White Currants and Elderflowers

Some Culinary Footnotes

In my Northern garden the white currants are just ripening as the last of the elderflowers are opening

For those of you who research the history of food these days, you have a much easier time finding sources than I did when I started getting a taste for the subject in the early sixties. Nowadays there are many online scanned and transcribed texts of period recipe collections, as well as modern reprints and facsimiles. If I wanted to consult one of these rare works I would have to go to the British Library and look at an original copy. The trouble was I was only thirteen when I first got interested, which was too young to have a reader's pass. So the only alternative was to buy originals with whatever pocket money or holiday job wages I could muster. The first cookery book I ever bought was John Nott's Cook's and Confectioner's Dictionary (London: 1723). I found a good working copy for about 75p ($1.00). When most of my friends were spending their spare time listening to the Beatles or the Stones, I was trying to learn to cook out of this masterpiece of baroque gastronomy. I thought I had discovered a golden age of British food and just had to learn more. So, once I had learnt how to seek out and buy books of this kind, I spent every penny I had on acquiring more, and more, and more! Armed with a copy of Arnold Whitaker Oxford's bibliography, I started hunting out some of the key works he describes in what became my bedside bible.* 

I was lucky. With not too much outlay, by the time I was sixteen I owned good original copies of works by Gervase Markham, Joseph Cooper, Kenelm Digby, Hannah Wooley and a few other Jacobean cookery writers. In 1967 I cashed my £40 premium bonds to buy a perfect copy of John Parkinson's Theatrum Botanicum (London; 1640). This teenage obsession grew into a lifelong passion, the result of which is a lovely and incredibly useful book collection. An early purchase which really tickled me, was Mr Oxford's own copy of T. Hall's The Queen's Royal Cookery. It was an imperfect one with a note in Oxford's hand explaining that the last page of the text was missing, but it only cost me half a crown (twelve and a half new pence)! I have since found a better copy, but I had to pay a lot more than that for it.

By the time I was in my twenties, I became particularly interested in works on confectionery. The very first I acquired was a second edition of Borella's The Court and Country Confectioner (London: 1772). It was this marvellous little book that kindled an early interest in ice cream and I was soon attempting to learn how to make ices using the methods described by this head confectioner to the Spanish Ambassador .

I remember buying this particular book in July when the elder bushes were in flower, so I had to have a go at making his Muscadine Water Ice, a lemon sorbet flavoured with elder flowers. This was the very first period ice I ever made. I used salt and ice in a bucket and an old milk can because I did not at the time own a sorbetiere. Once I had figured out Borella's rather confusing instructions with his cross references to other recipes, I got it to work really well. What amazed me was the incredible smoothness of the finished ice - no detectable ice crystals and a silky feel on the tongue. In a brief footnote to his recipe, Borella (we do not know his first name) explains that a variation on the theme was to make the ice with white currants.

This is a sorbetiere and spaddle, the equipment Mr Borella used to make his muscadine ice. I prefer this to any modern ice cream maker. It is usually quicker and makes wonderful smooth ice creams and water ices

This unassuming little N.B. is one of those treasures that occur from time to time in our culinary literature, where in a brief note a truly wonderful masterpiece of a dish is delineated. I managed to get hold of a huge basket of white currants from a friend in Sussex and had a go. What a revelation! This was in 1971, when many considered British gastronomy to be in a trough of despond. Not in my London flat it was n't! I fed my flatmates with this icy nectar and they were truly astonished. Marine Ices had been open for a few years down the road in Chalk Farm, at the time about the only place in London where you could get decent ice cream. But as nice as their ices were, Mr Borella's Muscadine Water Ice with elderflowers and white currants was on a much higher plain.

Mr Borella's White Currant and Elderflower Muscadine Ice made in a Georgian fluted mould

I had a lot of the currants left over and with them made another eighteenth century delicacy, white currant shrub, from Charlotte Mason's The Lady's Assistant (London: 1773), though delicate is probably the wrong adjective to describe this fiery high octane liqueur. Again, the recipe is in the form of a very brief note, the use of white currants just an alternative suggestion to red ones. I made about a quart with my currants - again a superb forgotten use for these translucent, pearl like fruits.

* A. W. Oxford,  English Cookery Books to the Year 1850 (London: 1913).

La Gelateria Scappi - è un bidone!

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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