KISSING COMFITS AND SNOW ERINGOES: APHRODISIACS, by Jane Borodale

Eryngium maritimum © Valerie Hill 

Effective, practical enhancement of the art of love has been sought after since ancient times. Roots of sea holly or Eryngium maritimum were collected on a large scale in England during the 17th and 18th centuries for candying as restorative, quasi-aphrodisiac pastilles, known as eryngoes. Old records of Colchester show that the town was famous for oysters and eryngo root, where a 17th-century apothecary called Robert Burton set up a manufactory to made these popular sweetmeats, candied with sugar and orange-blossom water. They even get a mention in the 'Merry Wives of Windsor', when Falstaff, off to meet Mistress Ford in Windsor Forest, declares; ‘…hail kissing comfits and snow eringoes; let there come a tempest of provocation…’ 

Sea holly grows well in gardens (you absolutely wouldn’t collect it from the wild anymore – it’s far too scarce) and Mrs Grieve suggests digging up the roots at the end of the season, from plants at least two years old. Geoffrey Grigson points out wryly that, ‘careful wives grew Sea Holly in the physic garden.’ (What are you waiting for...?)

Pliny describes it as a sweet savouring root. 16th-century botanist William Turner writes of its virtues; ‘to stir up the lust of the body, and … give it to both men and women that are desirous to have childer. Some condite (candy) or keep in sugar the roots for this purpose.’ Nicolaus Alexandrinus of the late 13th century has four medicines using this herb which he ‘maketh to stir up the pleasure of the body, and to make men and women fruitful.’

Sea holly © Valerie Hill

Here’s a 17th-century recipe for Candied Eringo-roots from Hannah Woolley. I have it on good authority that it is effective – but don’t blame me for consequences of any sort whatever:

Take of your Eringo-roots ready to be preserved, and weigh them, and to every pound of Roots you must take of the purest Sugar you can get two pound, and clarifie it with the whites of Eggs exceedingly well, that is may be as clear as Crystal; it being clarified, you must boil it to the height of Manus Christi, and then dip in your Roots two or three times till they are all Candyed; put them in a Stove, and so keep them all the year.

Dorothy Hartley gives us a hand-me-down recipe for Eyringo Jelly (sometimes called Gloucester Jelly as sea holly grew in the estuary):

1 oz each of sago, hartshorn shavings, eyringo root, and pearl barley; put into a pan with 2 quarts water, and boil until reduced to 1 quart. Strain and let it set – it should be stiff. Slices of it should be put into invalid drinks (!) – or it may be flavoured and sweetened and eaten as a jelly.

She also suggests Eryingo toffee:

Boil some of the sliced root in a little water till well flavoured, and add this water to the sugar and butter with which you make the toffee: just as it is ready to set, drop the softened root chips into it.

Early purple orchid © Valerie Hill

It wouldn’t be representative of the early herbals if I didn’t include mention of them getting it perfectly wrong. A popular but useless aphrodisiac came from the orchid (or standergrasse) family. ‘Orchis’ is from the Greek orkhis meaning literally ‘testicle’, and the plant acquired attributes of sympathetic magic due to the shape of its tuber. Orchids, particularly Orchis mascula or Early Purple were cited as a vital ingredient in a sweet electuary known as a diasatyrion, which combined Orchid tubers with dates, various nuts including pistachios, galingale, peppers, musk, ambergris, grains of paradise, ash-keys, nettle seed and Malaga wine, and which was prescribed by the College of Physicians in London as ‘a provocative to venery’. Henry Lyte’s 'New Herball' of 1578 says: ‘the full and sappy roots of Standergrasses (but especially of Hares Ballocks, or Goates Orchis) eaten, or boyled in Goates milke and drunken, provoketh Venus, or bodily lust.’

But there were plenty of other options if you couldn’t get your hands on either of these. Pliny suggests that artichokes ‘taken in wine stirreth up the lust of the body… but likewise as this herb provoketh lust in women, so it abateth the same in men.’ As ever it depends on whom you read, and Henry Lyte disagrees on the finer point; ‘the first springes or tender impes of the Artichoke sodden in good broth with bytter, doth mightily stirre up the lust of the bodie both in men and women, causeth sluggish men to be diligent in Sommer…’ Aniseed (Pimpinella anisum) is a traditional aphrodisiac, a sweet, warming stimulant herb. Turner says of anise that ‘it stirreth men to the pleasure of the body.’ There was lovage, and garlic. Ayurvedic medicine still regards garlic as rejuvenative and aphrodisiac. Turner says that it ‘stirreth men to venery, drunken with green Coryander and strong wine.’

Ash keys © Valerie Hill

Anyone could obtain a bit of ash out in the woods or on the roadside – its seeds according to Dioscorides, ‘provoke lust’ or ‘render a man more spirited with ladies’. Lyte says, ‘The seed of the ashe-tree increaseth naturall seed, and stirreth by Venus, especially being taken with a Nutmeg, as Isaac, Rhasis, Damascenus, and many other Arabian Physitions doe write.’

