A New Food Society.

November 5.

I wish to announce the formation of a new society, and invite you to join. It is “The Society of Abligurands”. Membership is free, meetings are held ad-hoc (but as frequently as possible, preferably at expensive restaurants), rules will be few (and are to be advised), and the only membership requirement is that one must be a regular practitioner of the art of abligurition, or have aspirations to be such a practitioner.

Abligurition is, according to the OED, ‘prodigal expense on meat and drink.’ It is derived, as I understand it, from various words which reference squandering on dainty articles of food, and licking (lips certainly, fingers possibly, but perhaps also plates?). The OED does not appear to include the word ‘abligurand’, but it most certainly should, and perhaps with sheer force of our numbers (I know there are more of you out there), perhaps it will at its next revision. You can be part of linguistic history as well as culinary, if you join now.

I eagerly await your enthusiastic participation, and in the meanwhile offer you the details of one of the most famously extravagant dishes ever made.

In 1850 in York, England, a Grand Banquet was given by the Mayor, as part of the promotion of the planned Great Exhibition. The guest of honour was Prince Albert (the mastermind behind the show), and the chef was the great Alexis Soyer. Soyer was known to spare none of his employer’s expense in preparing his great banquets, and really, when the point of this feast was propaganda, why would he?

Soyer outdid himself on this occasion. He came up with a dish that was referred to at the time as “l’extravagance culinaire à la alderman”, or “the hundred guinea dish”. To give it some perspective, one hundred guineas (₤105 and 5 shillings) is equivalent to US$17,368 or AUD$18,819 today.

The ingredient list read:

5 Turtle-heads, part of fins, and green fat.
24 Capons (the two small noix from each side of the middle of the back only used).
18 Turkeys, the same.
18 Poulardes, the same.
16 Fowls, the same.
10 Grouse
20 Pheasants, noix only.
45 Partridges, the same.
6 Plovers, whole.
40 Woodcocks, the same.
3 Dozen Quails, whole.
100 Snipes, noix only.
3 Dozen Pigeons, noix only.
6 Dozen Larks, stuffed.
Ortolans, from Belgium.
The garnish, consisting of cocks’-combs, truffles, mushrooms, crawfish, olives, American asparagues, croustades, sweetbreads, quenelles de volaille, green mangoes, and a new sauce.

The cost was explained thus:

“The expensiveness of the above is explained by the fact, that if an epicure were to order this dish only, he would be charged for the whole of the above-mentioned articles.”

Care to join?

We need to start work on the manifesto as soon as possible, so please send in your suggestions.

Tomorrow’s Story …

A Glutton, by any other name.

Quotation for the Day…

...The rapturous, wild, and inefable pleasure of drinking at someone else's expense. Henry Sambrook Leigh.

A Saintly Weed.

Today, January 19th …

After the previous two days of heavy-duty menus, it is a relief to return to some delicate plant cookery. The mediaeval monks’ saintly calendar of flowers comes to our rescue today. The plant of the day, which is dedicated to St Martha, is the White Dead Nettle.

The stinging nettle is a weed, an invalid food, or a spinach substitute, depending on your point of view, state of health, and finances. Its medicinal use goes back many centuries, and we have already met the hymnist John Byrom, who used ‘nettle broth’ for some unspecified malady in 1728. Nicolas Culpeper in his famous herbal the English Physitian (1652) gave a list of medicinal actions of the nettle, noting among other things that would:

“ … open the Pipes and passages of the Lungs … and helpeth to expectorate tough Flegm, as also to raise the impostumated Pleuresie, and spend it by spitting; .. killeth the Worms in Children, easeth pains in the sides, and dissolveth the windiness in the Spleen, as also in the Body, … Remedy against the stinging of Venemous Creatures, the biting of Mad Dogs … ”

Culpeper’s contemporary, Samuel Pepys, recorded taking nettle porridge on a number of occasions. We know he suffered from ‘the stone’, so perhaps the nettles helped, for Culpeper also said of it that “the Seed provoketh Urine, and expelleth the Gravel and Stone in the Reins or Bladder.”

Aside from its medical use, the nettle is a most useful culinary plant. It can be used to make tea or beer, depending on inclinations and brewing skill, but it is less well known that it can be used as a sort of vegetable rennet (vegetarians take note). Cassells’ Dictionary of Cookery (1870’s) says:

Nettle, Rennet of.
In the Western Isles of Scotland a rennet is prepared by adding a quart of salt to three pints of a strong decoction of nettles, a table-spoonful of which is said to be sufficient to coagulate a bowl of milk.

