Ivan Day - Some Forthcoming Lectures

I thought that some of you who follow this blog might be interested in some lectures I am giving over the next few months. I am in Hartford, CT later this month presenting a lecture at the Wadsworth Atheneum and a workshop at the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale. These are internal events and as far as I am aware are now fully subscribed. However, on the 14th April, I am giving a public lecture at Christies New York and reading a paper on the 30th at the Bard Graduate Center as part of the symposium Kitchen and Table in Early Modern Period Europe and Colonial America. On 7th June I am speaking at the Garden Museum in London on food at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. There are further details of all these events below.



Christies NYC
Dining Culture in Enlightenment Europe

A lecture by Ivan Day

From the townhouses of Edinburgh to the palaces of St Petersburg, from the chocolate houses of Madrid to the grand salons of Stockholm, the cuisine and dining protocol of the French ancien regime spread rapidly during the course of the eighteenth century to all of the great European centers, frequently obliterating the native high status food traditions of those who adopted it. In this illustrated lecture,British food historian Ivan Day will examine the dramatic cultural impact that the spread of French court food had on the non-French speaking aristocratic world. He will not only discuss the remarkable food itself, but its mode of service and the glittering material culture which it spawned.

Please join us for a fascinating look at the cuisine and dining protocol of the French ancient regime which spread throughout Europe during the 18th century. In this illustrated lecture, British food historian Ivan Day will examine French court food’s dramatic cultural impact, its mode of service and the glittering material culture it inspired.

Sunday, April 14 2013
3:00 pm

Christies

20 Rockefeller Plaza
New York City

Cost to attend is $25.00 and must be paid in advance – gratis to students upon presentation of school ID.
To RSVP and arrange payment, please contact Johanna Josefsson at
jjosefsson@christies.com or on +1 212 636 2215

The Bard Graduate Center NYC
Symposium: Kitchen and Table in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America



Displaying the Kitchen and Table
A lecture by Ivan Day

The vast material culture spawned by the consumption of food has frequently been studied by art historians whose chief criteria have been aesthetic developments, makers, materials and other formal issues. Considerations of utility - how objects were actually used and particularly how they were used together - have often been glossed over and rarely fully discussed. In terms of museum presentation, this means that most of the silver, glass, ceramics and other tableware associated with dining are arranged in display cabinets as precious objects worthy of our admiration, but removed from their original human context, a table surrounded by diners. On the other hand, the more humble utilitarian objects associated with the production of food have often been perceived as historical ‘bygones’ or curios, frequently grouped together as ‘kitchenalia’ and not usually considered worthy of study by the serious scholar. Using examples of period dining room re-creations and open kitchen displays he has curated over the past two decades, the speaker will discuss issues of interpretation, authenticity and ways forward for contextual displays of this nature.

Registration Details and Symposium Programme

Monday April 29 2012

9.30am to 6.00pm

The Bard Graduate Center
18 West 86th Street
New York, 

New York 10024
Telephone 212 501 3000
E-mail generalinfo@bgc.bard.edu

The Garden Museum London

Symposium: Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens

I have just been told by the organiser that this event has been cancelled!!!

A Quart of Arrack and a Heart Cake

Food and Drink in Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens 1661-1859

A lecture by Ivan Day

Monday 17th June 2012

For more information on this event go to the GARDEN MUSEUM WEBSITE

The Garden Museum

5 Lambeth Palace Rd London SE1 7LB

020 7401 8865

Eating Egypt

Pharaonical Feasts and a Regency Ghost

William (Gugliamo) Jarrin (1784-1848). Stipple engraving (1820). 

I have not posted an article on this blog for ages. A number of demanding TV and museum projects have conspired to make me so busy that I have had no time to add anything in the past couple of months. So with all this going on, I thought I would set aside an hour or two to share with you a recent and remarkable find.

