Food History Jottings

The Pudding King?

2012-02-23T07:33:00.004-08:00

George I (School of Godfrey Kneller). Is that an orb with a sceptre and cross on the table?

Just dip into the vast amount of material that has been written about the history of Christmas pudding and fairly soon you will come across references to King George I (reign 1714-1727). You will quickly learn that he was served plum pudding as part of his first Christmas dinner as newly crowned monarch in 1714. You will also find recipes that claim to be for the very pudding. Some sources even give us the exact time of the brand new king’s initial experience of this curious English dish – 6 pm on December 25^th 1714. As a result of these strong connections to the dish you will also learn that George was given the nickname the ‘Pudding King.’

Or is it something else?

However, the eighteenth century archival record is curiously silent on this matter. There does not seem to be anything on the story in any of the nineteenth century records either. It is not until the twentieth century that the story surfaces. And it surfaces with a clamour, with many leading food writers telling the story of the Pudding King, some claiming that it was George himself who was actually responsible for making it our national Christmas dish. So if there are no eighteenth century primary sources for the story, where on earth does it come from? Many food authors cite the recipe and the legends attached to it, including worthies like May Byron (1929) Florence White (1932), Dorothy Hartley (1954), and Elisabeth Ayrton (1974). However, all are unanimously silent on one important matter – none of them give their sources.

Plum pudding is liberally steeped in myth as well as brandy

Plumcake, Food History Jottings research assistant has made a special project of this problem and has been delving through the historical evidence to find out how the story emerged. She has made some interesting discoveries and what follows is based on her research. The very earliest record she has found so far linking George I to plum pudding is an article about a royal family Christmas at Sandringham during the reign of George V (1910-1936), who came to the throne 196 years after the death of his namesake. This was published in the Strand Magazine in 1911. It is highly likely that this is the original source of our story - it is certainly the earliest so far discovered.

The article is entitled THE HOME LIFE OF THE ROYAL FAMILY. The author is unnamed, but is described in bold uppercase type by the Strand Magazine as ‘AN OFFICIAL OF THE ROYAL HOUSEHOLD.’ It goes on to say that the article ‘IS PUBLISHED WITH GRACIOUS PERMISSION AND APPROVAL OF THEIR MAJESTIES THE KING AND QUEEN. THE ACCOMPANIED PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE ROYAL CHILDREN HAVE BEEN EXPRESSLY SELECTED FOR THE ARTICLE BY THE QUEEN HERSELF.’ It is definitely an article with impressive royal approbation.

This Christmas gathering was the first one for the royal family after George V’s coronation in June 1911. The article describes how after breakfast the royal children paid their compliments to the recently widowed Queen Mother and then the whole family attended morning service,

‘After service a return has been made in the past to Sandringham in order that the children may enjoy their Christmas dinner, which is composed of the traditional roast turkey, sausages and plum-pudding. The latter, by the way, is made from a recipe that has been in the possession of the Royal Family since the days of George I, and is compounded in the huge kitchens at Windsor Castle.’

The recipe is given in a footnote. Here it is –

We are glad to be able to give, by permission, this recipe, which is composed as  follows: 1½ lb. suet (finely shredded), 1lb. Demerara sugar, 1lb. small raisins, 1lb. plums  (stoned and cut in half), 4oz. citron (cut into thin slices), 4oz. candied peel (cut into thin  slices), teaspoonful of mixed spice, half a grated nutmeg, two teaspoonfuls of salt, 1lb.  bread crumbs, ½ lb. sifted flour, 1lb. of eggs (weighed in their shells), wineglass of brandy. Beat the eggs to a froth and then add to them half a pint of new milk and mix the  various ingredients. Let the mixture stand for twelve hours in a cool place. Then place in  moulds and boil for eight hours. The above would make three ordinary-sized puddings.  The Strand Magazine, Vol. 42, [1911] p.634 (No.252, December 1911).

What this article actually says is that this recipe had been in the possession of the Royal Family since the days of George I. What it does not say is that it is for making a pudding that was actually served to him. Anyone who has experience of early Georgian recipes will realise that this cannot be an exact transcription of the original. Its structure and language are entirely modern. If it is based on an eighteenth century original it is very much an adaption for an early twentieth century reader. We know of no other eighteenth century pudding recipes that instruct the cook to weigh the eggs. Nor is Demerera sugar an ingredient that is usually named in eighteenth century recipes. It might be common ingredient now, but surprisingly candied peel is not an ingredient that occurred in eighteenth century plum puddings. The earliest recipe that Plumcake has found for one which includes it is in John Mollard, The Art of Cookery (London: 1801). Moulds for boiling puddings are described in nineteenth and early twentieth century recipes, but not in those from the early Georgian period.

If George I ate plum pudding at Christmas, it would have been boiled like this, in a cloth

Plum puddings were boiled in fancy moulds in the 19th and early 20th century. However, in 1911 the word mould could also mean a plain basin like those used by most cooks today

The instruction to use ‘plums’ in the recipe is also interesting. Well it is a plum pudding is n’t it, so what is strange about that? However, when plums are called for in recipes for this dish, it usually means something else. After an initial definition of the word ‘plum’ as the fruit of the plum tree, Dr. Samuel Johnson in A Dictionary of the English Language (London: 1755), gives us an alternative meaning,

Dr Johnson's alternative definition of 'plum'

The Victorian economic historian Stephen Dowell in A History of Taxation and Taxes in England (London: 1884, IV. i. vii. 37) tells us more, ‘The dried grapes‥we term simply raisins when used for eating uncooked, and plums when they form an ingredient in the famous English plum pudding.’

But we are getting distracted into a different issue. Why plum pudding is called what it is and the additional meanings of the word ‘plum’ will be dealt with in greater detail in another posting. Let us return to the Pudding King. We do not doubt that there is a recipe in the Royal household somewhere for plum pudding that dates from the time of George I, but its wording would be completely different from the one published in the Strand Magazine. Compare the above to the language of this recipe from 1723, which incidentally, is also a recipe ‘from the days of George I’.

A Plum-pudding

Shred a Pound and a half of Suet very fine, and sift it; add a Pound and a half of Raisins of the Sun ston’d, six spoonful of Flour, and as many of Sugar, the Yolks of eight Eggs, and the Whites of five, beat the Eggs with a little Salt, tye it up close in a Cloth and boil it for four or five Hours.

George I had four more years to reign when John Nott published the above recipe in 1723 in The Cook’s and Confectioner’s Dictionary. It is likely that the royal recipe published in the 1911 article was adapted to suit contemporary kitchen practice, or its language would have been closer to Nott’s instructions.

It is not until 1929 that we hear of George I’s Royal Christmas Plum Pudding again, this time in May Byron’s Puddings, Pastries and Sweet Dishes. Mrs Byron offers a slightly different version of the recipe, substituting the plums for Valencia raisins and the small raisins for sultanas. It is likely that she was trying to clarify the word plum for a readership that no longer understood its alternative meaning. She also doubles the quantity of flour, but it is pretty obvious that her source for the recipe is the 1911 article.

And so it goes on. In her lovely Good Things in England, Florence White, founder of the English Folk Cookery Association offers the same recipe, giving a version, which apart from a little more flour is pretty faithful to the 1911 original. The journalist Hayden Church cites the recipe in a rather interesting article written for the New York Times in December 1931 and syndicated two years later to The World Almanac and Book of Facts. But Church tells us that the pudding was made from ‘a recipe used in the royal household since the seventeenth century and preserved in an old cookery book at Windsor Castle.’ So we are now being told that the royal recipe predates the reign of George I! In her 1974 version, Elisabeth Ayrton includes self-raising flour, glacé cherries and dates, telling us more about 1970s taste than an authentic attempt to replicate an eighteenth century dish! Elisabeth! We thought that this was supposed to be the very pud that George ate in 1714 - shame on you!

Many other journalists and cookery authors right up to recent years have given versions of the recipe first described in the 1911 article, some of them elaborating on the story. We think that those who actually give us the exact time and date of George I’s first Christmas dinner were probably making a well educated guess! But whoever made up the story about him being called the Pudding King? He certainly was not called that in his lifetime, or even in the two centuries after his death. This particular variation on the theme seems to have emerged in the decades after World War II.

So it seems to us that the tales of the Pudding King are myths that have gradually grown on top of a recipe cited in a journalistic account of a Royal Christmas in 1911. However, to get to the real truth we need to see the royal cookery book with its recipe, hopefully still on a shelf somewhere in Windsor Castle. Is there anyone out there with some good royal connections who could organize that for us? If there is just the slightest chance that Your Majesty reads this blog, could Plumcake and I come to Windsor to look through your cookery books please?

To demonstrate how the recipes claiming to be for George I’s Plum Pudding are derived from the 1911 Strand Magazine article, Plumcake has constructed this detailed analytical chart - click on the link below.

George I Plum Pudding Recipe Chart

George V. The real Pudding King?

There is an ironic coda to this story of kings and Christmas pudding. George V, whose first Sandringham Christmas is described in the 1911 Strand magazine, probably has more legitimate claims to the title ‘Pudding King’ than his Hanoverian ancestor George I, whose links to the dish seem to be tenuous. On Christmas Day 1927 George V gave his whole-hearted support to a propaganda campaign organized by the Empire Marketing Board to encourage trade within the British Empire. He sat down that year at Sandringham with his family and instead of eating the usual pudding ‘from the days of George I’, he sampled the delights of Empire Christmas Pudding, supposedly invented by his chef André Cédard. This pudding was made with ingredients grown all over the British Empire. That Christmas the king’s loyal subjects throughout the Empire were encouraged to follow suite. Perhaps they should have toasted their monarch with,
‘The Pudding King is dead. Long live the Pudding King!’

Trayne Roste - A Fifteenth Century English Spit Cake

2012-02-13T13:02:00.010-08:00

Trdelník, sometimes called chimney cake because of its hollow cylindrical form

If you have ever been to Prague at Christmas time you will almost certainly have visited the wonderful Christmas fair held in the Old Town Square. Although it is always pretty cold at this time of year, street vendors selling hot punch, spit roast ham and a host of other Bohemian street foods, offer plenty of opportunities to warm up by the fires at their stalls while you enjoy their wares. One hot delicacy which I particularly love is Trdelník, a spit roasted cake which is one of the most fascinating foods on offer. This is made with a sweetened yeast dough, which is spiralled round a metal cylinder, rolled in sugar and spices and then rotated rapidly over hot charcoal. The sugar caramelises on the outside making the crust of the Trdelník very crispy. It is delicious.

Trdelník is closely related to Kürtőskalács, an ancient chimney cake which has been made in Hungary for a long time and which is said to have originated in Transylvania. Many other European countries have cakes which are also baked on specialised spits in front of a fire. In Austria there is Prügelkrapfen, Germany has Baumkuchen, Sweden Spettekaka, France gateau à la broche, which is closely related to the Šakotis of Lithiania and the sękacz of Poland, both used to celebrate Christmas and at weddings. And there are others. There is a recipe for baumkuchen in Marx Rumpoldt's Ein new Kochbuch (Frankfort: 1589). And Conrad Hagger in Neues Saltzburgisches Koch-Buch (Augsburg: 1719) gives an illustration of a specialist spit fitted with a wooden cone for making the sensational Hapsburg pyramidal spit cake.below.

But what about Britain? Well I am afraid that just about the only thing that you will see rotating on a spit nowadays in this country is a doner kebab. There are no contemporary spit cakes. Which is a sad state of affairs, since the British were once famed throughout Europe for the quality of their spit cookery. However, at one time there was an English spit cake, probably the most unusual in the whole of Europe. Sadly it has been extinct since the days of the Plantagenet monarchs. There are a number of recipes in some fifteenth century court cookery books. It was usually called a trayne roste, though there is a variant called a hastelet of fruit. The recipe below is from Harl. Ms. 4016 in the British Library. It dates from about 1420.

Take Dates and figges, and kutte hem in a peny brede; And þeñ take grete reysons and blanched almondes, and prik hem thorgh with a nedel into a threde of a mannys length, and one of one frute and a-noþer of anoþer frute; and þeñ bynde the threde with the frute A-bought a rownde spete, endelonge þe spete, in maner of an hasselet; And þeñ take a quarte of wyne or Ale, and fyne floure, And make batur thereof, and cast thereto pouder ginger, sugur, & saffroñ, pouder of Clowes, salt; And make þe batur not fully rennyng, and noþer stonding, but in þe mene, that hit may cleue, and than rost the treyne abought the fire in þe spete; And þeñ cast the batur oñ the treyne as he turneth abought the fire, so longe til þe frute be hidde in the batur; as þou castest þe batur there-on, hold a vessell vndere-nethe, for spilling of þe batur/ And whan hit is y-rosted well, hit wol seme a hasselet; And þeñ take hit vppe fro þe spit al hole, And kut hit in faire peces of a Spañ length, And serue of hit a pece or two in a dissh al note.

I recently roasted a trayne roste for the Hairy Bikers, a popular television food programme produced for the BBC. For those who would like to see in detail the very interesting process of making this extraordinary cake, here is the video below.

There is some more information about trayne roste and other spit cakes on my website

Pumping up the Syllabub

2012-02-12T11:43:00.001-08:00

To make whip syllabub the most common tool was a birch whisk used to excite a mixture of wine, lemon juice and cream into creating a layer of bubbles on top.

Since this is the third posting on the subject, readers of this blog might get the impression that I have more than a passing interest in syllabub. You would be right. I started experimenting with old syllabub recipes nearly fifty years ago. I had my first go at making syllabub using the oft cited method of milking a cow into some sweetened cider when I was fourteen. It was a miserable failure. The milk curdled and made a terrible mess. What was I, or the cow doing wrong? I found the same thing happened when I tried recipes that called for warm milk to be poured from a great height into the mixture - resulting again in stringy and inedible curds. In my early days of syllabub experimentation there were very few modern recipes. It was not until Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson started publishing some in the late 1960s that the British general public started becoming aware of what until then been an almost totally extinct dish.

What a contrast that is to the situation today. Google the word and you will find a myriad modern recipes - champagne syllabub, turkish delight syllabub, amaretto syllabub, iced cappuccino syllabub, hogmanay syllabub, passionfruit syllabub etc. What I have noticed though is that nearly all of these contemporary versions are made by whisking whipping cream with the other ingredients until it sets into a uniform thick whip. This type, which seems to be the only one made in modern times, is derived from those revived recipes by Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson, which they based on what was once called solid syllabub. This sort, also known as everlasting syllabub, was technically a flavoured alcoholic whipped cream. After a while a small amount of liquid might form at the bottom of the syllabub glass, but generally this type consisted of a uniform creamy whip.

A solid or everlasting syllabub in a panel moulded double handled syllabub glass of the mid -eighteenth century. This is the model for just about every modern syllabub. It is really a type of whipped cream

A glass salver set with ribbon jellies and solid syllabubs. Photo: Vicky Osborne.- courtesy Delomosne and Son.

As the bubbles rose they were skimmed off with a spoon

Another syllabub, older in origin than the solid kind, was the whip or whipped syllabub. If the very large number of surviving recipes is anything to go by, it seems to have been very popular, This was very different in nature to solid syllabub. It does not really seem to be understood by modern cooks. The cream/wine mixture was whipped in a large bowl, usually with a birch whisk, but chocolate mills were also used. As the bubbles rose they were skimmed off the surface and put on a sieve to drain overnight.

The foam was allowed to drain over night until it turned into a much lighter and dryer froth

It is not as fiddly as it sounds and a very large amount of bubbly suds can be accumulated in a fairly short time. Interestingly a very old and ubiquitous rural name for a sieve was a sile or syell, commonly used in dairies for straining milk. Syllabubs were originally made in dairies rather than kitchens. In seeking for an origin for the word syllabub, the etymologists have complete ignored this Old Norse word. Above you can see a sile covered in bubbles - any thoughts? Once the bubbles had drained thoroughly, which usually takes about twelve hours, an incredibly light, rather dryish foam of a most ethereal texture is created. This was then floated on top of some wine or whey which had been poured into the syllabub glass. This is much lighter and of a completely different character to the modern version of the dish. The evidence points to the fact that the pan top syllabub glass was designed specifically for whip syllabub. The pan helps to support the foam above as below.

