More Edible Artistry

The images on this page are of food produced by attendees on my two most recent courses, with a little help from me! I do try to convey to my students that standards of food and presentation in the past were frequently very high and that one of the best ways to understand this is to work with original equipment in order to replicate dishes that convey the staggering beauty of much of our ancestors' food. Appearance was everything! 

But taste was pretty important too - look at this delicious nineteenth century pie, garnished with truffles and crayfish in the image above - and marbled with truffles, pigeon, capon breast and turkey when cut through. We had it for our lunch on my moulded foods course last Sunday - it tasted as good as it looked. I made eight pies like this last week - all different - for a BBC drama production set in the early nineteenth century. They were all spiked with silver hatelet skewers and ornamented like the one above. You might get a glimpse of them when the programme goes out at Christmas, but more on that later on.

A jelly in the form of a Prince of Wales Feathers made with a rosewater flavoured blancmange above and a raspberry jelly below.

My current obsession - Mrs Elizabeth Raffald's 'Solomon's Temple in Flummery' made in a 1790s Staffordshire mould. The first one we turned out on the course failed because I was not concentrating when I turned it out. But we made another the next day - the one depicted above - and that came out perfectly, looking like some beautiful alien being from another planet with its garniture of fresh flowers.

We used these tiny profiteroles filled with apricot preserve to make a delicious profiterole pudding, a moulded custard very lightly set with gelatine and flavoured with kirsch and muscatel raisins poached in syrup. The recipe we used was from Jules Gouffés The Royal Cookery Book (London: 1871). Rather like a cold luxury bread and butter pudding, we made it in a tall and quite spectacular stepped mould. There are over fifty profiteroles embedded in the soft rich custard. Because they give strength to what would be a weak towering structure if they were not present, the profiteroles allow the jelled cream to be a very light one, giving it a nice soft mouth feel.   

Photo by Ran Akaike

The finished profiterole pudding was delicious. It was served at dinner with two other moulded dishes made on the course; an iced cabinet pudding and a raspberry jelly surmounted by a blancmange portrait of Queen Victoria. Here they all are after a marathon unmoulding session in my kitchen. The iced cabinet pudding is in the centre. It is embellished with maidenhair fern fronds and surrounded by garnish ices made of muscadine water ice, a delicious lemon sorbet flavoured with elderflowers.

Photo by Vicky Shearman

On my moulded food course last weekend, one of the students brought along a lovely wooden sugar mould for pressing out  a small grapevine design in gum paste she had recently bought on ebay. But she was unsure how to use it. Just for fun I taught her to use it to construct a Wedgewood style Jasperware plate entirely out of sugar. With the use of a few other moulds belonging to me, we made the components to make it into an impressive edible taza.

Photo by Ran Akaike

Some of my students collect antique moulds and want to learn how to use them. Though few would be able to make this Alexandra Cross jelly. Although surviving outer moulds in this design are not uncommon, the internal liner required to make one with the Danish Flag running through it is extremely rare. So it was a great experience for them to make this crazy Victorian set piece dish, which they had all heard of, but never seen. For those of you who might like to have a go at making food of this quality, I will be publishing my 2014 course schedule on my website and on this blog in September.

If you found this interesting, you might like to have a look at an earlier posting with lots more beautiful food which I have made. 

Macedoine and Other Eccentric Jellies

A Jelly made using a macedoine mould in my collection

Perhaps the most singular culinary expression of the advance of the Industrial Revolution in Victorian Britain was the extraordinary popularity of mass-produced copper jelly moulds. By the middle of the nineteenth century the fashion for this kind of kitchen kit had accelerated into a gastronomic craze. This was the result of the convergence of two emerging phenomena - the availability of cheap factory made gelatine and the increasing use of powerful pneumatic presses to stamp out copper into ever more intricate shapes. After a hundred years of being an unloved, even despised children's party food, a jelly revival has once again recently hit the fashionable food sector. This was started about twenty years ago by my dear genius friend Peter Brears and to a lesser extent by myself, when both of us started running country house events where we recreated jellies and other moulded foods for the public using original period moulds. I also started running courses on the subject in the early 1990s. More recently, Sam Bompas and Harry Parr, both attendees of my courses who have always kindly acknowledged the debt they owe to Peter and myself, have made a career for themselves out of the genre. However, despite modern computer 3D printing technology, the moulds available to the contemporary aspiring jelly maker just cannot compete with those of the Victorian kitchen. Just look at these!

