Food, Glorious Food! - Celia Rees

 My last post magically coincided with the publication of my first adult novel, Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook. That novel began with this cookery book. The kernel of the idea was sown when I found the book among my mother's effects. The book was stained, faded and falling apart. I could have thrown it out but I stayed my hand. 

 It had an interest of its own as a historical document. A book given away with gas cookers - does anyone talk about regulos now, or even know what they are? There's a section on Invalid Cookery, Barley Water, Beef Tea, Calf's Foot Jelly and it gives a taste (literally) of what people ate in the mid Twentieth Century that we tend not to eat any more. Recipes for Heart (Baked), Sheep's Head, Calf's Head, Brain Sauce. 

It is also a kind of time capsule. When I opened it, I found all kinds of recipes that had been clipped from newspapers and magazines, many of them from the Second World War. I spent a long time poring over these, fascinated.  This was a little treasure trove, a tiny historical archive that brought a particular time to vivid life. These were not facsimiles. They were of that time, faded and folded, carefully clipped from long gone newspapers: The Daily Herald, Daily News and Westminster Gazette and magazines that had disappeared decades ago. There were leaflets and pamphlets issued by the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, the Ministry of Food, '"New Wartime Recipes" price 7/12d, post free'. DIG FOR VICTORY LEAFLET No. 10'.

They spoke directly of a time of rationing, scarcity, government departments devoted to managing food production and distribution and of the ingenuity of the individual householder in managing  the family, the ration, doing his or her bit to improvise, to add to the basic ration by growing as much food as possible, digging up the garden, tending the allotment. On a macro level, they illustrate the far sightedness of the British Government in protecting food supply and distribution in a country heavily dependent on food imports which were likely to be curtailed, even cut off by enemy blockading. The simple strategy of encouraging more home production while safeguarding fair distribution and coming down hard on hoarding and black market trading were important strategies in maintaining a healthy working population and adequate supplies for the fighting troops. 

Dig For Victory was no idle instruction.  

I found all this fascinating, but the most valuable finds were the hand written recipes slotted into the pages, on different stationery, in different writing. These were from the people who had handled and used this cookery book, swapping recipes as women did then and still do. Now, it might be a link to a page or a computer print out but the desire to share a favourite recipe is common to cooks. These recipes, swapped between my grandmother, aunt and my mother, were the only written connection that I had found between them. There was something here that I knew I had to write about. I carefully saved the book. It was now  a 'found' document of special significance. 

It was years before I discovered the key that would link to that initial idea and provide the inspiration for  Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook. The Radiation Cookery Book remained central to the writing of the novel. Hand written recipes, swapped between women, morphed into coded messages; the recipes in the Radiation Cookery Book providing the key to the code. I also found a use for all those newspaper and magazine clippings. My main character, Edith Graham, is a school teacher but she has an alter ego, the rather dashing cookery writer,  Stella Snelling. This allows her to lead a hidden life and I've  always loved hidden lives...

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook HarperCollins

Mediaeval food, feast and famine by Carolyn Hughes

In my novels of 14th century England, like many other writers, I try to include a good deal of description of medieval daily life. Clothing, housing, furniture and furnishings, artefacts and tools, working practices, medical practices and, of course, food, can all help to place characters in context, differentiate the life styles of people of diverse stations, and bring a sense of authenticity to the historical world one is creating.

In this post, I thought it might be interesting to review what I have learned so far about the food that medieval people ate, using a few descriptions from my own novels as evidence.

Daily bread

Breakfast

I have read that breakfast was a meal that few folk ate, but maybe that applied mostly to the better-off, who might rise late and weren’t required to expend much energy during their day. For them, waiting until dinnertime – at around midday or so – might not seem much of a hardship. But, for the peasant who spent his or her entire day in the fields, rising at dawn and setting off to work soon after, waiting four or five hours for a first bite to eat would surely make for an inefficient, ineffective and disgruntled worker. I feel sure that most labouring people, and tradesmen, would have broken their fast before they went to work, albeit if all they had was just a hunk of dry bread and a cup of weak ale.

“Eleanor wrapped two thick cloaks about her shoulders as she sat down to eat her unappetising breakfast – the breakfast Hawisa always insisted that she ate. In truth, a small bowl of Hawisa’s flavourless but warming gruel would have been more welcome than the hard coarse bread, dry cheese and mug of cold ale set before her.”

