a series of astonishing military victories against Louis XIV. Though Marlborough was ousted in 1710, the British army backed by Protestant allies was by 1712 massed on the borders of France ready to march on Paris. It was then that without our allies’ knowledge we secretly signed a peace treaty and deservedly gained the pejorative title of ‘perfidious Albion’. It was Jacobite (Roman Catholic) sympathisers within the British Government who had ousted Marlborough from his command and reneged on our allies; this same faction with the help of Louis had planned to place the Stuart Pretender upon the throne and to reject the Hanoverian succession. To the general populace anything French was traitorous, Catholic, and an insidious threat. The Catholics, it seemed to them rightly, were eager to regain control of England; even the recent Act of Union with Scotland was suspect for everyone knew how Papist the Highlands were. However, French chefs and the food they produced were popular with the aristocracy who thought that French recipes were superior to the English; therefore, to prefer English food was a sign of patriotism and Protestantism, and these feelings went deep. Nevertheless French food was also fashionable and the pull of fashion was incredibly powerful in this century, as we have seen. Besides, food has a will of its own, born from a combination of planned accidents; it absorbs influences from wherever it attracts. English food had already borrowed from every country that Englishmen had visited and enjoyed, and it would hardly retrench now.
Mrs Glasse’s fulminations against French cooking have amused historians and food writers, for she represents the ambivalence I have described above. Let us examine her more closely. The Art of Cookery made plain and easy by a Lady (Hannah Glasse 1747) went through many editions, was amazingly popular and went on selling through into the next century. She poaches from other cookery books published in the first half of the century, so the book is highly representative.18 Ann Cook, who in 1755 devoted sixty-six pages of her Professed Cookery to criticising Mrs Glasse’s recipes, puts her finger on various flaws where she obviously did not cook the recipe first, or had made mistakes in amounts of the ratio of meat or butter to rice, or been far too generous with the amount of salts when she pots venison and beef. This comes, one surmises, in Mrs Glasse having been too hasty in her borrowings.
Mrs Glasse writes to enlighten the servants, ‘ that every servant who can but read will be capable of making a tolerable good cook’. She wishes to instruct the ‘lower sort’, and uses expressions they will understand, for she says great cooks ‘have such a high way of expressing themselves that the poor girls are at a loss to know what they mean’. So Mrs Glasse is a teacher, an aspect all the women writers were very conscious of. Their instructions were part of the civilising process; if it did not teach young girls how to possess the attributes of being a lady, at least they could minister to them with skill and elegance, thus ensuring employment for their lifetimes.
This down to earth approach must have been appealing, but surely Mrs Glasse’s success was also due to a practical appreciation of the art of economy and an obvious irritation with French extravagance and deceit, which is at once apparent in her introduction. ‘If Gentlemen will have French cooks, they must pay for French tricks,’ she announces tartly, then continues:
A Frenchman in his own country would dress a fine dinner of twenty dishes and all genteel and pretty, for the expense he will put an English lord to one dressing dish. I have heard of a cook that used six pounds of butter to fry twelve eggs, when, everybody knows that understands cooking, that half a pound is full enough. But then it would not be French. So much is the blind Folly of this Age, that they would rather be imposed on by a French booby, than give encouragement to a good English cook.
Her strictures against the French continue throughout the text. After giving a detailed recipe on the French way of dressing partridges, Mrs Glasse adds: ‘This dish I do not recommend; for I think it an odd jumble of trash, by that time the cullis, the esssence of ham, and all the other ingredients are re-reckoned, the partridges will come to a fine penny; but such receipts as this, is what you have in most books of cookery yet printed.’ She then gives seven sauces which use a cullis and concludes: ‘It would be needless to name any more; though they have much more expensive sauce than this. However, I think here is enough to show the folly of these fine French cooks.’ Then, Cassandra-like, she prophesies bankruptcy for these large French estates. She is writing just thirty years before the Revolution.
The time of writing is very important, for Mrs Glasse was compiling and writing the book when the 1745 rebellion had thrown England into a great panic; the Jacobite army had marched south into England as far as Derby and was only a few days’ march from London itself. It seemed then that George II and the Hanoverian lineage would be short-lived, that Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, would be back upon the English throne and the British Isles would return to Catholicism. No wonder Mrs Glasse was vindictive in her writing of France and its cooking, for if the Stuarts were back in power that would be the style of cooking celebrated everywhere. It would have been like a British cook in 1940 saying how great and marvellous was German cuisine and looking forward to the time when we should all be eating it.
It follows that in Glasse we should find an English cuisine, holding at bay most of the French and other national ideas. This is not so, however. She welcomes a ‘Pellow’ or a ‘Currey’ in the Indian way, for example. Like other cookery writers, Mrs Glasse reflected the current interest and enjoyment of Indian spices and ketchups. These had been brought back to Britain by retired East India Company officials, who often had their favourite recipes made up in their own kitchens.19 Some of her recipes are termed ‘in the French way’, although they would have been familiar to an English medieval cook. She stuffs a hind saddle of mutton beneath the skin with truffles, onions, lemon peel, parsley, thyme, mace and cloves. She cannot resist saying of another French dish, Cutlets à la Maintenon, that it is a ‘very good dish’; the cutlets are stuffed, then baked en papillote (as we would describe it, for this term was not used then). Her stuffing is minced veal, beef suet, spice, sweet herbs and yolks of eggs (à la Maintenon now means a soubise [onion] purée with sliced mushrooms, truffles and pickled tongue). She spreads French terms around in her recipes without a shred of embarrassment (à royale, à la dauphine) and gives many recipes for ‘fricaseys’; the latter were interpreted as fry-ups and thus as much an English medieval dish as a contemporary French one.
It was one of the misunderstandings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that recipes ‘in the French manner’ were so often cooking methods used here before the Reformation, which were then re-imported back into England in the mistaken impression that they were new and French. It must have been galling for Mrs Glasse to know that Frenchmen were being employed by the British aristocracy and being paid ten times as much as she was, while also being given the freedom to spend ten times as much on the food and its preparation. She must have looked at the methods used and found them on so many occasions not worth the extra work, ingredients and expense.
Where did this English awe of French culinary arts, which is obviously flourishing in Hannah’s lifetime, begin? It has to go back to Robert May, inculcated in French skills and techniques, and his work for the English Catholic nobility, who looked to France as an example of all things wise and good. To sit down to a meal in the French fashion must have been to celebrate a rite common to international Catholicism centred on Rome, and the more the dishes reflected such a style the deeper the reverence felt. This was the cooking England would have had, if the Reformation had never happened; this was the cooking to which England could return if it came back to the rule of Rome. The Hanoverian Kings were solidly in power in Mrs Glasse’s lifetime; there was no chance of a return to Rome in the immediate future (except for the panic felt in 1745). British Catholics kept a low profile, for the legislation against them was fierce and of great bigotry. Of course, the character of the food eaten then was given no significance by anyone of whatever belief, but the difference in the style of food and the groups that ate it is clearly apparent now. Hannah Glasse may enthuse over plain and economical cooking (and Mrs Bradley after her), expressing disgust and horror for the French style, but the sub-text speaks powerfully to us. The Englishness of the former represented values of freedom, an elected Parliament, an English Church free of foreign domination, food without taint, fresh from the English soil, while food in the French manner was something quite insidious, almost, she makes us feel, a contamination, a creeping infection, to be much feared and halted if at all possible. She admits, with a cross sigh, that such recipes are to be expected, but makes her readers feel guilty for wanting them.
Sea Travel
Mrs Glasse’s Chapter Eleven is specifically for captains of ships and deals with recipes intended to last, which can be taken on voyages. It begins with a ketchup to keep twenty years which is made from strong stale beer, a pound of anchovies, shallots, ginger, mushrooms, mace, cloves and pepper. She gives a fish sauce which is also made from anchovies, spices, lemon and horseradish. Two spoonfuls will be sufficient with a pound of butter, she says, as a sauce for boiled fowl or veal. (Mrs Raffald also makes these sauces up and then keeps them to add to gravies for meats and fish.) These magnificently, intensely flavoured sauces, are so powerful in their heat and spices one feels Mrs Glasse’s pleasure at the thought that they could never appear in the French cuisine. Nor would the almost forty recipes for pickles from walnuts, oysters, red currants to elder shoots in imitation of bamboo. (Varenne pickles only a very few vegetables in vinegar and salt with perhaps a bay leaf.) There are over twenty recipes for potting meats and fish from venison to mackerel.