Whip syllabub floating on wine in an eighteenth century pan top glass

Now all this whipping, whether with whisks or chocolate mills, especially when catering for a large company, was a lot of hard work. So a number of pieces of equipment were designed to make the process easier. The earliest of these was a syringe known as a wooden cow. These are first mentioned in the late seventeenth century. A lot of bubbles can be created by squirting air into the mix with one of these curious implements. They were similar to a device called a butter squirt, which could also be used to make syringe fritters. Syringes of this kind had various applications in the kitchen and dairy. I have never seen any English early modern period images of these things, but Bartolomeo Scappi in his Opera (Venezia: 1570) does illustrate a kitchen syringe. This is a woodcut version from the 1621 edition.

Choose your weapon. Birch whisk, chocolate mill, syllabub pumping engine or wooden cow?

A variation on the wooden cow was the 'syllabub pumping engine', which appeared in the first half of the eighteenth century -

“Dr. Hayles hath actually published what has been for some time talked of, a tube of tin with a box of the same at the lower end of it...that is full of small holes. This engine, with the help of a pair of bellows, blows up cream into syllabub with great expedition. This complex machine has already procured the doctor the blessing of the housekeeper in this palace, and of all such as she in the present generation (who know the time and labour required to whip this sort of geer), and will cause his memory to be held in reverence by all housekeepers in the generations that are yet to come.” A. Hartshorne, Old English Glasses, (London and New York: 1897), p. 307.

I have reconstructed this 'engine' and it works very well, blowing 'up cream into syllabub with great expedition. I have had a love affair with this uniquely English dairy food most of my rather long life and have written three published papers on the subject. Syllabub has spawned its own unique material culture and I also collect both the tools which were once used to make it, as well the beautiful glasses that were designed for serving it. With this kind of long experience of the subject, it is always tempting to feel smug and consider oneself some kind of an expert. However, it is humbling to find out that in fact one really knows very little. I recently learned that in nineteenth century North America special mills called syllabub churns were manufactured to make solid syllabubs. After nearly fifty years of studying the subject I had never heard of them. As far as I know, there was never anything like these made in Britain, but I could be wrong.

Below are some photographs of one of these churns, which according to one or two folk who have used them are incredibly effective. They work rather like a plunge butter churn. By pushing the shaft up and down the mixture gets thoroughly aereated. If there are any US readers of this post who have experience of these fascinating utensils, I would love to hear from you. Happy syllabub pumping everybody!

Mary Midnight's Bubble and Squeak

2012-02-10T08:33:00.002-08:00

When I was a child in the 1950s one of my favourite dishes was 'bubble and squeak', made by my mother from potato and cabbage left over from the previous day. She fried the ingredients in a little beef dripping saved from the Sunday roast, creating a piping hot slush of brassica and mash trapped within a crisp browned crusty jacket. Sometimes she cooked it in bacon fat, which was even better. This humble dish is the stuff from which my earliest food memories were forged. Never mind Proust's dainty madeleines - just the thought of a pile of bubble and squeak infuses my whole being with a poignant yearning for those breakfasts of more than half a century ago. Sadly, I am now always disappointed with the dish as it never lives up to my nostalgia-driven expectations.

The closest to my mother's I have experienced is Nigel Slater's excellent recipe. However, like most other modern versions this requires a non-stick pan, a luxury unknown in the 1950s. As a child, it was those crunchy, not quite burnt golden flakes of potato that had to be physically scrapped off the bottom of an old black cast iron frying pan that gave the dish its character. Without them it was bubble, but sadly deficient in squeak.

Essential tools for bubble and squeak - a 19th century scrapper and cast iron frying pan

The process of making bubble and squeak required as much scrapping as it did frying. A specialised tool called a bubble and squeak scraper (above) was once used for making the job easier. However, the true purpose of these beautifully designed utensils has now been entirely forgotten. As well as having a sharp edge for scrapping the crunchy bits that stuck to the pan, they also allowed you to chop the vegetables as they fried. Their craftily designed handles enabled you to use them without being obstructed by the sides of the pan.

Bubble and squeak choppers or scrappers

The English have also forgotten that the very nature of bubble and squeak changed radically at some point in the twentieth century. This favourite dish has been around since at least the middle of the eighteenth century, but for the first hundred and eighty years of its existence it was made by frying together small slices of meat, usually beef, with boiled cabbage. Potatoes did not even get a look in until the late nineteenth century. I suspect the meat got dropped from the recipe during the course of the Great War, but the jury is out on that one. By 1951, The Good Housekeeping Magazine Home Encyclopedia declared that 'in the modern version of bubble and squeak the meat is usually omitted'. This modern version is the one I remember from my childhood breakfasts and which is still cooked today.

In the 1890s the great Victorian chef Theodore Garrett, described bubble and squeak as, 'a favourite domestic réchauffee of cold meats and vegetables, variously compounded, according to what materials are at hand, or to fancy.' This is quite close to the modern concept of the dish, a kind of fried mish-mash of any vegetables left over from a previous meal. But Garrett's recipes all contain meat, so in the late Victorian period it was quite a different dish to the bubble and squeak the British enjoy today. I have appended Garrett's article on bubble and squeak at the very end of this posting.

Christopher Smart aka Mary Midnight, the author of the first printed recipe for bubble and squeak

As far as I know, ‘bubble and squeak’ first gets a mention in literature in 1752 in an issue of The Drury-lane Journal, by Madam Roxana Termagant. This was a scurrilous magazine, in reality written by the poet Bonnell Thornton. Thornton was a member of the Nonsense Club, a gathering of literary figures and artists, which included William Cowper among its members. The earliest recipe I know was published a year later in 1753, not in a cookery book, but in another irreverent collection of satirical verse and prose called The Midwife, or Old Woman’s Magazine by one Mary Midnight - again a pen name, this time used by the eccentric poet Christopher Smart (1722-1771).

Title page and frontispiece of Christopher Smart's The Midwife. This is the first number of October 1750. Mary Midnight's recipe for bubble and squeak was printed in Vol III in 1753.

Mary Midnight's style of writing is peppered with juvenile humour, much of it downright silly and often outrageous - a kind of Georgian Monty Python. The recipe had probably been around for decades and may have originated as a sailor's way of dealing with salt beef or pork. It is quite fitting that a recipe for a dish with such a ridiculous name first appeared in such an absurd journal. Mrs Midnight's 1753 recipe, reproduced below, is really a spoof, a satire on the life style of the Oxford and Cambridge students of the day, but it does work.

The earliest 'recipe' for bubble and squeak - made with salt meat.

Bubble and squeak naturally lent itself to comedy and features regularly in humorous poetry and prose during the second half of the eighteenth century and beyond. Peter Pindar's marvellous evocation of it noisily cooking in the pan, surely explains the onomatopoeic origins of its name -

What mortals Bubble call and Squeak

When midst the Frying-pan in accents savage,

The Beef so surly quarrels with the Cabbage.

The first directions in an actual cookery book do not appear until 1773, and then only in a footnote to a recipe for boiled beef in Charlotte Mason's The Lady's Assistant (London: 1773). The dish seems always to have been of a homely nature. In his marvellous Slang. A Dictionary (London: 1823), Jon Bee offers this definition - 'Bubble-and-squeak - a vulgar but savoury kind of omnium gatherum dinner of fried scraps, the scrapings of the cupboard.'

Although synonymous with plain living and making do, bubble and squeak had some surprising fans. According to Fraser's Magazine (1837 Vol. 15. p. 375), George IV, when Prince of Wales, was introduced to it when he dined with Sir Robert Leighton at Loton Hall in Shropshire -

‘Sir Robert, being a batchelor, was unused to giving so large a dinner as this occasion called for; and his cook, being rather at a loss to fill all the numerous side-dishes required, decided on fried beef and cabbage for one of them. “What have you got in that dish?” said the prince to a gentleman before it happened to be placed. “That sir,” answered Sir Robert, “is a favourite dish in Shropshire, called bubble and squeak.” “Then give me some bubble and squeak,” resumed the prince; and he ate heartily of it. Thus far I can vouch for what I have said; but it was currently reported that this homely dish was afterwards frequently seen at Carlton House.’

To me, this is the whole point of bubble and squeak. George was a prince noted for his love of extravagant dining. He employed Antonin Câreme for a short while and ate the most sophisticated French cuisine off the grandest gilt service ever made in the history of English silversmithing. But he could still take pleasure in such a homely dish.

In a similar fashion, it is a common experience that after over indulgence in the rich foods of Christmas dinner, our jaded appetites can still be revived by this 'vulgar but savoury kind of omnium gatherum dinner of fried scraps', in other words the Boxing Day bubble and squeak made from the leftovers. Englishmen of every class have had a long lasting love affair with this most basic, but tasty of dishes.

The last word on the matter must go to the anonymous versifier who wrote the following lines for an edition of Punch magazine published at the height of the Crimean War.

BUBBLE AND SQUEAK

I am a man who dwells alone,

Save only that I keep a dog,

Who eats my scraps up, orts and bone,

So that the creature shares my prog.

I had a boiled salt round of beef

On Monday, all to my own cheek,

Wheron my hunger sought relief

From day to day, for near a week.

Of cold boiled beef the daily round,

After a while begins to tire,

One longs for something nicely browned,

Or steaming from the genial fire.

And then the beef was getting dry;

But food away I never fling,

What can be done with it? thought I:

Bubble and Squeek, sir! – that’s the thing.

KING GEORGE THE FOURTH was not a dunce

At least in gastronomic lore;

Bubble and Squeak he tasted once;

And then he ate it evermore.

The King had oft on turtle dined,

As I have sometimes chanced to do,

We both, to think I am inclined,

The less enjoyed it of the two.

So large with what it fed on grew

My whetted appetite’s increase,

That ‘twas as much as I could do

To leave my dog a little piece.

And even when I gave him that,

I muttered in a doubtful mood,

“is this quite right now – what I’m at,

In giving you, Sir, Christian food?”

The dish at which I’ve pegged away,

So that it my interior fills,

Would that they had it this cold day,

The Brave on the Crimea’s hills!

They in the cannon’s mouth do not

The Bubble reputation seek,

But Glory find; their onset hot,

Leaves to the Russians all the Squeak.

But Bubble, not of empty air,

And Squeak that’s more than idle sound,

Soon may those gallant heroes share

At mess on Russia’s conquered ground!

Anon. Punch 1855. vol. XXVIII, p.10

Theodore Garrett's article on bubble and squeak. The Encyclopaedia of Practical Cookery (London: nd. 1890s)

A nice recipe for modern bubble and squeak by Nigel Slater (though not as good as my mum's!

Syllabub Revisited and Sugar Plumb Theories

2012-02-08T06:36:00.000-08:00

I recently bought a copy of James Gilray's satirical cartoon Heroes recruiting at Kelseys (1798) which is in its original uncoloured state (see detail above). All the other copies I have seen of this print have at some time been painted over with watercolour, as below. This very interesting image shows two military officers sampling the delights of a London confectionery shop. A bonneted proprietress of ample proportions is walking towards them with a bobbin-stemmed salver set out with jelly glasses. These are heaped up with a creamy froth, which the officer on the right is spooning out of a fairly conventional jelly glass. Is this ice cream, or something else?

A small bobbin stemmed waiter with pan top syllabub glass - both second half of eighteenth century. Note how the spoon is perfectly visible through the clear white wine below the foam of the whip syllabub

If you could afford it, ice cream was very popular and common enough in 1790s London confectioners' shops. But close scrutiny of the detail of the uncoloured Gilray reproduced above, shows that a spoon is visible through a clear liquid sitting below the frothy head. This would indicate that the artist's original intentions were to depict a glass of whip syllabub rather than ice cream. Ice cream is opaque and the spoon would therefore be concealed. The water colourist who tinted the print below (probably at a later date) did not appreciate this and has filled in the glass with a uniform pink wash. It is amazing how much can be learnt from such small details.

The other officer is holding a conical twist of paper filled with 'sugar plumbs'. What on earth were these? Well according to some authorities, such as television historian Ruth Goodman, food historian Sharon Cohen and many websites out there in cyberspace, sugar-plums were quite literally plums that had been preserved or coated with sugar. Well I am afraid that this is terribly lazy and inaccurate history, because it is just not true.

Let me explain. Many of us are now familiar with the term sugar-plum from Tchaikovsky's Dance of the Sugar-plum Fairy from the Nutcracker, first performed in St Petersburg in 1892. Tchaikovsky's original French name for this music was Danse de la fée dragée. Dragée is a word still used in France. It means a sugar-coated seed, or nut, not a sugar-coated plum. The Italian equivalent word is confetto, giving us the English comfit. So the literal meaning of Danse de la fée dragée was the Dance of the Sugar Comfit Fairy. However, in England comfits had been known by the nickname sugar-plums since at least the early seventeenth century, because they were the shape of a plum, not made with plums. The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy was a more poetic translation and made perfect sense in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Nowadays, the term is so obsolete that even some self-styled historians, who are meant to study the past critically from primary sources have forgotten what it means. But anyone who cares to look up sugar-plum in the OED will find the definition, 'A small round or oval sweetmeat, made of boiled sugar and variously flavoured and coloured; a comfit.' The definition is followed by many instances of its use. This is not to say that plums were not preserved with sugar. They were, but they were not called sugar plums in the past.

There is a bit more on sugar-plums and comfits on my website, including explanations of how they were really made. Below are links to some sites which have misunderstood the true nature of these interesting sweeties. If you would like to learn how to make real sugar plums, come to my Historic Food Sugar and Confectionery Course.

Ruth Goodman's video of "sugar plum" making
Sharon Cohen's essay on "sugar plums"
Another website which tells you how to make 'sugar plums'

$1000 REWARD FOR LOST PUDDING DECREE

2012-02-07T09:39:00.000-08:00

One thing that really, really annoys me is a tendency in the world of food journalism, broadcasting and food writing to continuously repeat stories about the history of our food which have very little basis in fact. Many food writers, celebrity chefs and yes, even people who actually describe themselves as food historians are guilty of this. This is a plea to all of you out there to stop accepting secondhand, often suspect statements without questioning the sources upon which they are based. I have already given some examples on this blog of this uncritical approach and in the future, I will offer you many more. And I will spare no blushes.

Perhaps no other food in the English culinary canon has been subjected to this process of popular mythologising more than Christmas pudding. In her book Food and Cooking in Victorian England - A History (Greenwood. Westport CT: 2007, pp.149-50), Andrea Broomfield, Associate Professor of English at Johnston Community College, tells us,

‘The plum pudding’s association with Christmas takes us back to medieval England and the Roman Catholic Church’s decree that the “pudding should be made on the twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity, that it be prepared with thirteen ingredients to represent Christ and the twelve apostles, and that  every family member stir it in turn from east to west to honor the Magi and the supposed journey in that direction.”

Now being a professor, Dr. Broomfield naturally provides us with a reference for her source. I was hoping that she had consulted the original medieval decree, because I would love to see it myself. But no, she refers us to a book written by the celebrated English actor Simon Callow called Dicken's Christmas (Francis Lincoln. London: 2003), which she quotes. Mr Callow is a brilliant thespian, in fact he is one of my favourite actors, but he is not noted for his research into English pre-Reformation Ecclesiastical decrees, or Christmas pudding for that matter. His book is an attractive one and is full of interesting information, but it is unreferenced and he repeats a number of the usual annoying cliches about Christmas foods, such as mince pies being representations of Christ's manger etc. Unfortunately Mr Callow does not give us a reference for the source of his information, so where it comes from is anyone's guess. If by any slim chance, you read this posting Mr Callow, I would be grateful if you could let me know your source. By the way, I loved your Dr Marigold and Mr Chops at the Riverside Studios!