Peasants breaking bread. Public Domain via https://commons.wikimedia.org/

Dinner

Dinner was the main meal of the day. In religious houses, the time for the meal was originally “nones”, the ninth hour after sunrise, which, depending on the time of year, might be the middle of the afternoon (i.e. the equivalent of 3pm). But, again, working people couldn’t wait so long, so “noon”, and dinner, generally happened around midday (12pm).

For most people, this would be the (possibly only) hot meal of the day. For working people (assuming they ate at home), it would usually entail a pottage of some sort – essentially a stew or thickened soup – with vegetables, a little meat if available, and maybe some “extras” gathered (possibly illegally) from the fields and woods. It would be eaten with a lot of bread and ale.

Peasants might not eat meat every day but, if they had the space to rear hens and a pig or two, then they might have the occasional chicken, and more certainly pork, including the bacon they smoked by hanging a flitch where it would receive the fumes from the fire. My reading suggests that, while beef was eaten, lamb was less often on the menu, even of the wealthy, perhaps because sheep were raised principally for their wool. Eggs and fish would be available, the latter perhaps most commonly for coastal-dwelling peasants, for fish in the manor’s rivers in principle belonged to the lord and was not available to his tenants, unless they risked poaching it. 

Pork butcher. Public Domain via https://commons.wikimedia.org/ 

Wealthier people might well also have some pottage, though the finest pottages might contain almond milk, or spices such as ginger and saffron. But they would perhaps also have some roasted meat, or a meaty stew – a brewet – which might also be rich and spicy. I imagine it was rare for peasant folk to have access to spices…

Apart from the vegetables in the pottage or stew, I have the impression that, if you were able to afford meat and good bread, separate vegetable dishes were not especially popular.

The quality of your bread was undoubtedly dependent on what you could afford. Wheat bread was the finest, white bread, with the bran removed, being the preserve of the wealthiest. Maslin was a mix of wheat and rye, perhaps much like our wholemeal bread. Much coarser and darker was bread made from barley, perhaps mixed with rye or flour made from dried peas, or at its worst mixed with chaff and waste from the bakery floor!

Desserts, of fruit, sweet pastry or some sort of milk-based pudding, might be an everyday aspect of the wealthy person’s table. I suppose peasants ate sweetmeats less often, but I assume they might have access to fruits of various kinds, including apples, pears, cherries and strawberries, all of which they could have grown in their gardens (though perhaps only the more prosperous amongst them would give space to growing fruit rather than the staples of onions, peas, beans and cabbage), together with what they could forage from the hedgerows.

“Susanna was hurrying back along the narrow path from the vegetable plot to the house, bearing the last of the winter kale, which she intended to add to the beans and onions already in the pottage on the fire.”

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“Alice…knew exactly where to find the best brambles, as well as a good source of hazelnuts, and, in autumn, where she’d the best chance of locating a few fungi to add savour to her pottage.”

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“Scanning the remnants of the feast left scattered across the table, he grabbed a leg of cold capon, pierced some slices of roast meat with his knife, and tore a small maslin loaf in half.”

Chickens on a spit. Public Domain via https://commons.wikimedia.org/

Supper

Supper, I gather, was invariably something simple such as (yet more) bread, cheese and ale. Something cold was likely, especially in the non-summer months, when it would be getting dark by the time the workers reached home. That’s not to say that a stay-at-home housewife might not prepare a warming pottage for her family, if just with vegetables, rather than any meat.

“Alice decided to make a little pottage for their supper: she added oatmeal to the pot, together with a few dried peas she’d already soaked and a scrap of the small piece of salted pork that remained, hung up in the storeroom. She stirred the pottage well, and waited for her sons to return.”

If supper in peasant homes was invariably modest, so it might be too in grander homes, even if the quality of the food was better…

“Supper at Meonbridge manor was far more meagre than she had expected. Yet, what little was offered was of the highest quality: soft white wheaten bread, a little fresh butter and a delicious sheep’s cheese, both made in the manor dairy, and a bowl of cherries picked from the orchard – and a large flagon of rich Gascony wine.”

Brews

It is often assumed that everyone in the Middle Ages drank huge quantities of ale, downing mugsful at every meal. This assumption is based on the premise that water was a no-no, on the grounds that it was almost certainly polluted. But apparently this was by no means universally the case. Water was drunk, unless of course it was known to be unpalatable, which would be judged presumably from its smell and colour.