The most usual use of course is as a pot herb. Given that the usual consumers of the nettle are the peasants and the poor, it is not surprising that there are almost no recipes for it in cookbooks – if one could afford to buy a cookbook, and had an education that enabled one to read it, presumably one would not be eating wayside weeds. Alexis Soyer, the most famous chef of the Victorian era did however include instructions for cooking nettles it in his Shilling Cookery for the People, published in 1854. He did not have a recipe for them in The Modern Housewife (1853), which was clearly written for a better class of reader.

Here is the recipe from Soyer’s book, whose full title is: Shilling Cookery for the People: embracing An Entirely New System of Plain Cookery and Domestic Economy (1854). He addresses the recipes in the book to ‘Eloise’.

“I herewith send you the receipts I promised you on Nettles which I tried while in Norfolk”

Nettles.
Wash them well, drain, put them into plenty of boiling water with a little salt, boil for twenty minutes, or a little longer, drain them, put them on a board and chop them up, and either serve plain, or put them in the pan with a little salt, pepper, and a bit of butter, or a little fat and gravy from a roast; or add to a pound two teaspoonfuls of flour, a gill of skim milk, a teaspoonful of sugar, and serve with or without poached eggs.
This extraordinary spring production, of which few know the value, is at once pleasing to the sight, easy of digestion, and at a time of the year when greens are not to be obtained, invaluable as a purifier of the blood; the only fault is, as I have told you above, Eloise, they are to be had for nothing; it is a pity children are not employed to pick them, and sell them in market towns.

Monday’s Story …

The Death of a Queen.

A Previous Story for this Day …

A story about the avocado, which grows on 'the Testicle Tree'.

On this Topic …

Other recipes for flowering plants are:

15thC Almond and Rose-petal sauce for Loche [fish]
17th C Minnow tansie with primroses and cowslips (same site as the above)
18th C Syrup of Violets.
20th C Eggs cooked with Marigold

Quotation for the Day …

Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food. Hippocrates.

Drowning in Armagnac.

Today, December 21st …

Today is the anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Disraeli, Britain’s only Jewish Prime Minister. Before he entered politics, he was a writer, and being a dandy and gourmet, there are many references to the good life in his novels. One of his most frequently quoted sentences, from “The Young Duke”, is:

“All paradise opens! Let me die eating ortolans to the sound of soft music.”

Unless we are prepared to break the law, most of us will never know this paradisical experience, for these tiny European garden birds are now protected. The French chef M. Massialot (1702) described the ortolan as “a delicate Fowl of an exquisite taste, about the bigness of a Lark.” For centuries, in France, they have represented the abolute pinnacle of gastronomic experience. Francois Mitterand had them prepared (illegally) for what was his final fine dining experience before his death from cancer in 1996. I wonder, did he have soft music playing?

The famous chef, Alexis Soyer was briefed in 1846 to provide a dinner at the Reform Club in London, with “magnificent contempt of expense”. One of his inspirational thoughts was: “An ortolan can hardly be truffled, but I will undertake that a truffle shall be ortolaned!” Or, in other words he would cook “the delicate native of Provence .. gloriously interred in the choicest production of Perigord”. This culinary gilding of the lily did not eventuate; the birds were not delivered in time. Poor gourmets.

Poor birds: ortolans were caught and force-fed until they were “lumps of fat”, and were then suffocated (“take them by the Beak, and holding it close between your Finger and Thumb, the Bird will be stifled in about a Minute”), or drowned in Armagnac (super-gourmet method).

Soyer’s guests would not have needed instruction in the ritual of ortolan-eating. A large napkin covers the head and plate while the diner eats the whole bird (except the beak), with the hands. Depending on beliefs or sensibilities, the purpose of the napkin is to (a) capture the aroma (b) hide the messy process from other guests, or (c) hide the greediness from God.

As for cooking them, the method is simple. M. Massialot says:

Ortolans must be drawn, and roasted on a small Spit, and basted with a little Lard: Then they may be cover’d or strew’d with Bread and Salt, and eaten with Salt and Orange.

Tomorrow: The Taste of Music.