Broomfield/Callow are nowadays quoted by Wikipedia in their article on Christmas Pudding and as a result the medieval decree theory can be seen all over that most efficient myth spreader in the history of mankind, the world wide web.

But is there anyone out there who can tell me where I can find a copy of the original decree? Did it really exist? I am genuinely offering a $1000 reward to the first person who can find me the original medieval text of this so-called decree and point me to the library in which it is housed. If the decree came from the very highest authority - the pope, I suggest you start by looking in the Vatican archives for a papal bull, motu proprio or papal brief. Perhaps it was a decree created by one of the Ecumenical Councils, or since it was specifically aimed at the English congregation, it may have been issued in our own ecclesiastical province at a synod under the authority of the Archbiship of Canterbury. Anyway, brush up your Church Latin and I wish you all good hunting in the archives. The reward will be valid until midnight on 24th December 2012, when the offer will close. Good luck! There will be much more on Christmas Pudding in a future posting.

An original papal bull. Papal bulls got their name from the bulla, the small ball shaped seal made of lead which was attached to them. If there was ever a papal bull on the subject of Christmas pudding, perhaps the bulla would have looked like this. Or perhaps the whole thing is just a load of old papal bull----.

Salads to reach round the world

2012-01-15T01:24:00.000-08:00

A Grand Salad for Winter

Minimalism and simplicity were not features of high status life in the seventeenth century. Intricate aesthetic and allegorical schemes dominated the fine and applied arts of the period. A baroque ceiling painting in a church in Rome - or nearer to home - a Purcell anthem, or a Grinling Gibbon's overmantel, are all survivals of an age when complex, florid forms were much to the taste of both Church and nobility. Even in fields like medicine, there was a tendency towards complexity. A remedy might have many ingredients in the hope that one may actually be effective. The astrologer and physician Nicholas Culpeper, commenting on a popular 'antidote to plague and pestilence', which was made up of hundreds of different ingredients said "I am very loath to leave out this medicine, which if it were stretched out, and cut in thongs, would reach round the world.'

So it was with food. The more princely cookery books of the period are packed with recipes for complex olios, bisques and other dishes, packed to the brim with a bewildering variety of meats and game birds. Elaborate and highly decorative salads with many ingredients were also fashionable. In this country these were known as Grand Sallets and some recipes have such an abundance of ingredients that they too, when "cut in thongs, would reach round the world". These colourful arrangements were among the most decorative dishes that ever graced the English table. Take the recipe below from 1709 -

From T. Hall, The Queen's Royal Cookery (London: 1709)

Unlike a modern salad this is more like an arrangement of pickles and was designed specifically for winter. As well as pickled garden stuff, such as the French beans and asparagus (sparrow-grass), there are some seafoods - anchovies, pickled oysters and scallops. The sallet also contains two exotics - mango and bamboo. These had been available in England for some time through the East India trade and were imported in pickled and preserved form. Both were served to James II at his coronation feast in 1685. Most eighteenth century cookery books teach us various ways of counterfeiting them. The fake mangos were made from melons or cucumbers and the bamboo with elder shoots. The real articles must have been rare and expensive. Flowers were also pickled in the summer months to make very decorative salads for winter.

A half pound of butter clapped down on the plate and covered with red cabbage, white cabbage and parsley

Many recipes for grand sallets feature a 'standard', a decorative feature like the sprig of bay laurel described here. Others, such as the one illustrated at the top of the page are embellished with a sprig of rosemary, in this case flicked over with whipped egg white to represent snow and therefore suitable for a winter table. The twig was usually stuck into a half lemon or other fruit, or into a mound of disguised butter.

T. Hall's grand sallet with its whole pickled mango. The small red berries garnishing the rim are pickled barberries

The finished sallet with its plume of bay laurel

Complex salads were also a favourite dish on the baroque table in Spain and Italy, where they were known as royal salads. My favourite insalata reale is from Naples. It appears in Antonio Latini's Lo Scalo Moderna (Napoli: 1692 and 1694). The recipe is below. Like English winter salads, this heroic concoction contains a lot of preserved items such as olives, capers, botarga, anchovies etc. One of the more unusual of these is tarantello, salted tuna belly, a very important ingredient in Italian renaissance cuisine. It is very, very difficult to get hold of these days, but I make my own. If you like anchovies, you will love tarantello.

Tarantello (below) and botarga (above)

Insalata reale

Take endive, or wild chicory, mince it finely and put it to one side, until you have prepared a large basin, at the bottom of which are eight, or ten biscottini, friselle, or taralli, soaked in water, and vinegar, with a little white salt; put the said chopped endive on top, intermix with other salad stuff, albeit minced finely, make the body of the said salad on top at your discretion, intermix with radishes cut into pieces lengthways, filling in the gaps in the said basin with the ingredients listed below, all arranged in order. Pinenuts four ounces; stoned olives six ounce; capers four ounce; one pomegranate; white and black grapes ten ounces; twelve anchovies; tarantello (salted belly of tuna) four ounces; botargo three ounces; comfits six ounces; preserved citron and preserved pumpkin twelve ounces; four hard boiled eggs; whole pistachios four ounces; four ounces of raisins; other black olives six ounces. Caviar, four ounces; minced flesh of white fish, six ounces; little radishes, salt, oil, and vinegar to taste, garnish the plate with slices of citrons, and citron flowers round about in order, take heed not to add salt or seasonings, until it goes to the table, and is about to be eaten.

From Antonio Latini. Lo Scalo Moderna (Napoli: 1692 and 1694). My translation.

Latini's salad is constructed over a bed of biscuit soaked in vinegar. I have used his option of taralli.

This salad can be made at most times of year as it contains items that would be kept in most larders

The finished salad with its 28 ingredients including sugar comfits

The Leeds symposium on History and Traditions on 21st April this year is on the subject of vegetables. I am reading a paper on salads, so expect to see much more on the subject on this blog. I will leave you with a close up of T. Hall's Grand Salad of 1709. Yummy - especially those pickled scallops and oysters!

John Parkinson's Orange Sprig Sallet

2012-01-14T23:44:00.001-08:00

Carved preserved oranges

Here is a very simple, but effective thing. Seville oranges are in the shops here in England, which makes it marmalade making time. In a month's time, the International Marmalade Festival takes place here in Cumbria at Dalemain House just up the road from me. I make marmalade, and am one of the judges at the festival, but I also use a very large number of Seville oranges to make preserved and candied orange peels like those above. I need a lot of these for my courses. Seville oranges contain enormous numbers of pips. When making marmalade, I usually boil these in a little cloth bag to get extra pectin into the mix. However, when preparing preserved peel, I end up with a lot of pips which are surplus to requirements. So what I do is to plant them in the garden and in flowerpots - not to end up with a forest of orange trees in about twenty years, but to produce a small amount of tiny citrus flavoured sprigs later in the year, which are delicious chopped and sprinkled on top of a salad.

Seville oranges are notorious for the sheer abundance of their pips

A flowerpot sown with Seville orange pips ready to be covered with compost

I found this idea in John Parkinson's wonderful book on gardening, Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris (London: 1629). Parkinson was 'herbarist' to James I and had a physic garden in Long Acre in Covent Garden. This is what he says,

"The kernels or seeds beeing cast into the ground in the spring time, will quickly grow up, (but will not abide the winter with us, to bee kept for growing trees) and when they are of a finger length high, being pluckt up, and put among sallets, will give them a marvellous fine aromatic or spicy taste, very acceptable."

Yesterday, I rescued about two hundred of these 'kernels' and 'cast' them in a number of flower pots. When they are ready, I will tell you what I do with them.

John Parkinson. Woodcut from Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris (London: 1629)

Parkinson names his orange as the Mala Arantia, equivalent to our bitter Seville orange Citrus X aurantium. At this time he did not know of the existence of the sweet orange, which became known as the Portugal, or China orange after it was introduced into Europe by the Portuguese. As the marmalade season advances, there will be much more on this blog on matters citrus.

Mala arantia from John Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris (London: 1629)

The International Marmalade Festival

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Bohemian Baroque

2012-01-12T18:08:00.000-08:00

A Hapsburg period pie from 1719 I made from a Hagger design a few years ago

How would you like to wine and dine in true eighteenth century Hapsburg style in a magnificent palace in Prague? Well in 2113 I am joining forces with my two friends Rostislav and Zlatuše Müller, who are responsible for reviving the remarkable Prague Carnevale, or Masopust. Though outlawed during the communist regime, this ancient lenten festival has grown since its revival seven years ago into a major cultural event. Of particular note is the Crystal Ball, a baroque inspired extravaganza held in the beautiful Clam-Gallas Palace in the historic centre of the city. Featuring period music, choreography and authentic food, it is an opportunity for all who attend to dress in sumptuous Hapsburg outfits. This is an extraordinary event, held in extraordinary surroundings. If you come, you will be following in the footsteps of Casanova and Mozart, who were both enthusiastic carnevale participants.

Prima donna in the ballroom of the Clam-Gallas Palace

My role is to organise the food for the Crystal Ball. I intend to create a ball supper of authentic Hapsburg dishes served in true baroque style. My theme for 2013 is to celebrate the wonderful cuisine of Conrad Hagger, whose lavishly illustrated Neues Saltzburgisches Koch-Buch published in Augsburg in 1719 is the text book for all interested in baroque food. Born in 1666, Hagger started his career in St. Gallen and then served as a campaign cook under the Earl of Latour in the Balkans. He saw further action as a military cook in other occupations in Austria, Germany and Italy. He ended his career as cook to Johann Ernst von Thun und Hohenstein, prince archbishop of Salzburg, who he served for 27 years. Many of Hagger's dishes are surprisingly simple and suited to modern taste, but others, particularly his pastry work, are very technically challenging. I have been a proud owner of a magnificent copy of Hagger's book for many years and have attempted some of the remarkable dishes illustrated in this bible of baroque cookery. To be invited to recreate and lay out his extravagant dishes in an authentic table display in this major European baroque palace is a real honour. I am very excited by the prospect.

With its 305 engravings, Hagger's massive tome is the most
valuable resource we have on the appearance of Baroque food

The Clam-Gallas Palace, the venue for the Crystal Ball, as it was in the eighteenth century

This cook is probably Hagger himself, in the act of preparing an ornate pasty

You will dine under this ceiling painting

One of Hagger's sumptuous cakes

While you dine, you will be entertained by some of the most talented artists in Bohemia

A Hagger tart design

This remarkable hairpiece was designed and constructed by Rostislav Muller

The food matches the lavishness of the wigs. One of Hagger's remarkable pies

In future years we will be holding baroque dining events in other Bohemian locations, including this painted ballroom at the Troja Palace, designed purely for the summer divertimenti of Emperor Leopold I. Even the stables at Troja have painted ceilings!

I will be posting much more information about these events on future blogs as well as on my website. Meanwhile, it is not too late to order tickets for this year's Crystal Ball, which is being held at the Clam Gallas Palace on February 18th. Go to the official Prague Carnevale website.

This blog is created by Historic Food. Go to the Historic Food Website.

Spongata - An Italian Minced Pie in Georgian London

2012-01-03T16:58:00.000-08:00

A slice of spongata made from Jarrin's 1820 recipe

Every Christmas for the past 25 years, I have made spongata from a recipe published in 1820 by one of my favourite cookery authors, the Italian confectioner Giuliamo Jarrin. This delicious peppery honey cake is still made at Christmas in villages and towns throughout Emilia Romagna, Jarrin's native region. Indeed, just about every family have their own recipe, as do the professional pastry shops. All keep their own specific methods and ingredients as proudly guarded secrets. This interesting celebration cake is sometimes compared to the English mince pie, though in reality it is much more closely related to the better known Italian confections panpepato and panforte. Though unlike these celebrated cakes, spongata has a thin coating of crisp pastry.

Jarrin was born in the town of Colorno near Parma in 1784. After working in Paris for a while during the reign of Napoleon, he came to London in 1817, where he lived for the rest of his life, running various confectionery establishments in the West End until his death in 1848. He even anglicised his name to William. Jarrin's book The Italian Confectioner, which he wrote in English, was first published in London in 1820. It is by far the most important work on confectionery published in Europe at this period and offers a wonderful insight into the techniques and processes used by the professionals. Sadly, it is hardly known in Italy. Though I don't suppose many contemporary cooks and chefs in England are aware of this seminal work on dessert foods either. Unfortunately there is no modern printed edition of Jarrin's book, but the good news is that the third edition of 1827 is now available on Google books (link at end of this posting).

Giuliamo Alexis Jarrin from the third edition of The Italian Confectioner 1827. There is another portrait of Jarrin as a younger man on this blog in a posting about cupcakes.

To my knowledge, there are no recipes for spongata in any of the works on cookery and confectionery printed in Italy during the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Jarrin actually gives us two. As far as I know they are the earliest printed recipes for this regional cake, predating any published in Italy. It is ironic that they were issued in London in English. Both of Jarrin's recipes can be found at the end of this post. Do try at least the first one, as it is easy to make and very good. The second is a bit more tricky.

There are a number of theories concerning the origin of spongata. Some suggest that the cake is a survival from Roman times and offer a rather tenuous argument that it is similar to one described in Petronius's Satyricon, written in the 1st century AD. Cakes are mentioned in the celebrated passage describing Trimalchio's extravagant feast, but not in enough detail to make a positive identification as spongata precursors. Certainly, all the ingredients spongate contain - honey, breadcrumbs, pinenuts, walnuts, currants, pepper, cinnamon and cloves - were all familiar in the Roman kitchen, but there does not seem to be any actual evidence that the Romans made these cakes. Others believe that the cake is Jewish in origin. Whatever the truth, it is certainly pretty ancient. It first gets mentioned in a letter dating from 1454 to Francesco Sforza, the Duke of Milan.* As you would expect, there are many other stories about this iconic and delicious cake, but like many other food legends they are very difficult to verify from historic sources.

However, as an historian who enjoys replicating period dishes, what interests me much more than trying to figure out the origin of spongata from the scant historical record, is to understand a little more about its appearance and how it was made. Happily, help is at hand in the evidence provided by the marvellous etching reproduced below, a small detail from a board game published in Bologna in 1691.

A spongata vendor from a board game published in Bologna in 1691.

In his recipe Jarrin tells us to prick the finished cake all over with 'the point of a knife'. Most modern day spongate made in Emilia Romagna are still pricked all over in this way, usually with a skewer. However, what strikes me about the late seventeenth century spongate being sold by the long nosed gentleman above, is that they are marked criss-cross fashion with holes in the centre of the individual diamond shaped lozenges. This is a very familiar pattern to me, because an identical one was once called for in pricking or 'docking' Shrewsbury Cakes in seventeenth century England. This effect was achieved by marking the cakes with the teeth of a comb and then making a small hole in each lozenge, as in the photo below.

17th century English Shrewsbury Cakes were marked with a comb

In his manuscript cookery book, the diarist and courtier John Evelyn gives a recipe To make Shrewsbery cakes, in which he instructs us to 'pricke them with the great teeth of a comb that is new and kept for that use'. A similar pattern was used to mark another Shrewsbury speciality, the simnel cakes made for mid-lent Sunday and illustrated (as below) by Robert Chambers in The Book of Days (London: 1862). The probable origin of these markings, at least with the Shrewsbury cakes was to enable the cakes to be broken into smaller pieces without having to cut them. I suspect that the markings on the spongate in the 1691 Bologna etching were for the same purpose.

A recreated Shrewsbury simnel

So in recreating my spongata cakes, I now mark them with a comb as in the picture below. After baking, I dust them with icing sugar, which is still common practice thoughout Emilia Romagna.

A spongata marked with a comb and skewer

One traditional spongata made in Corniglio, a small town about 40 km northwest of Parma, is printed with a geometric design with a wooden mould as well as being pricked or docked - see below. Interestingly in Jarrin's second spongata recipe, he tells us that 'You may have wooden moulds, representing different subjects, into which you may put your paste, and fill the moulds as above, covering them with a wafer paper.'

