To Preserve Green Oranges

The young green fruits of Citrus X aurantium

January and early February are the traditional marmalade-making months in Britain. This is because Seville oranges are available in the shops during this very brief period. The Seville, or the bitter orange (Citrus x aurantium) appears to be a hybrid between the pomelo (Citrus maxima (Burm.) Merr.)  and the wild mandarin (Citrus reticulata Blanco). Although it is known in England as the Seville orange, the bitter orange is grown all over the Mediterranean and throughout Asia. In the medieval and early modern period, this bitter fruit was probably the first orange to be known in the West. It was introduced from Asia into Southern Spain and the wider Mediterranean by the Arabs. In England it is now chiefly used to make marmalade, but the juice and rind were once formerly used much more extensively in English cookery. The sweet orange did not appear in Europe until the early seventeenth century when it was brought to Lisbon from China by Portuguese plant collectors. In seventeenth century English cookery books these new sweet fleshed oranges were therefore known as either 'Portugals' or China oranges. In Greece, the name 'Portugals' - πορτοκαλία - is still used.

The bitter orange - from John Parkinson,In Sole Paradisus Terrestris (London: 1629)

Now, what interests me is this. I have said that the Seville orange season nowadays occupies a brief window in January and February. So how can the eighteenth century invoiced receipt below, which I came across in the archives of Arley Hall in Cheshire, be explained? It is a receipt for the sale of lemons, Cheanay oranges (sic), Sivill oranges (sic) and isinglass to Sir Peter Warburton, the owner of Arley Hall, by the Manchester grocer Mrs Elizabeth Raffald. The receipt is dated 29th May 1771. This would indicate that Seville oranges had a longer season back in the eighteenth century than they apparently do now. 29th May is well on from January and February. It could be that Mrs Raffald had the skill to keep her stock fresh for over three months, or Seville oranges were still being imported from Spain to Manchester in early summer, probably via Liverpool.

An invoiced receipt for citrus fruit in the hand of Mrs Elizabeth Raffald, who ran various grocery and confectionery shops in Manchester in the second half of the eighteenth century. Raffald was the author of the most original cookery book of the eighteenth century, The Experienced English Housekeeper (Manchester: 1769). She had worked as Sir Peter Warburton's housekeeper at Arley until her marriage in 1763. Photograph © Arley Hall Archives.

I was in Southern Spain recently in early June and noted that there were a few trees in the Seville area that were still bearing small numbers of bitter oranges. In some upland towns like Ronda, where the season is somewhat later, there were trees which were still heavily laden. So it is therefore highly possible that Seville oranges were being imported into England in the eighteenth century very late in the season, as Mrs Raffald's receipt suggests.

Seville oranges in Ronda on 6th June 2013

As well as the mature oranges, the trees I examined also bore small young green embryonic fruit. In Asia, mature bitter oranges (such as Japanese dai dai) stay on the tree for up to four years and actually go green again in the hot weather. While I was in Andalusia I collected a lot of small green baby Seville oranges and lemons on a friend's farm as I wanted to try out the recipe below for a sweetmeat from The Lady's Companion (London: 1751). I first came across the practice of preserving immature green bitter oranges in the 1970s when I lived on Crete. A friend of mine in Athens sends me some of her own homemade ones every year. They are superb. However the recipe below is English. In eighteenth century England, many wealthy estates had orangeries and it is likely that in poor years they had a large number of immature fruit to deal with. I suspect that this was the Georgian equivalent of that common modern recipe for making use of green tomatoes at the end of a cold, sunless English summer - the ubiquitous green tomato chutney. However baby green oranges and immature lemons preserved in syrup are much more interesting. Other immature green fruits such as hard unripe apricots, almonds and walnuts were also once preserved in this way. The nuts were collected before the hard shell formed and were processed in a similar way to the green oranges.

This recipe from The Lady's Companion (London: 1751). was reprinted in Hannah Glasse, The Complete Confectioner (London: 1770). Glasse also used this book as the source for many recipes in her earlier work The Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy (London: 1747).

Small, fragrant baby lemons.

Small highly fragrant, but intensely bitter baby Seville oranges

The baby oranges and lemons are soaked in a strong brine for fifteen days to remove the bitterness. They are then washed in fresh water every day for five days to get rid of the salt. They are then preserved in sugar syrup.

