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

A Sweet Kind of Adultery by Catherine Hokin

I'm currently having a bit of an Annie Grey fan moment having just read The Greedy Queen (a fabulous account of Queen Victoria and food) and watched her recent BBC series The Sweet Makers which plunged four chefs back into the world of British confectionery production from the Tudors to the 1930s.

 Tudor Room set for a sugar banquet
© Minneapolis Institute of the Arts

There were all kinds of wonderful nuggets in the series. I loved the concept of a Tudor sugar banquet - basically the dream 'pudding dinner' my kids always longed for - and the weird Georgian jellies but what intrigued me most was the Victorian muddling of sweets and poison. We bandy the word poison about a lot when it comes to food and, ironically, it's currently sugar that is only permitted a place at the Devil's table. This is neither the time nor the place to rant about clean-eating (although the news that coconut oil is basically lard had me in fits of joy for a week) and nuts and additives are a minefield for those with allergies, but at least they're not arsenic.

Yes arsenic, just one of the jolly compounds accidentally or intentionally used in food manufacturing in nineteenth century Britain. Fancy some more? What about copper sulphate used in bottled fruits and pickles or red lead for colouring Gloucester cheese or perhaps a tasty drop of strychnine in your rum or beer? If you're not in the mood for those, how about setting the breakfast table with a jug of chalk-filled milk, a nice loaf of bread with added plaster of Paris and a pat of butter brightened up with copper. Pop Tarts suddenly don't sound quite so bad after all.

Adulteration in food is nothing new. In the middle ages, costly spices were often bulked out with ground nutshells or pits or even stones and dust and bread flour was regularly mixed with sand and sawdust. Laws to try and regulate price, weight and quality of foodstuffs such as bread and beer began in 1266 and were heavily enforced by trade guilds. These laws, however, were to protect the market not the consumer and were patchy in their application outside towns and cities. Fast forward to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the mass move towards urbanisation, and adulteration becomes the rule rather than the exception across pretty much all food and drink sectors and one of the worst offending culprits was the confectionery trade.

 Pharmacy Jars with sweetie ingredients

Access to sugar democratised in the mid nineteenth century as prices fell sufficiently for sweets and associated items (such as cakes and biscuits) to come within working class budgets. A cottage industry grew up to feed the nation's new sweet tooth, particularly round the production of boiled sweets. However, this was also a period of intense competition as technological innovations in processes and packaging (and the growth of the advertising industry) opened the market to entrepreneurs such as Fry, Rowntree and Cadbury whose interest was not tiny kitchens but large scale manufacturing. Profit became king and corners were not so much cut by the smaller producers as rampaged round. Potentially lethal chemicals were used for colouring, especially to make the sweets attractive to children, eg: mercury sulphide (red), lead chromate (yellow), copper sulphate and good old arsenic (blue) and copper arsenite (green). Sugar was bulked out with plaster of Paris and limestone. Very often the hapless consumer could not tell the difference - as the sweet makers demonstrate in the programme when they compare adulterated and non-adulterated toffee.

 Caricature by John Leech, Punch 1858 

Oh the poor consumer: as is too often the case, it took a rather nasty accident to wake everyone up to what they were really brightening their diets with. Analytical chemistry was on the rise in the nineteenth century, particularly with the development of the microscope, and a few brave souls had tried to turn whistle-blower on some of the more dubious practices. In 1820, a chemist by the name of Frederick Accum published The Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons which contained detailed methods for detecting adulterants within foods and drink. He then followed this up by publishing a list of all those convicted of selling adulterated products and, not surprisingly, found himself up in court on charges of stealing and then damaging some of his source books. Reputation in tatters, poor old Accum fled home to Germany and the malpractices continued, with unfortunate results for the people of Bradford. 