Having said all this, however, I must admit that most of my characters do seem to drink quite a lot of ale (or wine, depending on their social status)! The ale might be bought from an alewife, who might also run some form of ale-house or tavern, but many peasant housewives made their own ale. This home-brew had a relatively short “shelf-life”, and would be made often and in small batches. I have a number of references to people drinking spiced ale and spiced wine, both of which I have suggested were warmed, though I am not sure if this was invariably the case.

It seems that milk – cow’s, goat’s or sheep’s – was not generally consumed as a drink (except perhaps by children), but was more usually turned into butter and cheese, again often by the housewife.

Feasting

Feasts might occur at weddings, at Midsummer, at Christmas. I describe at least a couple, both provided to the tenants by the lord and lady of the manor.

The first is a Midsummer feast celebrated at the end of June in 1349, when the devastation caused by the Black Death is finally coming to an end in my fictional community, Meonbridge. This is not a period of famine, but the arrival of the plague had meant that fields weren’t ploughed and sown as they should have been, animals and vegetable gardens had been neglected, so food was not necessarily in plentiful supply. Many people were hungry. The lady of the manor did her very best, in difficult times, to provide a substantial feast for her suffering tenants.

“Roasted meats glistened on their trenchers, and dozens of small roasted birds – woodcock perhaps, trapped in the local woods – were accompanied by spicy dipping sauces. There were pigeon pies as well as a rich venison brewet served with a creamy wheat and almond milk frumenty, pease pudding and a thin spicy mortrews. As well as the usual dark rye and barley bread, they all shared a few small maslin loaves that contained a little wheat flour – Sir Richard was probably the only one in Meonbridge who still had wheat from last year’s harvest, but at least he was sharing it with his tenants.

Excitement buzzed around the company as the dishes were presented, then near-silence descended as everyone fell upon the food and devoured what was, for many, the only substantial meal they’d had for several months.”

From the Luttrell Psalter. Public Domain via https://commons.wikimedia.org/

And here is a description of a Christmas feast…

“…there were coneys in wine, and little pies of venison, a brewet of beef in a thick spicy sauce, and hens stuffed and roasted and glazed with green. A wonderfully rich blend of smells, spicy and savoury, vinegary and sweet, tingled in her nostrils, enticing her to eat...

It was hard to restrain her eagerness to try at once all the appetising dishes laid out around her, but she contented herself with sipping wine and nibbling at the little white wheaten loaves, as she waited for her turn to come to be offered a rabbit leg and a few slices of roasted chicken...

As the first dishes were being consumed, more followed, the most magnificent a whole roasted pig, its mouth stuffed with apples, borne in on a great platter, still hot and steaming, presented to Sir Richard, then placed on a serving table for carving into thick, succulent slices…

Some sweetmeats had been brought to the tables, for those who had had their fill of meat – dishes of pears in wine and plates of honey cakes, baked apples and sweet custard tarts.”

Both of these feast passages do rather give the impression of a modern banquet, with the “first course” consisting of savoury dishes, and the dessert course following on. In practice I understand that courses might contain a mix of dishes, both savoury and sweet, served and eaten together…

Food away from home

Of course not all meals were taken at home... If dinner was eaten at midday, I suspect that, for workers out in the fields, returning home from the fields would take too long, so they would take a “packed lunch” instead. In this extract, the miller is simply too busy to take a break for dinner...

“Pa was too busy to eat his dinner at home, because tomorrow was Midsummer’s Eve, and he’d got his orders from the manor. And bread and pies for the whole village needed a lot of flour, and he was racing against time to grind it all.

So Ma wrapped a hunk of coarse bread, a lump of cheese and a flask of ale in a cloth, and bade Peter run to the mill and give the bundle to his father.”

But, as working people so often do today, some might go to the pub for dinner…

“‘G’day to ye,’ said a stranger, tipping his hat to the men sitting outside Ellen Rolfe’s ale-house, drinking and munching on Ellen’s hot meat pies…

‘Pies good?’ he asked, sniffing the steam rising from the pastry crust Roger had just sliced into with his knife. Then he tipped his head towards the ale-house door. ‘I jus’ ordered one.’

Roger nodded, his mouth full of hot meat and gravy.”