Other traditional spring tonics like watercress (nasturtium) and parsley feature often in the herbals as having aphrodisiac virtues. Turner claims that ‘Persely… stirreth up appetite to cold women’, and it’s notable that parsley oil is used today in perfumes for men. There was saffron, or coriander seeds, or leeks and onions; in some regions of France there was a custom of preparing onion soup for newly-weds after their wedding night. Pliny suggested that if southernwood (also called lad’s love) ‘…be layed under the bed, pillow or bolster, it provoketh carnall copulation, and resisteth all inchantments, which may let or hinder such businesse, and the inticements to the same.’

The opposite effect.

Just in case, I should point out one or two easy-to-find antidotes or anaphrodisiacs: such as mallow, hops and lettuce. The Pythagoreans knew lettuce as the 'eunuch’s plant', but luckily you need more than a bowlful of salad for it to have an effect, it’s the concentrated milky juice or sap, the 18th-century 'lettuce opium' that has the sedative power.

And while I’m in this bodily vein (it’s all sex and death today) – there are still tickets left for the upcoming Medicine and Mortality weekend at the Weald and Downland Museum in Sussex, 21-22 Sep. Historians including Ian Mortimer, Clare Gittings and Owen Davies will talk about health, fatal illnesses, magic, medicine and funeral rituals; medical herbalist Christina Stapley will demonstrate historical herb recipes – ask her about eryngoes! – and much more.

And that, people, is my very last post. I’ve absolutely loved being a History Girl and will go on reading HG posts galore, but right now must bury myself and do nothing but write, write, write, for a while.

Thank you for having me, and adieu… 

www.janeborodale.com

THE GLASS BEAD (GUESSING) GAME, by Jane Borodale

I think it’s partly the mystery, the unknoweableness of the past that makes it so compelling - isn't it? And why is it that some objects from the past can seem so much more peculiarly intense than others? It’s as though along the way they’ve somehow absorbed tiny aspects of previous lives or previous contexts and concentrated something of those existences into an actual, physical potency. An object like this rare 17th-century English glass beadwork basket, currently on display at the Holburne Museum in Bath, certainly has that:

I was quite taken aback by its charisma – if an object could have such a thing – when I saw it last week, laid in its display case, where the museum has an urgent appeal for donations towards its purchase. At first glance it looks quite mild; pretty enough, a fine, colourful object made painstakingly with skill and quality materials. But look more closely and abruptly it seems crawling with verdant nature, almost disturbingly intense, like a vivid dream of a sampler or tapestry half-manifesting into an animate state. I’m not exaggerating – it really does have a spooky, hyperreal quality.

It’s made of small beads of glass, coral and wood that are threaded in sequence onto fine wires and sewn into place on the wire mesh frame of the tray-shaped basket. It depicts three figures standing beside a turreted castle. Tumultuous clouds, in twisting beady ribbons of blue and white like a Van Gogh painting, scud across a swirling, sunny sky above them. The pastoral scene is crowded with flowering and fruiting plants, dotted with creatures and cross-hatched with beadwork.

 

Catherine of Braganza by Jacob Huysmans

The figures are believed to represent King Charles II with his Queen, Catherine of Braganza, attended by a lady-in-waiting – and it’s likely to have been made in about 1665, in celebration of their marriage and the restoration of the monarchy. Catherine of Braganza was a long-suffering though loyal and loving wife. Daughter of the king of Portugal, she endured three miscarriages (never producing an heir to the throne), the famous Popish Plot led by Titus Oates, plus the ignominy of the existence of a string of the king’s mistresses.

Barbara Villiers by Henri Gascar

One such prominently favoured mistress was Barbara Palmer, nee Villiers. It would have been impossible for Catherine to ignore her presence, as Charles gave her the position of the queen’s Lady of the Bedchamber. (Barbara later gave birth to Charles’s illegitimate son and was made a duchess.) Could she possibly have a similarity of feature to the third figure in the bead tableau - she certainly caught the public imagination, is it inconceivable that she has a subtle mention in this beaded portrait too? 

The glass beads themselves are beautiful, still rich in colour (where a sampler of the same period would be faded to more muted colours). They were mostly likely imported from Venice and the Netherlands, and the head and hands of the King and Queen are of the finest quality lampwork.

It’s probable that whoever made this basket was little more than a child herself – young educated girls in the 17th century made samplers and were taught fine needlework as a matter of course – but this seems like a very special example. How did she learn to bead so ambitiously, with so much craftsmanship? How long did it take for her to finish the object, and what happened to it afterwards – was it a gift for an occasion, a wedding or christening perhaps? Tessa Murdoch of the V&A describes the basket as being, ‘…in astonishing condition and a remarkable testimony to the domestic needlework skills of women and teenage girls.’

It’s very satisfying to imagine the maker plotting her design, waiting for her order of beads to arrive, impatiently spilling them out of their packets, gloating over them and letting them run through her fingers like bright seeds or beans. It’s hard not to wonder where and in whose house was the finished thing proudly displayed – in front of a window, maybe, glinting in sunlight, or on a candlelit table for visitors to admire. And above all, who was she, the maker? Likely we’ll never know, but then sometimes the best thing about history is the mystery, and the sheer guessing-game nature of it.

So! Here’s where you could come in. The Holburne Museum in Bath is appealing to acquire this basket for its permanent collection. They need to raise £6,000 through public donations to match another £78,000 being sought through grants – and the clock is ticking as the deadline to raise the cash is July!