Are these recipes really going to be incorporated into a ship’s stores for a long voyage of exploration? Did James Cook’s expeditions around the world from 1768 to 1780 carry Hannah Glasse recipes? In his journals for July 1772 Cook gives an account of the provisions placed aboard the Resolution and Adventure to feed 201 men. On the Resolution, the greatest quantity is almost 60,000 lb of ship’s biscuit; 17,000 lb of flour is listed with 14,000 lb of pork and only half that of salt beef. There are 19 tons of beer, 642 gallons of wine, 1397 gallons of spirit; there are quantities of dried peas, wheat, oatmeal, butter, cheese, sugar, olive oil, vinegar, suet, raisins, salt and malt. What makes Cook’s provisions strikingly different from others, however, is the quantities of various types of ‘anti-scorbuticks’; he had 19,000 lb of ‘sour krout’ as well as salted cabbage, portable broth, saloupe, mustard and something entitled ‘mermalade of carrots’. Cook explains that only ‘portable broth’ was ever used before in the stores. This was beef broth reduced so that it jellied; a cube of it was then mixed with boiling water and given to the sick at the discretion of the surgeon. The rest of the men had it boiled with the peas on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays because they were meatless days. Saloupe was lemons and oranges kept for the sick and scorbutic only. Mustard was given to everyone in the belief that it was an anti-scorbutic. The mermalade of carrots was the juice of yellow carrots ‘inspissated till it is the thickness of flued honey’, which was recommended by Baron Storsch of Berlin. Cook quotes him as saying, ‘a spoonful of this Marmadlade, mix’d with Water, taken now and then will prevent the Scurvey, it will even cure it if constantly taken.’ Cook adds, ‘It is much used by the poor in Germany.’ The provisions were to last two years.
They also had fishing lines, nets and hooks and some empty barrels in order to take on 400 gallons of Madeira wine. There is, of course, no mention of any of Mrs Glasse’s recipes, but some of her preserves might well have been on board, or ketchups and pickles very similar to hers, as the officers brought their own personal supplies, having been given jars of various preserves by their mothers, wives and sweethearts. On deck there was also a menagerie of horses, cows, sheep, pigs, chickens and even a goat who eventually circled the globe twice. The livestock was there to produce milk and eggs but also to leave on desert islands so as to populate them with useful food animals. John Thompson was Cook’s cook on the first voyage and he had to slaughter, prepare and cook cormorant, penguin, dog, walrus and quantities of unidentified plants, as well as the salt beef, pork and dried peas. He used a stove that burnt wood (the best fuel was coniferous logs and coconut shells), and could only accommodate two copper vessels with a capacity of 5 to 10 gallons each to feed 100 men daily. The ship’s company was divided into messes of four persons sitting together and eating out of the one dish. The officers and gentlemen ate separately from the crew in the Great Cabin with windows out at the stern. The men were not always happy at what they had to eat: ‘It was No Uncommon thing when Swallowing Over these Messes to Curse him heartily and wish for gods sake that he Might be Obledged to Eat such Damned Stuff Mixed with his Broth as Long as he Lived …’20
In September 1769, Joseph Banks, the naturalist on board, wrote in his journal:
Our bread indeed is but indifferent, occasioned by the quantity of Vermin that are in it, I have often seen hundreds, nay thousands shaken out of a single bisket. We in the Cabbin have however an easy remedy for this by baking it in an oven, not too hot, which makes them all walk off, but this cannot be allowed to the private people who must find the taste of these animals very disagreeable, as they have everyone a taste as strong as mustard or rather spirits of hartshorn.
Later the same day he notes that Dr Solander has been unwell, so he opened Dr Hulme’s Essence of Lemon Juice which ‘proved perfectly good, little if at all inferior in taste to fresh lemon juice’. Then he comments that a pie was made from the North American apples that Dr Fothergill had given him, which proved to be very good; he goes on to note that ‘our ships beef and Pork are excellent as are the peas; the flour and oatmeal which have at some times failed us are at present and have in general been very good.’
In April 1769 Banks tells us that he ate constantly of the ‘Sower crout’, until the salted cabbage was opened, which he found he preferred. He noticed that his gums swelled and he had a few pimples on the inside of his mouth, so:
I then flew to the Lemon Juice which had been put up for me according to Dr Holmes method described in his book … Every kind of liquor which I used was made sour with the Lemon Juice, so that I took near 6 ounces a day of it. The effect of this was surprising, in less than a week my gums became as firm as ever …
Cook at first found that the sailors would not eat the sauerkraut, so he used a ploy he had found never failed; he ordered that every day a dish should be placed on the officers’ table and all should partake of some without fail. Within a week he found that all the sailors insisted on eating it and he had to place an allowance on the amount everyone now ate. Cook comments: ‘the moment they see their Superiors set a Value upon it, it becomes the finest Stuff in the World …’ Seven years later Captain Cook addressed the Royal Society of London and was awarded the Copley Gold Medal for his paper as the best experimental research of that year for the method that preserved the health of the crew. Cook had allowed each man to have 4 lb sauerkraut per week which gave every man 40 mg vitamin C daily. (10 mg vitamin C daily will prevent scurvy.) Cook also insisted that the men ate fresh greens boiled in their broth every day, but this could only happen when they were close to land when crew members could row ashore and pick wild leaves.
They used the produce of the islands whenever they landed, but they also planted cereals and vegetables: turnips, carrots, parsnips, peas, beans, melons and strawberries. In New Zealand the Maoris were already cultivating large acreages, and they found sweet potatoes, yams and pumpkins. As well as the breadfruit tree which fascinated them, Cook relates how in 1773 they salted their own pork in New Zealand: ‘In the cool of the evening the hogs were killed and dressed, then cut up, the bones taken out and the Meat salted while it was yet hot, the next Morning we gave it a second salting, packed it into a cask and put to it a sufficient quantity of Strong Pickle, great care is to be taken that the meat be well covered with pickle other wise it will soon spoile.’
In July 1769 when anchored at Tahiti Cook lists the fruit and vegetables upon the island which they are eating: Bread fruit, cocoa-nuts, bananas, plantains, a fruit like an apple (Spondias dulcis), sweet potatoes (Ipomoea Batatas), yams (dioscorea alata), a fruit known by the name of Eag melloa (Eugenia malaccensis) and reckoned most delicious, sugar cane, which the inhabitants ate raw, a root of the salop kind called by the inhabitants pea (Tacca leontopetaloides), the root also of a plant called Ethee (Cordyline terminalis), and a fruit in a pod like a kidney bean which when roasted can be eaten like a chestnut and is called Ahee (Inocarpus edulis), the fruit of a tree called wharrra (Pandanus tectorius) something like a pineapple, the fruit of a tree called by them Nano (Morinda cirifolia), the roots of a fern (Angiopteris evecta), and the roots of a plant called Theve (Amorphophallus campanulatus).
Their tame animals numbered hogs, fowls and dogs; the latter, the sailors had discovered, were as delicious as English lamb. Cook is amazed at the variety of the sea food. He remarks how astonishing it is that the wealth of food upon the island allows the natives the freedom not to have to cultivate, though he notices that their main food is vegetables and these they either bake or boil. What makes Cook so remarkable a man and so valuable to history is not only his observation and tenacity in noting everything, but the fact that he and his men try every possible food they stumble across. Such a willingness made the men vulnerable to the odd toxins; there was an occasion when they ate water hemlock, another time when they consumed mussels infected with red tide; and they also suffered agonies from eating a poisonous reef fish. Other than the occasional belly ache, however, they survived remarkably well after such long voyages, without anyone becoming mortally ill from scurvy.21
Cook constantly amazes one with how enterprising he was. In May 1779 at Unalaska, finding the ground beginning to be clear of snow, he led a party ashore and found nettle tops and onions which they collected. Then he tapped the birch trees which gave a ‘good quantity of clear, sweet juice’. Back on board the company were given an allowance of brandy to drink with the juice every day for as long as it lasted. It was far too early in the year for any other vegetables. Cook noted that the ones they found were too advanced in decay, but what he found instead were berries; he ordered one-third of his crew by turns to go ashore and pick them, and a good quantity were procured from the natives. They caught salmon trout and once a magnificent halibut weighing 254 lb. They received from the natives a rye loaf which encased spiced salmon and surmised that this present must have been from some Russians in the area, so they sent back bottles of rum, wine and porter. In South Georgia Cook was so heartily sick of salt beef that he noted he much preferred penguin. The flesh was ‘reminiscent of bullock’s liver’; they were ‘tolerably palatable and very nutritive’. Cook’s voyages lasted only nine years, before he was killed by the natives in the Sandwich islands in 1779.22
Cook’s dietetics are all the more impressive because he disregarded Admiralty orthodoxy; their ineptitude had led to a long catalogue of disasters. Two Elizabethans, Sir Richard Hawkins and Sir John Lancaster, had both recognized the value of lemons in the treatment of scurvy and had written journals detailing the fact. The Admiralty had ignored them. Between 1740 and 1744 George Anson took five ships and two store ships to circumnavigate the globe. The ships were overrun with rats and the men with lice; when crossing the Atlantic there was a devastating epidemic of fever and dysentery which killed ninety men; off the coast of Brazil mosquitos attacked the convalescents; a captain died of cerebral malaria while men fell sick with scurvy, as well as asthma, idiocy, lunacy and convulsions, which imply multiple vitamin deficiencies. One of the captains, Cheap, had lost all self-respect, and was covered with filth, alive with vermin, and a human anthill, whose legs were as big as millposts, though his body appeared to be nothing but skin and bone. His memory gone and failing even to recall his own name, he lapsed into a stumbling passive state. From that ship of 243 men only thirty-seven finally survived. On other ships men continued to die, until off the coast of Chile they ate turnips, radishes, scurvy grass and goats’ flesh. A few men from another ship had survived by finding at Tierra del Fuego wild celery and other greens. When Anson finally returned he had lost nearly 1,500 men and only 150 returned home. Anson was interviewed by the influential physician Richard Mead, who thought that the antiscorbutic properties of fresh vegetables and fruits were due to their astringency and hence recommended vinegar and bitters as a substitute for further sea voyages. He also thought ships should be better ventilated and suggested extraction tubes. The Admiralty at once implemented both suggestions.23
White Bread and Potatoes
The eighteenth century saw the rise in consumption of both the wheaten loaf and the potato so that both eventually became a staple of the working class diet. At the end of the century in 1798 Arthur Young notes: ‘The usual diet of labourers in Hull and its neighbourhood is wheaten bread, with the cheapest sort of butcher’s meat, potatoes and fish.’ In the early part of the century workers had been content with a loaf of mixed rye and wheat; the changeover to a completely wheat loaf had occurred by the 1770s. Young notes the change as early as 1767: ‘Rye and barley bread, at present, are looked on with a sort of horror even by poor cottagers, and with some excuse, for wheat now is as cheap as rye and barley were in former times.’24 At that time it had been estimated that in England about 41/2 million people lived on wheat and rye and about 11/2 million on barley and oats. By the end of the century the number of people who would eat only wheat bread rose steadily, not only as the price of wheat went down, but as the idea that to eat white bread was a mark of privilege available to all gained more and more credence.