The Greenmarket in Bradford was home to a sweet stall owned by William Hardaker, who was known to locals as "Humbug Billy". He bought his humbugs from sweet maker Joseph Neal, who should have been making his lozenges from peppermint oil, sugar and gum. Neal, however, preferred the profit margin obtained by replacing part of the sugar with gypsum, a kind of plaster known in the trade as "daff". So far so every day but, in what must have been the one of the worst examples of  "you really can't get the staff," Neal sent his assistant to the pharmacy for his dodgy supplies where that assistant was served by another assistant and the resulting purchase was not 12 pounds of daff but 12 pounds of arsenic. The sweets were made - apparently they looked a bit odd and the sweet maker (James Appleton) came down with vomiting and pains in his hands during the process but that didn't stop Neal selling 40 pounds of the luscious lozenges to Hardaker. Within 24 hours of the first batch being sold, 200 people had arsenic poisoning and 21 died. 

Bradford was lucky: the resulting trial (at which all were acquitted) estimated each humbug contained 9 grams of arsenic, twice the lethal dose, and enough had been distributed to kill 2000 people. And this was not an isolated case. The following year, 6 pupils at a school in Bristol plus a publican and his brother became violently ill after eating Bath buns purchased from a local bakers. When the buns were analysed, each was found to contain 7 grains of the paint pigment lead chromate which the baker had used rather than eggs to colour the buns bright yellow. Apparently he did it all the time but had somehow used too heavy a dose on this occasion. As with Bradford, no one was prosecuted because no laws had actually been broken. There was an outcry and laws were finally introduced (The Pharmacy Act, 1868 and the Adulteration of Food and Drugs Act 1872) which led to an ongoing recognition of food-borne illnesses and a programme of regulations to combat malpractices. 

The chilling bit, of course, is the detection. In the middle ages, awareness of adulteration came through noticing changes to weight and smell and taste. As technology progressed, it became easier to detect the undetectable but that doesn't mean the threat went away - the adulterers just got cleverer and technology and malpractice always seem to have a lag, especially when profits are involved. A study produced in 2013 listed 10 common products still regularly picked up in tests as being adulterated, including maple syrup, wine and coffee and milk in China where it has been contaminated with melamine to make it appear more rich in protein. Kale anyone?

Sweet as Candy: A few notes on sugar in the Middle Ages

A few months ago a reader wrote to me to say that I mentioned sugar in one of my novels and she wondered how they had extracted sugar from sugar beet in the 12th century.  I wrote back explaining that sugar at the time came from sugar cane, not beet, which wasn't processed as a source of sugar until the late 18th century.  Just recently I read a novel set in the 14th century which explained how much of a treat sugar was back then, and I decided that perhaps a few notes on the Medieval sugar industry and how medieval people treated the commodity might prove interesting to readers.


 Unlike honey, the powerful sweetness of sugar from sugar cane was not available to everyone.  It began as a product grown and produced in India and gradually spread to the Middle East and the Mediterranean. By the 10th century, Egypt was a major producer and exporter of sugar and by the 12th it was grown wherever practical  in all Muslim lands bordering the Mediterranean.  More distant areas such as Morocco and Andalusia were under cultivation too.  There is also strong archaeological evidence for Christian sugar production in the Jordan Valley in the crusader period. Cyprus too became a major producer, and Crete, dominated by the Venetians and Genoans.  It was in Cyprus that the water driven sugar crushing mill was invented, thus making sugar a more readily available commodity on the European market.  The Venetian Cornaro family owned extensive sugar plantations on the south of the Island around Espiscopi and a sugar processing complex. Sugar syrup was obtained from crushed cane, clarified, solidified into conical loaf shapes and sold throughout Europe.

modern sugar loaf

In the 14th century Italian Merchant Franceso Pegolotti listed fourteen different types of sugar readily available to the consumer.  These included rock candy, sugar scented with roses or violets, sugar from Damascus, Bablyon and the Genoese port of Caffa in the Crimea.  Pegolotti lists sugar with descriptions of spices, and indeed it was classified as a spice in the medieval period.

There was a large European market keen to buy sugar for artistic and medicinal purposes.  It was ideal for creating confectionery sculptures as statements pieces at grand banquets and was being used on a large scale in France by the reign of Philip IV (1285-1314).  Even earlier in England in the 12th century, it is listed on the Pipe roll accounts for the reign of Henry II. 
However, even as time and technology progressed and the Cypriot crushing mills brought down the price of sugar, it was still a luxury item.In the 15th century, honey imported into England cost £2.10 shillings per ton.  The same weight of sugar cost £40.00 per ton.  At this sort of price, a single bag in the consumer's hands was worth a skilled man's wage for a day.