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“We’re sitting in an alehouse near the market, spending some of the money on an early dinner of pies and cups of weak ale. …my pie[‘s] got meat in it as well as onions, though I have to chew and swallow hard to make all of it go down.”

It seems that, in my ale-houses, mostly pies were served! But not in all…

“Some hours later, Thorkell and his brother were dining on stewed mutton and red wine in a grimy, noisy, smoke-filled inn near Andover, some thirty miles from Meonbridge. …the mutton was tough and gristly, and he tried to wash down the half-masticated lump with some of the foul wine. But he started to choke and tears came to his eyes. For a few moments he couldn’t breathe, and his face went red and sweaty, until Gunnar thumped him hard upon the back and the vile lump flew from Thorkell’s mouth and landed in the noisome rushes on the floor. Thorkell gulped more wine and, puffing out his cheeks with relief, wiped his sleeve across his eyes. Then both men threw back their heads and guffawed.”

Oh dear! That doesn’t sound much like “Good Pub Grub”…

Peasant meal. Aristotle, “Politiques et économiques”', France, 15^th century. 

Paris, Biblioteque nationale, Département des manuscrits

During harvest-time, tenants were entitled to their dinner being provided for them in the fields by their lord. If the lord were generous, it could be something of a mini-feast.

“Eleanor was certainly looking forward to a good long drink, for the day was warm and, despite the frequent small cups of weak ale handed round throughout the morning, her mouth was parched from the effort of her labours and the dust that rose constantly from the grain as she bundled the stalks together. The two women trudged across the field to where the food was laid out on huge trestles: a loaf apiece, great hunks of cheese, and even slices of roast meat, as well as enough barrels of ale to slake the thirst of a multitude.”

Exotic ingredients

I have already mentioned the use of spices. I assume that peasants rarely had access to any spices, because of their high cost. They were mostly the preserve of the wealthy, but it does seem that the use of spices of many kinds was very popular in medieval cuisine.

Here, although Eleanor isn’t “wealthy”, neither is she poor, and feels able to treat her cook to a little luxury…

“Eleanor stood at the spicerer’s stall, breathing in the curious nose-tingling perfumes rising from the colourful sacks of seeds, barks and berries, and on the edge of a sneeze as pungent dust drifted from the peppercorns the merchant was scooping from a sack. She had always loved coming to the fair. Because it was held only once a year and lasted three days, it encouraged a few merchants to travel from much further afield.

…these foreign merchants sold mostly manufactured goods, which were often of much better quality, or more exotic, than anything the local merchants could offer – the finest woollen cloth, well-made pewter ware, and jewellery – and, sometimes, spices. A spicerer did not come every year to Meonbridge but, in the summer months, an employee of the spice merchant in Winchester would travel between a few Hampshire fairs, bringing cloves and cinnamon, and ginger and mace, as well as pepper. How delighted Eleanor was to find that the spicerer had this year chosen to come here.

She had already treated herself to a length of fine cloth for a new kirtle, and wanted to please Hawisa by buying a little spice and sugar for her to add to a pie or pudding. It could not be much, for she was not one of the wealthier sort, but Hawisa could make a little go a long way.”

The food of the poor

The poor, on the other hand – in my novels, these are the cottars, the labouring folk on the lowest rung of the social ladder – might struggle to provide their family even with the basics. Money was scarce, and they might have very little land to grow their own food.

“Emma always knew exactly what she had available to feed her family: bread, of course, a few eggs, dried beans, a couple of onions, sometimes a scrap of bacon or a small piece of cheese when she or Ralph had earned a little extra. It was never much, and never in such quantity she’d not notice something going missing.”

She might have to make do with old vegetables, and be circumspect about how much she buys…

“Emma nodded. ‘Four eggs, if you will, Alice, and d’you still have any leeks?’

Alice…held out two fat leeks... ‘Not many left,’ she said. ‘The leeks are rather old now, and you might want to remove the outer layers. Are these enough?’

Emma took one. ‘Just this.’ She’d keep as much of it as she could. She thought she saw a glimmer of understanding in Alice’s eyes. ‘And the eggs.’”

At the same time, a woman such as Emma might well long for the opportunity to be a better provider for her children…

“She knelt down by her meagre herbary with her weeding hook and fork. She’d learned from Alice long ago how to grow a few herbs, thyme and sage and marjoram, parsley, mint and clary, to add flavour to their simple food. She’d have liked to grow vegetables as well, onions and cabbages, but the plot just wasn’t big enough. She often thought with envy of Susanna’s croft, with not only space enough for vegetables of many kinds, and trees of apple, pear and cherry, as well as herbs, but also for a flock of fussy hens, and even a sty with two fat pigs.”