A few nineteenth manufacturers designed and produced highly specialised multi-part moulds for creating very unusual jellies with mysterious internal components, such as spiral columns and pyramids of fruit. Some of these striking British designs were even admired from afar by important chefs on the other side of the English Channel. In Cosmopolitan Cookery (London: 1870), the great Second Empire French chef Felix Urbain Dubois illustrated two of these extraordinary English inventions together with recipes he designed for them. He probably encountered them in London when he was exiled there during the Franco-Prussian War. One he illustrated was the macedoine mould, a fancy copper mould with a dome shaped internal liner, both clipped together with three metal pins. Here is Dubois's illustration -

This mould was utilised by pouring a transparent jelly into the gap between the mould and the liner. Once the jelly had set, warm water was poured into the liner, which enabled it to be removed. Small pieces of fruit (the 'macedoine') and more jelly could then be used to fill up the resulting cavity. The finished dish was a striking hollow jelly containing a mosaic of coloured fruit, which distorted into an abstract pattern because of the effects of refraction caused by the flutings on the mould. I am fortunate enough to own a complete macedoine mould and used it to make the jelly at the top of this posting. However, my example is a different design from that which Dubois illustrates, though in principle it functions in exactly the same way. Although macedoine moulds are extremely rare - I have only ever seen two others, which lacked their liners. My example is the only one I have ever encountered which is complete. Here are some photographs.

Macedoine Jelly from above

Another Macedoine Jelly made with this mould

Cross section through the macedoine jelly above

The chained pins ensure that the inner liner is kept stable and at an equal distance from the outer mould.

Macedoine jellies were also be made in plain moulds. The striking example above is from Jules Gouffé, The Royal Book of Pastry and Confectionery (London: 1874). A large plain charlotte mould would have been used to make this. It has been garnished with jelly croutons to create the crest around the top and is surmounted by a gum paste or nougat tazza filled with real or ice cream strawberries. Although a very weak jelly with a light 'mouth feel' was used to make a macedoine, the fruit inside acted as a very strong armature which could support a decorative structure like the tazza above.

Even rarer than the macedoine mould illustrated by Dubois is this remarkable and lovely version, which reminds me of a Maya pyramid or ziggurat. It has a liner very similar to the other one and makes the most wonderful jelly filled with a pyramid of fruit. I have never ever seen another in this design.

A Jelly containing a pyranid of apricots made in the stepped macedoine mould above

The second English mould illustrated by Dubois in Cosmopolitan Cookery (1870) is a version of a very popular novelty mould first marketed by Temple and Reynolds of Belgravia in 1850. The location of their shop gave the name to this particular dish, the most extraordinary of all Victorian novelty jellies, the Belgrave. The outer copper moulds are quite common, but a complete set with a full compliment of pewter spiral liners is a rare find. Two versions were made, the round and the oval, the latter being very scarce now, especially with liners. The liners were placed into a jelly mould which was filled with clear jelly. When the jelly had set, the liners were literally 'screwed' out of the jelly by pouring hot water into them. This resulted in a number of spiral cavities which could then be filled with a coloured jelly or blancmange.

Urbain Dubois's 1870 illustrations of the Belgrave Mould

An illustration and instructions for making a Belgrave Jelly from a very late edition of Eliza Acton, Modern Cookery (London: 1905) 

My very rare oval Belgrave mould with pewter liners

Oval Belgrave Jelly made with the mould above

The more orthodox round Belgrave Jelly

The two most common jelly moulds which included liners to create striking internal features were the Alexandra Cross and Brunswick Star. These were designed to celebrate the wedding of Queen Victoria's eldest son Edward Prince of Wales to Princess Alexandra of Denmark. The Alexandra Cross jelly had the Danish Flag running all the way through it, while the Brunswick Star had a white Garter Star running through it, both rather like a stick of rock. Here is an advertisement from the 1890s published by the cookery teacher and mould retailer Mrs Agnes Marshall. Surviving liners are almost unknown.

To make both, coloured jellies were poured into the mould in a particular order and then the liners were inserted. The rest of the jelly was poured in around the liner, which was removed by pouring hot water into it. The cavity was then filled with white blancmange.