Spongata di Corniglio - the website where I borrowed this image has another showing a baker printing a spongata on top of a wafer paper just as Jarrin describes.

Jarrin's recipe for spongata from The Italian Confectioner. (London: 1820).

Jarrin's second recipe for spongata or Italian Christmas cake.

* G. BERNARDINI, La spongata: dolce tipico di localita del territorio parmense. Origini storiche, le tipiche località di produzione, le ricette, Parma, Tecnografica, 1995. Accademia Italiana della cucina, Delegazione di Parma.

Download G. A. Jarrin. The Italian Confectioner. 3rd edition. (London:1827) - Google Books

This blog is created by Historic Food. Go to the Historic Food Website.

My 2012 Historic Food Courses

2011-12-28T11:36:00.000-08:00

Where else in the world can you learn to make a beautiful nineteenth century water ice like this?

Or bake a Strasbourg Pie like this?

Or an amazing Victorian shortbread like this?

Or fire a Yorkshire Pudding under the spit roast like this?

Or meet such a lovely group of people as this?

Due to a lot of work in the museum sector and writing commitments, I am only running a small number of courses in 2012. However, there is a nice range of subjects to chose from and I have published a course schedule and a booking form on my website. If you are interested, please get in touch as soon as possible, as they tend to fill up very quickly.

To all of you who have supported me and attended my courses over the years, I wish you a Happy and Prosperous New Year.

This blog is created by Historic Food. Go to the Historic Food Website.

William Verral's Red Currant Tea Bags

2011-12-28T01:56:00.000-08:00

Will Verrall's Currant Fritters en surprize 1759

In my last posting I lamented the decline of the standard of food at the White Hart Inn (now Hotel) in Lewes. So I thought it would be fun to make a dish for you from the 1759 cookery book written by William Verral, the master of the inn at the apogée of its gastronomic fame. I have chosen an unusual, but easily made fritter. Here is Verral's original recipe. He almost certainly learnt it from Clouet, the Duke of Newcastle's cook. It is hardly a great set piece baroque dish, just a simple fritter made in rather an eccentric way, but Newcastle loved Clouet''s tasty little treats like this.

From William Verrall, A Complete System of Cookery. (London: 1759).

Fritters of all kinds were popular in the Georgian period and there were many unusual varieties on offer. I have already introduced you to skirret fritters. Here is a clever way of deep frying currant jelly in batter to produce an incredibly rich and buttery parcel of crisp batter with a soft fruit centre. Most fritters were fried in hog's lard at this period, but clarified butter (oiled butter) is used here to give these little devils their decadent buttery character.

The little wafer paper packages of red currant jelly look like tea bags.

Modern wafer paper (rice paper) is too thin to withstand the heat of the boiling butter and will split open and release its jammy contents, but if you use a double layer of rice paper, the recipe works very well. Wet the edges lightly and pinch them close together to make a good seal. Dip them in an eggless beer batter and drop them into the hot butter immediately. They need a turn, which must be done carefully with a perforated spoon. Then drain on some paper. Sprinkle with powdered sugar and eat them while still hot. As you savour their delicious texture and flavour, you will also feel the indescribable sensation of your arteries rapidly furring up! Enjoy!

One of Will's heart attack fritters cut in two

Wafer paper must have been made commercially at this period. It crops up from time to time as an ingredient. However, after a lifetime of searching I have only found one recipe, which I have posted below. The more adventurous of you may like to experiment with it.

A rare recipe for wafer paper from John Thacker, The Art of Cookery. Newcastle upon Tyne: 1758

Verral, in his recipe for currant fritters en surprize, refers to a previous recipe, so I have reproduced it below. If you do not have any wafer paper, you might like to try this one instead. If you have ever prepared hand-made ravioli, you will be familiar with the technique. It works very well when made with very thinly rolled puff pastry.

On early recipes using deep fried puff pastry (and wafer paper) - more anon!

This blog is created by Historic Food. Go to the Historic Food Website.

How are the Mighty Fallen

2011-12-27T15:41:00.000-08:00

I recently had lunch in the White Hart Inn in the delightful Sussex town of Lewes. In the middle of the eighteenth century the master of this establishment was William Verral, whose lovely book A Complete System of Cookery was published in 1759. Verrall trained under the celebrated chef de cuisine Pierre de St. Clouet, who for a while cooked for Thomas Pelham Holles, the First Duke of Newcastle. Holles, who was a lover of high class French cuisine, owned the White Hart and with Verrall as cook the inn became famous for the quality of its hospitality. Sadly it is no longer a centre for fine gastronomy - in fact my lunch was so poor that I left most of it on the plate. Afterwards I checked out the hotel on Trip Advisor and discovered that I was far from being alone in my criticisms of this once celebrated inn. Here is what I found -

What a sad state of affairs that such an important place in our culinary history should have fallen on hard times. In fact none of the staff at the hotel to whom I spoke, had ever heard of William Verrall, despite the fact that his book has recently been reissued by Penguin under the title Recipes from the White Hart Inn! An enterprising hotel manager would have exploited this link and had copies of the book for sale at reception and perhaps a few of Verrall's dishes on offer in the restaurant.

Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st Duke of Newcastle entertaining Henry Clinton, 7th Earl of Lincoln at Claremont Palace. The Belvedere, the Duke's banqueting house can be seen through the window on the right.

Verrall's landlord Thomas Pelham Holles held lavish entertainments both at his London home Newcastle House and at his vast country palace at Claremont just outside Esher. Claremont was designed by Vanbrugh as his own home, but Holles bought it from the architect and commissioned him to enlarge it considerably. Nothing remains of this huge baroque palace, as Clive of India bought it and demolished it after Holles' death. Ironically, Clive spared Vanbrugh's romantic banqueting house, the castellated Belvedere, which still survives on a mount in the gardens. It was here that the elderly Holles entertained his choice guests in the summer months with dessert foods and sweet wines. In the engraving above, the Belvedere can be seen through the window on the right.

The Duke of Newcastle's banqueting house the Belvedere at Claremont

About fifteen years ago I recreated an early eighteenth century style banquet of sweetmeats in memory of Holles at Claremont. The other day I found a photograph of the table setting, which I have posted below.

My colleague Peter Brears made the sugar paste model of the Belvedere and I made the Duke of Newcastle's arms from almond paste and all the other dessert dishes from eighteenth century recipes. Just a week after setting this event up, I was lucky enough to buy a very nice copy of the wonderful etching below of Holles in his kitchen with his cook Clouet, who of course was also William Verrall's mentor. Aha - the wonders of synchronicity!

This blog is created by Historic Food. Go to the Historic Food Website.

Roasting the Christmas Goose and Turkey

2011-12-25T16:03:00.000-08:00

A spit roast turkey garnished with silver hatelets

It is Christmas Day. I have already had more than my fair share of roast geese, plumb puddings etc. on my recent Taste of Christmas Past courses and had every intention today of preparing a simple, non-traditional lunch. But a farmer neighbour turned up on the doorstep yesterday evening with a gift in the form of a small, but fine quality bronze turkey. The bird was too good to freeze for another day. So what choice did I have, but to roast it? And in this house, all roasting takes place in front of a roaring fire, not in the oven.

Now a nice, easy way to roast a large bird like a goose or turkey is with a clockwork bottle jack in conjunction with an unusual item called a broche spit. Many of the implements that we have inherited from the cooks of the past have not come down to us with an instruction manual and the broche spit is no exception. But with a bit of common sense and a little knowledge gained from experience, it does not take much of an effort to figure out that this device was designed for suspending large birds under a bottle jack. There is a line drawing of such an arrangement in Seymour Lindsay's classic Iron and Brass Implements of the English Home (London: 1927), which I have reproduced below.

I am fortunate enough to own a broche spit very similar to the one above, so it was with this that I decided to roast my Christmas Eve gift.

The bottle jack and broche spit in my kitchen.

After stuffing the turkey, I trussed it and stringed it as in the images below. A large flat skewer was pushed through the pinions, (the terminal section of the turkey's wings). Then the skewer on the broche spit is inserted between the bones of both legs, at the same time pushing it through the abdomen.

A nineteenth century print showing how to string a turkey for a bottle jack. When you use a broche spit, you do not need the top skewer which goes through the scaly part of the legs.

The photo below shows a goose which was roasted on one of my courses - trussed, strung and ready for putting down to the fire. A turkey is prepared in exactly the same way. The string will hold the bird on the broche spit even when the flesh softens and there is a likelihood of it falling off the skewers.

Basting a goose with some melted butter before putting it down to the fire. Photo: Michal Finlay

As the bottle jack rotates, my Christmas Day turkey starts to brown in front of a very fierce fire.

Both goose and turkey cook rapidly in front of a good fire. Believe it or not, this one took just over an hour, much quicker than oven roasting. My favourite recipes for roasting turkey are from the anonymous The Whole Duty of a Woman (London: 1737). This marvellous manual of eighteenth century culinary art offers a variety of methods for roasting turkeys and turkey poults (juvenile turkeys), including instructions for cooking them with mangoes, shallots, cardoons, stuffed with either oyster or crawfish and for roasting them the Polish way with a saffron flavoured cullis. There is even one for roasting them with a farce of chestnuts and small sausages, the origin of the most popular stuffing recipe used today. Those people who say that eighteenth century English cookery was dull compared to French have no idea what they are talking about.

The finished bird.

This Christmas the British supermarket chain Waitrose have been marketing a rather expensive stuffing designed by the popular television cook Delia Smith under the brand name of Delia's Eighteenth Century Chestnut Stuffing. She has adapted it from a recipe in Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy. (London; 1747), although Hannah is not credited on the package. Delia's ready-made stuffing retails at £9.99 - and you have to add an onion, which will bring it over the £10 mark. I made mine from the original Glasse recipe for £2.50, using fresh parsley, onion and herbs from my garden. I have reproduced Hannah's recipe, which was originally for fowl (chicken) at the end of this posting. By the way, one of Hannah's main sources for recipes was The Whole Duty of a Woman.

Mandrake-like parsnips, purple potatoes and golden beets dug out of the kitchen garden at first light.

So what did I serve with my unexpected Christmas gift? Some freshly gathered vegetables from the garden of course, including the 'mandrakes' above. I have recently added some rather stony ground to my vegetable plot and as a result my parsnips have all turned into mandrakes and monsters from Mars.

I am pretty sure that my turkey was one of the finest of the many millions roasted in England today. It was a great bird to start with, but open fire roasting produces a succulent, fine flavoured roast, so much better than one suffocated in an oven. Here is ~~Delia's~~ Hannah's Eighteenth Century Chestnut Stuffing recipe -

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Shaped Minc'd Pies Again

2011-12-24T14:13:00.000-08:00

A salver with an arrangentment of minc'd pies from T. Hall. The Queen's Royal Cookery. (London: 1710).

It is often said that mince pies were originally made in the shape of the infant Christ's manger. This is a great story, but can any readers of this blog enlighten me as to the actual historical sources for this claim?

I have come across only three seventeenth century references to minc'd or Christmas pies being made in an oblong shape, but they are not entirely reliable ones. John Selden (1584-1654) in Table Talk (London: 1689) tells us that "the coffin of our Christmas-Pies, in shape long, is in Imitation of the Cratch". In the seventeenth century 'cratch' was an alternative word for 'manger' This is the only reference I have ever found which states directly that these pies were made in the form of Christ's cradle. Table Talk was published posthumously and was heavily edited by Selden's friend Richard Milward, so it may not be entirely reliable.

Another reference to oblong shaped mince pies can be found in a marvellous satire on puritanism entitled The Exaltation of Christmas Pye, which was penned by a certain P.C. in 1659. He proclaims himself on the title page as a 'Dr. in Divinity and Midwifery', so I don't suppose he can be taken too seriously either. Anyway, he tells us that these pies were made in the shape of a narrow boat in order that they could easily be swallowed whole! In P.C.'s own words, 'my Advice, my Beloved, to you is, that you eat them cold. For I have heard of a Bridegroom that was killed before he could lie with his Bride, for adventuring to shovel hot minc’d Pye down his Throat for a Wager…..But Dr. Mariot, a notable Causuist in these disputes, and a Man of a sharp Stomach, is of Opinion, that a Man ought to swallow them whole. And therefore he was the first in the World that caused them to be made after the Fashion of Boats, that they might swim down the Gullet the easier: And indeed, he was a mighty enemy to four corner’d Pyes, for he said they were used to stick in his Throat.’

The third piece of evidence is a tiny drawing of an oblong shaped mince pie with pointed ends in the wonderful 1692 manuscript cookery book of Hannah Bisaker in the Wellcome Collection in London. However, this shape is just one of 35 others she illustrates on a page of designs for minced pies.

The truth is that mince pies were made in an incredible variety of shapes. Dozens of designs were published between 1654 and 1751. The first shaped pie designs to appear in print were in Joseph Cooper's The Art of Cookery Refin'd and Augmented (London: 1654). Here is Cooper's recipe and woodcut.

A number of other cookery book authors, such as Robert May and Edward Kidder published similar designs, the aim always being to arrange the shaped mince pies on a plate rather like a contemporary knot or topiary garden. In the OED, Mrs Delany (1756) is cited as using a similar analogy when describing a country house garden, 'The gardens laid out in the old-fashioned way of mince-pies, arbours and sugarloaf yews." Others compared the pie arrangements to military architecture, probably having in mind the kind of forts that were designed by Marshall Vauban. The extract below is from an article written by a Mr Bavius and entitled On Christmas Pye. It appeared in The Gentleman's Magazine of December 1733.

Fort de Bellegarde designed by Marshall Vauban in Languedoc- Roussillon, France.

This arrangement of mince pies is rather like a seventeenth century fortress. It is from a set of playing cards depicting carving techniques published in London in 1676.

The changing face of the Christmas pie from 1615 to 1861

I am writing this on Christmas Eve, when according to the poet Robert Herrick it was once the tradition to sit up and guard the Christmas Pie. Whatever shape you have made your mince pies in, will you be sitting up with them tonight?

CHRISTMAS-EVE, ANOTHER CEREMONY.

COME guard this night the Christmas-Pie,
That the thief, though ne'er so sly,
With his flesh-hooks, don't come nigh
To catch it
From him, who all alone sits there,
Having his eyes still in his ear,
And a deal of nightly fear
To watch it.

Herrick, Robert. Works of Robert Herrick. vol II.
Alfred Pollard, ed.London, Lawrence & Bullen, 1891. 80.

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Drop the Shaped Minc'd Pies

2011-12-17T09:26:00.000-08:00

A panoply of eighteenth century minc'd pies based on designs in Edward Kidder,
Receipts in Pastry and Cookery (London: nd. c.1720).

Yesterday I made a very brief appearance on the BBC's popular early evening magazine programme The One Show. The aim was to talk a little bit about the history of minc'd pies with the presenter Chris Evans and the comedian Lee Evans. For the programme I made a number of minc'd pies from early recipes, including some attractive shaped ones based on wonderful eighteenth century designs. However, the director did n't really think viewers would find these interesting enough and wanted to run with the theme of unusual ingredients, which he felt had more comedic possibilities.

Most of us probably know that minc'd pies originally contained meat as well as sweet ingredients like dried fruit, candied peel and spices. However, what is not often discussed is the nature of that meat. In the early modern period tongue, lamb's stones (testicles), udder and tripe frequently turn up in the recipes, as well as the more usual veal and beef. Some even contained fish. One recipe, published by Gervase Markham a year before Shakespeare's death in The English Housewife (London: 1615) contained pickled herring. In 1660, Robert May gave recipes for minc'd pies made with salmon, eel and sturgeon!