Food in the time of famine

In a time of famine, however, such as the period 1315-17, the increasing dearth of food might affect everyone. Even those who could grow their own would find their produce dwindling in the face of terrible weather and hopeless growing conditions. But, again, it would be the poor, with no resources, who would suffer most. 

“I lift aside the piece of blanket covering my basket and show her the undersized onions and yellow-leaved cabbages. Taking out two onions and a small cabbage, Maud puts them in the pocket of her apron. Then she looks up at me, tears in her eyes. 

‘I can’t pay you, Agnes,’ she says, her voice the merest whisper. I feel a warmth rush to my face, remembering…Pa insisting I must always ask for something…

‘I’ll put them back,’ she says, but I shake my head.

‘No, Maud, keep them. Ma won’t mind.’

‘I’ll make a pottage. Maybe a few worms or grubs’ll make it tasty.’ She sniggers and, for an instant, she’s the cheerful Maud I remember. But the light’s gone entirely from her eyes. 

I give her a little smile. ‘Maybe.’

‘If they’re good enough for badgers,’ she says, ‘they’re good enough for us,’ and pats me on the arm.”

The hardships - and rewards - of war…

Even soldiers, fighting for the king, sometimes suffered from lack of food, when the king’s funds faltered. Yet, there were times too when they had more food than they could eat, when they plundered their enemy’s homes and farms in a brutal chevauchée…

“The Frenchmen don’t go quietly, but at least go with their lives. Though I can’t say they look grateful to be spared. Only once they’ve gone does Sir Henry order us to overrun their homes and gardens. We pile up our carts with whatever food they had: sacks of grain, remnants of smoked hams still hanging from the rafters, squawking hens and new-laid eggs, rounds of cheese and fresh-baked loaves of bread. We heave in flagons of ale and vats of milk. We tramp though their gardens, churning the soil to mire and ripping from the ground whatever’s growing there – beans, leeks, cabbages and turnips – and tearing fruit – apples, pears, medlars, quince – from their orchards. Then, throwing open the doors of barns and sties, we drive out those pigs and cattle we can butcher for our fires and slit the throats of those we can’t. When our carts are creaking under the weight of what we’ve gathered, we set light to whatever’s left – houses, barns, animals, trees. When it’s burning well we leave, to that night’s camp, to enjoy the fruits of our day’s work.”

If you are interested in medieval cookery, although I haven’t tried out any of the recipes, this online cookbook (http://www.godecookery.com) offers authentic medieval recipes interpreted for modern use. Could be fun!

History in the everyday, the importance of community cookbooks - Gillian Polack

I collect cookbooks produced by communities. Sometimes they’re big volumes, stuffed with recipes from every single family that attends a primary school, sometimes the recipes are full of healthy ingredients to reflect the interests of a life-saving organisation. One book is full of recipes from tins and packets. A whole group of books are simply copied from a stock source, with the names of the organisations changed. 

Last year a hundred of my community cookbooks were stolen and this week a friend posted a few replacements as a gift.

This is why I’m writing about them today. The changes in my collection and the emotions behind them – the sorrow of losing so much and the joy of friends remembering me and sending me more – brings the history of cookbooks into the forefront of my mind.

This post is dedicated to those kind friends who are watching out for community cookbooks for me because of last year’s loss. I want to talk about why it matters to me so very much. As well as what I talk about here, I use my collection to build foodways for characters in my fiction, but that’s a different story. It’s just as important: fiction rings out to the reader more clearly when the food is the right food for the place and time and when a character has their own interpretation of it. If the interpretation is sound then a simple cooking scene will resonate with every single reader who has a share in such a foodway. A different story, but a fascinating one.

This type of volume is a by-product of printing. It never has been a major part of the industry, but it’s been around for a while.

The reason for a community to order a cookbook are varied. Some are to raise funds and some are to commemorate a big event and some are ‘because we felt like it.’ My own recipes are in several of the volumes that survived the theft. One of the volumes (Homemade, 2009) raised money for bushfire victims, and another (Scary Food) is part of a horror anthology edited by Cat Sparks. The first is all recipes, dense and rich. Half the copies printed were given to those who lost everything in the 2009 bushfires, which means some of us who contributed gave important family recipes, in the hopes that we might replicate recipes that had been lost in the fire. Scary Food is mostly short stories, with just a sprinkling of dark recipes.