I have frequently mentioned the Italian confectioner Willliam Jarrin on this blog. Resident in London in the first half of the nineteenth century, his book The Italian Confectioner (London: 1820) provides a remarkable insight into the extraordinary world of the European confectioner of this period. In my own practical endeavours in this field, I have learnt more from Jarrin's writings than from any other printed historical source. He came to London from Paris in 1817 to work as an ornament maker for the celebrated London confectioner James Gunter. Even by this time the young Italian was a consummate practitioner of sugar sculpture. In his book he boasts of an occasion when he produced a gum paste piece montée for an entertainment in Paris attended by Napoleon, which included a full length sculpture of the Emperor himself. Napoleon was apparently impressed with his work. Jarrin tells us that he preferred to freely model in gum paste, but he also pressed the material into wooden moulds to make all sorts of motifs for various purposes. Like many confectioners, he carved his own moulds, his preferred woods being pear and box. In a chapter entitled Engraving on Wood, he claims that anyone with enough patience could learn to carve moulds of this kind. In 1820, he tells us that he had been practising the art for 16 years, which would have made him 20 years old when he started.

Pear wood confectioner's mould. Engraved on the one side are the words  Jarrin Fecit (private collection)

Until a few days ago, I knew of only one surviving sugar paste mould actually carved by Jarrin, a small slab of pear wood engraved with the figure of a drunken man and two busts - one a man in a tricorn hat, the other a Turk in a turban. This mould is signed Jarrin Fecit (Jarrin he made). These intaglio motifs are for making free-standing features - once knocked out of the mould, the two halves were joined together. He probably used these figures for ornamenting the tops of twelfth cakes, for which he was famous. Unfortunately, I have not yet located any images of Jarrin's ornamented cakes. But in the trade card below, advertising the wares of one of his London competitors, a twelfth cake surmounted by a group of tiny figures can be seen on the stand on the right.

Now we know of another mould carved by Jarrin, because yesterday I bought a small, but spectacular collection of early nineteenth century confectioner's moulds, which included the striking specimen below which depicts a winged Egyptian mask signed by him on the side. Unusually it is dated - 1820, the very year in which his book was published and portrait engraved. You can imagine my excitement! It is also exceptionally large, taking up almost the full length of a ten inch long block of pear wood. The mould still retains small residual patches of gum paste and starch, though it would be romantic to think that these were left by Jarrin, as the mould may have been used by a more recent confectioner. Jarrin was declared bankrupt in 1828 and in an inventory of his goods are listed 'Moulds, tools and different apparatus' to the value of £200. No doubt this newly discovered mould was once among these items.

An illustration of wood carving gouges from Jarrin's book

Egyptian motifs in architecture, furniture and the decorative arts were very popular at this period. Napoleon's campaign in Egypt (1798-91) and Nelson's victory at the Battle of the Nile (1798) had created a fashion for all things Egyptian in both France and England. In 1807, the Sèvres manufactury near Paris produced a vast porcelain dessert service based on Egyptian motifs which was gifted by Napoleon to Czar Alexander I. It can be seen at the marvellous Kuskovo Palace Museum near Moscow. Another version is on display at Apsley House in London, originally ordered by Napoleon for Josephine, but given as a gift to the Duke of Wellington by Louis XVIII of France. 

The spectacular 1808 Sèvres Egyptian Service laid out in the Kuskovo Palace Museum

Two seminal publications, Charles Percier and Pierre François Léonard Fontaine's Recueil de décorations intérieures (Paris:1801) and Vivant Denon's Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte (Paris:1802) both contained beautiful plates which helped spread the trend for Egyptian based design. In England, the traveller and interior decorator Thomas Hope (1769-1831) was one of the arbiters of taste who was instrumental in popularising the fashion for all things Egyptian in London. His book Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (London: 1807) includes an engraved illustration of an Egyptian room in his own house in Duchess Street off Portland Square, which he designed to house his collection of Egyptian antiquities. 

Thomas Hope, Household Furniture & Interior Decoration. (London:1807).

Some of the most extraordinary examples of Egyptian influenced tableware from this period are a series of silver tureens designed by the great Regency silversmith Paul Storr. The earliest set was made as part of the 'Grand Service' for the Prince of Wales, later George IV (1762-1830) in 1802-3, for his dining table at Carlton House. In 2000 the Royal Collection generously lent one of them to us for the exhibition Eat, Drink and be Merry and there are some excellent photographs of it in the book of the same name, which I edited. A very similar set made in 1807-08 for the Duke of Cumberland can be seen in the Gilbert Collection in the V&A. Unlike the Royal Collection set these are not gilt. If you look carefully at the example below, you can see an Egyptian winged mask very much like that carved by Jarrin on the lower part of the bowl.      