The DONATE program enables people to make contributions of £1 or more via smartphones, when and where they please. Click here to donate now. If the Holburne can secure enough money, it will be the only place nationally to have a beadwork basket on permanent display. (Otherwise, it’s very likely to leave the country…)

NIGHTJAR AKA THE GOATSUCKER, by Jane Borodale

‘Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-notes unvaried,

Brooding o’er the gloom, spins the brown eve-jar.’ George Meredith

Caprimulgus europaeus

It’s an obvious thing to say, but some aspects of the past are utterly gone. But every now and then we’re lucky enough to get a fleeting, unexpected taste of what the past might have been like, a tiny hint or reminder – what the painter Winifred Nicholson might have called ‘glimpses through’. I had one of those moments yesterday, when I heard a nightjar.

I’d just gone out to shut the henhouse for the night and was watching a bat flicker across the open space between the hedge and wood. Dusk in May is so deliciously fresh – every evening a little longer, a little more promisingly nearly-summer, and here was a nightjar as well – what a bonus. Tantalisingly, I had to wait for quiet stretches between the noise of passing traffic to listen properly to this strange voice from the past, calling from a time when such things were plentiful in the countryside…

The European nightjar (Caprimulgus europaeus) is a nocturnal summer visitor from warmer places. Although on the increase again, they number just over 4600 breeding pairs in the UK.

It isn’t hard to understand why this modest, reclusive, mysterious bird became associated with the uncanny. Its associated myths pre-date Aristotle, who recorded them, and throughout Europe folklore insisted that the nightjar stole milk from goats’ udders – earning it the name Goatsucker, by which it’s known in many places, from Spain to Russia. Other country names in Britain include ‘Flying–toad’, ‘Fern-owl’, ‘Night-hawk’ and ‘Moth-owl’, which seems exactly right, given that it must surely be the nearest thing to a moth one could ever see in bird-form.

Infrequently seen as they sleep during the day (unless you stumble upon a female sitting on her eggs on the ground), but its appearance lends itself easily to legend. The nightjar has wide, black eyes that shine like a cat’s if caught in torchlight. It has camouflaging, mottled brown feathers like lichen, or a reptile. Its pink gape opens very wide for swallowing large moths, craneflies, chafers and dor-beetles, and the beak is surrounded by bristles, presumably to more efficiently hoover up supper on the wing.

It looks, in short, like a cross between a cuckoo, a moth and a catfish. It is very agile in flight, and has a peculiar serrated middle claw which it uses for preening.

It is also called ‘Corpse Fowl’ and ‘Puckeridge’ – nightjars were also wrongly accused of pecking the hides of cattle and causing the disease called puckeridge (a condition caused by the warble fly which lays its eggs under the skin’s surface).

Naturalist and curate Gilbert White (1720-93) in his Hampshire parish of Selborne often recorded the presence of nightjars or fern-owls, and noted:

‘The country people have a notion that the fern owl … is very injurious to to weanling calves … [but] the least observation and attention would convince men that these birds neither injure the goatherd nor the grazier, but are perfectly harmless and subsist alone on night insects. … Nor does it anywise appear how they can … inflict any harm among kine, unless they possess the powers of animal magnetism, and can affect them by fluttering over them.’

He says ruefully that:

‘It is the hardest thing in the world to shake off superstitious prejudices: they are sucked in as it were with our mother’s milk … and make the most lasting impressions, become so interwoven into our very constitutions, that the strongest good sense is required to disengage ourselves from them.’

In Yorkshire nightjars were said to be the souls of unbaptised children, condemned to wander the world forever.

Poets love the nightjar, occupying as it does that crepuscular, liminal half-place between day and night where changes happen. Dylan Thomas mentions it in his poem ‘Fern Hill, and Wordsworth describes it like this: ‘The Night-hawk is singing his frog-like tune/ Twirling his watchman’s rattle about.’ (Though he later changed the lines to the rather vaguer: ‘The buzzing Dor-hawk round and round is wheeling.’) Poet and naturalist Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) wrote, ‘While, by the lingering light, I scarcely discern/The shrieking night-jar sail on heavy wing.’ John Clare (1793-1864) mentions it frequently.

The warm undulating churring of its song sounds almost mechanical, like an old Singer sewing machine, or a spinning wheel; or crickets. John Clare described it in a letter as ‘a trembling sort of crooing noise’. The male call is the churring one, at 1,900 notes per minute, which it can sustain for several minutes at a time.

To hear it for yourself, click here to go to a sample recording (Xeno-canto: Sharing Bird Sounds From Around The World).

Listening to the nightjar’s song in the field produces a peculiar sensation – as if the ground itself were vibrating inside your head, almost felt rather than heard, and very hard to pinpoint in terms of location – the nightjar seems to throw its voice like a ventriloquist. If you didn’t know what it was, or if you were fairly steeped in superstition as a way of life, your blood might well momentarily run cold with the eerieness of it. It’s a fabulous, spooky bird. If only there were more. Bring back the nightjar!

Can anyone think of any other wild creature so unfairly maligned?


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WEEDS AND WEEDING WOMEN, by Jane Borodale

© Valerie Hill

‘As oft as nede shall require it must be weeded, for else the wede woll overgrowe the hearbs.’ (Fitzherbert, 1532) 

This slovenly gardener (I mean me) has been taken by surprise. Lulled into a false sense of security by the lateness of spring, then just two days of sunshine, and suddenly the bare land is alarmingly green and bristling with a mass of creeping buttercup, ground elder, coltsfoot and bursts of dock and dandelion.