This kind of book, like the seventeenth century chapbook, a form of cultural ephemera. While a few volumes may be treasured for years or may enter collections, most fade. Some of the volumes are foodie treasures and some of them echo the worst food of a time and place, or the idea (when the book is pre-packaged and just the name of the organisation is changed) that there is a shared cuisine in a given place at a given time.

These books are fragments of our foodways. 

If I were making a time capsule, I would include a community cookbook. It would tell the person who opened the time capsule so much about the people who buried it. What recipes were worth including in the book? What group of people does the volume’s creation tell us about and what background do they share? 

What does it tell us about the foodways of the group that published it? If the book is laid out according to courses, as many are, it tells us a lot about the way food was served. How much fat/spice/sugar do recipes have? It tells about eating habits and dietary preferences. There’s a lot of information scrunched between the covers of a community cookbook.

Sometimes I pull out volumes from a single geographical region and arrange them in time order and discover what has happened over time to a given place. Sometimes I pull out the volumes published in a five year period and arrange them geographically. Sometimes I pull out the volumes shared by sports teams and sometimes primary schools. Each time I do this, I learn more about the culture and history that underpin our food. I also learn about people.

Edited and professional cookbooks have a different focus. They share just as much wonderful information, but they share it differently. Even the ones that are published to represent a group or who are from a food writer who is lovingly detailing the family’s past read differently to most community cookbooks. Professionalism changes the context of a cookbook and that book tells us a different story because of it.

Sometimes I think that the community books are like seventeenth century chapbooks. I still love seventeenth century chapbooks and my volumes of reprints are fewer, too, because of that theft, but this isn’t the parallel I’m making today. Nor is the obvious one: that both are printed ephemera. The audience is the interesting bit for me. Chapbooks have a different audience to bigger volumes because they wee cheap and more disposable. They also have a different audience because they were often brought into lives by peddlers and on streets rather than being the stuff of up-market bookshops. The peddler and the community stall at a fete have overlapping social roles.

The other book that has something important in common with the community cookbooks is the handwritten record of family histories. They linked to the other end of the market, during their earlier days, because literacy was not even close to universal when individuals started writing down their family recipes. Household notes, or detailed recipes - some families kept them. They cover some of the same functions as the community cookbook, preserving local foodways.

Although there is overlap in the writing down of foodways, these handwritten collections often don’t reflect quite the same aspects of culture as appear in a community cookbook. An individual writing recipes (Martha Lloyd, for instance, in Jane Austen’s family) makes personal choices about what part of the family’s food experience need preserving. It’s not the same as a “We have two weeks to collet your favourite recipes. Ready, set, go!” 

What they share is that need to define what’s valuable to the family, to the community. Many of the recipes In the bushfire cookbook are nothing like those in some of the community cookbooks lost in the fires. Most of those parts of rural Victoria had very Anglo cuisines in its community books for many years. Recipes for dishes such as scones were consistent across space and even time in that region. Homemade, the bushfire book, has three scone recipes, and none of them are for plain scones. One is for ham and cheese (in pinwheels) and the others are lemonade scones and pumpkin scones. Scones are still a recipe that helps heal, but the type of scone has changed just as the culture of the community has changed over time.

That’s why I love these cookbooks so very much. I can read the foodways over time and those foodways are magic.

Sugar and Spice and all things nice - the 17th Century Diet

by Deborah Swift

The concept of dieting would have been alien to our 17th Century forbears. In those days, the plumper you were, the better. Plumpness indicated wealth and class, and women aspired to be plump and white, rather than thin and tanned as is the fashion now. The 17th Century was when sugar became a major component of most people’s diet.

Still Life with Bread and Sweetmeats - Georg Flegel 

The Nouveau Riche 
The dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s had led to new land ownership, and consequently to a new class of non-aristocratic landowners and despite the English Civil War, (or even because of it) this new class of landowners and rich merchants was here to stay. With political stability and the restoration of the King, came an increased desire for luxury goods and London soon became the richest supplier of foodstuffs in the country. Charles II's marriage to the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza in 1662, coupled with his long exile in France led foreign food to become all the rage, especially French food.