Silver soup tureen and stand by Paul Storr (1771-1844) made in 1807-08. Photo © V&A.

A close-up of Jarrin's as yet uncleaned mould-  a pharaoh complete with remnants of sugar paste and starch

So the Prince Regent and his Carlton House guests enjoyed their soups served from Egyptian style tureens But what of Jarrin's mould? It is a sugar paste mould, probably used to make a motif for a complex sugar caprice for a dessert centrepiece. Certainly something much grander than a twelfth cake. When gilded this object was probably indistinguishable from some of the real silver gilt metalwork on the table. So did Regency diners actually enjoy eating food with a pharaonical theme? Well the evidence points to the fact that they did and not just as sugar decorations on fancy table ornaments. After the Battle of the Nile in 1798, Josiah Wedgewood started manufacturing creamware flummery and jelly moulds with Egyptian motifs. He produced moulds embellished with such motifs as the Nile crocodile, the sacred musical instrument known as a sistrum, funeral urns, lotus flowers and dozens of other ancient Egyptian symbols. Below is a selection of some of these unusual moulds.

Early nineteenth century Wedgewood mould with an image of the falcon god Horus. Photo: Mike and Sue Witts

Early nineteenth century Wedgewood mould with a sistrum. Photo: Mike and Sue Witts

Early nineteenth century Wedgewood mould with a sacred Nile lotus. Photo: Mike and Sue Witts

Early nineteenth century Wedgewood mould with Egyptian motif. Photo: Mike and Sue Witts

A couple of months ago, I was called upon to produce a full Regency ball supper for a forthcoming BBC documentary called Pride and Prejudice, Having a Ball. The programme celebrates the bicentenary of Jane Austen's wonderful novel by attempting to recreate the Netherfield Ball at Chawton Hall, her brother's home in Hampshire. It will be screened here in the UK fairly soon on BBC2. As this was meant to be a recreation of a Regency ball, I decided to have at least one ancient Egyptian themed dish on the supper table. So I used a mould in my collection which turns out the curious jelly below. In classical Greece this ram's skull was known as an agricranion, but in this version the skull is surmounted by a sacred lotus flower, so Wedgewood's designer probably concocted it from an Egyptian image he had seen somewhere or other. I cannot guarantee if you will see this colourful dish on the table in the programme, as I have no control over how it will be edited. Besides, across the first course and the dessert there are over 71 different dishes served out in a full scale à la française supper, so if you blink you will probably miss it anyway. Once the programme is aired I will post some details about the food and table setting that I am sure will be missed in the narrative.

As the nineteenth century rolled on, culinary Egyptomania continued and was particularly well expressed in a number of pharaonical ice creams. Ice cream pyramids, obelisks and even sphinxes appeared on the scene. In my own collection I have a couple of obelisks complete with hieroglyphics and the two small sphinx moulds below.

Nineteenth century three part ice cream moulds. Being an Italian, Jarrin specialised in ices and a whole chapter is devoted to them in his book. He even had his own ice house in Cromer Street near Kings Cross. When he went bankrupt in 1828, he owned £200 of pewter utensils.

The inside detail is very crisp

I mentioned at the beginning of this post that  I acquired Jarrin's Egyptian mould in a group of others. The remainder are unsigned, but Jarrin had a distinctive carving style and I suspect that some may also be by his hand. One of these allows a crown to be made out of sugar paste by flexing the sugar pressing round a former into a circle, a common technique that was also used to make three dimensional sugar baskets. I thought at first this may have been for making a royal crown for the top of a twelfth cake. But on the verso of the same mould - it is carved on both sides - there are some large ostrich feathers. In fact it was actually designed to make a sugar Prince of Wales feathers ornament. 