So I’m thinking about historical weeds. Our idea of what a weed is has changed, of course, over time. Many plants we now consider pests have been thought of in the medieval period (and earlier) as food or medicine. But some plants have always been more cosmopolitan, persistent and hungry than others, and they know no boundaries. 

© Valerie Hill

In his celebrated book Weeds (2010) Richard Mabey describes how the first Neolithic settlers in Britain brought seeds of corn poppy, charlock and wild radish inadvertently with their wheat and barley grains in 3500 BCE. Groundsel came with the Bronze Age. The Romans brought ground elder to feed their livestock. Rosebay willowherb started its journey here as a rare garden specimen in the 16th century that slowly, joyously escaped and by the 19th century was rampaging along the railway system, like Oxford ragwort. Nettles too have always followed the human trail, thriving in soil rich with our waste and decomposition and ash – on midden heaps and churchyards, and fields improved with manure from pond silt and grazing livestock. Weeds, like crop-methods, are evolving all the time – and keeping up.

'Burning Weeds', Alexander Mann (1853-1908)

How were they dealt with? In the larger Tudor gardens, weeders were most often poor women working for a few pennies a day. Historian C. Paul Christianson has studied 16th century accounts of the Bridge House garden in London, and in The Riverside Gardens of Thomas More’s London, looks at records of the large numbers of female staff working there and at York Place and Hampton Court. He says that, ‘it was chiefly women, often at first noted in the accounts simply as “a weding woman” or “a pore widow to wede the gardeyn” who were employed,’ often for a pitiful per diem of 2d - 4d. Garden weeds were picked as now by hand, sometimes wearing three-fingered weeding gloves (presumably for protection against bramble, thistle and the rasping, prickly langue-de-boeuf). In the fields though, before hoeing became more widespread in England, cropweeds were tackled thus:

French miniature, c1180

‘Ye have a wedyne-hoke with a socket, set upon a little staffe a yard longe, and this hoke would be ground sharpe, both behind and before. In his other hand he hath a forked styke a yarde longe, and with the fork putteth the weed from him, and he putteth the hoke beyond the roote of the wede, putteth it to him and cutteth the weed fast by the earth.’ (Fitzherbert). 

The fields must have been continually dotted with labourers weeding along the rows, throughout the season. No spraying of herbicides to rely on then – yet according to the 20th edition of The Agricultural Notebook, modern weeds are as troublesome as they ever were. 

Cleavers © Valerie Hill

Cleavers (or goosegrass, or sticky willy, depending on where you're from) can cause a staggering 40 percent loss to a broad-leaved crop, and annual grass weeds such as blackgrass or wild oats in cereal crops as much as a quarter. Other major agricultural weeds in the UK currently include chickweed, Japanese knotweed, thistles and speedwell, and it’s fascinating to compare these species with the main weeds of Fitzherbert’s or Thomas Tusser’s medieval farmland. They would have grappled with our own familiar adversaries like dock, mayweed, cleavers and thistle. Still a major cropweed now, The Niewe Herball (1578) says of poor or wild oats for example that it is, ‘a hurtfull plant to the Rie as other corne.’ 

Field bindweed © Valerie Hill 

But Fitzherbert and Tusser class as pests some that we’d now consider wildflowers; such as knapweed, cornflower, corncockle and pink mallow. Dorothy Hartley mentions in 1979 how it is no longer the vetches ‘that pull downward’, but bindweed. 

It’s an age-old battle. Literally; many annual weed seeds can stay viable in undisturbed soil for startling tracts of time, waiting till conditions are right before germination. Geoffrey Grigson in The Englishman’s Flora (1958) has a great phrase; ‘plough up the old grass, and up comes the charlock, like a vegetable rat.’ Weeds are wily, tough as old boots, and can be very, very patient. Archaeological sites unearthing soil previously covered to some depth have suddenly bloomed with ancient varieties of plant that have lain dormant for as much as 2000 years – truly the living past.

Mayweed © Valerie Hill

The presence of weeds is confusing, too – because as well as being the enemy of the farmer and the tidy mind, they have individual virtues of their own. Whether or not they’re welcome is all about context. 16th-century Henry Lyte, who translated The Niewe Herball, was as much a gardener and husbandman with an estate to run, as he was a herbalist. So he would have understood the repetitive tedium of hand-weeding running grasses, horsetail or bittercress, and while recognising the virtues of any variety of plant he would also have known its nuisance. He says for example: ‘The roote of Rest Harrow or Petie Whin is long and very limmer, spreading under the earth, and doth often times let, hinder and stay both the plough and Oxen in toiling the ground’. However, ‘the barke of the roote taken with hony, provoketh urine and breaketh the stone’. Elsewhere he explains how darnel ‘is a vitious graine that cumbereth or annoyeth corne,’ and yet, ‘with pigions dung, oyle and linseed, boiled and layd plaisterwise upon wens doth dissolve and heale them.’ Bracken in the wrong place disrupts upland and hill grassland, but in the past was an important resource in its own right, for fuel and soap production.