Of course, white bread from the earliest times was always a symbol of nobility and affluence, but in the Middle Ages the peasants had hardly any opportunity to eat it, except for the remnants in waste food thrown out of the castle kitchens. Through the ages white bread gained greater symbolic value, reflecting white damask tablecloths, cleanliness and purity, but also social status. To be able to eat it occasionally must have meant that one was climbing the social ladder, and to eat it every day, must surely be somehow significant that success and prosperity had almost arrived. The adoption of white bread was not only a sign of the hunger for status, but also evidence of an egalitarian spirit pervading the English class structure. It marks the end of the downtrodden peasant content with his lot, and clearly states that I am as good as the next man and the slogan of the French Revolution is applicable this side of the Channel too.
By 1795 the supremacy of wheaten bread was for all practical purposes complete, apart from in the north. Its success was all the more dramatic for after 1770, as produce rose in price and meat vanished from their tables, the workers had still insisted on eating white bread, and not the cheaper, coarser barley loaf; it was white bread and cheese that had become the staple food. They would rather turn to the two despised foods, potato and rice, despised because they were associated with the Irish and the coolie (the Chinese East End labourers) whom people regarded socially as little better than slaves, than return to eating the coarse, brown rye and barley loaves. Middle-class commentators saw little virtue in this new fad; it was merely another sign of the inferiority of the working class. ‘The flour must be divested of its bran and in a fit state for the most luxurious palate, or it is rejected not only by the affluent but by the extremely indigent,’ said Lewis Magendi in 1795, and Squire Bevan of Riddlesworth Hall, Norfolk, commented: ‘Our Labourers reject anything but wheaten bread.’ Lord Sheffield, the same year, wrote: ‘The poor are too fine mouthed to eat inferior bread till imperious necessity compels them.’ In the end it was ‘imperious necessity’ and Government policy that led not back to the rye and barley loaf, but onwards to the potato.
The acceptance of the potato was slow. When Young toured the country in the 1760s, he noted it was Lancashire, the nearest area to Ireland, where the potato was first fully established. The moist warm climate and the deep moss soil were particularly suitable for the tubers and Formby claimed to be the first site of their cultivation in the 1670s. Tolls had to be paid on every potato load going into the Michaelmas market in Wigan in 1680, but their immediate neighbours were not far behind. They were being grown in north-east Cheshire as early as the 1680s and by 1700 there is a reference to a potato bed at Garstang. There they are cooking a dish called lobscouse, a highly flavoured dish of meat, potatoes and onions, which became particularly associated with the seamen of the Lancashire ports.25 (In time Lobscouser became a nickname for a sailor.) The first field crop was grown in this county and by the middle of the century it had built up an export trade, the first of its kind in England, and was sending consignments of potatoes out to Gibraltar as well as sending twenty shiploads annually to Dublin.
A pamphlet on potatoes published in 1799 by one Hezekiah Kirkpatrick, who lived on the High Road between Warrington and Wigan, gives intelligent advice on their cultivation and cooking. The author admits he is not a Lancastrian, but aware of the superior attention given to this useful vegetable by the county wishes to render a service by introducing the potato to other counties. He deals with various methods of cultivation, storage and subsequent use of the land, includes four pages of recipes and details the uses of potato starch in textiles and the potatoes themselves for also feeding livestock.
He gives some space and detail to boiling potatoes in the Lancastrian way. The potatoes were peeled, placed in barely simmering water and cooked slowly (no cooking time is given); constant testing was needed to see the moment they were done; then they were drained, salted and placed back in the dry saucepan by the fire where they were left, after shaking the pan a little until they become fluffy. Eliza Acton also gives the recipe in Modern Cookery (1845). Kirkpatrick recommends potatoes sliced, seasoned and placed over minced beef or mutton and onion. He mentions that the dish may be made from cold meat, but considers it not so palatable. He also gives a recipe for mashing the potatoes and placing them in scallop shells or small cups to be made brown and crisp before the fire or with a salamander. He recommends them as being palatable and frugal dishes.
In 1772 early potatoes were selling at 2s 6d a pound, a high price which suggests that people so relished eating the very first crop that they would pay more than a labourer’s weekly wage. The potatoes had to be brought into market still attached to the roots otherwise no one would buy them. In 1795 John Holt writes that there is ‘general strife betwixt the Kirkdale and Wallasey gardeners, who can produce the first early potato at Liverpool market’.26 The rich were paying their gardeners to cultivate the potatoes over hot beds so that they could eat them at Christmas. Mr Butler, gardener to the Earl of Derby, practised this every year at his seat at Knowsley.
Other parts of England were slow to follow the Lancastrian lead, however. Possibly this was because the official view was distinctly unenthusiastic. ‘Potatoes are generally thought to be an insipid root: but when they are cultivated in a good mixed soil, they are not without their admirers: the smaller roots and knots are commonly preserved for a succeeding crop.’27 In the district around Doncaster potatoes were grown as a field crop but only to be fed to the horses. In the neighbourhood of the larger towns in the North and West Ridings of Yorkshire potato crops began to be important by the 1760s. In fact the crop followed these burgeoning industrial towns, as well as appearing far more often as a field crop in the enclosed system of agriculture and not in the open fields. The reasons are obvious: firstly, it had not taken long for farmers to discover how economical the crop was to grow, since the yield of tubers was great and it was easily sold in the market with a new and growing population, who had to provide cheap meals that were also filling. Secondly, it was the large farms that were more economically attuned to the needs of the market and could put large acreages to the crop. Agricultural writers were not encouraging. They were convinced the potato was not a crop for the small garden, but should be assiduously cultivated in the fields. In 1756 Thomas Hale was very specific: ‘It should be put in the hands of the farmer, especially near big towns.’28 By 1770, when Mrs Austen (see page 255) advised a tenant’s wife at Steventon near Basingstoke to plant potatoes in her garden, the answer she received was: ‘No, no, they are all very well for you gentry, but they must be terribly costly to rear.’29
At the beginning of the eighteenth century the smallholder was consuming a varied diet: milk, butter, cheese, whey and buttermilk, cabbage, turnips, parsnips, carrots, onions and potatoes, apple pie, pease-pies, puddings and pancakes; gruel, flummery and frumenty. Meat and fish did not appear: the first was too expensive and the second, because of poor roads and communications, never found its way inland.30 For a time the landless labourer could not have enjoyed so wide a range, nor so ample a supply of food. This was reflected in the institutions; in 1714 the Bristol Workhouse fed its inmates three times a day on meat, green vegetables, turnips and potatoes; in the Bedfordshire Workhouse there was meat six times a week, wheaten bread and cheese for supper, milk and bacon. They were fortunate that they were not attempting to drink milk in the midst of any of the big cities.