One of Jarrin's contemporaries, the Yorkshire confectioner Joseph Bell, actually illustrated a cake surmounted by a sugar paste Prince of Wales feathers in his A Treatise of Confectionery (Newcastle upon Tyne: 1817). Bell's cake is decorated with swags and drops, garter stars and patriotic emblems in the form of the flowers of England, Scotland and Wales. I own plenty of Regency period moulds for making all of these ornaments, with the exception of the lion and the unicorn. But I expect one day they too will turn up. When they do, I will make the cake for you. 

By the way, the ghost of Joseph Bell's daughter Eleanor is said to haunt the beach at Scarbororough, where he had a confectioner's shop. In 1804 she was tragically murdered and her body left on the beach at  Cayton south of the town. Her killer was never found. More on her distraught father Joseph, another forgotten British 'food hero' in a later post. 

An ornamented cake made in honour of the Prince of Wales from Joseph Bell, A Treatise of Confectionery (Newcastle upon Tyne: 1817).

Paul Storr's Egyptian tureens in the Royal Collection

For  information on the influence of the Egyptian style in Europe, see Patrick Connor ed., The Inspiration of Egypt: Its influence on British Artists, Travellers and Designers, 1700-1900 (Brighton Borough Council, Brighton, 1983); and Jean-Marcel Humbert, Egyptomania: Egypt in Western Art, 1730-1930 (Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, 1994).

Henry VIII's Jely Ypocras?

Some spices commonly used in the preparation of hippocras - starting in the left hand bottom corner and rotating clockwise - grains of paradise (referred to in the recipes quoted here as grains), galingale, long pepper and cubebs

I recently had an email enquiry from the Australian historian Rachel Grimmer concerning the use of jelly moulds in sixteenth century England at the time of Henry VIII. Of all English monarchs Henry is probably the first to come to mind when thinking of feasting and gastronomic excess, though bills of fare for specific meals at his court are rare. Neither Peter Brears in his excellent book on the food culture of Hampton Court All the Kings Cooks, nor Alison Simm in Food and Feast in Tudor England give any examples of Henrician menus. Nevertheless, a few 'ordinances of fares of the dietts to be served to the King's Highnesse' transcribed from a manuscript of 1526 were published in 1790 in one of my favourite sources on British royal domestic matters, the wonderful A Collection of Ordinances and Regulations for the Government of the Royal Household printed for the Society of Antiquaries. And jelly appears on the menu. In fact a jelly made with the spiced wine hippocras is featured at the beginning of the second course of a royal diet 'on a flesh day' served alongside cream of almonds. (Though some doubt has been raised about this because of the comma separating the words Jelly and Ipocras - please read Tudor Cook's very pertinent comment below). 

Jely ypocras seems to have been a royal favourite. It also occurs in an earlier bill of fare for a Henrician feast transcribed from a since lost manuscript in 1672 by the antiquarian Elias Ashmole in his magisterial History of the Noble Order of the Garter. Unlike the 'dietts' of 1526 this earlier meal was for a specific occasion and a very grand one too. In the second course of the dinner held as part of the Garter celebrations at St George's Hall, Windsor Castle on Sunday 29th May in 1520, 'jely ypocras' was again served to Henry XVIII and Queen Catherine of Aragon. As in the 1526 diet it is listed as the first dish in the second course.

How this jelly was presented to table is not indicated. Was it moulded, or served in glass or silver vessels? I don't suppose we will ever know. I have seen a number of carved wooden moulds (all continental) which date from the sixteenth century, but they are all carved in shallow relief and were probably used for printing marchpane paste and cotoniacs. But sophisticated methods of moulding jellies did exist at the Tudor court. A letter dated July 10th 1517, sent to Isabella d'Este, Marchesa of Mantua by Francesco Chieregato, the apostolic nuncio in England, describes a remarkable feast which Henry gave in honour of an embassy sent by the King of Spain. This extraordinary supper, which followed a magnificent pageant and joust, puts the 1520 garter feast and the rather domestic 1526 'dietts' firmly in the shade. Chieregato's comments at the end of his letter on the elegant manners at the English court belie the popular but mistaken image of Tudor dining as a boorish free-for-all. But note the fourth paragraph on the twenty different jellies served at the feast, 

' All the knights and jousters then assembled together, and having made a fine procession around the tiltyard, accompanied the King to the palace, where his Majesty had caused a sumptuous supper to be prepared. There were present the King, the two Queens, the Cardinal, all the aforesaid ambassadors, the Duke of Norfolk, the Marquis (of Dorset), and their ladies, together with other baronesses, in such numbers, that at table each man paired with a lady.