A finished Alexandra Cross jelly

A finished Brunswick Star jelly

Slices of Brunswick Star jelly

Jelly extravaganza in Harewood House. There is an oval Belgrave jelly in the centre of the table

About three years ago I manned the wonderful period kitchen at Harewood House and demonstrated period jelly making to the general public. As the jellies came from the moulds, I dressed the dining room with a typical Victorian entremet course using Princess Mary's priceless Venetian glass dessert service. Last week I was at Harewood again, this time dressing the kitchen and gallery (the most wonderful room in England) with Regency period food for a major forthcoming BBC drama production, which I will tell you more about after it has been transmitted at Christmas. I made a large number of jellies and blancmanges for this production using Staffordshire ceramic moulds made in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. To whet your appetite, here are a few photos. As you can see, the Victorians were not the only ones to have beautiful moulded foods - the late Georgians could give them (and Bompas and Parr) a real run for their money.

Man in the Moon and Star flummeries made in early nineteenth century Staffordshire moulds

A flummery hedgehog made in an early nineteenth century ceramic mould

Pineapple flummery made in a 1790s Wedgewood mould

A footman struggles with two flummery Solomon's Temples, one of my Georgian signature dishes

There is a little more on these remarkable jellies here

Spanish Paps and Steeple Creams

Or The Wobbliest Jelly In The Universe

A 1655 piramidis cream garnished with pine nuts ('Pine Apple blown')

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries one of the most widely used food moulds was simply a conical wine glass. Early modern period English dishes like Spanish Paps, Pirimidis Creams and Steeple Creams were all moulded in ‘an old fashion drinking-Glasse’. When released from their glasses each little cream would pop out in the form of a miniature steeple, thus one of the popular names for this type of dish. Spanish Paps, so called because they were reminiscent of little breasts, were thickened with ground rice, while Pirimidis and Steeple Creams were a type of opaque white jelly rendered solid with various types of collagen. Hartshorn, isinglass, calves foot jelly, gum tragacanth, gum Arabic and even ivory shavings were all used to set them. One of the earliest printed recipes for this type of sweet was published in W.M.’s The Queen’s Closet Opened (London: 1655). As you can see it is a fairly complicated procedure.

To make Piramidis Cream

Take a quart of water, and six ounces of harts horn, and put it into a Bottle with Gum-dragon, and Gum-arabick, of each as much as a small Nut, put all this into the Bottle, which must be so big as will hold a pint more; for if it be full it will break; stop it very Close with a Cork, and tye a Cloth about it, put the Bottle into a pot of beef when it is boyling, and let it boyle three hours, then take as much Cream as there is Jelly, and halfe a pound of Almonds well beaten with Rose-water, so that you cannot discern what they be, mingle the Cream and the Almonds together, then strain it, and do so two or three times to get all you can out of the Almonds, then put jelly when it is cold into a silver Bason, and the Cream to it; sweeten it as you like, put in two or three grains of Musk and Amber-greece, set it over the fire, stirring it continually and skimming it, till it be seething hot, but let it not boyle, then put it into an old fashion drinking-Glasse, and let it stand till it is cold, and when you will use it, hold your Glass in a warm hand, and loosen it with a Knife, and whelm it into a Dish, and have in readinesse Pine Apple blown, and stick it all over, and serve it in with Cream or without as you please.

The kind of wine glass used to make these conical creams and opaque jellies

Some recipes published in the second half of the eighteenth century, like that of Elizabeth Raffald's 1769 receipt for Steeple Creams with Wine Sours, instruct us to turn the little set creams out of the conical glasses made specifically for jellies. Round about this time the Staffordshire potteries started producing specialist ceramic moulds in either salt glazed stoneware or creamware, which enabled the cook to turn out these creams in more sophisticated shapes than was possible with a wine or jelly glass. It was discovered that a conical jelly, though stable at the base possessed the ability to wobble in a most suggestive and amusing way. This was particularly the case if the mould was made in stepped form.

A medley of late eighteenth century creamware pyramid and steeple moulds by Wedgewood. The large one  in the middle is an early version of the kind of stepped steeple mould that was destined to become one of most popular of all English jelly moulds

Spode and Minton copied Wedgewood's idea and were still marketing this particular steeple mould in the early twentieth century

In my long career I have come across a large number of these moulds, both in the antique trade and in collections. The reason for their enduring popularity is easy to understand. They must have provided a great deal of hilarious amusement to generations of diners. Watch this brief video and you will immediately appreciate what I mean by this. The second sequence in the video shows an attempt to travel with a steeple cream on my lap as a car passenger. As you can see the journey rapidly ends in disaster as the jelly self-destructs as the car goes over over a speed bump. The third sequence shows the sensual contortions of a Solomon's Temple in Flummery, another wobbly creature which I have already dealt with in a previous post.