Broad-leaved dock © Valerie Hill

I’m thinking that the process of writing is very much like weeding – it’s all about taking things out, for the good of the whole. Not just at the editing stage, (which is more like the final tidy-up before winter) but the whole way through writing a novel. It’s always about giving enough space to the significant idea or image, not letting it be choked with superfluous word-clutter or unnecessary infill. It’s a fight against those weeds/words of the subconscious, chattering mind that never shuts up; that never stops germinating, propagating, spreading sideways. Fields (or plots!) must be constantly gone over if they are to yield anything. Countless seedling ideas and thought-shoots ripped up and discarded before they get a hold, in order for a few to flourish… Hurrah for the weed-hook and the delete button, because the minute we stop weeding, the game’s over. At the best of times – we’re just keeping the wilderness at bay. Pretending that our thoughts are orderly, sequential, cultured, when really it’s a never-ending battle, above and below ground…

Jane Borodale’s novel The Knot is out in paperback with Fourth Estate - this Thursday! 

There are plenty of weeds in it.

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WITHY, by Jane Borodale

If an advertisement for the basket were ever needed – then surely this picture by Beuckelaer must be the one. This lady is strong! And her baskets! Just look at them; tough handled, sinewy, perfectly formed, smooth, and bursting with good produce. Hers is an affirmation of skilful basketry put to practical use.

Joachim Beuckelaer, (1533-1575), Woman Selling Vegetables

And (though at great risk of sounding like Prince Charles), I say bring back the basket – home grown, durable, long-lasting, as light as, well, wicker, and sustainable. In a world of rising sea-levels and reclaimed wetland returning to its natural state in the face of the cost of sea defences; wouldn’t it make perfect sense to say that dampness is in, with its accompanying willows and withy beds, and imported jute and hessian out of fashion.

Salix Purpurea, Otto Wilhelm Thome
1885

The Somerset Levels are now the only part of the UK where willow is grown commercially for basket-making, see Musgroves or Coates, but traces of previously widespread cultivation lie all over the country in place names containing ‘withy’, from Withypool, Hereford, to Withymead, Chingford. 

It’s the perfect material for everyday carrying or storage vessels, not to mention eel traps and lobster pots, cradles, hot-air balloon baskets, coffins, and fencing. Willow is also used for high grade charcoal for artists and gunpowder, and has potent medicinal qualities. It can last practically forever, (possibly why willow is associated with the dead in many cultures across the world?). For an example of wicker’s longevity, click here and then scroll down a little for an excavation image of rare Roman basket, discovered beautifully preserved in a waterlogged pit at Marcham in Oxfordshire, and accompanying description of its possible use as a ritual object. 

I was interested to read that this basket was made of extremely fine stripped willow, of a fineness not grown in this country today, because although many texts about willow talk about the coarseness of basketry in the past, due to the limitations of methods of growing, old herbals mention many different kinds of withy or osier – implying that there was growing in withy beds, as well as pollarding from the tree, in early times. (Pollarding being where the tree is cut back to the main trunk, and then the resulting supple fresh growth of shoots or withies harvested each year.)

The Basketmaker, Jan Luyken (1649-1712)

Last year I did a short basketry course because for various reasons I have an old basket maker at the heart of my novel The Knot, a blind woman called Widow Hodges, and I felt it was important to at least partially understand the process of what she does all day. It was very demanding – like maths with twigs, and very hard on the hands, both in terms of strength needed and the astringent nature of the twigs. (I produced, since you ask, a very uneven greenish basket of which I was inordinately proud, that does despite its wonkiness actually get used for tidying every day. It took months for the deliciously sharp, smoky, bitter smell of damp willow to disappear from the room where it lives.) The tools used by basket makers are very simple and haven’t changed much over the centuries; a picking knife, a bodkin, horn full of grease…

Seriously, for those of us living in damp places, withy beds must be the thing to invest in, for when oil runs out…?

WHAT'S FOR SUPPER? by Jane Borodale

The horsemeat contamination debacle has thrown up familiar discussions in our household as elsewhere; about the convoluted nature of our modern food chain and how vulnerable it leaves us, and how passive our consumption is. 

Grimani Breviary: February (Flemish), c1490

But how easy was it to feed your household in February in the past, when production could be (largely) in your own hands or at least in the hands of those working nearby? What was available and what was being prepared for future months? What tasks out there in the yard or garden would I have to be busy with right now if I couldn’t open the fridge-freezer or nip to Tesco?

I’d rather vaguely assumed that there was very little around to eat in February, that the diet must be dull and barrel-scraping, relentlessly salty and lacking in variety – especially once the restrictions of Lent kicked in: an added challenge for both housewife and husbandman. And since pancake day I’ve been wondering whether there were ever years in the past when the hens hadn’t even started laying by Shrove Tuesday for this very egg-orientated feast (can any historian-chickenkeepers out there enlighten me, please?).

Les Tres Riches Heures du duc
de Berry: (February, detail)
Limbourg brothers,  c1412

The Anglo Saxons apparently called February solmonath, or ‘mud month.’ I don’t know whether the seasons were more advanced on the Continent – but the Dutch called February Spokkelmaand, or ‘vegetation month’ which, looking out of my window (there are actual icicles today), seems very optimistic.

A glance at February entries in the diary of the Somerset parson, William Holland, shows his household busy even in this cold month of 1806:

Feb 8 – John finished spreading the dung in the Paddock.