There was a buffet set out, 30 feet in length, and 20 feet high, with silver gilt vases, and vases of gold, worth vast treasure, none of which were touched. All the small platters used for the table-service, namely “seyphi,” dishes, basins, plates, saltcellars, and goblets were all of pure gold. The large vases were all of silver gilt, very costly and precious.

The guests remained at table for seven hours by the clock. All the viands placed before the King were borne by an elephant, or by lions, or panthers, or other animals, marvellously designed; and fresh representations were made constantly with music and instruments of divers sorts. The removal and replacing of dishes the whole time was incessant, the hall in every direction being full of fresh viands on their way to table. Every imaginable sort of meat known in the kingdom was served, and fish in like manner, even down to prawn pasties (fino alli gambari de pastelli); but the jellies (zeladie), of some 20 sorts perhaps, surpassed everything; they were made in the shape of castles and of animals of various descriptions, as beautiful and as admirable as can be imagined.

In short, the wealth and civilization of the world are here; and those who call the English barbarians appear to me to render themselves such. I here perceive very elegant manners, extreme decorum, and very great politeness; and amongst other things there is this most invincible King, whose acquirements and qualities are so many and excellent that I consider him to excel all who ever wore a crown; and blessed and happy may this country call itself in having as its lord so worthy and eminent a sovereign, whose sway is more bland and gentle than the greatest liberty under any other. After supper his Majesty and the chief ambassador from the Catholic King, together with other lords, danced with the ladies until daybreak.'*

The great Isabella d'Este, the recipient of Chieregato's letter had a real interest in this occasion, as her husband Francesco Gonzaga had gifted a magnificent horse to King Henry which was ridden at the joust. Feasting was an important element of life in the Gonzaga family and Isabella was well used to lavish banquets. Bartolommeo Sacchi (1412-1478), better known as Platina, author of the first printed cookery book had worked for Francesco's grandfather Ludovico II Gonzaga as tutor to his children. It is interesting to see how Cheiregato is trying to impress the marchesa with the scale of Henry's feast and to perhaps correct any stereotypical ideas she may have had about English food.

Isabella d'Este (1474-1539) by Titian

There were earlier examples of moulded jellies at the coronation feast of the eight year old Henry VI at Westminster Hall in 1429, including one in the form of a 'Gely party wryten and noted with Te Deum laudamus'. So the technology of making elaborate dishes of this kind had been around for at least a century before Henry's jellies in the form of castles and animals were borne to his table on the backs of elephants, panthers and lions.

Although there are recipes for plain hippocras in early sixteenth century cookery texts, a specific recipe for a jelly made with hippocras does not appear until the reign of Elizabeth I. It was published in A. W., A Book of Cookrye, Very Necessary For All Such As Delight Therin. (London: 1584) and is simply called jelly.

In case you find the black letter of the original difficult to read, here is a modern transcription.

To make Ielly.

Take Calves feete and fley them, and faire washe them, and set them on to seethe in faire licour, and faire scum them, and when they be tender sod, faire straine out the licour, and see your licour be verye cleere, and put your licour into a pot, if there be a pottle of it, put a pottle of claret wine unto it, and two pound Sugar, a quartern of sinamon, half a quartern of ginger, an ounce of Nutmegs, an ounce of grains, some long Pepper, a fewe Cloves whole, a few Coliander sads, a little salt, Isonglasse being faire washed and laid in water a day before, Turnsole being aired be the fier and dusted, and when they be wel sod, let it run through a bag, and put two whites of Egs in the bag.