Of course these flavours seem bizarre and even repulsive today, but back in the seventeenth century pie eaters were less squemish. In fact the sense of revulsion felt by many towards offal and the idea of eating an ingredient like fish in a sweet dish like a minc'd pie, seems to be a fairly modern and exclusively Western development. Our forefathers were less concerned about such matters.

So a good laugh was had by all on the programme at our ancestor's decadent and bizarre taste and my lovely shaped mince pies were dropped from the schedule in favour of the comedic possibilities of ones made with tripe and pickled herring! So just for readers of this blog, here above is a photograph of them. By the way, I filled them with a lovely mince meat from a 1699 Cumbrian recipe from the receipt book of Elizabeth Brown of Townend Farm, Troutbeck. As you can see from her recipe, Elizabeth called them Shred Pies - they contained minced veal. They are really delicious.

The whole subject of minc'd pies is a fascinating one and will be dealt with in a later, much more detailed posting which I hope to publish before Christmas wanes and you all lose interest in such seasonal matters. Our Food History Jottings researcher Plumcake has undertaken a lot of work over the years on the mythology surrounding mince pies and we will incorporate some of her findings into the posting.

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Lady Rachel Fane's Syllabub

2011-12-17T06:45:00.000-08:00

Glass collector Tim Udall holding an eighteenth century spouted syllabub glass.

Earlier this year I contributed an essay to an exhibition catalogue of English dessert glass published by Delomosne and Sons, Britain's leading dealer in antique glass. The wonderful assemblage of glass described in the catalogue was put together over a lifetime of avid collecting and outstanding research by Mr Tim Udall. All items were for sale at the exhibition and most found buyers very quickly. I was delighted to offer a new home to an eighteenth century spouted syllabub glass and a spectacular dessert tree or glass epergne. An online version of the fully illustrated catalogue is available at Delomosne's website and I have inserted a link to it at the end of this posting. You can also order a copy of the catalogue from the site. Please take a look at it - the quality of this collection is outstanding. Mr Udall's own excellent essays on dessert glass, written for the Journal of the Glass Circle in the early 1980s, set the standard for scholarship in this fascinating area of material culture and I am indebted to him for many insights and leads in my own research on syllabub and jelly glasses.

The photograph above shows Mr Udall holding a glass spout pot very similar to the one I bought from his collection. These glasses have a superficial resemblance to a teapot, but the spout was used for sucking, not pouring - rather like a kind of proto-drinking straw. Early modern period syllabubs had two layers - a stratum of foam or curd on top and a pool of strong alcoholic liquid nestling below. The froth was eaten with a spoon and the pungent liquor sucked through that delicate spout. Surviving examples of these fragile vessels are rare and references to them in early recipes books even rarer. However, they do get a brief mention by the seventeenth century gallant and alchemist Sir Kenelm Digby in a recipe in his collection The Closet etc. (London: 1670). The recipe is attributed by Digby to Rachel Fane, Countess of Middlesex, who “makes syllabubs for little glasses with spouts.” Lady Middlesex instructs us “to put into each glass a sprig of Rosemary a little bruised.” During the course of the eighteenth century syllabub glasses started to lose their spouts and the dish was more usually served in pan top glasses like that illustrated below. The function of the pan top was to support the foam, which was spooned over the wine or whey in the lower part of the glass.

Left. An eighteenth century pan top whipt syllabub glass containing a whip syllabub. The pan top supports the frothy syllabub very effectively above the sweet wine below. Right. An earlier spouted glass containing a syllabub made from the recipe by Lady Middlesex.

Lady Rachel Fane, Dowager Countess of Bath and Countess of Middlesex (1603-1680).
Engraving by Pierre Lombart (after Van Dyck) c.1660.

Lady Middlesex was an attractive, highly educated woman, who wrote some remarkably sophisticated masques while still in her teens. She was also the author of a manuscript collection of recipes, including one for a dish called 'pets', an early form of meringue. Rachel's first husband, Sir Henry Bourchier, the Earl of Bath, died in 1654 and she married Lionel Cranfield, the third Earl of Middlesex six months later in 1655. This second marriage was a disaster, as Cranfield turned out to be a monster. According to Lady Rachel Newport he sold all of Rachel's books as well as her silver and household stuff and spent the money on 'rioting and play'. Not surprisingly the couple separated shortly after the wedding. Below is Rachel's syllabub recipe as quoted by Digby. I always enjoy putting a face to a recipe.

There is a particularly fine miniature of Rachel by David des Granges in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge - see it at this link.

18th Century Glasses for the Dessert. The Tim Udall Collection

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Roasting the Christmas Beef

2011-12-07T06:18:00.000-08:00

A 22 lb sirloin roasts in a cradle spit in front of my kitchen fire

By the end of this week I will have given five lectures on the history of Christmas food, run two practical courses on the same and written an article on the subject for the current edition of BBC Countryfile Magazine. As a result, I have cooked my way through a lot of ancient Christmas dishes and it isn't even Christmas yet! I am not exactly jaded with Yorkshire Christmas Pie, hack pudding, plum pottage and spit roast goose, but they are beginning to lose their appeal. On the big day a simple Christmas lunch of a digestive biscuit and a cup of cocoa would suit me just fine!

My roasting range has been particularly active over the last month with joints of beef, mainly large sirloin and rib joints rotating slowly in front of incredibly hot fires. On my last Taste of Christmas Past Course, we roasted a 22lb sirloin. This was a bone-in joint with the full fillet tucked away inside, a cut quite rightly once considered the beef joint of choice for roasting in front of the fire. It took four and a half hours to cook to perfection. All who tasted it said how moist and delicious it was. It was so tender that it was like carving a slab of marshmallow! Of all our Christmas dishes, roast beef served with plum pudding is the most evocative of past traditions of hospitality. It was once Britain's prime celebration dish and a potent symbol of the nation's character and cohesiveness.

A 15lb rib joint spit roasted to perfection

A rib joint is a great alternative to a sirloin and a few weeks ago I roasted one for for the BBC magazine photographs. This weighed in at just fifteen pounds and was perfectly cooked in just three hours. These cooking times might surprise those who have only had experience of 'roasting' meat in an oven, but they make sense of the ones suggested in early cookery texts, which often seem rather on the short side to contemporary readers. This is because very few people living today have experienced just how hot and efficient a generously fuelled roasting range is when roaring at full capacity. However, my little farmhouse range would be dwarfed by the roasting facilities once employed in the great houses and royal palace kitchens, like those below at Windsor.

Roasting the baron of beef at Windsor - Christmas 1856

Every year a full baron of beef was roasted in the Windsor Castle kitchen. According to Dr. Johnson, 'a Baron of Beef is when the two sirloins are not cut asunder, but joined together by the end of the backbone'. In other words, the whole bum of an ox! Once roasted, this gigantic Royal cut was displayed on the dining room sideboard, together with a very large game pie, a boar's head, a shield of brawn and a woodcock pie. In fact surviving royal menus for the Christmas season indicate that all these dishes were displayed on the sideboard for the whole twelve day holiday, at least at dinner time. I expect they were all moved to a cold larder between meals. Queen Victoria kept up this tradition when she moved to Osborne on the Isle of Wight, but there was not a large enough range in the kitchen there to roast the baron, so it was roasted at Windsor and sent to Osborne by train and ferry! It was always served as a cold cut.

Some very large Christmas pies were also prepared for the Royal sideboard. I have made four of these so far this season. Here is one I baked for the BBC magazine article. If not opened, these could be kept for months, as the meat inside was embedded in clarified butter. I once stored one for three months in a cold larder before cutting into the pastry. The meat was still perfectly sweet. But to get this to work successfully is incredibly difficult, as there must not be a single hairline crack in the pastry and all the gravy has to be drained out from the pie before it is filled with clarified butter.

A Christmas Pie with a filling of boned turkey, goose, fowl., duck, partridge and pigeon

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Battenburg Cake Revisited, or Neapolitan Roll Rediscovered

2011-12-05T08:28:00.000-08:00

Robert Wells

I recently tried to sort out some of the nonsense that is commonly written about the Battenburg Cake (see posting for August 2011). I described how the earliest recipe for a multi-coloured Battenburg Cake was published by Frederick Vine in 1898. Vine's cake had nine panes rather than the four that make up the modern cake.

Cover of Wells's Cakes and Buns.

However, the story of Battenburg Cake's origins is more complicated than I thought. I recently discovered a recipe for a cake called Neapolitaine Roll in a small book - Cakes and Buns written by a contemporary of Vine called Robert Wells. Wells was a prolific author on bakery and confectionery matters, who like Vine wrote mainly for the trade. A preface in my copy of the second edition (undated) of Cakes and Buns is dated 1897, so the book was probably first published, or at least written in that year. The British Library catalogue lists an edition published in 1898. What is curious about Neapolitaine Roll is that it is identical to a modern four pane Battenburg Cake, except for a coating of pink coconut which encases the almond paste. Here is Wells's recipe.

Neapolitaine Roll (sic.)

Cut from your Genoese cake two strips of plain  cake about one inch square, and the length being the  width of your tin upon which it is baked. Likewise  two similar strips from the " Raspberry Genoese."  Place these together with apricot jam. If made hot  you can apply it much better with the aid of a small, clean grease brush. Place the coloured strips alternately, so that the pink strip rests upon the white  strip, and the other white upon the red, making a  square with the four strips. Take and roll a sheet  of almond paste, making the width to cover the four  sides, and the length the same as the cake. When  you have rolled your almond paste out you must cut  to the size required with a knife. See that it does not  stick to the slab, dust with a little icing sugar. Take  your brush and slightly moisten, just sufficiently to  make it adhere to the cake, then lay the cake upon it, commencing by carefully laying at the edge and gently  pressing. It will turn over with the paste adhering to  the cake. Having got the almond paste right round, see that it thoroughly holds to the cake by gently  pressing with the palm of the hand all over. Again I brush on apricot jam, and roll on pink cocoanut. Sell at 1/- and 1/4 per lb.  This is a very simple yet a very pretty and  attractive cake.

From Robert Wells, Cakes and Buns. Manchester: 2nd edition nd.c.1900. pp.42-43.

Neapolitan Roll - an 1897 sponge and marzipan cake by Robert Wells. Don't mistake this for Battenburg cake, which had nine panes - not four at this period. Unlike Battenburg Cake, Neapolitan Roll was dusted with pink desiccated coconut.

So during the closing years of the nineteenth century, there was a four-pane cake with alternate pink and white genoise square sections wrapped in almond paste, just like a modern Battenburg Cake, but it was known as Neapolitan Roll. This cake co-existed in late Victorian England with a similar, but nine-pane cake, which was called the Battenburg Cake, at least by Vine and a few other professionals. This new evidence makes me believe even more strongly that the story about each pane of the Battenburg Cake representing one of the four Battenburg princes is a later twentieth century fabrication. Neither Vine or Wells mention this story and Wells does not associate his cake with the Battenburg family at all, even though its morphology is much closer to the four pane version we consider to be the 'traditional' Battenburg cake today.

Wells may have called his cake a Neapolitan Roll because of its similarity to the striped Neapolitan ice cream, which was very popular at this period. Striped jellies known as ribbon or ribband jelly had been popular since the seventeenth century. Neapolitan Roll was very much in this decorative tradition of English food. Interestingly, in twenty first century US, Neapolitan Roll Cake or Neapolitan Jelly Roll, is what we in Britain call Swiss Roll. Why did Wells call his cake a roll, when it is actually square? Probably because the almond paste is rolled round the four strips of genoese to create the marzipan jacket.

A Neapolitan brick of ice cream - also known in the nineteenth century as hokey pokey

There were other cakes in the late Victorian period which were also called Neapolitan Cakes. These were usually made by building up layers of almond cake with different coloured jams spread in between. So Neapolitan meant stripes. However, some Neapolitan cakes only revealed their stripes when they were sliced, as they were often elaborately decorated on the surface with cut-out shapes made from puff pastry, as in the illustration below. Many types of Neapolitan cake with coloured stripes or checkered patterns are still made today. Well's recipe indicates that the Battenburg cake was a variation on this theme that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century.

Neapolitan Cake from T. Garrett. The Encyclopaedia of Practical Cookery. London: 1890.

A menu for refreshments for a Bicycle Gymkhana I recently came across in a Victorian scrap book.

Original source and date unknown.

Our Victorian ancestors loved colourful novelty cakes like the Neapolitan Roll and the Battenburg. Perhaps the most fun member of the genus was the Domino Cake, which was a Genoese fancy decorated to resemble a domino. These were made in sets, but I wonder if they actually played dominoes with them?

Above is an extraordinary bill of fare for refreshments for a Victorian 'Bicycle Gymkhana' in which Domino Cakes feature. You will notice that there is also a recipe for them. They are coated in maraschino icing. What a wonderful and sophisticated selection of picnic dishes this is. The spiced beef and cucumber sandwiches sound delicious, as do the three flavours of ices and iced drinks. And as for the very molecular sounding fruit "foam"at this early period, eat your hearts out Feran and Heston - there is nothing new under the sun. It would seem that "foams" were being served at Victorian bicycle gymkhanas well over a hundred years before they arrived at either elBulli or the Fat Duck!

A domino cake from T. Percy Lewis and A. G. Bromley's The Book of Cakes (London: 1903)

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This Year's Twelfth Cake

2011-12-05T03:10:00.000-08:00

Food History Jottings' Twelfth Cake for 2012

Every year I make a Twelfth Cake, which I ornament with gum paste motifs printed from original eighteenth and nineteenth century moulds. Some years ago I was fortunate enough to find a lovely boxwood confectioner's mould designed for making the components of a crown. This has enabled me to embellish my cakes with a couple of beautiful sugar crowns in the manner of the period. This year I have decorated my cake with motifs from the Regency - the Prince of Wales feathers, the rose of England, the thistle of Scotland and the shamrock of Ireland. The background icing is coloured with cochineal, which according to the evidence seems to have been fairly usual. Although it looks like something from Barbara Cartland's boudoir, this colour sets off the pure white gum paste perfectly.

This particular cake is going to be raffled to support the appeal to purchase Rose Castle in Cumbria (see previous posting). It is displayed at Dalemain House near Penrith.

Every year I run a course called A Taste of Christmas Past, on which I teach my students how to make and decorate a Twelfth Cake using period techniques. We bake the yeast leavened cake in a wooden hoop or garth and everybody gets the chance to learn the difficult techniques of making gum paste sprigs. To find out more visit the Twelfth Cake page on my website.

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Elizabeth Rainbow's Skirret Pie

2011-12-04T09:28:00.000-08:00

An Early Modern Pie from Rose Castle, Cumbria

Because of the sizeable mountain of skirrets that I have extracted from my garden, I decided this week to make a skirret pie from a recipe in a very special English manuscript cookery book. This is the wonderful Receipt Book of Elizabeth Rainbow ( d.1702), the wife of Edward Rainbow, Bishop of Carlisle (1608-84). The couple lived in the Bishop's Palace at Rose Castle in Cumbria until Edward's death in 1684. Here are Elizabeth's original handwritten instructions.

Photo © Dalemain Estates.

Elizabeth Rainbow. Photo © Dalemain Estates.

Skirret pies seem to have been popular from the Stuart period to the middle of the eighteenth century. Recipes occur frequently in both manuscript and printed collections. Other ingredients such as dates, chestnuts and candied orange peel were usually included in the pie filling. Bone marrow was also popular. These pies were usually filled at the end of baking with a 'lear' or 'caudle', a kind of custard made with wine, sugar and egg yolks. Pies of this kind were also made with artichokes, sweet potatoes and eryngo roots. Below are two other recipes from well-known printed sources.

SKIRRET PYE

Take your skirrets and boil them, skin them, then cut them to Lengths about two or three inches. Wash them with yolks of eggs and season with salt, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg. Put to them some chestnuts boiled and blanched and some yolks of hard-boiled eggs split, and lay over some sliced lemon. Put over butter and close it in a raised coffin.

Joseph Cooper. The Art of Cookery. London: 1654.

SKIRRET PYE.

