Frederick Nutt's Millefruit Biscuits

Frederick Nutt's Millefruit Biscuits on a small English bobbin stemmed salver from the 1760s. The raised edge around the top of the salver is perfect for stopping small sweetmeats from slipping, making it very easy to construct miniature pyramids.  

From the seventeenth century onwards English cookery and confectionery texts abound with recipes for a family of biscuits which contain no flour. The ingredients are held together with a simple mixture of powdered sugar and egg white. Base ingredients include everything from dried jasmine flowers, slivered almonds to slices of candied peel. One variant, known as bane bread or bean bread, consists of little piles of flaked almonds held together with an orange or rosewater icing and baked with a generous scattering of caraway comfits. These biscuits were usually baked on wafer paper. They blister a little while cooking and sometimes spread out a little beyond their brittle bounds, but they crisp-up once cold and hold their crispness for weeks. They remind me very much of the Italian bruti et buoni to which I am sure they are closely related. The London confectioner Frederick Nutt, one time apprentice to the great Domenico Negri gives a number of recipes for this type of biscuit, which may have originated from the Italian peninsula. For instance, one, in his Complete Confectioner of 1789 called 'almond faggots' is very close to modern Umbrian bruti et buoni. These delicate crunchy biscuits have a feather-light texture and are redolent of orange flowers. They were probably eaten with sweet dessert wines.

However, Nutt's most interesting recipe in this genre is for a biscuit consisting of little morsels of citrus peel, which he calls millefruit biscuits. As well as the finely chopped preserved peel of oranges and lemons, they also contain angelica, slivered sweet almonds and bitter almonds, all held together with egg white and orange flower water icing. I have put Nutt's original recipe below. Try it. These unusual, delicate biscuits are easy and quick to make.

Nutt's book, first published in the year of the French Revolution was in its first few editions issued anonymously, the author being named at first as 'A Person'. Although Nutt's marvellous book is forgotten  now, in its day it proved to be a best seller and went into a number of editions. Its easy to follow recipes have a professional ring about them. It certainly affords a remarkable glimpse into the sophistication of late Georgian dessert food. Nutt also gives us recipes for both Millefruit Ice Cream and Millefruit Water Ice. Just like his biscuits, these two frozen dessert dishes are spotted with little dots of cochineal at the end of the freezing process to create a kind of marbled effect. I have made both and they are excellent. I will devote a post to them at some time. But in the meantime, here is the process to make his delightful Millefruit Biscuits.

Angelica is often used as a decoration, but here is an essential element in this biscuit. I use apricot kernels instead of bitter almonds.

The nuts, peels and angelica are mixed together with the icing

A teaspoon full is dropped onto paper - I use rice paper - and are spotted with cochineal with a small paint brush

They bake to a fine light brown and crisp up once they are cool

The finished biscuits. They are wonderfully crisp and have a perfumed, archaic citrus peel flavour

If you live in Britain watch Ivan make Frederick Nutt's 1789 Spice Biscuits on a BBC video. Not available outside the UK. Sorry.

Go, bind thou up yon dangling apricocks

Charles Elmé Francatelli's German Tourte of Apricots is a wonderful tart from the early reign of Queen Victoria

Those of you who follow this blog are probably aware that I love food that looks good. And the kind of good looks that I love are those that express the extraordinary skill and attention to detail that cooks in the past lavished on their art. Their sense of food aesthetics was very different to ours. I am sure they would have been completely puzzled by the abstract smears, dustings, drizzles, foams and stacks of contemporary plated-up restaurant food. I hope this blog is a healthy antidote to such matters.

But I also love food that tastes good and am always on the look out for special recipes that would be suitable to serve to guests who attend my various period cookery courses. Many of those who have come have waxed lyrical about some apricot dishes that I serve when I can get hold of decent fruit. I thought I would share those recipes with you.

Charles Elmé Francatelli in the 1840s

The first one is a lovely apricot tart which is in Charles Elmé Francatelli's book The Cook's Guide (London: 1855). Francatelli was born in Clarkenwell, the Italian district of London to Italian parents who worked as domestic servants. In the early 1840s he served briefly as Queen Victoria's chef de cuisine at Buckingham Palace, but was not happy with the sanitary arrangements in the palace kitchen and left! I like to think that this recipe, seemingly of German origin, might have been a court favourite in the Duchy of Saxe-Coberg-Gotha. We will never know, but perhaps Francatelli prepared it for Prince Albert. Here is the recipe, but beware I do not go in for contemporary redactions. If you really want to learn about food in the past, just do as you are told. The old recipes that follow are perfectly clear.

Half the apricots are dusted with lemon rind and sugar and baked on a sheet of pastry. The other half are cooked into a jam-like preserve with their blanched kernels, which is spread in between and over them.

The baked tourte is sprinkled with cinnamon sugar before being served

Brilliant with vanilla or apricot ice cream

My next two recipes are from a hundred years earlier. They are both from a lovely little cookery book first published in Pontefract in Yorkshire by Mrs Elizabeth Moxon in 1741. Her English Housewifery Exemplified is a real antidote to the complex recipes of the male cooks of this period. And quite rightly it went on to become one of the best selling books of the eighteenth century. It contains a number of regional Yorkshire recipes, including some very old fashioned gingerbreads. The two recipes I have chosen are sweet ones, the first, 'Apricock Jumballs' is a very artistic and delightful item of confectionery, while the second is a wonderful cream pudding.

I cook the apricot paste and sugar together in a preserving pan until they form a thick paste like pate de fruit

In The New World of English Words (London: 1678) Edward Phillips defines the name for this confection thus, 'Jumbals, a sort of Sugared past, wreathed into knots'. These knotted delicacies were usually made with a kind of biscuit or marchpane dough and were baked. They probably emerged from the craze in the 1570s for knotted strap work. Jumbals were made all over Europe. In France they were called gimblette, in Italy gemelli. They almost certainly derive their name from the Italian verb gemáre - 'to divide asunder'.* These confections were responsible for the term 'to jumble up'. Jumbals were made by professional early modern period confectioners to a very high level of complexity and are frequently depicted in Netherlandish paintings. 

A bowl of sweetmeats including candied peel, rolled wafers and some impressive jumbles. A detail from Jan Breughel the Elder, An Allegory of Taste. 1618. Prado Madrid.

The more basic apricot jumbles below were made on my Sugarwork and Confectionery Course and are in the form of true lovers knots. Similar jumbals or knots were made with pippin (apple paste). They have a really concentrated flavour of fruit.

Elizabeth Moxon's Apricock Jumballs

The last dish is a lovely cream custard covered with confited apricots. I have given you a whole double page spread, as you need to refer to both Moxon's instructions to make Apricock Custard and her Apricock Pudding in order to make sense of the recipe. Note her recipe 'To make Jumballs another way', which is a baked biscuit version, but like a lot of later jumbles, not jumbled up at all, but like a flat biscuit. 

I make the custard as Mrs Moxon instructs, but frequently bake it in a dish in a bain marie in a cool oven until it just sets. I then put the cooked apricots on top. The combination of the rich cream and the half candied apricots is superb. Do try it.

Moxon's Apricock Custard

*John Florio, Queene Anne's Newe Worlde of Words. (London: 1611).

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

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