I have completed the process of brining the oranges and have also washed them for five days in fresh water, changing it every day. Today, I made a stock syrup with a litre of water and a kilo of white sugar and have started the process of preserving the fruit in the syrup. I will post a photograph of the finished article in a future article about the wider issue of preserved and candied citrus peels.

Arley Hall Archives

Culinary Slapstick

Bacon and eggs made entirely with jelly from a 1769 recipe

I recently had a conversation with a television producer about some of the joke recipes included at the beginning of the medieval cookery poem, the Liber cure cucorum (ca.1420). He wants me to make some of these well-known old howlers for a programme he is producing. The anonymous author suggests that, Yf þe coke be croked or sward mane, (if the cook be a crooked or froward man) it would be a real hoot to put some soap in his potage, with the result that his kitchen would be flooded by a mass of bubbling foam, much to the amusement of all.

Þenne wylle þe pot begyn to rage
And welle on alle,

Another of his practical jokes was to cover meat with dried hare's or kid's blood in order to make it appear raw to the diners, even though it had been cooked.

How somme mete schalle seme raw I teche;
Take harus blode, or kyddus ful fayre,
And dry hit in powder and kepe hit fro ayre;
When flesshe or fysshe his served wele hote,
Cast on þe powder of hare I wot;
Hit is so frym, ren hyt wylle
An malt as sugar, by ry3t good skylle
And make þo flesshe to seme, iwys,
As hit were raw, and 3yt hit nys.

Food could also be tainted with fake maggots by strewing it with short pieces of gut harp strings, no doubt causing a considerable amount of mirth in the great hall, at least among the adolescents in the company,

Anoþer sotelté I wylle telle.
Take harpe strynges made of bowel,
In brede of stoe, þou cut hom þenne;
Kast hom on fysshe or flesshe, I kenne,
Þat sothyn is hote or rostyd, iwys,
Þat wynne seme wormes, so have I blys.

Well I suppose they did not have Channel 4 in the fifteenth century, so bumper wheezes and wizard japes like this were perhaps designed to add a touch of fun to a feast. Despite all the clichés to the contrary, high status medieval dinners were heavily ritualised and rather stiff, so a bit of slapstick and buffoonery would have made for a slightly less formal ambience. The best known joke dish of the medieval period was the cockatrice. To prepare one of these the cook had to attach the derriere of a pig to the front end of a cockerel. I suppose the result was meant to resemble those mythical beasts that one comes across carved on miserichords in cathedral choir stalls, or in the marginal illuminations of medieval psalters. However, on the few occasions that I have attempted a cockatrice, it resembled nothing more than a pig's bum sewn on to a sad looking dead cockerel's head - not a terribly appetising prospect, nor in the slightest bit funny. 

Not a cockatryce, but a common garden chocolate cockerel copulating with its chocolate hen. A rather lewd nineteenth century edible joke with a very long history

Some marginally better food jokes appeared a little later. Sir Hugh Platt in Delights for Ladies (1600) explains how to make an entire fake meal of roast rabbits, poultry and game birds out of a sort of moulded blancmange. They were even 'dredged' with breadcrumbs 'so they will seem as if they were roasted and breaded'. At least these required a degree of skill. Here is the full text of Platt's directions,

Sixty years later, Robert May offers us a few more comedic dishes, including a complex bride pie in which is concealed 'live birds, or a snake, which will seem strange to the beholders, which cut up the pie at the Table.' He goes on to comment 'this is only for a Wedding to pass away the time.'  Perhaps the pie was cut up and the snake released during a particularly boring best man's speech in order to cause a diversion. But the most legendary of all May's gastronomic drolleries was the remarkable piece of Stuart performance art outlined below. Sorry about the seventeenth century custard pie stain on my copy.

This amusing interlude is now well known. It was an old joke which had its roots in some of the remarkable banquets of Renaissance Italy. By using the word 'triumph' to describe this lively performance - based on trionfo,  the Italian name for a culinary fantasy - May gives us a clue to the origins of this particular joke. It was a baroque elaboration on a pie filled with live birds described in the 1598 English translation of Giovanne de Rosselli's Epulario.