Not all occasions were suitable for cavorting wobbly jellies - sometimes something more elegant was required. In the 1780s Wedgewood started producing two part pyramid, obelisk and steeple moulds which had an inner core decorated with flowers and other ornamentation. Their outer moulds were filled with clear calves foot jelly, so that the decorations could be seen through a thin film of transparent jelly.

Some steeple jellies were stiffened with a ceramic core decorated with flowers. Very beautiful, but  rather stiff and not half as amusing

These lovely Wedgewood ceramic cores have been separated from their outer moulds 

Stiffness and wobbliness combined. When unmoulded this core jelly has a very wobbly top. If you have watched the video above, you will understand the mirth that must have greeted it when it was placed on the table

A 1790s Neale and Co. obelisk mould and decorated core in my collection. The obelisk has been coated with a thin layer of transparent jelly

As a postscript to all this, a few years ago I was visited by Patrick Furlong, the producer of Heston Blumenthal's first Feast television series made for Channel 4. This was about a month before they started filming. Heston had suggested to him that I came on board the series as an historical advisor. I gave Patrick lunch and for his pudding served him a steeple cream similar to the one in the video above. He filmed the very amusing way that it cavorted and wobbled on his camera and showed it to Heston, who was knocked out by it. As a result Heston and his team made a giant conical jelly in a large stainless steel mould in one of the programmes. It swung dangerously from side to side when it was brought to his guests' table, but it did not have anywhere near the remarkable sensitivity to movement of the original jelly that inspired it. You can see Heston's jelly perform on YouTube on the link below. Sorry Heston - my jelly is wobblier than your jelly!!

Heston Blumenthal's modern wobbly absinthe jelly

Samuel Pepy's Best Ever Dinner

A portrait of Samuel Pepys you may not know. He is shown as one of the bearers of the King's canopy at James II's coronation in 1685.

In the next couple of weeks I will be making a minor contribution to a television series that is intending to plot the evolution of our daily meals -  breakfast, lunch and dinner. This is very familiar territory to me, as in 2000, together with art historians Peter Brown, Andrew Moore and Gillian Riley, I curated the major travelling exhibition Eat, Drink and Be Merry, which surveyed the development of the English table and our meals in great detail through major paintings and the decorative arts. We recreated dinners, suppers, breakfasts and teatimes from many different periods using original tableware, silver, porcelain and glass as well as food. Just for the record I have not seen anything yet that matches the scope and vision of that exhibition in any of the British TV programmes that have so far touched on food history. Just to illustrate what I mean, have you ever seen anything like this on tellie?

My recreation  of the Duke of Newcastle's Garter Feast of 1698. This is the king's table, where he dined alone

For the section of the programme to which I am contributing, the makers are focussing on records of food and dining in the dairy of Samuel Pepys. They want me to cook some of the dishes he mentions. Pepys (1633-1703) started his diary in January 1660 and stopped making entries when his eyesight started to fail in May 1669. Throughout his journal there are numerous references to food and particularly to drink, of which he was of course very fond. Some of his observations are very useful to those of us interested in understanding the cookery of this period. For instance, on 13 January 1662, he described an ambitious and expensive dinner of which he was very proud, which included a 'rare chine of beef' roasted in front of the kitchen fire with his clockwork jack. Many of the dishes were prepared by a professional cook who was brought in for the occasion. Pepys expressed some doubt that the jack could manage to turn this large joint, but was pleased that it 'do carry it well'. He tells us that the chine was put down to the fire before six o' clock. Since he left his office at noon, it would seem that this dinner probably did not get underway until about 1.00pm. So the beef, which was served in the first course may have cooked in front of the fire for as long as five hours. It must have been a massive joint as the usual roasting time recommended for this cut in the cookery books was between three and three and a half hours. I have roasted large joints of this kind many times with a jack and I usually roast them for about four and a half hours.