One of the ingredients of A.W.'s recipe is turnsole, a dyestuff commonly used to colour jellies and other foods. It was chiefly made from the fruits of Chrozophora tinctoria, a type of spurge found in the Mediterranean. It appeared in commerce as a rag which you macerated in your jelly mixture in order to release its colour. Henry Lyte in his A niewe Herball or Historie of Plantes (London:1578) tells us that ‘they die and stayne old linnen cloutes and ragges into a purple colour wherewithall in this countrey, men use to colour gellies, wynes, fyne confeciones and comfittes.' More on turnsole and its applications in the kitchen in another post. 

Chrozophora tinctoria from Pierre Pomet, A Compleat History of Drugs (London: 1737)

Chrozophora tinctoria or turnsole. Be careful with this plant. Like other members of the Euphorbiaceae, it contains toxic glucosides. Put it in your jely ypocras at your peril.

From A Noble Book of Festes Royalle and Cokery (London: 1500)

There is much more on Hippocras on my website.

* Brown, Rawdon et al. Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, Volume 2: 1509-1519 (London: 1867) 918.

From Jardiniere to Satyr Pie

A copper jardiniere with a hidden history

New insights into Britain's extraordinary culinary history sometimes turn up in quite unexpected ways. A few weeks ago a great friend of mine, the sharp eyed Michael Finlay, a fellow Cumbrian with a lifetime's experience of dealing and collecting fine antiques, turned up at my house with an object he had just purchased. The vendor had described it as a Victorian jardiniere. This handsome looking copper vessel did indeed look like it may once have been given pride of place on a window sill, perhaps with a large aspidistra growing out of it. But careful scrutiny of its structure alerted the ever watchful Michael to the fact that it was not what it seemed. 

Michael is a truly remarkable man. Over the years he has put together many major specialist collections of antique objects. These include bronze bell mortars, writing equipment and mining tokens. Once he has built up a large and representative assemblage, he then usually writes the authoritative book on the subject and sells the collection to finance his next interest. His remarkable book Western Writing Implements: In the Age of the Quill Pen won the Daily Telegraph book of the year award and now changes hands for hundreds of pounds. In the last few years he has turned his attention to collecting culinary antiques, an interest for which he blames me. In a very short time he has put together a museum style collection of the very highest quality. For instance in just one year he has assembled a truly extraordinary collection of pastry jagging irons, including wonderful rare examples dating from the renaissance through to the nineteenth century. They will form the subject of his next book, which is already taking shape. Michael has just launched a marvellous new website. There is a link at the end of this post.

However, let's return to his copper jardiniere. Michael thought that it had a very close resemblance to a nineteenth century pie mould. He should know, because he has some very nice examples himself and has spent many fruitful hours in my kitchen making pies with them. He was pretty sure he was right, but wanted confirmation from me. From the very moment I first saw it, I knew it had indeed once been a large copper pie mould, but had been subjected to a conversion probably at about the time of the First World War. Its once separate sections had been brazed together and a couple of brass handles attached. It was in fact one of the most unusual pie forms I have ever seen and certainly the most handsome. As you can see from the photograph, it is ornamented with the grimacing head of a horned satyr, perhaps intended to be old Pan himself. What a pie it must have made! A very interesting detail was an engraved ownership mark, an Italianate capital H surmounted by an earl's coronet. 

Marks of this kind are often seen on items of batterie de cuisine out of great house kitchens and this particular one was very familiar to me as I had worked many times in the historic kitchen in Harewood House near Leeds, where many items are engraved with an identical symbol. However, there were also earls of Huntingdon, Halifax and Harrington, so the jury is still out as to which noble kitchen it originally came from. But I suspect it is from Harewood. How it came to be turned into a plant pot is a mystery. 

Ivan making pies some years ago in the Harewood kitchen using some of the copper pie moulds that have survived there from the nineteenth century

Michael took the jardiniere to a metalworking friend who skilfully converted it back to a pie mould.Yesterday, we both had a great baking session and used it to make a pie, the first time it had been used for that purpose for at least a hundred years. The problem now is how do I find a butcher who can provide me with satyr meat to make the filling?

Our 'satyr' pie with its lid  ready to be ornamented

With the help of a jagging iron and a couple of pie boards to make pastry ornaments, we embellished the lid

The reborn 'satyr pie' egged and glazed, a testimony to the once fine art of British pastry making

Michael Finlay's Website

Eat the Entire Creation if you dare ....