Feb 11 – Sent John into the garden to prepare ground for potatoes. Turned the great horse into the churchyard to stretch his limbs. Walked to Court House and got some seeds from Furse, he had pease and beans very fine, and Early Peep potatoes. Rain came on after dinner so we could not plant any.

Feb 12 – A fine pleasant day. I put down my Early Peep potatoes and John planted carrots and onions.

Feb 19 – This evening sat by a good fire and with my family compared the Four Evangelists on the Resurrection. (It would have been Ash Wednesday.)

Feb 20 – John went on still very well in the garden but he was called off rather soon to go with our little sow to the boar to Strinxon, Farmer Landsey went with him.

Plucking examples at random: 16^th-century household accounts at high-status Wollaton Hall show salt fish eaten in great quantities during Lent, such as cod, eel, ling, pollack and lobbe. Salted and dried, or salted and packed in barrels, which was called green fish. There was also stockfish, which was air-dried, and preserved herring. And there was fresh fish available in Lent from local suppliers and inland markets – historian Mark Dawson in Plenti and Grase mentions a great variety of fresh sea-fish and freshwater fish, including cod, skate, turbot and thornback. Big households also had the advantage of fishponds on their estates, for more readily caught bream, pickerel, pike, tench and by the end of the century, carp.

For those that could afford it, dried fruit was a part of the Lenten diet too – figs, prunes, currants, almonds, and there were always spices and other flavourings to ring the changes.

Giles Moore of Sussex records various purchases on the 17^th and 18^th Feb 1663 for ‘an entertainment’, including a Quart Bottel of Sack, 3 pecks of barley malt, Pullet, three nayle of Beef, halfe a pound of sugar, spice, bread, butter, rosewater. A few days before, he’d bought a gallypot of greene Ginger. (Though I should say it wasn’t quite Lent yet, as a quick check in Cheney’s ‘Handbook of Dates’ shows that Easter was 19^th April this year.)

Spinacia oleracea,
Otto Wilhelm Thome,
Flora von Deutschland, 1885

There was greenery too, if you planned ahead: 16^th-century gardener Thomas Hill talks about the importance of planting with Lent in mind. He says that spinach is the ‘plant aptest for Lent … the first Pot-herb which is found in gardens about [this] time. This plant very well endureth … cold, frosts and snow.’ He goes on to point out the merits of the ‘Carot and Parsnep .. sown in harvest time to enjoy them all the Lent.’ And there were other roots that would keep well until now – dried peas and beans, and stored keeping apples and pears of very many kinds.

17^th-century Hannah Woolley gives us a Bill of Fare suitable for every Month in the Year, and suggests for February:

A Chine of roast-Pork, Veal or Beef roasted, A Lamb-Pye, and Mince-Pyes, a couple of wild Ducks, a couple of Rabbits, fried Oysters, a Skirret-Pye. And for the second course: A whole Lamb roasted, three Widgeons, a Pippin-Pye, a Jole of Sturgeon, a cold Turkey-Pye.

By far the largest section in 18^th-century Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery is devoted to recipes for fasting food – from Crawfish Soop to Buttered-wheat and Chesnut Pudding. She lists foods available at this time of year, including: ‘many sorts of cabbage and savoy, small herbs on the hot beds (i.e. hot with dung) also mint, tarragon preserved under glass, chervil, sallary, marigold flowers and mint dried, beet-leaves, sorrel…’

I’ve barely scratched the surface of this topic, but my overall feeling, having glanced over these February choices from the past, is that although we pride ourselves on the range of year-round food drawn from all over the world available to us - in the past (for those who could afford it), there was quite a startling array of fresh or readily-available food.

I don’t really approve of hankering after the past per se, and am grateful not to have to be taking my sow to the boar today in order to ensure a supply of pork for the months ahead – but right now I’m thinking that it might be interesting to try a nice fresh pickerel served with colliflower and followed by a dessert of Golden-pippin or Winter Pepperning, or a Dagobent Pear… Anyone care to join me?

THE PAST AS LUCKY DIP, by Jane Borodale

Bran tub, 1922 (Berkshire Newspapers)

Something that historical novelists are supposed to do is to 'capture the spirit of the age' in which their book is set. Books are very often judged according to how successfully they might (or might not) have caught this elusive thing. But what is it, exactly, and at what point does it get fixed and generally agreed upon to be so? It is far too slippery to pin down in the context of the present; it only begins in the past. It’s something that only seems to manifest behind us, when we’re not looking – we have to turn back to it to see it for what it is. So how much time needs to elapse before the spirit of it can be felt – a decade? Fifteen years? Is it the distance from ourselves that makes it graspable as that complex texture of things (objects, attitudes, occurrences) that we sense as the spirit of an age. Or is it simply that by the time it’s clearly in view, a kind of consensus has settled on what was significant or widespread about an era – the official or generally accepted/ selected accumulation of facts, versions and bits of evidence. And if so, should we be wary of such a construct?