French medieval merchant selling sugar loaf (far right)

As mentioned above, sugar was viewed in the Medieval period as a  medicinal item.   That it tasted good and could be turned into various forms such as syrups and pills was a great advantage and it also helped to counteract the bitterness of some of the medicines in which it was an ingredient. It wasn't until the 18th century that sugar ceased to be considered as a drug and a spice and became a basic staple of daily life.

An important medicinal use of sugar was to balance the humours.  The medieval mindset on bodily health was based on humoural theory - the belief that all existing things were composed of a combination of two pairs of elements - warm and cold on the one hand and dry and wet on the other. These elements were then acted upon by the temperamental agents of blood, choler, phlegm and melancholy.   The sanguine temperament (blood) combined warmth and moistness.  The choleric temperament was warm and dry, the phlegmatic cold and moist, and the melancholic was cold and dry.  Foodstuffs too had their element, and the way they should be prepared had specific and logical rules.  So, fish that were cold and moist, were generally fried at least as a first step in their preparation, because frying was hot and dry.  Wine was seen as a hot, dry substance in terms of its humour, so was an ideal medium in which cold, moist pears might be cooked.  Again, the same with fish.  Lampreys, seen as being particularly cold and moist were often killed in red wine and then cooked in it. Henry I dying of a surfeit of lampreys has more going on in that statement than first appears.  Any medieval person would immediately recognise the danger signs.  You took your life in your hands when you ate lampreys unless they were correctly balanced by other products and suited one's humour!

On the humour table, sugar was warm in the first degree and moist in the second and seen as being one of the best foodstuffs for the human condition. It gave sugar a starring role on the pharmacist's shelf and by the 14th century was so prevalent in dishes for the unwell or the recuperating as opposed to those who were healthy, that historians can immediately tell the intention of the dish when studying recipes of the period.

Of course, if it was good for the sick, then it was probably beneficial to the healthy too, and following on from this, everyone else who could afford it embraced sugar into the diet. What was not to like?  The Tacuina sanitatis, an 11th century  medical treatise has this to say on sugar.

'Ask the grocer for refined sugar which is hard, white as salt, and brittle.  It has a cleansing effect on the body and benefits the chest, kidneys and bladder...It is good for the blood and therefore suitable for every temperament, age, season and place.'

Since Medieval food was all about balance and harmony, sugar was often combined with vinegar, the properties of which on the humour table made it the perfect partner for sugar and a distinct 'sweet and sharp' cuisine became very popular.  Fish, chicken, rabbit, all received this treatment, sometimes with the sweetness coming from dried fruit. All very delicious, (I've tried rabbit and salmon versions and they are wonderful)  and all very good for you by the lights of humoural theory.

Sugar and spices were blended together as an end of meal digestif, aiding the closing of the stomach after it had been opened with an 'aperitif' to light up the furnace of the stomach and get it working. The main courses would then be consumed by the fire in the stomach cauldron, and the digestif would settle everything afterwards and close it all down safely.   Cinnamon or rose water were blended with melted sugar to make sweets and partaken of at the end of a meal.  Candied ginger too and cardamom. We still have the tradition when we we eat After Eight mints, truffles, petits fours, and the like following formal meals, but mostly without remembering the original reason.

In the large Italian cities such as Milan, the equivalent of sweet shops existed by the end of the 14th century and 'Candi' (from Arabic 'Kand') could be bought by weight in small amounts, made from imported cane sugar melted and crystalised and sold in paper cones - see the illustration opposite (that brings back memories of my own childhood and the way sweets were bought in the local shop!). 

These days our love for sugar has run wild and some would say out of control.  In the Middle Ages, sugar was a drug, and I guess we're all addicts!

ELIZABETH CHADWICK
Elizabeth Chadwick's latest novel The Summer Queen came out in June 2013.