In The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), Tobias Smollett sums up the trade in fresh milk in the following passage:
… carried through the streets in open pails, exposed to foul rinsings discharged from doors and windows, spittle, snot, and tobacco quids, from foot passengers; overflowings from mud carts, spatterings from coach wheels, dirt and trash chucked into it by rogueish boys for the joke’s sake; the spewing of infants, who have slabbered in the tin measure, which is thrown back in that condition among the milk, for the benefit of the next customer; and, finally, the vermin that drops from the rags of the nasty drab that vends this prescious mixture, under the respectable denomination of milkmaid.
By the last quarter of the century dark clouds had begun to gather on the horizon. The American War of Independence meant that the Nottingham hosiery workers were thrown out of work, and the invention of the spinning jenny began to withdraw work from the cotton spinners. Unemployment began to rise. Adam Smith was convinced that the potato could replace wheat as the mainstay of the poor, and estimated that an acre of land under potatoes would yield an equivalent in food to three acres of wheat and could therefore maintain a larger population. The harvests of the 1790s were disastrous, especially in 1794 and 1795, causing widespread distress. The Government published a series of well informed articles on the ‘Cultivation and Uses of the Potato’ which advocated its adoption by workers as a cheap substitute for wheat. They championed varieties of potato to grow and eat, while there was another variety to be grown for feeding livestock. They also encouraged people to use potatoes in bread, assuring the public that 12 lb potatoes added to 20 lb wheaten flour would make 42 lb of excellent bread.
Commentators were not enthusiastic, however: ‘The poor will not eat potatoes if they can get anything else,’ said Thomas Ruggles. ‘I believe the daintiness of the poor to be the chief obstacle,’ thought Thomas Butts in 1794. Other landowners, however, agreed with the labourers in the value and nutrition of white bread. ‘The poor allege that as they live almost entirely on bread, they cannot perform their tasks without good bread,’ said John Wickens from Dorset in 1795. ‘They have nothing but bread and they want the best,’ Charles Onley pointed out very reasonably in the same year, and Bernard James agreed: ‘The principal food of the Poor is the whitest bread of which they eat but little else, and they must have it of the most nourishing kind.’31
The poor were distrustful of this new food that was being thrust upon them with such enthusiasm, but the price of white bread continued to rise; meat and cheese had doubled in price and milk, as a result of the enclosures, was unobtainable in many parts of the country. They had to eat. The Board of Agriculture had said: ‘Potatoes and water alone, with common salt can nourish men completely … they are perhaps as strong an instance of the extension of human enjoyment as can be mentioned …’ The clergy up and down the country were urged to tell their flocks of the incomparable advantage of potato bread. The Prime Minister, Pitt, suggested a loaf made from maize and potato was very pleasant and nutritious. But to little avail – out of ninety-eight different districts only seven reported that any of the ‘poor’ had used potatoes in their bread. However, with hunger being the dominant factor, the poor now began to grow and use potatoes as a vegetable, though they resolutely refused to substitute them for wheat in their bread. The distress caused by the second bad harvest of 1795 induced many cottagers who still had a tiny plot of land to grow the root. The Times of 10 September 1795: ‘From the apprehension of a second year of scarcity, potatoes have been everywhere planted and their produce has been generally great.’ Industrial workers had already been buying potatoes from the market, now the rural workers were growing them and from thence on potatoes appear as an item in the family budget.
Whether white bread or the potato was the mainstay of the meal was subject to circumstances for the next thirty years: in times of good harvests when the price of bread fell, the white loaf reigned almost supreme; but when economic conditions were harsh the potato returned to occupy the centre of the table.
Women Cooks
Elizabeth Raffald (née Whitaker) was born in 1733, one of four sisters. It is thought her father did some teaching. As a very young girl she went into service and almost certainly learnt there how to make confectionery. There was a shortage of good servants in the eighteenth century; because of social mobility, there was a scramble to better oneself, so servants were always leaving. Though the great houses had a pool of young people in the children of their estate workers, no sooner were they trained than they left to find better positions or to get married. Servants attempted to save money from the ‘perks’ offered: the master and mistress’s clothes could be sold on, they had a right to sell candle ends and they were given tips by visitors.
In 1760 Elizabeth got a new position as housekeeper at Arley Hall in Cheshire, where her duties included looking after the servants, buying fish, tripe, oysters, lemons and lobsters from the vendors who visited the house, keeping an account which the steward vetted every month, as well as preserving, pickling, making wines and table decorations, cakes and confectionery to be offered at that now established ritual the mistress’s tea. The steward settled meat bills and those for the London goods, which was where the spices were ordered: cinnamon, cloves, mace and nutmeg. (The list is basically no longer than the Earl of Bedford’s a century before.) The new housekeeper also had game from the estate and all the garden produce, as well as ice from the icehouse to make her ice cream.
The gardener at Arley Hall was one John Raffald, and he and Elizabeth were married early in 1763; however, they now had to leave the Hall as great houses insisted that servants should be unmarried. They travelled to Manchester and opened a shop where Elizabeth advertised Yorkshire Hams, Tongues, Newcastle Salmon, potted meats, portable soups (on which Captain Cook was to rely), sweetmeats, lemon preserve and mushroom ketchup, cakes and table decorations. She also began a register office so that employers could find servants, while also compiling and writing her book The Experienced English Housekeeper. Unfortunately, the registry could also be mistaken for something rather dubious, so Elizabeth Raffald had to place another advertisement to make that clear: ‘As several of Mrs Raffald’s friends in the country have mistook her Terms and Designs of her Register Office she begs leave to inform them that she supplies Families with Servants, for any place, at ONE shilling each.’
In 1766 they moved to a more central shop in Market Place near to the principal inn, The Bull’s Head, and next to the markets. Her many advertisements detail the wide range she offers to the public: ‘creams, possets, jellies, flummery, lemon cheese cake, best boiled tripe, pickled walnuts, coffee, tea and chocolate of the finest sorts’. Amidst all of that, it is thought that she gave birth to sixteen daughters, but only six were baptised and only three survived their mother. As so many cookery books were pirated, Mrs Raffald chose to publish hers by subscription in 1769 and sample pages were placed in shops for inspection. This was a huge success; the public responded to her experience and authority and the book went on into thirteen editions well into the next century as well as selling twenty editions in America.
Elizabeth Raffald states that the book contains ‘near 800 original recipes most of which never appeared in print’, a claim heard often but which is possibly true in her case, for her recipes are practical, there is a marvellous no nonsense approach and her writing is clear and concise. Many of the recipes could be used today without making any changes. She frequently uses alegar, which was a vinegar made from ale or beer; she used it to rub fish with before poaching or as a flavouring. She is writing twenty-five years after Mrs Glasse and she does not mention the French or their influence, nor does she bother with a ‘cullis’ or coulis. Her sauces seem eminently sensible and trouble-free, such as one for salmon which is simply chopped fennel and parsley added to melted butter. Perhaps the most complicated is the alternative sauce for salmon which she also suggests is good for all kinds of boiled fish. She begins with a strong stock of meat and vegetables, which she calls gravy, adds to it an anchovy, a teaspoon of lemon pickle, a meat spoonful of the liquor from walnut pickle, some of liquor that the fish was boiled in, a stick of horseradish, a little browning and salt. This is boiled together, thickened with a beurre manié, then strained and sent to table.
I don’t know whether ‘browning’ is the first mention of this ingredient, which was familiar enough in my childhood as a commercial bottle with its thick, black gummy liquid, a spoonful of which was always added to the gravy for the Sunday joint. Mrs Raffald gives a recipe for it, which begins with butter and sugar cooked together until it caramelises, then red wine, jamaica pepper, six cloves, four shallots, two or three blades of mace, three spoonfuls of mushroom ketchup, salt and rind of a lemon are added; it is boiled together, and bottled when cool. This sounds delicious and so does the gravy sauce for the fish to which it is added. It also strikes me as equal to any reduced sauce, or coulis by a French chef. She writes: ‘I have given no directions for cullis, as I have found by experience, that lemon pickle and browning answer both for beauty and taste (at a trifling expense) better than cullis, which is extravagant.’ So in her sauces, which one might suppose were more vulnerable to French influences than any other dish, we can only discern a wholly British character. Mrs Raffald does not bother, like Mrs Glasse, to argue truculently with the fussiness and expense of French cooking; she almost ignores it completely. She says: ‘And though I have given some of my dishes French names, as they are only known by those names, yet they will not be found very expensive, nor add compositions, but as plain as the nature of the dish will admit of.’ Her book is the second work (see Mrs Bradley below) to celebrate the quintessence of British cuisine: country produce cooked simply with sauces of intense flavour. Let us look briefly at other cookery books written before Mrs Raffald’s.