...but Beware of the Fatal Effects of Gluttony

I have often thought that if the great biblical deluge had taken place in the eighteenth century and Noah had been an Englishman, all those creatures which God placed in his care would never have survived. They would have all been devoured by Mr and Mrs Noah and all the little Noahs before they even had a chance to go forth and multiply and fill the four corners of the earth. Eighteenth century English diners were serial carnivores and I sometimes think it was their gastronomic ambition to gnaw their way through the entire creation. Just look at this pie baked in 1763 in the kitchen of a long vanished country house close to where I live in the English Lake District.

From the Manuscript Commonplace Book of Richard Hoggart of Clifton, Westmorland.  1760s (private collection)

If you find the handwriting a bit difficult, here is a transcript.

Feb 24th 1763

Contents of a Pye lately made at Lowther Hall

2 Geese, 4 Tame Ducks, 2 Turkeys, 4 Fowls, 1 Wild Goose, 6 Wild Ducks, 3 Teals, 2 Starlings, 12 Partridges, 15 Woodcocks, 2 Guinea Cocks, 3 Snipes, 6 Plovers, 3 Water Hens, 6 Widgeons, I Curlew, 46 Yellow Hammers, 15 Sparrows, 2 Chaffinches, 2 Larks, 3 Thrushes, 1 Fieldfare, 6 Pidgeons, 4 Blackbirds, 20 Rabbits, 1 Leg of Veal, Half a Ham, 3 Bushels of Flower, 2 Stone of Butter - the Pye weighed 22 stone

This makes the heroic Yorkshire Christmas Pies of the period with their fillings of boned turkey, goose and other poultry seem positively parsimonious. The ecological consequences of a pie filled with the fruits of a mass slaughter on this scale must have been severe. I don't suppose much bird song was heard in the Lowther Valley for some months. 

But if you really wanted to munch your way through the entire avian population (with a few leverets and baby rabbits thrown in for good measure), why not do it in a more organised way and hold a dinner four times a year to regale your guests with just those birds that are in season. Here are four bills of fare offered by Charles Carter in his rare and much neglected The Compleat City and Country Cook (London: 1732). The ornithologists among you will have fun ticking off the various species on offer here against the twitcher's bible - The British List:A Checklist of Birds of Britain. Not quite all the birds of the air, but still a pretty impressive assemblage and a lot more generous than that modern emblem of plentitude, the 'family bucket'.

I think this justifies my claim that we English were dedicated carnivores, though you must understand that a lot of the birds served up at these dinners, such as the chick peepers, green geese, turkey polts, pheasant polts, squabs etc, are baby chicks, barely just sprouting their juvenile feathers. So as well as enthusiastic zoophagists, we also regularly committed serial infanticide. Unlike his modern equivalent, the Georgian diner had no sentimental barriers to eating babies - they tasted better and were more tender than adults. So what was the problem with a massacre of the innocents? 

If a scorched earth ornithological orgy every three months failed to sate your appetite, you could always turn your gustatory inclinations to the scaly creatures of the briny deep.  Here is another of Carter's great feasts, this time A Table of all Sorts of Fish, published in his third book The London and Country Cook (London; 1749).  

Ever since the medieval period some classes of Englishmen have liked plenty of variety on the table in front of them. Fear of mass extinctions did not cross their minds. This was particulary true at the great livery company feasts in the City of London. The poet Edward Hake, writing in 1579 in his Newes out of St Powles Churchyard describes the variety of birds served at one of these occasions. 

The keen bird watchers among you (and thanks to all those who helped me identify water dab as the little grebe) should have fun identifying some of these creatures from their Tudor names. Well over a decade ago I created a table at the Museum of London based on a feast book for the Grocers' Company from 1566. Here is the table, an avian disaster zone if ever I saw one. 