Boil your biggest skirrets and blanch and season them with cinnamon, nutmeg, and a very little ginger and sugar. Your pye being ready lay in your skirrets; season also the marrow of three or four bones with cinnamon, sugar, a little salt and grated bread. Lay the marrow in your pye and the yolks of hard eggs, a handful of chestnuts boiled and blanched, and some candied Orange-peel in slices. Lay butter on the top and lid your pye. Let your caudle be white wine and sugar, thicken it with the yolks of eggs, and when the pye is baked pour it in and serve it hot. Scrape sugar on it.

E. Smith, The Compleat Housewife, 1727.

Below is a pictorial record of the whole process of making Elizabeth's pie.

Skirrets from John Gerard. The Herball. (1633)

Before you can make a skirret pie you will need to grow some skirrets. I propagate mine every year by dividing up these young root offsets and planting them out about a foot apart.

Unpeeled skirret roots coming to the boil in a brazen skillet. They take about 8 minutes to cook.

While the skirrets are cooking, a raised pie coffin is made using a very large pie dolly.

The boiled skirrets are peeled

Bone marrow is extracted from some ox bones with a marrow scoop.

The pie coffin is filled with layers of skirrets, bone marrow and dates

The coffin is filled to within an inch of the top - note the cinnamon.

Detail of a still-life painting by A. Pereda (1678) showing a typical raised pie of the kind made in Elizabeth Rainbow's lifetime. Although this pie is from a Spanish source, very similar pies are illustrated in Robert May's The Accomplisht Cook (London: 1660). I aim to make a pie loosely based on this striking design.

A lid is added to the pie and the edges crimped. The structure in the centre is called a haystack and is used as a kind of pastry funnel through which the caudle is poured at the end of baking.

The pie is ornamented.

A caudle is prepared by whipping up egg yolks, sack and sugar.

The finished pie is removed from the oven and the caudle poured in through the haystack.

This sort of pie was eaten by removing the lid and spooning the contents from the coffin.

Elizabeth Rainbow's skirret pie is related in some ways to the better known mince pie. The addition of bone marrow makes the pie filling very rich. Inside the coffin, the skirrets dissolve in the heat of the oven into an unctuous mush surrounded by dates and the rich caudle, though their distinctive flavour is still strongly evident. This luxurious Caroline pie is incredibly delicious.

Elizabeth and Edward Rainbow's former home of Rose Castle is a remarkable building with an extraordinary history. Since the thirteenth century it has been home to sixty-six Bishops of Carlisle. The Church Commissioners recently decided to put the property up for public auction, but the Friends of Rose Castle, a group passionately committed to saving it, are attempting to raise the funds to purchase it. Fortunately the Church Commissioners have recently agreed to give the group two years to buy the castle for the wider community.

Phillipa Harrison, one of the friends, says. 'Only one building represents the unique history of the establishment of a Border between Scotland and the North West of England, Rose Castle, created for the Bishopric of Carlisle to administer the “lands which were Scottish”, before Cumbria finally became English a hundred years later than the rest of the country. Also the preeminent English castle in the medieval Scottish wars and reiver skirmishes in the North West, Rose is the only remaining monument to our turbulent border history there. Its retention, with public accessabilty and as an educational resource, is vital for the maintenance of any sort of national historical perspective.'

Elizabeth Rainbow's skirret pie is a tiny element from the domestic history of Rose Castle brought back to life. If you would be interested in knowing more or becoming a friend of Rose Castle, there is a link to the website below. As part of the fund raising effort, I am planning to produce an entire seventeenth century Bishop's feast from Elizabeth's receipt book, which will be served at Rose Castle at some point in 2012. If my skirret harvest next year is as good as this year's, skirret pie will definitely be on the menu. Look out here for more news about this event.

The Friends of Rose Castle

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A View up the President's Chimney

2011-11-22T04:59:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago I was at Mt. Vernon in Virginia, the home of George Washington, where I spoke at a really excellent conference on the subject of Dining with the Washingtons. The curatorial staff were kind enough to give me a private tour of the house and its associated buildings. I found the kitchen rooms particularly interesting and was allowed to explore the inside of the flu belonging to the large fireplace where Mrs Washington's enslaved kitchen staff roasted George's dinner. I was interested to see that the smoke jack mechanism which powered the spits was still in situ. Although I have seen many of these mechanisms in the UK, this was the first American one dating from the eighteenth century that I have ever had the opportunity to inspect.

Unlike most of the surviving British examples, where the gearing comes out onto the front of the chimney breast, the Mt Vernon smoke jack is housed entirely in the flu with the jack chains which turn the spits hanging directly down the chimney. It is of a type that once must have been common in Britain before roasting began to be more commonly carried out in front of raised coal burning ranges rather than before a down hearths fuelled with wood. All photographs courtesy of Mt. Vernon.

The inglenook in the Mt Vernon kitchen with a pastry oven to the right

Looking vertically up the Mt Vernon kitchen flu, the smoke jack turbine and its gearbox can be clearly seen. The rectangular sheet of iron is the cover for the gearbox. These boxes were usually filled with oil in which the worm and worm wheel turned. The oil was changed once a year.

There are two metal pulleys running two jack chains, so two horizontal

spits could be rotated at the same time.

As far as I know this is the earliest English depiction of a smoke jack. From John Wilkins Mathematical Magick. (London: 1648). However, this movement includes a contrate wheel and lantern pinion rather than the worm and wheel in the Mt. Vernon smoke jack.

The Italians were the first to document smoke jacks. Leonardo de Vinci illustrated one in about 1487. The image above was published in Scappi's Opera. (Venezia: 1570). That ice cream must have melted very quickly with all the heat.

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Richard Briggs' Skirret Fritters

2011-11-20T13:52:00.000-08:00

I have had a bumper harvest of skirrets in my garden this year. This ancient vegetable (Sium sisarum L.) went out of favour during the course of the early nineteenth century. Despite their sweet, delicious flavour, the straggling, mandrake-like roots are difficult to clean and I suspect many cooks just lost patience with them. The kitchen staff must have dreaded it when the master called for a dish of skirts, because it meant hours of tedious scrubbing and scrapping. Some of the older roots also have a hard stringlike thread going through them, providing the diner with a length of built in dental floss! However, they do have a great parsnip-like flavour and a wonderful creamy texture, so I take the trouble every year to make one or two dishes from them. Today, I made skirret fritters, an old favourite of mine from a recipe in Richard Briggs, The English Art of Cookery (London: 1788).

Skirrets cook very quickly and once boiled the skin can be rubbed off quite easily. I followed Brigg's method exactly, making about a pint of creamy skirret puree. The rest of the process is shown in the images below.

A creamy puree is made by rubbing the skirrets through a drum sieve.

Flour, sugar, eggs, ginger and nutmeg are added to make the fritter batter.

A spoonful of the batter is dropped into hot hog's lard and the fritters fried until golden brown

The fritters served on an eighteenth century silver plate with their garnish
of dried sweetmeats (courtesy of Plumcake). Delicious!

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La Gelateria Scappi - è un bidone!

2011-11-10T16:36:00.000-08:00

Signor Scappi, vogliamo gelati, confettura non!!
Mr Scappi, we want ice cream - not jam!!

Today, I will deal with an Italian fairy story. There is an enormous amount of nonsense posted on the internet at the moment about the origins of ice cream. A large number of websites are stating that the celebrated sixteenth century papal cook Bartolomeo Scappi included a recipe for sorbet in his 1570 Opera. Just try googling Scappi sorbet or Scappi gelato and you will see what I mean by this. If what these sites claim is true, it would mean that Scappi was the first European author to give instructions for making a frozen dessert.

However, these assertions are all total balderdash and are based on an entirely ignorant reading of Scappi's text. In reality the recipe in question is for making a kind of preserve from morello cherries, not an ice. It does not require freezing and Scappi never ever calls it a sorbet, or gelato, as some of these sources claim. As far as we know the earliest Italian instructions for freezing sorbetti do not appear in print until the 1690s, over 120 years after the publication of Scappi's book.

Here is the original recipe. From Bartolomeo Scappi. Opera. Venezia 1570. Libro II. Cap. CCLXXX

Here is my rather over literal translation.

To do morello cherries in jelly.

Get ten pounds of fresh morello or sour cherries gathered the same day; they must not be bruised, and leave half the stalk on them, and fashion them into small bunches with ten to the bunch, have a casserole with a pound of clean water, and put the morellos into it, and as it begins to simmer, put in ten pounds of finely ground and sieved sugar and allow it to boil slowly, skimming it with a spoon, and when the morellos have burst, and are all of a colour (meaning same colour), take them down and put them in a plate and allow them to drain, and allow the decoction to boil by itself until it starts to cook, not failing to skim it, and do the test on the plate, and if it forms a morsel (globule) that does not spread when you touch it, take it from the fire, and unbind the bunches of morellos, and arrange them in cups, or in dishes of silver, with the decoction, which should be warm, over them, and put them in a cool place to set. In this way you can do sour cherries (visciole), and in the same decoction you can cook some fresh damsons.

Anyone who has made jam or conserves, will recognise the technique which Scappi describes here (underlined text), of putting a little of the 'decoction' on a plate to check whether the cooked fruit and sugar will set properly. Of course this is as far away from the technique used for making sorbet as you can possibly get. What the recipe makes is a very pleasant dish of lightly cooked cherries in a pectin-rich fruit jelly - in other words cherry jam! This is what Scappi's marasche in gelo really looks like. I have served it here on a silver dish as he suggests. How can anyone think that this is a sorbet or gelato? See what I mean - another stupid fairy story.

Scappi's marasche in gelo - 1570

In fact this dish is what later confectioners would come to call a compote of cherries. In The Italian Confectioner (London: 1820), the Georgian confectioner Giuliamo Jarrin (like Scappi a native of Northern Italy) gives a recipe that is almost identical to that of his Renaissance predecessor:

Jarrin's 1820 recipe for a cherry compote. Note how both Scappi and Jarrin cut the cherry stalks in half.

All of this confusion has been caused by a fundamental misunderstanding of the meaning of two words in the original Italian text - gelo and congelare. In the early modern period the word gelo could mean two things - either frost, ice, freezing, but also jelly. The word gelato, meaning a type of ice cream did not come into usage in Italy until the nineteenth century. In the context of this recipe, the word gelo without doubt, means the pectin-rich jelly of the kind created when you boil fruit with sugar. Here are some early definitions of gelo and related words from John Florio. Queen Anna's New World of Words, or Dictionarie of the Italian and English tongues. London 1611. Note the double meaning.

So, it is being assumed that the title of the recipe - Per accommodar marasche in gelo means 'to do morello cherries in ice', when the whole sense of the recipe clearly tells us that the use of the word gelo in this case indicates jelly. Some of the sites claiming that this is a recipe for sorbet or gelato translate Scappi's words 'et mettanosi in loco fresco a congelare' as 'put in a cool place to freeze', when the meaning of congelare here is clearly 'to set' or 'to gel'. Scappi describes no freezing equipment or freezing method. I am afraid that it is impossible to freeze anything by simply putting it in a cool place; especially in Italy during the hot weather experienced during the cherry picking season. What has amazed me is that most of this utter nonsense has come out of Italy.

If I am wrong and Scappi did really serve ice cream at the papal court in Renaissance Rome, we may have to reassess the significance of the wonderful illustrations of culinary equipment in his magisterial book, like those examples reproduced below.

Scappi's little helpers frantically lifting the Baked Alaska off the fire for the Pope's dinner

Gelati misti à la Rinascimento

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Pickled Radish Pods and the Archduchess of Austria

2011-10-31T05:29:00.000-07:00

Silver tureen and stand. Ignaz Joseph Würth. 1779-1782. Photo: Metropolitan Museum

In 2009 I was working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on a table installation for a wonderful exhibition of Du Paquier porcelain. One day I was asked a question about a mysterious silver tureen by a colleague, decorative arts curator Wolfram Koeppe. This wonderful tureen, pictured above, was made by Ignaz Joseph Würth for Duke Albert Casimir of Sachsen-Teschen (1738-1822) and his consort, Archduchess Maria Christina of Austria (1742-1798), daughter of Empress Maria Theresa. It has a lid heavily ornamented with a finial in the form of a plant with small pods looking rather like peas, but the leaves are not those of a member of the pea family. Dr. Koeppe wanted to know its identity. I recognised the plant immediately as the rat tailed radish (Raphanus sativus), a form of radish cultivated not only for its roots, but for its delicious pods, which are marvellous eaten fresh, or pickled. They were once a common vegetable grown all over Europe and are making a bit of a comeback. A good variety to grow is München Bier. I have cultivated various types in my garden for over thirty years. I like them fresh, but pickled they are excellent with cold meats and fish.

Another mystery about this object was its gilt lining, which can be seen clearly in the photo below. The probable explanation for this, was that this small tureen was actually designed for serving pickled radish pods. The vinegar in the pickle would chemically attack silver, but not neutral gold, so the Archduchess's pickled radish pods would be untainted! This a nice example of how food history studies can inform decorative arts scholars about the forgotten purpose of an item of table equipage.

Detail of the tureen, showing the radish pods and the gilt lining. Photo: Metropolitan Museum

Rat tailed radish pods in the Food History Jottings garden

Below is a recipe from John Farley's The London Art of Cookery. London: 1789. 6th edition). The same recipe occurs in many other cookery books of this period. Of course this is an English recipe, and I would be very interested to learn from any readers of this post of any eighteenth century Austrian recipes they might know for pickling this vegetable.

Farley's recipe, or in truth, a recipe pinched from another author.

The young radish pods soaking in salt water

The finished radish pods in their pickle of vinegar. Note the long pepper and horseradish added for flavour

The tureen belongs to the so-called Second Sachsen-Teschen Service, which comprised more than 350 items. Dr Koeppe curated the wonderful exhibition about the service Vienna Circa 1780: An Imperial Silver Service Rediscovered at the Met in 2010.

See a video of Wolfram Koeppe giving a lecture about the Imperial Silver Service

Learn more about the Second Sachsen-Teschen Service

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Solomon's Temple in Flummery - a Culinary Mobile

2011-10-25T11:44:00.000-07:00

A number of English cookery books published in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century offer a recipe for making a 'Solomon's Temple in Flummery', a dish that would be very difficult to replicate today, unless you happened to own an original mould from the period. These are extremely rare, so it is unlikely that there will be a major revival of the dish.

The earliest recipe was published by the Manchester confectioner Elizabeth Raffald in 1769. Earlier this year my friend Tony Barton cast me a fake one in silicone rubber for the exhibition I curated on Mrs Raffald, which is currently running at Rienzi at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, which I have discussed in an earlier posting. Despite being cast from rubber, it made a lovely feature on the table and was garnished with small dianthus flowers, candied raspberries and pippin knots or jumballs.

A Wedgewood creamware Solomon's Temple mould from the 1780s.

Mrs Raffald's husband John was a gardener and seedsman, who organised horticultural competitions at an inn which the couple ran together in Salford. The evidence points to the fact that he was fond of growing pinks and carnations. This is why I decided to use the pinks as a garnish. His brother grew fruit in a market garden, which he sold from a stall in the market near the Exchange in Manchester. This is why I used candied raspberries to surround the flummery. Mrs Raffald instructs us to use rock candy sweetmeats. Candied fruit or peel is what was usually meant by 'sweetmeats'. The term 'rock candy' indicates that the sweetmeats had a sugar crystal or candy coating.

A late Victorian confectioner called Robert Wells also included a recipe in his book Ornamental Confectionery (London: 1898). Wells garnishes his Solomon's Temple in Blancmange, as he calls it, 'with jumballs, apple paste and rock candies'. This is why I garnished the Houston fake rubber Solomon's Temple with pippin knots, or jumballs, as well as the rock candy raspberries. Here it is on the table surrounded by beautiful eighteenth century silver and porcelain.