There were the private recipe collections in the homes of the gentry. ‘The Lady Cravens Receipt-Booke (privately owned), 1697-1704, is perhaps representative of these. Elizabeth Craven died in childbirth aged twenty-five, and not surprisingly, considering her early death, the receipt book has many blank pages. What makes her collection interesting, however, is firstly a recipe for oyster loaves which must have its roots in the Anglo-Saxon version. (See page 31.) Here the loaves are small rolls with the interior crumb removed, the oysters are poached in white wine and chopped onion with pepper, salt, mace, nutmeg and cloves, then much butter is added and they are poured into the bread rolls which are baked in a hot oven. Secondly, food preparation, storage and cooking have not changed since Elinor Fettiplace’s time, a hundred years earlier. Lady Craven dries peas and beans for keeping throughout the winter, she pickles purslane, French beans and artichokes. She makes a ragout of pigeons, where they are trussed as for baking, then beaten so that the bones are broken, then seasoned with pepper, salt, mace and cloves. They are larded, then floured, then poached in a strong broth, stewed until tender until no more broth is left, then chopped sweetbreads, mushrooms, artichoke bottoms are added with wine, herbs and lots of butter. This is cooked for a while and the pigeons are served in the sauce. There are recipes for cheeses, including Angelot; Lady Fettiplace gave a recipe for this, and it is little changed. The cheese once set is rubbed with salt and butter. Lady Craven also gives recipes for cream cheese, winter cheese and little straw cheeses. She has four recipes for mushrooms, including one on how to pickle them. They are peeled, boiled, then placed in white wine vinegar with cloves, mace and pepper. She says the same pickle will do for ‘cowcumbers’. The first recipe is for almonds to make into comfits, they are boiled in syrup, left to cool, then more sugar is added and they are boiled again; the process continues for days until the syrup is hard.
Mrs Anne Hawtrey’s Receipt Book for 1689 (privately owned) has a collection of recipes that seem quite familiar: a peas pottage for example for which the dried peas are soaked, then boiled with a ham bone; a fricassée of chicken, where the chopped pieces are fried in butter until brown, then poached in broth and wine; the sauce for it is thickened with egg yolks. As you read on you realise that so many of the recipes are quite lost to us, such as roasted rabbit with oyster stuffing, or a stewed breast of veal, or minced pies from beef with nutmeg, cinnamon, lemon, sack and sugar. Her recipes include how to make thick cheese, almond cheesecakes, lemon custards, quince cream, cabbage and clotted cream, how to candy angelica, how to pickle anchovies, green French beans, walnuts, cowcumbers and cockles, how to preserve barberries, plums and morello cherries, and how to make apricot cakes, raspberry cakes and apple pudding. As in the sixteenth century, the household receipt book is also the repository of all medicinal cures and wisdom; here one can read how to prevent miscarrying, how to make Mrs Buster’s powder for convulsions, to purge gently, to make vapour water, to cure deafness and the bite of a mad dog. And how to make ‘Mr Whissellers pultice’ which is good for any sore or swelling. These two books, at the cusp of the new century, reflect the last few hundred years, and in no way anticipate Mrs Raffald’s sixty years later.
The first wildly successful cookery book of the eighteenth century was Eliza Smith’s The Compleat Housewife (1727); it went through almost 100 editions and was published up until 1773. It included 500 receipts, and in 1742 it became the first cookery book to be published in America. She says of herself that she had been constantly employed in fashionable and noble families. If the soup she made for them on fast days is anything to go by they sacrificed nothing. This, in fact is the nub, as her recipes still reflect medieval concepts of luxurious fast day dishes, mixing meat and fruit, of almonds and verjuice. Her noble families are surely of the old faith and of great piety. Eliza herself quotes the Bible with relish:
That Esau was the first Cook I shall not presume to assert; for Abraham gave Order to dress a fatted Calf; but Esau is the first person mentioned that made any Advances beyond plain Dressing, as Boiling, Roasting etc. For tho’ we find indeed that Rebeckah his Mother was accomplished with the Skill of making savoury Meat as well as he, yet whether he learned it from her, or she from him, is a Question, too knotty for me to determine.
Quite Eliza, so why mention it? Yet the mixture of Biblical quotation and kitchen lore was obviously loved by her eighteenth-century public.
A fasting day ‘soop’ is made from spinach, chervil, sorrel and lettuce with herbs sautéed in butter, then simmered in water with pepper and salt and an onion stuck with cloves, a stale French roll cut into slices and pistachio nuts. It continues to simmer, then is thickened with eight egg yolks mixed with a little white wine and the juice of a lemon; a toasted French roll is then placed in the bowl, the soup is poured over and it is garnished with ten or twelve poached eggs.
Both a lamb pie and a chicken pie are made with the addition of fruit, damsons, gooseberries, citron and lemon chips, all mixed with butter. A sauce or caudle is added afterwards made from sack, white wine, verjuice and sugar. A white leach is made with milk, almonds and rosewater, set with isinglass and flavoured with grains of musk and oil of mace or cinnamon. These are medieval recipes still alive and well in the 1720s.
To mumble rabbits and chickens, she suggests stuffing them with parsley, onion and liver, and boiling them. When they are half done, the flesh should be torn from the bones in flakes, and with the stuffing boiled with white wine, butter, nutmeg; it is then thickened with a little flour and served on sippets. This is another medieval recipe unchanged from the twelfth century. To collar salmon, Hannah Glasse gives a recipe almost word for word the same as Eliza Smith’s. Recipes on how to collar beef, veal, or venison, were all popular, because it is a way of keeping a dish for some days. A strip of meat or fish is beaten thin, a stuffing made and spread over it, then it is rolled up and tied, and poached in a pickling liquor where it is left to remain until cold. It is kept in the liquor and served sliced with some of the liquor. A goose, turkey or leg of mutton à la daube is a recognisable recipe that we might use still today. On the other hand, we have quite forgotten the popularity of cucumbers cooked in butter and served with meat. Eliza Smith gives a method of potting swans, which will also do for goose, duck, beef or hare. She colours milk with marigolds when making cheese. She gives a direction when pickling samphire ‘to pick your samphire from dead or withered branches’; this, of course, is rock samphire which is no longer picked and eaten. Today we eat marsh samphire.
One of the most impressive cookery writers of the century was Martha Bradley. The British Housewife, or the Cook, Housewife or Gardener’s companion, by Mrs Martha Bradley, late of Bath was published in 1760, in two volumes, with 725 pages in all. Unlike earlier cookery writers, Mrs Bradley explains everything in great detail beginning with the produce itself: for example, caviare is the roe of the sturgeon, prepared and dried. Then she tells you how it is caught, prepared and sent all over Russia. Capers and ‘cayan’ pepper are dealt with as efficiently. She is highly informative and is the first real educator in food for the literate classes. Her book is well indexed and could be used today as a food encyclopaedia of general interest. (She does, however, make occasional mistakes, such as believing that soy sauce was made from a purplish mushroom with a wrinkled surface resembling that of morel.)
The importance of Mrs Bradley’s work is that it is the first and only book before Mrs Raffald’s which is written for the British housewife as opposed to an English gentlewoman. One can imagine it being the kitchen standby of an Irish housekeeper of a great estate in County Wicklow, or being read with avidity by the wife of a sea captain in Swansea, or a doctor’s wife in Edinburgh. This is food for the literate masses and classless, written in an easy style, succinct and pragmatic. Mrs Bradley is interested in communicating information and does so brilliantly. She is incredibly comprehensive as she writes: ‘directing what is to be done in the providing for, conducting and managing a family throughout the year’. She goes on to tell you what the book contains:
… a general account of fresh provisions of all kinds. Of the several foreign articles for the Table, pickled or otherwise preserved; and the different kinds of spices, salts, sugars and other ingredients used in pickling and preserving at home: showing what each is, whence it is brought, and what are its qualities and uses. Together with the nature of all kinds of foods and the method of suiting them to different constitutions. A bill of fare for each month, the art of marketing …
And so she goes on. Was there anything that the British housewife needed to know that wasn’t in this book? What of the recipes, however? If this book is a great social leveller the recipes should be as practical as the advice, and here surely are recipes that dispense with the frivolities.
Her recipe for boiling any fowl, even a turkey, is simple enough: put in enough water, she directs; too little water makes the bird look brown and dirty. A chicken needs only 15 to 20 minutes but a turkey will take about an hour. (All birds then were far smaller than intensively farmed poultry now.) A fowl to be roasted is basted with butter and dredged with a little flour, and that is all. (Flour had now been fully accepted as a thickening medium.) To roast a fowl pheasant fashion is to truss it like a pheasant (keeping the head on), lard it with bacon and serve it with a sauce associated with pheasant. People are fooled by this dish, she tells us, and when they have both real and fake pheasant on the table, often prefer the fowl. Here, we suddenly see, is a writer on the side of the kitchen staff, ready and eager to deceive her employers, the wealthy or the gentry. She does also give a recipe for roasting a good, fine fowl, which should be stuffed with oysters mixed with a glass of white wine; then the fowl is buttered and larded with bacon before it is roasted. She tells us how to boil a goose which will need an hour and the water merely has the addition of salt and parsley. It is served with cabbage – ‘let them be well boiled’ – and she finishes the recipe by telling us that a boiled salted goose served with pickled red cabbage is an excellent dish. She gives a recipe for a stuffed shoulder of mutton in which the stuffing is composed of oysters, anchovies, hard-boiled eggs, onion, nutmeg, thyme and winter savory; it is served with a sauce of red wine and oyster liquor, which one knows would be marvellous. And there are many other recipes that strike one as delicious. In her brisk manner she has a way of cutting through what she considers to be unnecessary; she gives a recipe for a goose à la daube which is not what we would recognise as such, but is merely a goose served cold seasoned with lemons, bay and chives, having been boiled and wrapped in a napkin.