Perhaps the most celebrated meals Sam describes are his annual 'stone feasts', held in gratitude for a successful operation he had for a painful bladder stone in 1658. An entry for Wednesday 26 March 1662, describes one of these meals. He says, 'I had a pretty dinner for them, viz., a brace of stewed carps, six roasted chickens, and a jowl of salmon, hot, for the first course; a tanzy and two neats’ tongues, and cheese the second; and were very merry all the afternoon, talking and singing and piping upon the flageolet.' A year later on 4 April, he had an even more ambitious feast, 'Very merry at, before, and after dinner, and the more for that my dinner was great, and most neatly dressed by our own only maid. We had a fricasee of rabbits and chickens, a leg of mutton boiled, three carps in a dish, a great dish of a side of lamb, a dish of roasted pigeons, a dish of four lobsters, three tarts, a lamprey pie (a most rare pie), a dish of anchovies, good wine of several sorts, and all things mighty noble and to my great content.'

Pepy's records of his food and drink are useful to the social historian, but in content they are rather scant and frequently only list those foods and dishes which he found notable. His accounts of his stone feasts are among his most detailed entries. His day to day comments on his diet tell us a lot about his food preferences. Since he mentions it nearly fifty times, one of his favourite dishes seems to have been the luxury meat venison, which he usually encountered in the form of venison pasty. Sam usually enjoyed this high status dish, but he also had some bad experiences, such as at a dinner on 1st August 1667 at the house of his next door neighbour, the parliamentarian and admiral Sir William Penn, 'Up, and all the morning at the office. At noon my wife and I dined at Sir W. Pen’s, only with Mrs. Turner and her husband, on a damned venison pasty, that stunk like a devil. However, I did not know it till dinner was done. We had nothing but only this, and a leg of mutton, and a pullet or two.'

Two venison pasties made from seventeenth century designs. They are both over three feet long.

Sam does not seem to have had a great deal of luck with the venison at Sir William's table. He experienced another rotten pasty on 28 August 1668, 'Betimes at my business again, and so to the office, and dined with Brouncker and J. Minnes, at Sir W. Pen’s at a bad pasty of venison,'

At yet another entertainment at the Penn household (Sunday 16 September 1666), he was displeased with the venison again, though this time it was baked in pans rather than in a pasty.  'At noon, with my wife, against her will, all undressed and dirty, dined at Sir W. Pen’s, where was all the company of our families in towne; but, Lord! so sorry a dinner: venison baked in pans, that the dinner I have had for his lady alone hath been worth four of it.' He was more than likely complaining because it was dry. Baking venison, a meat with very little fat does not make sense. Indeed,  according to his numerous records of the meat, the diarist only ever had it cooked this way on this one occasion. It was normally served to him in the form of a pasty, or more infrequently boiled.

So why were some of Sam's pasties tainted? In one entry for 10th July 1666, he indicates that a pasty made in his kitchen was sent to the bakers - "At noon home to dinner and then to the office; the yarde being very full of women (I believe above three hundred) coming to get money for their husbands and friends that are prisoners in Holland; and they lay clamouring and swearing and cursing us, that my wife and I were afeard to send a venison-pasty that we have for supper to-night to the cook's to be baked, for fear of their offering violence to it: but it went, and no hurt done." So it looks like Mrs Pepys occasionally tried her hand at making them herself. But a venison pasty was more often made by a cook on the estate where the deer had been hunted. A whole boned side was encased in a pastry crust (usually rye paste) so these pasties were very large. When cool they were stored in a larder, where under cold conditions they could keep for months. The thick pastry casing prevented bacteria from entering and causing decay, at least for a while. It was a process equivalent to canning. However, this technique of preservation sometimes failed, as Sam found out to his disgust at Penn's dinners. Pasties were often sent from the country seats where the deer had been hunted, frequently to London, where they were much appreciated as gifts. Some travelled great distances. There are sixteenth century records of these great pasties being sent to France. Sam and his neighbour William Penn probably got hold of them, as well as raw venison meat from noble friends who owned deer parks. Venison was not a meat you could normally buy from a butcher.

Venison pasty was on the bill of fare at an extraordinary feast which Pepys attended in 1685, many years after he stopped writing his diary. Most scholars have overlooked this meal in the many published discussions of Pepy's diet because they have tended to focus on his diary entries. This was the coronation feast of James II. Although we do not have a firsthand account by Pepys of the occasion, the king commissioned the herald Francis Sandford to write a comprehensive book on the event. This includes a detailed description of the feast, which compared to the everyday meals he describes in his diary, must have been the most sumptuous repast that Sam ever experienced.