I’ve been turning this over (having spent all day shovelling thick pieces of ice like giant’s Kendal mint cake – there was a lot of time to think!) as last week I glimpsed a vivid reminder of how so many ages co-exist within any age, at any one time. This was a small-town scene from someone else’s era altogether - an elderly lady sweeping her front step with a very old dustpan and brush with proper bristles. She wore a housecoat, sensible russet brown shoes, tights and headscarf; and she was talking to an elderly man leaning against the porch in a dark waistcoat and jacket with string tied around his middle, smoking a pipe. (I think there was a cat and a washing line with pegs but I might have made that bit up.) It could have been the 1950s, if not earlier, and certainly looked that way. And I really liked the unexpected jolt of this slippage in the neat chronology of my nearest town, the reminder of how untidy the passing of time actually is, the raggedy-endedness of it, whichever way you look, how very composite and layered and in flux the whole thing is. When I look at photos of my parents’ wedding, the older relatives look already like ghosts from a previous decade.

So my perturbation is (today at least, whilst I shovel) just how, as a novelist, one can really set out to pick out the right parts of an age to be definitive, particularly when selecting primary sources and first-hand accounts in order to get an idea of what the age is. No… Strictly speaking, I suppose I should be asking not what the spirit of the age is, but more precisely – spirit of whose age, exactly? Which does make me feel better – to cut a long story short it must all surely (don't you think?) be rooted in character... Phew. (Thanks for listening to me laboriously work that one out!)


www.janeborodale.com

HIPPOCRAS, by Jane Borodale

The first day of the holidays, and in celebration of the winter feast I thought I'd look at recipes for hippocras - that stalwart festive cordial wine popular since medieval times.

Taking its name from the conical bag shaped like the Sleeve of Hippocrates (used by apothecaries, vintners or housewives) to strain the spice from the liquor, hippocras (hypocras, ipocras) was drunk at the end of a high-status feast to balance the humours, as a sweet and efficacious digestive and carminative. It could be made with red or white wine, sugar and cinnamon being the main constituents, and often a variety of other ingredients.

I’d be the first to admit that mulled wine made badly can be truly horrible (am thinking of the sour, mouthcurdling addition of a carton of orange juice, which is surely one of the most vile culinary perversions ever to be concocted, and which resulting clouded and sickly purple looks exactly like the colour of painters’ turpentine when the brushes have been rinsed too much in it, and probably tastes worse). But these recipes sounded like a beautiful aromatic treat, and after reading quite a few, I experimented, trying to be fairly accurate but according mostly to the ingredients already in my cupboard (no spikenard...).

Here’s an example: ‘To make powdered hippocras, take a quarter of very fine cinnamon selected by tasting it, and half a quarter of fine flour of cinnamon, an ounce of selected string ginger (gingembre de mesche), fine and white, and an ounce of grain [of paradise], a sixth of nutmegs and galingale together, and bray them all together. And when you would make your hippocras, take a good half ounce of this powder and two quarters of sugar and mix them with a quart of wine, by Paris measure.

I’d always laboured under the impression that hippocras was more-or-less the same as mulled wine. But rolling up my (unHippocratic) sleeves has reminded me of the need to keep properly looking afresh at the past. In short – I was really surprised. Not just by the flavour, (unexpectedly, utterly fabulous and unlike anything else I’d had before) but that some of the recipes were not heated at all, neither in the making, nor the serving. Some ingredients included milk or cream. (I can also report on the relative merits of warming the wine in a saucepan ‘on the fire’ or with a hot poker plunged into the vessel itself. In order to heat a quantity of liquor, you need an exceedingly hot poker. The hiss, bubble and spit of it going in is exciting, and the caramelising scent, but it was hard to get it actually hot. You though may have more luck.)

'Circe Mulling Wine', Gioacchino Assereto

The Goodman of Paris tells us that after dessert of fruit and compotes came the ‘departure from the table’ – hippocras and wafers called mestier. ‘…Waffurs to ete, ypocras to drynke with delite. Now this fest is fynysched, voyd the table quyte.’  (1393) In his suggested menus for dinner for a Meat Day for great lords and others, one sixth course was hippocras with wafers (rich batter cooked between hot iron moulds on a chafing dish, and sweetened with honey and rosewater), pears and comfits, medlars and peeled nuts. Another includes sugared flawns and larded milk, cooked pears and hippocras.

He also mentions the purchase of ready-made hippocras from the spicer, buying 3 quarts at 10s. the quart (which surely seems very expensive?) Lump sugar could also come from the spicer, grocer or mercer, or would have been bought, along with dried fruit and other items for the banquet course, at fairs such as Lenton. Hippocras is not, apparently, to be confused with piment or clary, which were similar but made with honey instead of sugar, but there are very many differing methods and quantities to be found, according to personal taste and availability of spices. Sugar itself was considered a spice, and to have medicinal qualities. Lower orders, perhaps yeoman farmers, merchants and the like may have used honey in its stead.

John Russell’s 15^th-century Boke of Nurture gives a detailed, rhyming method for hippocras, you can read it here at Project Gutenberg.

'The Spice Shop', 1637, Paolo Antonio Barbieri

It wasn’t universally loved – William Harrison (1535-1593) gives it only a rather offhanded mention of ‘sundry sorts of artificial stuff, as hippocras and wormwood wine’. Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) is disapproving, saying that ‘overhot, compound, strong thick drinks,’ including ‘all those hot spiced strong drinks’ are to be neglected by those who suffer this malady, as ‘spices cause hot and head melancholy, and are for that cause forbidden by our physicians. Sweets turn into bile, they are obstructive.’ As a balancer of humours, whether it worked would clearly depend on your natural temperament; sanguine, melancholic, choleric or phlegmatic. I imagine this is also why it is a solely winter beverage, not drunk in the warm months of the year. The Goodman points out for a wedding feast in May, ‘apples and cheese without hippocras, because it is out of season.’