She finished that recipe with this observation: ‘The French dress partridges, pheasants and other Game this way but the tame fowls do better.’ Now we know, Mrs Bradley has spoken. Her suspicion of French influences is also seen in her explanation of the ‘cullis’. ‘These are a particular article of the French Cookery, which we have not named in the preceding months, because victuals made to be dressed in a plain way do very well without them; but they are essential to made dishes, and will be found very useful on many other occasions.’ She then gives various recipes that are similar to the ones Patrick Lamb gave fifty years earlier. So the French get a rather grudging acknowledgement that the cullis is not really essential to good food but at times can be useful in ragouts and rich soups. It is the expense, of course, that alarms the English cooks, she writes of a ragout of cabbage: ‘The French are so extravagant at their great tables that they use such a ragoo as this as a sauce.’
Is Mrs Bradley guilty of over-cooking the vegetables, however? Her advice on savoys, cabbages and cauliflowers is to boil until the stalks are tender. Her further advice on cabbage is after this to chop it up, mix it with butter and boil for another five minutes, then to send it to the table mashed. Little doubt there that the cabbage would stink of sulphur while it cooked, or come to the table soggy. Historically throughout northern Europe all brassicas were cooked slowly in the cauldron for great lengths of time; the tradition was that cabbages should be well and thoroughly cooked. However, Mrs Bradley observes in her recipe for cauliflower that the boiling time must be watched carefully, for over-cooking was a common fault. Also, her recipe for cooking spinach is perfect: she observes it needs no water added, just a little salt and it would be cooked in a few minutes; then it should be drained and sent to table with a little butter.
Mrs Bradley and Mrs Raffald are celebrating both the birth and instant flowering of the British cuisine; they are solidly bourgeois, pragmatic, sensible; they eschew time-wasting in the kitchen, dislike fussiness, and yet value clear, distinct flavours and the quality of their produce. They are not much influenced by any French notions of gastronomy; in fact both ignore it, yet they are open to ideas from British travellers and colonialists. Mrs Raffald gives a recipe for Indian Pickle or Piccalillo and one in imitation of Indian Bamboo. Mrs Bradley lists and describes many imported foods, including dried mushrooms and truffles; the latter which she regards as so tasteless they are a waste of time. These women writers were Protestant and churchgoers; in fact it is very likely that Mrs Raffald was in the Collegiate church at Manchester when Ann Lee created a rumpus, for which she was fined and jailed before she left for America to found the American Shakers.32
The Country Estate
The recipes and style of cooking on country estates were based on a supply of fresh country produce which was unequalled in its richness, variety and flavour. Indeed, with this kind of produce there was little need of culinary adornment, for it was cooked plainly and briefly. In Humphry Clinker Tobias Smollett’s country gentleman character, Matthew Bramble, makes an oft-quoted boast that sums up the richness of country produce:
At Brambleton Hall … my table is furnished from my own ground; my five year old mutton, fed on the fragrant herbage of the mountains that might vie with venison in juice and flavour; my delicious veal, fattened with nothing but the mother’s milk, that fills the dish with gravy; my poultry from the barn door, that never knew confinement, but when they were at roost; my rabbits panting from the warren; my game fresh from the moors; my trout and salmon struggling from the stream; oysters from their native banks … My salads, roots, and pot herbs, my own garden yields in plenty and perfection; the produce of the natural soil prepared by moderate cultivation. The same soil affords all the different fruits which England may call her own, so that my dessert is every day gathered from the tree; my dairy flows with the nectarious tides of milk and cream, from whence we derive abundance of excellent butter, curds and cheese; and the refuse fattens my pigs, that are destined for hams and bacon.
Bramble then goes on to make a point by point comparison with what is available in London, unfavourable in all respects to the city.
Gilbert White began work on his garden at Selborne in 1749 and the following year was planting forty different varieties of vegetables, including artichokes, endives, mustard and cress, white broccoli, skirret and scorzonera, marrowfat peas, leeks, squashes, cucumbers, all manner of lettuces and a crop of onions to pickle. He became obsessed with growing melons and by the mid-1750s had dug out a hot bed, referred to as a melon ground; it was 45 ft long and used thirty cart loads of dung annually.33
When living in Oxford he would purchase salad leaves from the Botanical Gardens to complement lobsters, crabs and oysters, olives, almonds, Seville oranges and strawberries, for all of which he had a great liking. Back home he was energetic in planting out asparagus beds, sowing his first potatoes and tending to the cucumbers on the hot bed. He wrote of potatoes: ‘They have prevailed by means of premiums within these twenty years only, and are much esteemed here now by the poor, who would scarcely have ventured to taste them in the last reign.’ In 1761 he planted a large number of fruit trees and made a fruit wall for his espaliers.
In Stuart times it had become the custom to build a kitchen garden with stillrooms in each corner, handy for processing the large number of medicinal herbs that were grown. Sometimes these plots, still planned on the four field system of medieval pattern, had earth walls planted with wallflowers; this was common in the north, though in the south it was more customary to build the walls out of brick or stone. Nevertheless, Gilbert White builds earth and straw walls and remarks how attractive they are.
We cannot but be impressed at the great range of vegetables and fruit grown on the eighteenth-century country estate. There were cabbages, in numerous varieties to obtain a succession from April to October, such as red cabbages, the Aberdeen red, the dwarf and the large, five varieties of savoy, fourteen of borecole (these are more brassicas, but cavolo nero is now sometimes referred to as borecole); Russian kale which was sometimes blanched like seakale, cauliflowers, broccoli, eighteen varieties of peas including sugar snap, ten varieties of broad bean, several varieties of kidney bean and scarlet runners, turnips, sometimes grown as seedlings and used in salads (it was Charles I’s favourite salad, so John Evelyn tells us), a new sort of violet carrot, parsnips, beetroots, skirrets, scorzonera and salsify (sometimes eaten like asparagus in the spring), radish seed pods used in salads and pickles, spinach, white and red chard, orach, New Zealand spinach brought back by Joseph Banks, Good King Henry (a relation of spinach, the tops of which were blanched in the spring), and sorrel, used in soups, sauces and salads. Then there were onions, leeks, garlic and shallots. It was thought that more asparagus was grown in London than anywhere else in the world; some growers had over 100 acres in cultivation in Deptford and Mortlake. Globe artichokes were grown in three varieties: the French conical, the globe and the dwarf globe. There were cardoons and rampion (the roots were eaten raw like radish and its leaves used in winter salads); alexander was going out of favour but celery was grown instead; celeriac was used for soups. For salads and flavourings they grew and used chicory, mustard and cress, lamb’s lettuce, water cress, burnet, wood sorrel, purslane, parsley, tarragon, fennel, chervil, dill, horse radish, nasturtiums, marigolds, borage, balm, thyme, sage, clary, rock samphire, wormwood, liquorice, mint, marjoram, savory, basil, rosemary, angelica, anise, coriander, rue, caraway, hyssop, camomile, elecampane, tansy and costmary.
As for fruit, quinces were used for marmalade, for making tarts and for flavouring apple puddings; medlars were bletted before being eaten or used for jelly. They grew 140 varieties of peaches and nectarines, seven of apricots, 100 of plums, forty of cherry. Mulberries were grown under glass, gooseberries grew wonderfully well in Lancashire. Currants were grown in fifteen different varieties and raspberries in nine; they grew the hautbois strawberry (fragaria elatior), as well as alpine and wood strawberries. Joseph Banks had introduced the cranberry. Five varieties of walnuts were grown, as well as the sweet chestnuts and filberts. Pineapples were being cultivated under glass, as well as grapes, peaches, melons, figs and cucumbers, while oranges and lemons had their own elegant buildings. At a garden in Salcombe, Devonshire, there were orange trees all over 100 years old and producing fruit as large and fine as any in Portugal.
Of course all this cultivation relied on a large number of gardening servants who worked hard for a small wage. The raised beds, the hot bed, the large number of glass houses, the paths, borders and hedges all required constant attention and a head gardener who was skilled in a job that required scientific precision at propagation, pruning, fumigation, forcing, delaying ripening, storage and packing, companion planting, espaliers and fan-training.