Sam sat somewhere down this end of the bishops' table on the right hand side of the hall

As one of the barons of the cinque ports (five maritime towns on the south coast), he was not only entitled to help carry the king's canopy, but also to attend the feast in Westminster Hall. He sat on a table reserved for the Archbishops, Bishops, Barons of the Cinque Ports and Judges.

Pepys had been fairly intimate with James when he was the Duke of York. Here he is again supporting the royal canopy.

The commemorative silver gilt cup made for Creshald and Gawdon Draper.  Courtesy of V&A

After the coronation, Pepys was also entitled as a perquisite for his role as a bearer to a share in the silver stave mounts and bells from the canopy. We have no idea what he did with his silver, but two of his fellow barons - Creshald and Gawdon Draper, who were from the same family, pooled and recycled their portions. Their silver was made up into a cup engraved with an image of the king's canopy in the latest chinoiserie style. This remarkable object was recently acquired by the V&A. Creshald, who was a baron for Wincelsea bore one of the staves of the king's canopy, while Gawdon, who represented Rye, held a stave of the canopy over the queen consort Maria de Modena.

At Charles II's coronation in 1661 an unruly brawl broke out at the beginning of the feast, as the barons of the cinque ports struggled with some of the king's footmen, who were determined to take the canopy from them. 'But at the Vpper end of the ffirst Table sate the
 Bishops, & below them the Judges, & the rest of the
 long Robe, & at the Table of the Masters of Chancery sate the Barons of the Cinque Ports: ffor as
 soone as they had brought the Canopy over the King 
to the ffoote of the stepps & that the King was retired, some of the Kings ffootemen most insolently
 and violently seised on the Canopy, & the Barons endeavouring to keepe it as their just right, were
 drawne downe to the lower end of the Hall, still
 keeping their hold, where accidentally Mr Owen
 York Herauld, seeing the Contest, caused the 
dore to be shutt, & his Majestie being advertised of
 this Insolency, Comanded one of the Equerries to 
goe & cause the Canopy to be delivered to the Barons, who by this meanes, lost their place at 
the vpper end of the Table assigned them.'* 

James II's coronation feast in Westminster Hall was superintended by the king's master cook Patrick Lamb. The table at which Pepys dined was furnished with one hundred and forty four dishes. Most of these were meat and fish dishes, including lots of pies, but there were eighteen salads on the table and luxury items like asparagus, mango, bamboo, truffles and morels. Scattered among the dishes of puffins, pallets rago'd, whole roasted fawns and pettitoes, were tarts, jellies, blancmanges and other sweet dishes. The king and queen's table was lavishly embellished en ambigu with three tall pyramids of sweetmeats and fruit. Sam's table had twenty-seven dishes of sweetmeats ranging down the table, so like the salads they were easily accessible to the diners. In the table plan below, the green dots represent the position of the salads; the red ones the dessert sweetmeats. The centre of the table must have been a riot of colour.

In addition to the eighteen salads arranged down the middle of the table, there were two more on the table, a salmagundi and a lemon salad, the positions of which I have also marked in green above. In Royal Cookery, (London: 1710),  a book of recipes published in Patrick Lamb's name after his death, there is a recipe for Salmagundy.  It was a type of salad made with lettuce, finely chopped chicken and anchovies, garnished with small poached onions and scalded grapes. With a whole host of spelling variants over the next hundred years, including Solomon Grundy, it went on to become a popular dish. There are versions of Lamb's original recipe in later cookery books, such as that of Hannah Glasse (1747).

Patrick Lamb's Salmagundy on a blue dash charger

In the seventeenth century, the word menu was not in use in this country. The term that was in common usage was 'bill of fare'. However, at James's great feast, the long list of dishes was referred to as a 'catalogue'. Here is the full catalogue of the dishes on Sam's table from my copy of Sandford's book. A venison pasty is listed as item 144. I am not sure whether he got to sample it, but if he did, I hope its was sweeter and more toothsome than the one at Sir William Penn's 'that stunk like a devil.' 

A catalogue of the several meats on Sam's table from Francis Sandford, The History of the Coronation of the Most High, Most Mighty, and Most Excellent Monarch James II (London: 1687). All the other black and white images are also from this book.

* Sir Edward Walker, A Circumstantial account of the Preparations for the Coronation of His Majesty King Charles the Second. (London: 1820), p. 122.

An online article on the James II coronation cup by Tessa Murdoch