It is generally said to have fallen out of favour by the 18^th century, though James Boswell notes in his diary on the 19 Jan 1763 that he ‘went into a little public house and drank some warm white wine with aromatic spices, pepper and cinnamon’.

In case you fancy trying it out too; to save you time I’ve converted the pottles and quarts and drams etc, into two recipes. Don’t baulk at the amount of sugar, it’s weird but it does work. This isn’t a drink to consume by the gallon – it’s a dessert. I didn’t adjust quantities for modern tastes, and am very glad I didn’t because these were delicious as they were, and it really felt like drinking a little bit of something from the otherworld. If you do try either of these, I’d love to know what you think:

red Hippocras (after the Goodman of Paris, 1393).

1 pint red wine

2 sticks of cinnamon

piece of fresh root ginger (about the size of man’s big toe)

7 cloves

4-5 cardamom pods

large pinch of mace

quarter of a nutmeg, freshly grated

7 oz caster sugar

Peel and chop ginger, break cinnamon into pieces and grind as finely as possible with other spices in pestle and mortar until small, then add sugar and grind until thoroughly combined. Add red wine and heat gently in a pan for about 5 min then remove from heat, strain through jelly bag or muslin and serve in tiny glasses. Sipped hot straightaway, it has an extraordinarily warming hit. Cold the following day, it’s pungent, with the consistency of green ginger wine, but a much more complex flavour.

white Hippocras (after Hannah Woolley, 1675).

1 pint white wine

2 fat sticks cinnamon

piece of fresh root ginger (just a little less than above)

3 cloves

4 peppercorns

half a nutmeg, freshly grated

4cm stem fresh rosemary

6 oz caster sugar

half pint of single cream

Grind spices as above, then add and grind sugar, then rosemary. Stir into white wine and leave to steep for 12 hours or overnight. (NB – the mixture is not heated.) Strain, then stir in cream before serving in aforementioned tiny glasses. This one really is quite unlike anything else I’ve ever tasted – perhaps like a rich, exotic lassi? Very fine and scrumptious. If I could only use one adjective to describe it, I would say it was exquisite.

And if you needed any more persuasion, for anyone already set to feel guilty about their levels of consumption over the next Twelve Days, hippocras may be your answer, at least according to Samuel Pepys who, on 29 Oct 1663, protests:

‘It being Lord Mayor’s Day… at noon I went forth, and by coach to Guildhall and there was admitted… and there wine was offered and they drunk, I only drinking some hypocras, which doth not break my vowe, it being, to the best of my present judgement, only a mixed compound drink, and not any wine.’ (My italics)

Your good health!

WHERE DO IDEAS COME FROM? by Jane Borodale

What is writing like? Someone asked me this the other day and I’d honestly struggled to provide a decent answer. What does it actually feel like, on the whole, the act of being engaged in writing?

Button and hat-cord maker, Nurnberg, 1669

Later that week I was on a train heading eastwards with a pile of scribbles that I was trying to cohere into a short story, (at least once the crazy lady with plants in the luggage rack had got off at Romsey). The scribbles, so far, seemed to be amounting to the right kind of atmosphere, they sketched out a proper length and I could almost picture the arc of their finishedness neatly ahead of me. Now it was time to gather together the moment of crystallisation, or punctuation note, which I’d already planned quite a while ago on another piece of paper. I read through that, and thought it might work best as dialogue, straight from the voice. My biro marked out some arrows to help me remember what I’d decided. I drew a snail in the margin. But still something was missing. It became horribly clear that I needed a sub-moment; that in fact nothing was done and it would all have to be reworked if it was to work at all, to hang properly. But what was the missing thing? I read it through a few more times and the lacuna gaped at me all the way past Havant, getting larger and larger until it ate up the point of the scribbles. There was nothing in my head for that bit, nothing at all. The last of my coffee got cold, the fields outside slid by.

Suddenly a man moving along the aisle let out a loud, startling grunt and bent over to pick up something from the carpet right by my seat. ‘I need one of those!’ he shouted, delightedly, to anyone that had no iPod in their ears, and held up a white button in the air like a little trophy.

And at that moment I was struck by how writing is so often like that - always waiting for that lucky button to appear. At first it’s all about laying down the groundwork, preparing, limbering up with thousands of words, and then it’s just a wait for the right thing to come from nowhere, when you least expect it, like heading back from the buffet car in that jacket that doesn’t button up anymore.

Of course – what you come across might not be quite the right shade or size, but it might be useful. Some days there’ll be some kind of button, some there won’t, but if there’s one thing I’ve learnt over the last few years it’s that you have to be looking, looking all the time, scribbling with the pen, staying alert. It’s not the camera that will steal your soul – it’s novelists. Novelists would steal any aspect of your life if it were interesting enough or relevant enough to whatever they’re currently doing – they’re out there, waiting to pounce on any fragment the unwary might let slip, to use straightaway or to save for later. There should be signage on trains like there is for pickpockets; Novelists operate in this area. Next time the person beside you is furtively scribbling something down – beware.

Jane Borodale’s novel 'The Knot' is currently out in hardback. She is working on her third. Her website is www.janeborodale.com