Master cook and merry prankster Robert May. I guess he does look a bit like Bruce Forsyth. Seriously though, May was one of England's very greatest cookery book authors

With its leaping frogs and ladies throwing eggshells full of sweet waters at each other, May's 'Triumphs and Trophies in Cookery' was a lively Jacobean equivalent of a Brian Rix bedroom farce, but it could not compete with the culinary slapstick humour of the Italian peninsula. Take the image of the triumphal arch below, entirely made of cheeses, hams and sausages, with two roast pigs squirting wine from the spouts in their mouths on to anyone foolish enough to walk below. This was constructed for a coccagna festival in Naples in 1629. At the end of the festivities, all the food in the arch was up for grabs, so the poor of the city demolished it, fighting each other fiercely in order to get their share.

Triumphal arch of cheese, hams, sausages and suckling pigs, made to honour Duke Antonio Alvarez di Toledo, Viceroy of Naples, on the Feast of St. John the Baptist, 23 June 1629. Anonymous woodcut from Francesco Orilia, Il Zodiaco . Napoli:1630. Image courtesy of Getty Research Institute

Coccagna festivals were held in many Italian cities and in some other European countries, but the best ones took place in Naples. They had their origins in the pan-European myth of the Land of Coccagna (usually spelt Cockagne in English), where money and food grew on trees, rivers flowed with wine and if you worked you went to prison. With its promise of unimaginable plentitude, this fable gave a vain hope of a better life to the undernourished and overworked peasantry of Europe. The massive machine della coccagna erected in the royal square were usually paid for by the king of Naples. They were entirely made of food materials and were ransacked by the poor of the city as soon as the king gave a signal. 

The pavilion on the hill in the image below is made of cake and bread, the fountains flow with wine and the formal garden in the foreground is constructed from hams and cheeses. The animals grazing on the hillside have been roasted and then put back in their own skins. The Neapolitan citizens are ready to rush in from the sides to ransack the whole structure and take advantage of the king's generosity. I was privileged enough to have been involved in an exhibition about a decade ago at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles entitled The Edible Monument, which was devoted to the coccagne and other European culinary curiosities. If you want to find out more about this extraordinary backwater of food culture, visit the exhibition website from the link at the end of this posting.

A Machina della Coccagna in the Piazza Reale in Naples. Engraving from Vincenzo dal Rè, Narrazione delle solenni reali feste (Naples: 1747). Image courtesy of Getty Research Institute

Neapolitans were also pretty good at making the kind of fake food that Sir Hugh Platt describes above. In the 1780s King Ferdinand IV of Naples and his queen Maria Carolina visited the convent complex of San Gregorio Armeno. The English travel writer Dr George Moore happened to be at the convent for the occasion and gave a very detailed account of the visit in his book A View of Society and Manners in Italy (London: 1790). He tells of a remarkable meal the sisters of the convent gave to the King and Queen. Although this sumptuous repast appeared to consist of a variety of fish, flesh and fowl, all the dishes were made entirely of moulded ice creams and water ices, a Neapolitan speciality.

The cloisters of the convent complex of San Gregorio Armeno in Naples

Here is Moore's account of the remarkable frosty feast prepared by the nuns.

These novelty moulded ices could be pretty convincing. Here is a one of a bunch of grapes I made just a few days ago. It was moulded from muscadine water ice, a lemon water ice flavoured with elderflower and coloured with red grape juice.

When Charles V visited the convent of Martarana in Palermo in June 1537, the fruit trees in the garden were bare, so the nuns hung them with fake oranges made of marzipan in order to impress the emperor - or so the story goes. Fake fruits of this kind were actually once made all over Europe. A few years ago I dressed a remarkable 1766 Sèvres dessert service which had been given as a gift by Louis XV to his minister the Marquess of Choiseul. I filled two extraordinary decorated flower baskets with trompe-l'œil marzipan fruit which I made in the manner of the day. Two very rare white biscuit Sèvres flower baskets needed artificial flowers, so I obliged with two bouquets entirely made from sugar.

A fruit basket from the Choiseul dessert service filled with my fake marzipan fruits at Waddesdon Manor in 2000

My sugar flowers among the biscuit figures on the same table

Early modern period sugar playing cards

This tradition of making novelty foods out of sugar paste has a long history. In the Renaissance, plates and cups formed of sugar paste were used for serving food and drink. At the end of the meal, they too could be eaten, elegantly saving the problem of the washing up. Many novelty items were made from this material, a blend of powdered sugar, gum tragacanth and rosewater. Complete chess sets and playing cards are just a few of the fun items that graced the Tudor banquet table. Curiously in the eighteenth century, floppy cribbage cards were made out of flummery or blancmange, like those made below from a recipe in Elizabeth Raffald's The Experienced English Housekeeper (Manchester: 1769). In the nineteenth century the New York based ice cream mould manufacturers Eppelsheimers retailed a set of pewter moulds to make a complete pack of ice cream playing cards.