Every country house had a kitchen garden on which they relied for their produce. Even the most modest of households like Jane Austen’s home had its hens, pigs, sheep or cow and a wealth of game birds, hares and rabbits that could be shot or snared almost on their doorstep and if not the sea coast, at least a lake or river nearby. This was the century when all these foods met on the table and were free of the commercial instant mixes that would so infect the cooking of the following centuries; the table was also free of the imported foods, which would in due course arrive across oceans to dilute the harvest of local foods on which all then lived. If the squire was fortunate enough to possess a skilled and experienced cook who had read her Mrs Raffald, Glasse or Bradley then the food served must have been notable. There was a pride in the Englishness of this cuisine, which crops up in novels and plays of the period: there was distaste for ‘made-up’ dishes, and the liking for plain roasted food with a sharp sauce seemed honest and true, reflecting values which were being communicated to the rest of the world. Nevertheless I believe this idea of ‘plain’ was more an abstract concept than a reality: the food in the cookery books is highly and imaginatively seasoned, and the British male’s palate was well attuned to these additions, as will be seen from the recipe below.
Another hindrance to our perceiving the true glories of the eighteenth-century diet is that when we read an account of it, all the colourful gustatory details are missing and the food strikes one as banal, because of the personality of the diarist. I don’t believe it to be so: for example, if pork sausages are mentioned, we are not told that they were flavoured with spinach, rosemary, sage, oysters, mace, shallots, onions, cloves and mace. This, however, is a recipe of Henry Howard’s from The British Cook’s Companion of 1729 and very good it sounds.
Parson Woodforde
James Woodforde was born in 1740, and was five years old when Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army reached Derby; his father, rector of Ansford and vicar of Castle Cary, would have been greatly alarmed and that concern and outrage must have spread through the house. Certainly the adult James in his reactions to events like the French Revolution takes a solidly conservative view utterly representative of his class and cloth. James went to New College, Oxford, in 1759, was ordained a deacon in 1763 and became a curate in Somerset in the same year. In the following year he was ordained a priest at Wells Cathedral. From 1776 to 1803, the year he died aged 63, he lived at Weston Longeville Parsonage in Norfolk, looked after by his niece, Nancy, for he never married. He began his diary the year before he left for Oxford and continued it until a few months before his death; its value to us is that often he recorded what he ate and drank at home, and more particularly when he went out to dine with grander neighbours or enjoyed festive dinners with the bishop, or at his Oxford college. It allows us to see in this one instance what the middle classes, comfortably off but not in the least affluent (he kept two maidservants, two menservants and a boy) ate everyday.
How far had Mrs Bradley and Mrs Raffald influenced the cooking in the kitchen of a country parsonage? What cookery books were in the kitchen to be referred to? Did his niece use one to make her cakes, tarts and puddings? We do not know for certain the answer to these enquiries, but if we look at the food eaten it tells us something.
At Oxford in August 1763 Woodforde dines at High Table ‘upon a neck of venison and a Breast made into a Pasty, a Ham and Fowls and two Pies. It is a venison Feast which we have once a year about this time.’ In Somerset he plants in his garden in February, peas, beans, radishes and Spanish onions. In 1766, while out to dinner, he tastes a pineapple for the first time, but unlike Evelyn he does not comment on how he found it. There is, in fact, a dearth of evaluation on the food he eats, no analysis of taste or criticism of a sauce, for example. His main criticisms are kept for his servants and almost his most adverse comment upon them is to find them ‘saucy’.
In March the following year he starts to take a decoction of alder stick in water: ‘I do really think that I have gained great benefit from it, half a pint each morning; it must be near the colour of Claret.’ Alas, he does not say why he takes it, but then he is reticent and, sadly for us, discreet. Red alder (Alnus serrulata) was taken for diarrhoea, indigestion and dyspepsia. A week later he is bled, just two ounces of blood for which he paid 2s and 6d but comments: ‘My blood was verey rich and, therefore proper to be bled.’ On 5 April 1768 his tenants paid him their rents and he gives them dinner: a loin of veal roasted and a good plum pudding. He goes to a dance two weeks later and is up until two in the morning; he had a dinner of roasted shoulder of mutton and a plum pudding as well as veal cutlets, frill’d potatoes, cold tongue, ham and cold roast beef and eggs in their shells. In September a friend from Oxford stays, to whom he gives hashed mutton and a roasted neck of pork. In October 1770 he gives a dinner for five friends, who have:
fine tench caught from my brother’s pond, Ham and 3 Fowls boiled, a plumb pudding; a couple of Ducks roasted, a roasted neck of pork, a plumb tart, an apple tart, Pears, Apples and Nutts after dinner; White wine and Red, Beer and Cyder. Coffee and Tea in the evening at six o’clock. Hashed fowl and Duck and Eggs and Potatoes etc for Supper. We did not dine until four o’clock – nor supped till ten.
In 1775 he took the Oath of Abjuration to which every employee of Church and State had to swear; this ritual oath ensured that no descendants of James II would ascend the throne. If Hannah Glasse cooked for churchmen or civil servants she would have been aware of the state fear of being overrun by Jacobites and surrendering the country back to Roman Catholicism. Woodforde, of course, was happy reading the 39 Articles in Weston Church before a crowded congregation and declaring ‘my assent and consent to the Liturgy’. In 1776 he moved to Weston Longeville where he took on the new maids and, as we have seen, agreed that part of their pay would be tea twice a day. In December his tenants visited to pay him their tithe (one-tenth of their income); he gave them a good dinner, they sat down at two to drink punch and ale, six bottles of wine and a gallon and a half of rum; they have roasted beef, a boiled leg of mutton and ‘plumb puddings in plenty’. One hopes they thought their tithe dinner was worth the loss of a tenth of their produce, but like their parson, one doubts that they questioned the status quo, though such questions were being asked elsewhere in America and across the Channel.
In 1777 Woodforde goes to friends for a Rotation Club meeting where he dines on another boiled leg of mutton, a batter pudding and a couple of ducks. In March he goes fishing and catches two brace of pike, one fine perch, some gudgeons and a few flat fish. In September some friends dine with him and he gives them fine tench taken from his pond, a boiled rump of beef, a roasted goose and a pudding. One of the ladies, a Mrs Howes, ‘found great fault with many things especially about stewing the fish – she could not eat a bit of them with such sauce etc.’ In May 1778 he catches ‘the largest pike, it weighed 7 pounds’, and at Lenswade Bridge a few days later he catches another: ‘a prodigious fine pike which weighed 8 pound and a half and it had in his belly another pike of about a pound’. With friends he drinks ‘a dish of tea’.
His dinners generally seem still to be structured in two courses, though as we have seen, the courses seem similar. In September he spends the day with his grand neighbours, the Custances, and he eats there for dinner ‘some common fish, a leg of mutton roasted and a baked pudding’, all in the first course, while a roast duck, ‘a Meat Pye, Eggs and Tart’ were in the second. For supper ‘We had a brace of Partridges roasted, some cold tongue, Potatoes in Shells and Tarts.’ In May 1779 the Howes and others return to dine and he gives them a dish of ‘maccarel’, three young chickens boiled and some bacon, roasted neck of pork and a hot gooseberry pie. They laugh so much because they have sent Mrs Howes to Coventry that the Parson gets the ‘Hickupps’. Obviously Mrs Howes was complaining of the fish again. One wishes he had been more forthcoming. In October he dines with friends and has for dinner a boiled leg of pork, a roasted turkey and a couple of ducks; for supper a couple of boiled fowls, a roasted pheasant and some cold things. ‘Dinner and Supper served up in China Dishes and Plates. Melons, Apples and Pears, Walnuts and small nuts for a desert’.
After church in January 1780 he dines with Sir Edward Bacon and company at the Calf ’s Head and has boiled fowl and tongue, a saddle of mutton roasted on the side table and a fine swan roasted with currant jelly sauce for the first course. He has for the second course a couple of wild fowls called dunfowls (small wading birds – dunlins), larks, blancmange, tarts and a good dessert of fruit which included a damson cheese. He comments: ‘I never eat a bit of Swan before and I think it good eating with sweet sauce. The swan was killed 3 weeks before it was eat and yet not the lest bad taste in it.’ The next year he visits a friend in Dereham who lodges over a barber’s and has dinner with him; a fine lobster and mutton steaks were sent over from the King’s Arms. In May he entertains the Howes again and others to dinner; he gives them his great pike which they roasted with a ‘Pudding in its Belly’, with some ‘boiled Trout, Perch, Tench, Eel and Gudgeon fryed, a Neck of Mutton boiled and a plain Pudding for Mrs Howes’. The company were all very impressed by the largeness of the pike and how moist it was. He gave another pike to Mr Howes when they left. One hopes that Mrs Howes coped with all the fish at dinner and was grateful for the gift. The next month in June he entertains the Custances with a couple of boiled chickens, a tongue, a boiled leg of mutton with capers and batter pudding for first course; for the second he gives them a couple of roasted ducks with green peas, some artichokes, tarts and blancmange. After dinner he offers them almonds, raisins, oranges and strawberries. He comments that the peas and strawberries were the first gathered by him that year – it is 8 June. Two months later they dine at New Hall with the Custances and have a ham and two fowls boiled, some young beans, veal collops and hash mutton for the first course; for the second, a roast duck, baked puddings and apple tart. In January of the next year his niece, Nancy, is very busy all morning making cakes, tarts, custards and jellies for an entertainment. At the tithe audit in 1882 he serves a dinner of salt fish, a leg of mutton boiled with capers, a knuckle of veal, a pig’s face, a fine sirloin of beef roasted and plenty of plum puddings. These, which are an obvious favourite at the Parsonage, are boiled suet puddings with dried fruit and spices; Mrs Glasse flavours hers with ginger and nutmeg, makes it with milk and eggs and boils it for five hours.