The ‘Kickshaws’ of French Cuisine 
French cuisine soon piqued the English palate, as their recipes included strong tastes such as anchovies, capers and wine. At this time the culinary words coulis, roux, ragouts and fricassé were introduced, and fancy French dishes were nicknamed kickshaws, after 'quelquechose', the French word for 'something'.

‘Service à la Française’ became the norm instead of the old medieval buffet style meal, with sets of cutlery laid out besides a personal plate and glass. Samuel Pepys was impressed to learn that his colleague the Earl of Sandwich was to employ a French chef, writing in his diary that the Earl had 'become a perfect courtier'.

Feasting in Charles’ court was renowned for excess. Once he had four huge pigs, dressed like a horse and cart, with sausages as reins and pulling a huge rag pudding like a coach behind it. When he had guests, Pepys too had meals of gigantic proportions;

'my dinner was great, and most neatly dressed by our own only maid. We had a fricasee of rabbits and chickens, a leg of mutton boiled, three carps in a dish, a great dish of a side of lamb, a dish of roasted pigeons, a dish of four lobsters, three tarts, a lamprey pie (a most rare pie), a dish of anchovies, good wine of several sorts, and all things mighty noble and to my great content.' Pepys Diary 1663

The East India company increased the cheapness of oriental goods such as sugar, spices and dried fruit. Of couse much of this bounty was based upon slave labour, but the human cost of sugar's production did not penetrate the consciousness of most Londoners.

The pages of 17th Century drama are full of references to sweet food, Dekker talks of ‘biskets’ 'carowayes' and 'marmilade', 'sugar-plums', 'pippin pies' and gingerbread, or of ‘sucking pigs – a fortnight fed with dates, and muskadine’. In the picture right at the top of this post you can see many sugar-coated objects. Two are obviously pears, but the others could be an onion ring, or...well, what? Often the sugar coating was on actual meat, and obviously judging by the picture, the sugar coating was quite thick!

There was also a fashion, as witnessed in Mary Fairfax’s diary for sugared flowers; she used violettes, marigiolds and roses, and even clover blossom in her puddings.  Below is a recipe for sugared roses.

Recipe and Revolution
This was the great age of 'Receipt' or Recipe books. Following the fall of the monarchy, many house chefs from the landed gentry were redundant or had lost their livelihood, and this is probably why so many new cookery books were published at this time. Literacy amongst women was lower than amongst men, so most 17th century cookery books were written by men, although the recipes themselves were often from the women of the house.

The publication of one of the first cookery manuals, Le Cuisinier François by François Pierre de la Varenne in 1651 caused a culinary revolution in France. La Varenne refines existing recipes, and suggests ways in which menus could be balanced, paving the way for a much more considered way of dining.

The first course consisted of  bowls of soups or stews, accompanied by prepared meats, the second of roast meats with salads and vegetables. Thanks to the French influence, the English realised that it was perfectly safe to consume vegetables raw, and began to enjoy 'salats' with their meals.

Tomás Hiepes - Sugared Fruits And Pastries 1640

The dessert (from desservir, French for ‘clear the table’), was often sugared fruit, and accompanied by 'sweet' entertainment such as music or dancing. Dessert often took place outdoors and in rich french households this course was laid out as a garden, complete with small buildings or statues in sugar-work. The idea spread to the English nobility with 'marchpane' (marzipan) sculptures. The towering sugared fruit was stacked as layers on dishes called 'pourcelaines', ornamental dishes on stands. With it, you would sip sweet, spiced wine, called hippocras.

Of course the poor never had such fare. Sheep’s trotters, sweetmeats; every bit of the slaughtered animal was used, and the cheapest unsavoury parts such as cow’s stomach – tripe – and the extremities like ears and tails, were the diet of the poor.

But for the well-to-do, the importance and status of costly food was such, that while the Great Fire of London grew ever closer, Pepys was desperate to save his bottles of wine and his parmesan cheese from the approaching inferno by burying them in his garden.

I am currently enjoying dining with Pepys in research for my trilogy of books based around the women in Pepys's Diary. A Plague on Mr Pepys will be out on 5th July from Accent Press.

Bibliography - 
The English at Table - John Hampson
Food in England -Dorothy Hartley
More about 17th Century Food from Food Historian Ivan Day

Find out more about my books at www.deborahswift.com