One of a set of moulds to make ice cream playing cards produced in the late nineteenth century for Eppelsheimer and Co. of New York City. The same company retailed moulds to create a complete chess set in ice cream as well as a three foot high mould to create a seventeen litre ice cream model of the Statue of Liberty. Miniature ice cream statues were made for benefit dinners to raise money to build the real statue, so they actually predated Berholdi's finished structure.

Flummery or blancmange was a favourite medium for making fake fruits and other novelties for the English table. This melon was made in a 1750s salt glazed stoneware mould

Mrs Elizabeth Raffald's famous Hen's Nest Jelly of 1769

This ability of joke food to switch from one medium to another is best exemplified in the examples illustrated below. The cockerel and hen in the top left hand corner date from 1621 and represent two folded napkins, no doubt intended for an all male gathering. The black and white image beneath it, shows the same joke nearly three hundred years later as a representation of an ice cream mould in an early twentieth century catalogue. The sugar or chocolate mould on the right dates from the late nineteenth century and is the one I used to make the chocolate Chanticleer covering his mate towards the beginning of this post. I guess the old ones are definitely the best ones.

There are a number of accounts of Italian Renaissance feasts where a table appears in the dining room as if by magic and after one course is eaten suddenly vanishes, only to appear again laden with a fresh batch of dishes. This of course was one practical joke which depended on sophisticated and ingenious mechanics. As far as I know, none of these extraordinary tables have survived in Italy.* However, there is one that is still extant in a banqueting house dating from 1692, known as the Bellaria, in the gardens of Český Krumlov castle in Bohemia. The baroque kitchen and table date from 1746. Next year I will be staging my first Bohemian baroque meal at the Prague Carnivale with my remarkable artist friends Rostislav and Zlatuše Müller, who were responsible for reviving the event. It will take place in the Clam Gallas Palace in Prague in February, but another year we are planning to use the magic table at Český Krumlov to recreate a multi-course baroque dinner. So if you like historical practical jokes of this kind do watch this space.

The Bellaria summerhouse in the gardens of Český Krumlov Castle

The machinery of the magic table viewed in the Bellaria kitchen before it rises up into the dining room above. Photo courtesy and copyright Český Krumlov State Castle

The beautiful rococo dining room of the Bellaria with the magic table laid with some fruit. Photo courtesy and copyright
Český Krumlov State Castle

* I have just heard from Marina Revelant, a follower of this blog from Italy, who has pointed out to me that an Italian magic table has survived in the beautiful Palazzina Cinese in the Parco della Favorita in Palermo in Sicilia. Marina has kindly sent me the photograph below of this lovely casina, which was designed by Guiseppe Venanzio Marvuglia (1729-1814) for Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies. It is known as ll tavola matematica and is very similar in every way to the one in Český Krumlov. I have visited Palermo three times, but did not know about this. So thank you very much Marina for getting in touch with this great information.

Marvuglia's Palazzina Cinese in the Parco della Favorita, Palermo

La tavola matematica

The Edible Monument

Solomon's Temple in Flummery - a Culinary Mobile

A footman at Harewood House struggles with two misbehaving Solomon's Temple flummeries

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, though of course the dish required a specialist mould so would have been the invention of a potter rather than a cook. 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.

This large salt glazed stoneware mould made in Staffordshire between 1730-50 is the prototype of the Solomon's Temple mould. Mrs Raffald describes 'steps' in her recipe, so this is the kind of mould she almost certainly used. Later creamware Solomon's Temple moulds are somewhat simplified, like that illustrated below. Courtesy Winterthur.

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

Tinned steel versions of Solomon's Temple moulds survived into the early twentieth century

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. This was made using a reproduction Solomon's Temple mould I commissioned from genius ceramic artist Morgen Hall. 

Some Solomon's Temple Moulds have miniature melons and cherries (jewel fruits) which were cast on the chocolate or coffee base in different colours, as in this example moulded from a 1790s creamware mould in my collection

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.

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

Go to Morgen Hall's Website.

Mrs Raffald puts on her cowboy boots and goes to Texas

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.

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