In April 1783 the Parson dines with friends, including the Howes, and has a leg of lamb boiled, a piece of roasted beef, a baked plum pudding, some crabs, tarts, raspberry creams and hung beef, grated. In June he dined with the Custances and had beans and bacon, a chine of roasted mutton, a giblet pie, hashed goose, a rabbit roasted with young peas, tarts, pudding and jellies. In August he enjoys a rather grander dinner of perch and trout, a saddle of mutton roasted, beans and bacon, a couple of fowls boiled, patties and some white soup in the first course; on the second course he has roasted pigeons and duck, ‘piggs pettytoes’, sweetbreads, raspberry cream, tarts and puddings and pippins. Mrs Raffald gives a recipe on how to dress a ‘Pig’s Pettitoes’, which are boiled suckling pigs trotters: she makes a gravy with the heart, liver and lights, then shreds them small into the liquor; she adds white wine and lemon, butter and flour, flavours with nutmeg and thickens with egg yolk and cream. She lays bread (sippets) upon a platter, splits the boiled trotters in two, lays them on top of the bread skin side up and pours the sauce over them.
When the Parson gets up especially early, he breakfasts on mutton broth. He always eats especially well when he’s with the Custances, even if they are all travelling; on one occasion they all dined with a mutual friend, Mr Micklethwaite, where they have ‘a very genteel dinner. Soals and Lobster sauce. Spring Chicken boiled and a tongue, a Piece of rost Beef, Soup, a fillet of Veal rosted with Morells and Truffles, and Pigeon Pye for the first course – sweetbreads, a green Goose and Peas, Apricot Pye, Cheesecakes, Stewed Mushrooms and Trifle.’ He was impressed by Mr Micklethwaite’s silver buckles which cost between ‘7 and 8 pounds’. In August 1790 he sends a dozen very fine apricots from his best tree, an Anson, to the Custances and they send back some fine black grapes from Mackay’s Hot House; Mackay was a gardener in Norwich. That Christmas he eats roast beef and plum puddings. At the tithe dinner the following year they get a sirloin of roasted beef, a boiled marrow bone of beef, a boiled leg of mutton with caper sauce, a couple of rabbits with onion sauce, some salt fish boiled with parsnips and egg sauce and plenty of plum puddings.
In August 1794 he has ‘a very genteel dinner’ with friends and neighbours at Hungate Lodge:
First Course at the upper end, stewed Tench, Veal Soup, best part of a Rump Beef boiled, 2 roast Chicken and a Ham, Harrico Mutton, Custard Puddings, backed Mutton Pies, Mashed Potatoes in 3 Scollop Shells brown’d over. Roots. 2 Dishes. Second Course. At the upper end, Rabbits fricasseed, at the Lower End Couple of Ducks rosted, Trifle in the Middle, blamange, Cheesecakes, Maccaroni, and small Raspberry Tartlets. Desert of Fruit mostly that sent by me to them, Peaches, Nectarines and three kinds of Plumbs.
Both Mrs Glasse and Mrs Raffald give recipes on how to ‘harrico’ mutton; they use the neck and cut it into chops which are fried, then the meat is stewed with root vegetables, celery and asparagus are added, the sauce reduced, and then it is served. Mrs Glasse adds chestnuts and herbs to hers. Mrs Glasse’s custard pudding is made in a wooden bowl with a pint of cream, a little flour, five yolks and two whites of egg, salt, nutmeg, three spoonfuls of sack, sugar to taste, a cloth is tied over the bowl and it is boiled for half an hour. The pudding is turned out onto a dish and melted butter is poured over it. For her rabbit fricassée, the rabbit is cut into small pieces, then egg and breadcrumbed, flavoured with mace and nutmeg, then fried in butter; once done a rich red wine gravy is made as a sauce. How interesting to see that blancmange, that relic from an early tenth-century Arab recipe that was to become such a medieval favourite, is eaten quite often. Mrs Raffald gives a recipe for a clear blancmange, which is calf ’s foot jelly mixed with cream, almonds and rosewater (a kind of distillation of the source recipe though not suitable for a fast day) and two others made with isinglass, one dyed green with spinach juice.
On one level there is something uninspiring about Parson Woodforde and his companions’ diet; there is far too much of it and surely the repetition of a variety of roasted and boiled meats day in and day out would become tedious. There can be no doubt, however, that it is representative of the age. The middle classes lived well and here is the proof of it. Fish came from the ponds, rivers and estuaries of East Anglia. Perch and trout are thought rather grand but eels are simply fried. Tench is eaten frequently, but it is a fish we never see now; it is a member of the carp family and weighs 4 lb or more. Pike is also served whenever the Parson caught one; these fish are either boiled or stewed, and served plain, for once when the tench came with a sauce Mrs Howes complained and would not eat it. They often eat sea fish like sole and mackerel, and salt fish is served quite often, especially for the tithe dinners – perhaps to remind the tenants of their status.
They also eat venison and game birds, although mostly the Parson serves beef, mutton and veal plainly cooked and with a separate sauce, referred to as a gravy. If the recipes in the cookery books were followed, of course, this sauce would be intensely flavoured, made from red wine, lemons, herbs and spices. They also eat young chicken and geese boiled, ducks, hens, capons and older geese roasted. There are very few made dishes like the fricassée of rabbit, which are made for special occasions. Plum puddings are served so often they must have been making these daily; egg custards of various kinds are the next choice. Root vegetables appear frequently, but the summer vegetables are a source of some excitement; the first garden peas are always recorded and so are the cucumbers and lettuces, so salads must have been enjoyed, as was the fresh fruit, the plums, nectarines and strawberries.
This food because of its freshness and its simplicity of preparation and cooking would not have been dull to the diners themselves (or indeed to us now if we were eating it); it is possibly that Parson Woodforde fails to bring it to life. We do not know how well the food was cooked, of course. I cannot help but think of William Verrall’s condemnation of some aspects of English ham: ‘We serve it up generally not half soaked, salt as brine, and almost as hard as a flint, and our sauce most times nothing more than a little greasy cabbage and melted butter, and sometimes for garnish an ugly fowl or two, or half a dozen pigeons badly trussed.’34 When Woodforde ate dinner alone there was of course less food; later in his life, when he recorded his food daily, it is just ‘boiled beef and a suet pudding’ or ‘Veal soup, Veal Collops, and Bacon and a brace of Partridges roasted and Apple Dumplins’,35 but there’s no doubt that his diet tended towards stodge. Overeating, obesity and gout were afflictions of the age, being a well-known target of the caricaturist.
There is comfort and security in these meals; the security funds the indignation Woodforde feels when the King is mobbed by an angry crowd as he travels in his coach from St James’s Palace; it fuels the horror he expressed when Marie Antoinette is guillotined, ‘all anarchy and confusion’, and he is content to pay heavy taxes in order to fight the rebels in the American colonies. James Woodforde never questions such matters as the Rotten Boroughs returning members, that a theft of over 40s is punishable by death, that the slave trade is nothing but a respectable institution, that men can be press-ganged into the navy, that the Catholics are hated and feared by honest God-fearing people. He is confined within his limitations, just as his diet is; he never ventures to eat anything alien to him – there is no whisper of garlic for example, for that belongs to France, to people who are the enemy and have been for hundreds of years. Once dining out he had a dish with morels and truffles in it (dried and imported) but they bring forth no comment. The cookery books of the time are not without imagination and enterprise; indeed,they are full of it. Though the Parson goes hare-coursing, however, does he ever eat it jugged or ‘florendined’ (boned, stuffed and rolled), does he take his partridges paned (minced, flavoured and baked in moulds) or have his beef in olives or his lamb fricasséed? No, he does not, yet these dishes appear in the cookery books of the time. It is not that his kitchen skills are limited, for servants and his niece Nancy wish to please him and would contrive to cook any amount of delicious dishes for him; it is simply that he is content with the plain fare he eats, or does not much notice it if it isn’t plain so cannot record it. Basically Parson Woodforde is a plain man, but we fall into an error if we think the food he eats is as plain and uninteresting as it sounds.