I am a fairly committed carnivore myself, but this kind of excess has always troubled me. I am no anthropologist, but I suspect 'heroic' eating on this grand scale must have grown out of male hunting culture. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries one of the most conspicuous dishes of the baroque feast was the olio, a mixed meat stew of Spanish origin which was enjoyed on high status tables all over Europe. It was an edible expression of the extent of the aristocratic host's estates and game parks. Remember aristocratic gentlemen of this period had two main hobbies - hunting and warfare. They did n't usually eat their human enemies, but they often consumed the spoils of the chase on an enormous scale. John Nott, master cook to the Duke of Bolton, tells us in the introduction to The Cook's and Confectioner's Dictionary (London: 1723) that 'this happy Island of Great Britain, which like another Canaan, may properly enough be call'd, a Land flowing with Milk and Honey, so richly is it stor'd with Fish, Flesh and Fowl.' Later in his book he gives the following recipe to make an olio. After he had prepared this gargantuan dish for his noble lord, you might well wonder that even if the nation's rivers of milk and honey still continued to flow, its abundant supplies of flesh and fowl probably became seriously depleted.

Well I hope that one day all those birds and fish and creatures consumed in olios, city feasts and other orgiastic mass extinctions eventually got their own back. Just recently I acquired a lovely copy of my favourite image of the joys of the revenge of the eaten on the eater. Based on Henry Fuseli's celebrated painting The Nightmare, this marvellous satyrical lithograph by MG (1830), shows Lord Mayor John Key being attacked by the creatures that should have made up his Lord Mayor's feast the previous evening, but for political reasons the feast was cancelled by the king. This image was first brought to my attention by my dear friend Gillian Riley when we worked together in 2000 on the exhibiton Eat, Drink and be Merry. It became the banner image of the exhibition so I am so pleased after all these years to have found a nice copy to hang in my own study. I will let the creatures of Key's abortive feast have the last word and I truly hope that that huge green turtle snogging my Lord Mayor has been nursing a really chronic case of halitosis on his long sea voyage from the Caribbean. 

However, there is an interesting American coda to this story of carnivorous excess. I passed through O'Hare airport in Chicago a few days ago on my way home from the Twin Cities. While I 'enjoyed' (wrong word) a modest, but pretty awful quasi-Chinese lunch in Manchu Wok in the airport food mall while waiting for my connection to the UK, I contemplated on one of the most extreme dîners à l'arche de Noé ever, served up in the Windy City in 1893. 

From Theodore Garrett, The Encyclopaedia of Practical Cookery (London: nd. 1890s) 

This edible ecological disaster, almost on the same scale as the mass exterminations of the Great Plains bison, was served to six hundred guests at the Grand Pacific Hotel in February 1893. This was the transatlantic incarnation of the baroque olio, but on an even more horrific scale. It is the culinary equivalent of one of those Victorian natural history museums, stuffed full of stuffed specimens in glass cases, the chief difference being that the diners in the Grand Pacific Hotel stuffed the specimens into themselves. The sheer logistics of hunting these unfortunate 'critturs', let alone skinning and plucking them, cooking them in a Victorian kitchen and finally serving them up with their complex garnishes to six hundred salivating Illinois huntsman is just mind-bogling. And did all six hundred manage to get a portion from the Pyramid of Wild Goose Livers? A wild goose only has one liver. Right? The manager and host of this grand event was called Mr. John Drake. With a name like that I thought he might have had a bit more sympathy with his feathered friends - and furry ones too - check out the black bear, cinnamon bear, opossum, racoon etc. among the roasts. But not a bit of it, in 1883 these annual 'eat all you can of God's creation for $9' indulgences had been going on for thirty-seven years! The 1883 bash was the very last. Drake died in 1895. I wonder if both he and Lord Mayor Key are still being tormented in their own personal circle of Hades by the angry souls of all those sturgeons, turtles, prairie chickens, fox squirrels, butter-ball ducks and cinnamon bears they devoured during their lives. Merry Christmas everyone! 

John Drake's Grand Pacific Hotel in Chicago, the venue of the annual game dinners

John Drake (1826-1895). Concealed  behind those tight lips I suspect there may be a set of very well developed canines.

Decorative cover of the 1872 Annual Game Dinner Menu suitably garnished with the bodies of the fallen

The folks back in England at Windsor Castle kept a pretty good table too. To get you into the Christmas mood, this is a view of the carnage in Queen Victoria's game larder in 1857 at Yuletide. Note the festive holly.