However, this static rubber fake cannot give a true impression of what this eccentric dish really looks like and more importantly how it behaves. Because it is made of flummery, which is a kind of opaque milk jelly, the central obelisk wobbles and cavorts in a most entertaining manner, while the four little cones shake, rattle and roll in a very naughty way. Below is a video of a Solomon's Temple I made a few days ago from real flummery to show you what I mean. I apologise for the quality of the video, which was made on my mobile phone. Next time I make a Solomon's Temple I will post a better video for you.

Recipe from W. A. Henderson, The Housekeeper's Instructor. (London: 1805. 12th edition).

In a cookery book supposedly written by the London Tavern cook John Farley, the Solomon's Temple mould is described as having steps. The recipe above by William Henderson is identical to Farley's. However, both are derived from Raffald's original 1769 recipe, which they have misquoted. She says, 'Then fill the top of the Temple to the steps', by which she probably means the base of the structure, that is the part coloured brown with chocolate. Farley and Henderson both say 'red flummery for the steps'. Of course Farley never really wrote The London Art of Cookery, so he probably never made a Solomon's Temple. The typesetter made a mistake, which was copied by Henderson. Oh! The never-ending joys of cookery bookery!

A real Solomon's Temple in flummery this time. The base is flavoured with chocolate dissolved in coffee; the central obelisk is coloured with cochineal. Only the little cones are the original white flummery colour.

Solomon's Temple moulds were made in other forms. A design with a large central cupola and four smaller surrounding domes became known as a Kosiki mould in the later nineteenth century. Here is a Solomon's Temple in flummery made from one of these.

If you want to find out more about period jellies and flummeries, visit this page on my website.

See if you can spot our fake Solomon's Temple on the table displayed in the Mrs Raffald exhibition in Houston. Why not go to Rienzi at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and see it for yourself. Though I must warn you, it does not wobble like a real one.

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Jellies and Gemstones

2011-10-08T10:46:00.000-07:00

I would not be telling the truth if I said that the photograph above was of an antique cameo or gemstone. It is in fact an edible jelly in the form of Cupid made from a late eighteenth century English ceramic jelly mould. Amazing isn't it? John Flaxman in jelly, or dare I say it - Luca della Robbia à la gelatina!

It was one of a number of moulded foods that I made for an event at Middlethorpe Hall near York on the 2nd October. This was the third food history/lecture demonstration for the York Civic Trust that I have presented at Middlethorpe, a wonderful Queen Anne house, now run by the National Trust as an hotel. On previous occasions I have held sessions on historical chocolate (2009) and Georgian ice creams (2010). This year I looked at English jellies and flummeries from the middle of the eighteenth century to about the time of the Battle of Waterloo.

The dish illustrated in the photo at the top is made with strawberry jelly topped with white flummery (blancmange). First of all some cold, but still liquid flummery, is very carefully brushed into the part of the mould modelled as Cupid and allowed to set. Then the rest of the mould is filled with the fruit jelly to create a transparent red plinth for the cupid to sit on. The mould used to make this extraordinary dish was made at the manufactory of Josiah Wedgewood in the 1790s. The finished effect is not dissimilar to that which Wedgewood achieved with his celebrated jasperware ceramics, though in this case the art work is completely edible! In the last decades of the eighteenth century, Wedgewood issued a number of creamware jelly moulds based on gemstone designs dating from antiquity, like that of the lion playing a lyre in the photograph below.

These moulds were almost certainly designed to create cameo-like jellies and blancmanges in high bass-relief, some with quite extraordinary sculptural detail. Here is another Wedgewood jelly from the Georgian period I made at the Middlethorpe event - this time in the form of an agricranion.

One of the most popular of Wedgewood's flummery moulds turns out this wonderful pineapple. The design was imitated by just about every other ceramic and copper mould manufacturer for the next hundred and thirty years.

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A review of The Marvellous Mrs Beeton, with Sophie Dahl. BBC TWO.

2011-09-30T13:53:00.000-07:00

Sophie Dahl. Photo: BBC

If I were to choose a presenter to front a programme about Mrs Isabella Beeton, Sophie Dahl would certainly not be my first choice. Nor would she be my ninety-ninth, or hundredth for that matter. However, as programmes go that touch upon the social history of food, I have actually seen a lot worse than The Marvellous Mrs Beeton, with Sophie Dahl, which I watched last night.

Why is it that these programmes are always made to the same pattern - a celebrity chef who knows very little about the subject; a quest of discovery involving a few train journeys; a handful of over-enthusiastic experts as talking heads; an obligatory visit to Borough Market; the weaving of a hypothesis (this time Beeton's chaotic childhood was shown to be the main factor that shaped her career); some recreations of the food just to show how awful it was at the time; and then a final recapitulation, when all of the talking heads join the hostess around a dinner table, to eat that 'dreadful' food and say witty things about it.

This exact structure was first used by Optomen Television a few years ago in Hannah Glasse the First Domestic Goddess and then again in The King's Cookbook. What terrible wasted opportunities those programmes were. Then it was Heston's turn to recreate food from the past using exactly the same structure. His two part series Feast told us more about his extraordinary creativity as a contemporary chef than it did about the history of food. But it was the dinner parties at the end of each programme with the sycophantic celebrities that I could not stomach! Sorry Heston mate. It was not your fault, but the programme makers' insistence on using that unimaginative shoehorned format approach.

And now it is Sophie Dahl's turn with Mrs Beeton. What next? Naomi Campbell dates Escoffier, or Kate Moss goes to bed with Carême?

Actually the best thing about Sophie's programme is that she did not attempt to cook much. That was left to Dr. Annie Gray, a Victorian food specialist who directs the domestic offices at Audley End. Dr. Gray knows what she is doing and at times I wished she would have shoved the doe-eyed Dahl out of the way and told us more about the food she was preparing. I also constantly felt the presence of Kathryn Hughes, who wrote the splendid The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton. I suspect she may have been the historical advisor to the programme. It would have been better if she and Dr. Gray had actually presented it together sans Sophie. Sorry Sophie!

The trouble with Mrs Beeton is that her celebrity and her enduring brand conspire to act as a smokescreen, which very effectively conceals a number of other more worthy nineteenth century food writers from our view. Most of the authors who were her main sources are sadly now forgotten. She was a compiler rather than an original writer and was certainly not a cook. She cruised widely on the Victorian internet and cut and pasted whatever she found. If she was alive today she would probably run a website called Wiki-Beeton.com

As to factual accuracy, Sophie's effort was much better than in that Optomen programme of a few years ago on Hannah Glasse and the other on the King's Cook Book, which were riddled with jabberwocky and nonsense. The only mistake I noticed was that oft-repeated statement that Mrs Beeton was the first cookery author to list the ingredients at the beginning of each recipe. She was not. In Britain this was first done by J. Caird in The Complete Confectioner (Edinburgh: 1809) and in the US by Eliza Leslie in Seventy-five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats (Phildelphia:1828). Mrs Beeton's book was published in 1861.

Despite everything I have said here I actually enjoyed Miss Dahl. Some of her observations were intelligent and she showed a genuine enthusiasm which endeared me to her. But please Sophie, do not make any more programmes about our great food writers. Leave that to someone who knows what they are talking about.

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Queen Cakes and Cup Cakes 3

2011-09-30T06:12:00.000-07:00

Apparatus for making a paper case from W. Jarrin. The Italian Confectioner. (London: 1820)

I remember as a child in the 1950s being sent to the grocer by my mother to buy a pack of the waxed paper cases used for making small cakes. This was always an exciting experience because it meant she was going to make a batch of fairy or butterfly cakes, which was what we all used to once call cupcakes in Britain and Ireland. The fairy cakes were little fluffy buns baked in the cases and then covered in icing with a few hundreds and thousands scattered over the top. The related butterfly cake was made by chopping off the top of the same cake and filling its centre with butter icing. The decapitated top was cut in two and stuck in the icing to make the butterfly's wings. Nearly every Sunday these cakes graced our high tea table. And with the large number of children in my family they tended to vanish very quickly.

When I first encountered an American style muffin in an English cafe many decades later, I was confused. It looked just like a giant fairy cake to me. Surely a muffin was a round of yeasted bread dough baked on a girdle? Anything to me that was baked in a paper case had to be a fairy cake, even if it was larger than usual. It was the paper case that defined the cake. I remember so well scrapping off those sticky bits that stuck to the bottom of the case. That was the best part.

British fairy cakes, American muffins and cupcakes. What these all have in common are the crimped paper cases in which they go into the oven. They are as essential to a cupcake as a cone is to an ice cream. In all the material I have read so far on the history of these cakes, these essential little pieces of culinary origami have been completely ignored. So when were cakes first baked in paper cases?

Paper has been used for centuries for putting under and over cakes baked in wood fired ovens to stop the surface from burning. The wooden hoops, garths and metal moulds used for baking cakes were wrapped in layers of paper for the same reason, a practice still carried out today. But it was a big jump to bake cakes in containers made of paper. The earliest recorded instance of a paper case being used for baking a cake that I know, is described in a recipe to make Naples biscuit written by Frederick Nutt in The Complete Confectioner (London: 1789). Naples biscuit was what we would now call sponge cake and was made in a very similar way then as it is now. Nutt tells us 'to take one sheet of paper, and make the edges of it stand up about an inch and a half high, and pour your batter in it'. To get the cake out, you had to brush the paper with water on the back, then wait a few minutes for the water to soak in and the cake would come out perfectly. I have made Nutt's orange flower and caraway flavoured Naples biscuit many times and it really makes sense to bake it in this way.

In his early career, Nutt worked as an apprentice at the Pot and Pineapple, a celebrated confectionery shop in Berkeley Square in London. In the following century, another member of staff at this establishment was a young Italian from Colorno near Parma who arrived to work at the shop just after the Napoleonic Wars. This was William Jarrin, who in 1820 issued the most important work on confectionery techniques to be published in Europe at the time, The Italian Confectioner. This work, sadly nowadays unknown in Italy, was written in English. It describes in great detail not only the techniques of the day used to make confectionery, but also the equipment. In a recipe for making Biscuits in Cases, Jarrin first of all tells us that the paper containers for making these 'are generally made of a square form', exactly like those described by Nutt forty years earlier. However, he then goes on to say that they are 'sometimes round like little baskets' and proceeds to explain how these were made, referring us to a diagram illustrating a finished case and the equipment required to make it. In describing the technique, he instructs us 'to form plaits like the frill of a shirt'. The plaited paper cupcake case was born! Jarrin's engraved plate is illustrated at the top of this posting.

William Jarrin, the earliest author to describe cakes baked in crimped paper cases.
If Amelia Simmons was the Mother Of All Cupcakes, William Jarrin must be the Father.

Jarrin describes these little cakes as biscuits, which might puzzle a modern American or English reader, because the word has different meanings nowadays. In the early nineteenth century 'biscuit' was a common name for sponge or savoy cake. So in many ways, Jarrin's little biscuits in cases deserve to be given a prominent place in the history of the cupcake, because they are much closer to our modern concept of the cake than any of the other historic cakes we have looked at so far.

Later nineteenth century authors also describe Jarrin's exact method of making paper cases by hand, which came to be used for serving not only baked goods, but also soufflés, mousses and jellies. Even special ice creams called biscuits were served in them! By the middle of the nineteenth century these cases were being manufactured on a large scale by companies like Hunt, Mansell, Catty and Co. Many very fancy variations on the theme became fashionable in the 1890s.

The modern craze for ornamenting American style cupcakes with frosting and decorative icing was pre-empted in the early twentieth century here in England by a fashion for French style petits fours served in Jarrin-style paper cases. These were in fact little miniature cakes made of carefully cut pieces of Genoese ornamented with fondant and other forms of icing and served, though not baked, in little crimped cases. Here is an illustration of one from 1903. In the amazing world of food history studies, you quickly learn that there is nothing new. It has all been done before! And frequently done much better.

At the beginning of part 1 of this rant, I hinted that the soundbite style approach to food history preferred by television producers can frequently give a very distorted version of the truth. I would like to add that this is not usually the fault of the experts who are often asked to contribute. They have no control over how their interview or demonstration will be edited.

And of course this is not the end of the story. Both Plumcake and I would love to hear from any readers of this blog who have any additional information about the development of these interesting cakes.

Despite the complex history outlined in these postings, decorated American-style cupcakes are really the modern day descendants of Edwardian petits four like this one illustrated in T. Percy Lewis and
A. G. Bromley. The Book of Cakes (London: 1903)

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Queen Cakes and Cup Cakes 2

2011-09-29T07:53:00.000-07:00

Eliza Leslie. Seventy-five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats (Phildelphia:1828). Probably the first cookery book to include a recipe for a cake that was actually called a cup cake

Miss Simmon's 'light cakes baked in cups' and Mrs Rundell's queen cakes in tea cups were not actually called cup cakes. So when did these cakes first get this name? Food History Jotting's researcher Plumcake has been investigating the American history of the cupcake and the earliest recipe she has found actually called by name 'cup cake', was published by Eliza Leslie in Seventy-five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats (Phildelphia:1828). The reason why Miss Leslie calls this a cup cake is not because it is baked in a cup - it is actually baked in small tins - but because the ingredients are measured out in cups. Here is her original recipe.

Perhaps the earliest printed recipe for cup cakes. From Eliza Leslie Seventy-five Receipts for Pastry,

Cakes, and Sweetmeats (Phildelphia:1828)

Miss Leslie's recipe is the only one in her book that uses the cup as a unit of measurement. All the others are written in pounds and ounces. This makes the recipe very significant in terms of American culinary history, because the volumetric unit of the cup eventually becomes standard in all US cookery texts, as it is today. Her 1828 recipe Cup Cake seems to have pioneered this approach. Miss Leslie's book is important in another way too, because it is probably the first cookery text published in the New World which lists the ingredients at the beginning of each recipe. This approach to recipe layout was first used in print by the Scottish confectioner and cook J. Caird in The Complete Confectioner (Edinburgh: 1809).

Related to this kind of cup cake, where the ingredients are measured out with 'a cup of that, two cups of this, three cups of that etc.', was the much older pound cake, two recipes for which were published by Miss Simmons in 1796. These give units in weight rather than volume - a pound of this and a pound of that etc., thus the name. However, pound cakes first emerged in England, the earliest we know first appearing in Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy (London: 1747).

So the earliest cake to actually be called a cup cake was given this name, not because it was baked in a cup, but because its ingredients were measured out by the cup. This of course made the recipe easy to commit to memory. In fact by the early 1850s one variation on the theme became known as a 1-2-3-4 cake, because it was made from 1 cup of butter, 2 cups of sugar, 3 cups of flour and 4 eggs. What a perfect mnemonic!

Plumcake has discovered that the earliest printed recipe found so far for this kind of cake appeared in Lydia Maria Child's The American Frugal Housewife in the 29th edition published in 1844. However, it is not called a 1-2-3-4 cake, just plain cup cake. Mrs Child's book has a complex publishing history, the first edition being printed in Boston in 1829, under the title The Frugal Housewife, Dedicated to Those Who Are Not Ashamed of Economy. By the eighth edition of 1832, its title was changed to The American Frugal Housewife, so as not to confuse it with the book called The Frugal Housewife by the English author Susannah Carter. Neither I, nor Plumcake, have seen any of these earlier editions of Mrs Child's book, so if any readers of our blog have access to any of them, we would be interested to hear from you, especially if you find a recipe which predates 1844.

Mrs Child's recipe is in every way a cup cake. The ingredients are not only measured out in cups, but the individual cup cakes are also baked in cups. Here is her recipe.

Maria Child's recipe for cup cake, the precursor of the 1-2-3-4 cake

In her search for the earliest recipe which uses the name 1-2-3-4 cake, Plumcake says this,

'I do not know who first entitled the cake as 1-2-3-4 cake, but the earliest recipe title, as far as I know, is in The American Matron: or Practical and Scientific Cookery (1851), by a housekeeper in Salem, Massachusetts.' Here is the recipe -

1,2,3,4 CAKE.
One cup of butter; two cups of sugar; three cups of flour; four eggs; cup of milk; scant tea-spoon of saleratus; one nutmeg; a little cinnamon. Work the butter and sugar together; beat the eggs separately to a froth, and work the dough as well as pound cake. Add the soda and put the cake immediately to bake.

This sounds like one large cake rather than individual small cakes like Miss Child's cup cakes. Saleratus was an early name for sodium or potassium bicarbonate from Latin sal aeratus - aerating salt. It occurred naturally in the vicinity of Saleratus Lake in Wyoming and was first marketed in North America as a leavening agent in the 1840s. It was the Americans, or more correctly German Americans, who seem to have popularised soda as a raising agent in baking. Amelia Simmon's baking recipes frequently call for pearl-ash, a form of potassium carbonate made by further burning the potash produced from plants and wood.

In fact a cup cake recipe in an English cookery manuscript dated 1835 in the Food History Jottings collection includes pearl-ash as an ingredient. As far as we know, this is the earliest English recipe for a cup cake, but because of the inclusion of pearl-ash, we suspect it is of American origin. The recipe indicates that it was baked as one large single cake.

An English recipe for a cup cake in an 1835 manuscript belonging to Food History Jottings

So the cup cake did eventually come to England and by the late nineteenth century cakes of this name were being made commercially. In fact our friend Frederick Vine not only gives us a couple of professional recipes, but shows us the equipment used to bake them. Here is an illustration of a tray of tin cup cake pans. The individual cups were riveted to the metal tray. The cakes he advocated baking in these, were egg leavened fruit cakes with currants and mixed peel, quite different to any cup cake we have seen so far.

From F. Vine. Saleable Shop Goods (London: 1898).

Now in trying to trace the development of our traditional foods, nothing is ever plain and simple. A contemporary of Vine, the great London chef Theodore Garrett. gives us a couple of recipes for cup cakes which are radically different to any of the others that Plumcake and I have studied so far. One describes a cake mixture raised with yeast which is then transferred into cups to be baked. The other one, which is much more unusual is reproduced below. Here the cup cake mixture is moulded in teacups, but not baked in them.

So cup cakes seem to have been many different things to many different people. We have also reached the end of the nineteenth century and we still have not seen anything like the modern cup cake which depends for its character on being baked in a paper cup. So we had better deal with the issue of paper cups in our next posting - Queen Cakes and Cup Cakes 3.

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Queen Cakes and Cup Cakes 1

2011-09-28T13:06:00.000-07:00

Two Queen Cakes with their fancy nineteenth century pans

I am sorry to be banging on once again about the food history snippets in the current BBC series The Great British Bake Off, because many readers of this blog may not have seen the programme. This popular, though heavily formatted series is a clone of the well-known Master Chef. In between features where the competitors try out their baking skills in such laudable exercises as 'the great cupcake challenge', an expert is interviewed about the history of one of the baked goods.

To be fair to the makers of the series, most of their history cameos pass muster. Some are actually much more interesting than the cupcake challenge stuff itself, but are far too short. A number of the experts are genuine and distinguished authorities on food history and some of the content has been engaging, informative and accurate - Peter Brears and Laura Mason on funeral biscuits for instance and Kate Colquhoun and Robin Weir on Bath Olivers. Despite the brevity of their slots, they all had interesting things to say. And it would have been better if we had heard a lot more from them.

However, a few of the other 'histories' were badly researched, or offered erroneous and misleading information. In Episode 1, as well as the nonsense talked about the Battenburg Cake (see earlier posting), the cupcake was subjected to a similar 'food detective' style investigation. The conclusion was that this cake had emerged from the kitchens of the great houses of England and was originally baked in a tea cup. A recipe for queen cakes from Maria Rundell's A New System of Domestic Cookery (London: 1807) was cited as the earliest cake to be baked in a cup and was therefore the 'mother of all cupcakes.' I am afraid the truth is much more complicated. In no way do I blame the expert - Dr Annie Gray of Audley End, who cooked the cakes in this section. She acquitted herself with intelligence and flair. I just got the feeling that the producer of the programme was trying to turn a very complicated story into a digestible, but superficial television soundbite.

Nothing at all was said in the programme of earlier recipes published in America, the true home of the cupcake, the garish modern incarnation of which has gained in recent popularity on both sides of the Atlantic as a result of appearing in an episode of Sex in the City. Nor was anything said about the development of the paper cup used for baking this type of cake, which is essential to the cupcake as we know it today. The cake baked in a tea cup on the programme was actually a queen's cake, a much older type of cake than the cupcake. So let me deal with the queen cake first.

Queen cakes were traditionally baked in tin pans which were made in a great variety of shapes, as in the print below. The most popular of these was in the shape of a heart, but many other forms were used.

Queen cake pans from F. Vine Saleable Shop Goods. (London: 1898).

Different shaped queen cakes could be arranged on a plate in a nice kaladaiscope pattern in the same way in which mince pies were served in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. In fact the earliest recipe for queen cakes known to us, dates from 1724, at a time when shaped mince pies were at the height of fashion. Here is the recipe -

An early queen's cake recipe from R. Smith, Court Cookery (London: 1724).

Although in ingredients and method, this recipe is very similar to later ones, it says nothing about the little tins in which the cakes were baked. Perhaps these were like the shaped patty pans that were popular at this period for baking small mince pies, designs for which appeared in a number of contemporary cookery books. It is possible to make mince pies in these complex forms without specialist pans, but it is a tedious and longwinded business. The tinsmiths of the period would have made it a straightforward task by providing a variety of shaped pans. Sadly none have survived. Here are some designs from a book published just over a decade before Smith's queen's cake recipe -

Mince pie designs from Henry Howard England's Newest Way (London: 1703).

During the eighteenth century the Staffordshire potteries produced similarly shaped patty pans in salt glazed stoneware. These were made in the form of stars and other fancy shapes.

These mince pies were made in similar shapes published by Edward Kidder in
Receipts of Pastry and Cookery (London: nd. c.1720s)

Mince pies like these had become obsolete by the second half of the eighteenth century, but the similarly shaped queen cakes remained popular. Most of the English cookery books of the Georgian and Victorian period offer recipes. Queen cake pans were sold in a myriad of forms and were still in production in the early twentieth century. Here are some that were advertised in the 1890s.

Queen cake tins from Theodore Garrett, The Encyclopaedia of Practical Cookery (London: nd. c.1890).

Most early queen's cake recipes call for an egg-rich batter that rises high above the tin, creating a domed top that frequently ruptures open rather like a modern American muffin. In the nineteenth century, professional bakers guaranteed this effect by including volatile, pearl-ash or soda in the mixture as raising agents.

Procuring a set of queen cake patty pans from a tinsmith required a modest investment and shortcuts were almost certainly taken by those who did not possess any. Mrs Rundell, the early nineteenth century cookery author who was the source of the cake made on the programme, suggests baking them in 'little tins, tea-cups or saucers'. Rundell's book was first issued in London by Byron's publisher John Murray in 1807. The author gives two recipes. The alternative one suggests baking them in 'buttered patty pans'. She also instructs us to butter the tea cups, so the cakes were designed to be removed from the cup to be served.

However, Mrs Rundell's recipe is not the earliest for a cake of this type to be baked in a cup. Another had appeared in the previous century in a book published on the other side of the Atlantic. This cake first saw the light of day in Amelia Simmon's American Cookery issued in Hartford, Connecticut in 1796. Here is the recipe.

Emptins was a form of yeast, so this cake was quite unlike the normal egg-raised queen cakes. Amelia does give a conventional recipe for queen cakes on the previous page to be 'put into pans'. They are more or less identical to the queen cakes being baked at this time on our side of the Atlantic. So it is to America that we need to go to explore the complex history of the cupcake, which will be continued in our next posting.

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Mrs Raffald puts on her cowboy boots and goes to Texas

2011-09-22T03:49:00.000-07:00

Eighteenth Century table setting at Rienzi, MFAH, Houston Texas

I have just spent a week installing an eighteenth century table setting at Rienzi House Museum in Houston Texas. The table, part of an exhibition called English Taste: The Art of Dining in the Eighteenth Century was designed to act as a showcase for an assemblage of important English rococo silver by Paul de Lamarie, Paul Crespin, William Cripps, and Robert Tyrill. Elements of the celebrated Meissen Möllendorff Service, said to be designed by Frederick the Great, also appear on the table. The exhibition runs from September 17th 2011 to January 29th 2012.

The layout shows the second course of a typical high status English meal of the second half of the eighteenth century. It is based on a table diagram published by the Manchester confectioner Mrs Elizabeth Raffald in The Experienced English Housekeeper (Manchester: 1769). Although savoury foods dominate the setting, including a larded hare complete with head and ears, there are also a number of Raffald's novelty flummeries and jellies, such as her fishpond and Solomon's Temple.

Credit must go to my dear friend Tony Barton of Bendipeeze Ltd and his Bendy assistants for making much of the remarkable artificial food, including that crazy larded hare, the original of which was roasted on a spit in front of my kitchen fire. A rare image of the closely guarded secret method of making fake peas used on the Bendipeeze production line can be seen at the end of this posting.

It is a great pity that an exhibition of this kind has never been set up in Manchester, England, where Raffald worked. So hip-hurrah to Christine Gervais at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston for having the vision to invite me to do this.

More can be found out about the exhibition at the MFAH website.

SEE A VIDEO OF THE TABLE SETTING

Mrs Raffald's Cribbage Cards in Flummery - rather impractical blancmange playing cards

Mrs Raffald's fishpond - gilded blancmange fish swimming in Lisbon wine

Frantic preparations at the Bendipeeze depot. The Bendies have
heard a rumour that Mrs Rafffald herself is about to visit the factory.

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Battenburg Cake - the Truth

2011-08-31T11:07:00.000-07:00

A factory-made Battenburg Cake - 2011 - four panels

There are lots of stories about this popular English cake, which is composed of alternating coloured slabs of genoese enclosed in an overcoat of almond paste. In cross section it looks like a child's drawing of a window, which no doubt is the reason why it is known in my part of Northern England as 'Chapel Window Cake'. The most commonly told tale about the cake relates to its alleged origin. It is said to have been created to celebrate the 1884 wedding of Prince Louis of Battenburg to Queen Victoria's granddaughter Princess Victoria. There are a few more detailed variations on this theme. One of these was aired recently in Episode 1 of Series 2 of BBC's competitive baking series The Great British Bake Off. This is the theory that the four sections of the cake originally represented the four Battenburg princes - Louis himself and his brothers Alexander, Franz-Joseph and Henry.

The only problem with this story is that the earliest recipes for this kind of Battenburg Cake all call for nine squares and not the four that are found in modern versions.

The earliest recipe I know for a Battenburg cake with coloured sections was published by Frederick Vine in 1898 in his marvellous book Saleable Shop Goods. Vine was one of the most eminent professional bakers and confectioners of his day. Not only was he the author of numerous books, but was also the editor of the leading trade magazine The British Baker. In his Battenburg recipe, he clearly tells us to create a cake with nine sections, alternately coloured red and white. He illustrates the finished cake in this diagram.

Battenburg Cake - 1898 - nine panels

This image appeared only fourteen years after Louis and Victoria's wedding and was published by London's most respected baker. If Frederick Vine did not know what a Battenburg Cake was meant to look like, then who did? Well, a few others actually. In the early years of the twentieth century, a number of professionals also published recipes and illustrations that agree entirely with Vine's. For instance, the recipe in T. Percy Lewis and A. G. Bromley's The Book of Cakes (London: 1903) also calls for nine panes, as shown in their striking chromolithograph illustration.

Battenburg Cake- 1903 - nine panels

I have been completely unsuccessful in finding any contemporary accounts of this cake that confirm it was invented to honour the 1884 royal wedding. This fact could well be true and perhaps the tradition is based on a folk memory, but it does not appear to be grounded in any written records. Nor are there any accounts that link the number of its sections to the Battenburg princes, unless of course there were five others we do not know about. Perhaps Louis had some other siblings about whom his father kept quiet! The story of the four panels and the princes appears to have surfaced quite recently and is described on Wikipedia without any citation of its source. If there is somebody out there who is aware of early documentation linking this cake with the Battenburg wedding I would be grateful if they would share their sources with me.

A neatly made Battenburg cake is a technical challenge for any baker and I can understand why it was chosen as a trial of skill for the contestants in The Great British Bake Off. In the past, the task of constructing one of these cakes was frequently given to apprentice bakers and confectioners to test their prowess and the results were often exhibited. In a 1936? edition of Vine's book, we can see what Battenburg Cakes (well at least showoff versions of them) had come to look like by the thirties.

Battenburg Cakes - 1936? - twenty- five panels!

The Battenburg Cakes are those on the left and right. It is the thirties and the number of panels has multiplied from nine to twenty-five - Art Deco gone mad!. Perhaps the bakers are now not only honouring His Serene Highness's princely brothers (including the illegitimate ones), but all of his grandchildren and great grandchildren too! Just how many did he have?

So when did Battenburg Cakes end up with just four panels? I am not sure, but it is possible that it dates from the time that they began to be manufactured by large industrial bakers like Lyons, who as far as I know started mass producing them before World War II. I suppose a four panel Battenburg is much easier to make on a production line than one with nine. Could somebody please enlighten me?

So where did the story come from about the four Battenburg princes? Well I guess that it was probably invented by the same fairy who has made up so many other stories about our traditional foods - of which more anon.

If there is a hero in this story, it is Frederick Vine. This forgotten British food writer, about whom you will hear a lot more on this blog, was the author of another book called Cakes and How to Make Them. Unfortunately none of the editions of this book are dated, though some evidence points to a publication year earlier than that of Saleable Shop Goods, possibly about 1890. If this is correct, and more research is needed to confirm it, this book contains the very earliest known recipe for Battenburg Cake. However, it is a completely different animal to the cake that now bears this name. Vine's earlier Battenburg Cake is in fact a simple fruit cake baked in a loaf tin. If you want to make it, here is his recipe -

No. 84 Battenburg Cakes.

4lb flour.

One and three quarters of a pound of butter.

One and three quarters of a pound of sugar.

Two and a half pounds of sultana raisins.

Three quarters of a pound of peel (mixed).

1 oz of cream of tartar.

1 oz. carbonate of soda.

8 eggs.

1 quart milk.

Method. - Weigh and rub on the board as before directed, and weigh into large size twopenny greased bread pans ten ounces for sixpenny cakes. sprinkle chopped almonds over. Bake in a moderate oven. These cakes sell well wherever introduced.

From Frederick T. Vine ("Compton Dene"), Cakes and How to Make Them. (nd. c.1890), p. 77.

Battenberg Cake - c.1890 - no panels, but lots of juicy sultanas and mixed peel.

Note that Vine, whose pen name was Compton Dene, tells us that "These cakes sell well wherever introduced." This would indicate that the Battenburg cake was a fairly recent arrival on the bakery scene in the early 1890s. The royal couple were married only six years before the recipe was printed. So perhaps this earlier cake has more claims to being the original celebratory cake than the better known cake of many colours. Vine was at the height of his career at the time of the wedding. If he was alive now I am sure he would be able to tell us why a delicious, but nondescript fruit cake was replaced by a flashy, sickly sweet interloper in a matter of about six years.

Well, I suppose the moral of this story is not to believe everything you see on television, or read in Wikipedia, which I suppose is where the television researchers found the Battenburg history nuggets that were served up in The Great British Bake Off.

For those of you more interested in fact than fiction, here is Frederick Vine's signature and book plate taken from his copy of Alexis Soyer's Gastronomic Regenerator, which is now in my library. It is a treasured possession. You may also have noticed that throughout these notes, I have spelt Battenburg with a 'u', rather than as Battenberg, which seems to be contemporary practice. Well, I have followed Mr. Vine in this matter too, as I think he should have the last word.

Frederick Vine's signature and book plate.

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