Galah Grub.

We continue our week of Aussie bush recipes, thanks to our source for the week - several editions of the Perth newspaper The Western Mail, which ran a competition on the topic in 1938. I can pretty well guarantee that you wont find today’s dishes on the menu anywhere.

The galah is a noisy, pretty pink and grey cockatoo found all over Australia. It also used to be an ingredient for the stew-pot in the days of real bush cuisine. The ‘real’ way to cook it of course is well known, but just in case you have forgotten them, let me give the instructions again via the words of a South Australian newspaper correspondent in 1934.

“DR. A. M. Morgan, North Adelaide, writes:- "Dear Bufus -Your friend who says galah is too rough to eat, evidently does not know how to cook them. The proper way is to put the bird in a billycan with a medium-sized stone, and fill with water, and bring to the boil. When a fork will go easily into the stone, and come out clean, the bird is done, and will be found tender and tasty. This is an old bush recipe, and I am surprised that your friend did not know it.”

The newspaper competition provides some slightly more sophisticated ways of dealing with the bird, which I am sure will adapt easily to any sort of cockatoo or parrot that might fall into your hands.

Curried Galahs.
Take six galahs, cover with about one quart of water. When boiled for half an hour add two onions, pepper and salt to taste and let boil for half an hour longer. Then take out half a cup of the galah stock and add to it one tablespoon of curry and two tablespoons of flour. Mix well together and add to galahs. Let simmer for quarter of an hour before serving.


Braised Galahs.
Allow one galah for each person. Cut off the heads and then skin the birds and clean them. Place in a dish of salted water for a few hours. Make a nice stuffing of onion and herbs, breadcrumbs, a knob of butter, salt and pepper and a grating of nutmeg. Bind with a well beaten egg. Stuff the birds with this stuffing, make some dripping very hot in a saucepan, and place in the birds. Turn occasionally to brown. When half cooked put in a little hot water and finish cooking. A rasher of bacon placed on each bird while cooking is delicious.


Galah Savoury.
Take four or five birds, skin (do not pluck them) clean and soak in salted water for a few hours. Cut a rasher of bacon into small strips, put two or three pieces inside each bird, then arrange them in a casserole, cut up an onion very small, put over the top of the birds, sprinkle a dessert spoon of flour over them, then small dabs of butter, or dripping on top. Now half fill the casserole with cold water, put the lid on and cook in a slow oven for about two and a half or three hours. The result is a cheap and appetising dish. Bronze wing pigeons and parrots done in the same way are delicious.

Quotation for the Day.

Not presume to dictate, but broiled fowl and mushrooms – capital thing.
Charles Dickens.

On Taste, Nutriment, and Salubrity.

Before Harold McGee on Food & Cooking, there were other writers on culinary chemistry. Perhaps the earliest, and certainly one of the most important was the Friedrich Accum (1769-1838), a German-born scientist who relocated to England as a young man..

Accum was a chemist – a rather broad term at the time, his training and interests including pharmacy, anatomy, and other medical fields. He became a passionate crusader against the adulteration of food – an increasing problem in the early nineteenth century due to the rapid rate at which food production was becoming industrialised. Accum’s best-known work - A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons was published in 1820, and it was the subject of an earlier post on this blog. The book quickly became very popular, and, not surprisingly, it made him a lot of enemies in the food business, which had a great deal to do with his eventual exile to his native Germany.

A year after publication of the Treatise (which became popularly known as There is Death in the Pot), Accum published Culinary Chemistry: exhibiting the scientific principles of cookery. I give you a few extracts from his initial chapter on ‘Cookery as a Branch of Chemical Science.’

‘... cookery ... is a branch of chemistry ... but it is also one of the least cultivated branches of that science’

‘... and much waste of the material, as well as labour of the parties might often be spared, were those to whom the performance of such tasks is committed, made acquainted with simple chemical truths which would invariably lead to certain results. And besides, the same knowledge would enable them to attain a much greater degree of perfection in curing and preserving all kinds of animal and vegetable aliments, and in combining the three grand requisites of taste, nutriment, and salubrity, in whatever manner they may be prepared.’

‘A kitchen is, in fact, a chemical laboratory; the boilers, stew-pans, and cradle-spit of the cook, correspond to the digestors, the evaporating basins, and the crucibles of the chemist. And numerous of the receipts of cookery are, the general operations (like the general processes of chemistry) are but a few.’

‘ ... and , there is reason to believe, that among the variety of circumstances which produce diseases, the improper modes of cooking food, are often the primary cause. Will it be believed, that in the cookery books which form the prevailing oracles of the kitchens in this part of the island, there are express injunctions to “boil greens with halfpence, or verdigrise, in order to improve their colour!” That our puddings are frequently seasoned with laurel leaves, and our sweetmeats almost uniformly prepared in copper vessels?’

Accum’s comments about the use of verdigris and cooking in copper pots refer to the very beautifully green but very poisonous copper salts that result from those practices, and which were, as he says, widely recommended in cookery books of the time. But ‘laurel’ leaves? Bay leaves, without which I could not cook?

It appears that the bay laurel, Laurus nobilis, has been cultivated since very ancient times – certainly since before recipes were written down. This ‘sweet bay’ as it is also called, is, thankfully, not poisonous (although there are a few members of the laurel family which are toxic). Large amounts of fresh leaves apparently can have a mild narcotic effect – a property used to advantage, it is said, by the priestesses of Delphi as an aid to prophetic inspiration.

Most of us however only want to put a leaf or three into our beef stew or Spaghetti Bolognese, and I can assure that at this level there will be no effect on your dinner-time demeanour. The situation is a bit like that of nutmeg – a little of what you fancy, flavouring-wise, will do you no harm.

So, why Accum’s anti-bay leaf stance? Perhaps, brilliant though he was, his botany was not quite up to scratch? Or perhaps the toxic laurel varieties were a common substitute in his time? I don’t know, do you? 

The recipe I have chosen for today uses laurel (bay) leaves both as an ingredient and as a mini-platter for stuffed quail. It is from an English cookbook of Accum’s time - The Professed Cook, by B.Clermont, published in 1812

Quails with Laurel.
Stuff the quails with a farce made of their livers, scraped lard, chopped parsley, shallots, pepper, salt, and one laurel-leaf chopped very fine; roast them, first wrapped in slices of lard, and then in paper; put a slice of ham into a small stew-pan, and simmer it some time; when it begins to stick to the pan, throw in a glass of white wine, a little cullis, and half a clove of garlick; reduce it to a good consistence, sift it ,and add a lemon squeeze: when ready put the quails each upon a laurel leaf and serve the sauce upon the birds.

Quotation for the Day.

Everything I eat has been proved by some doctor or other to be a deadly poison, and everything I don't eat has been proved to be indispensable to life ... But I go marching on.
George Bernard Shaw

Notable Things about Fowl.

Yesterday we received some interesting insight into historical methods of prolonging the life of fresh food from the book of the week (A Thousand Notable Things, 1815, original version late sixteenth century). One of those methods was for keeping fowl meat fresher for longer, in the time well before refrigeration. The threat of salmonella and other unpleasant bugs springs to the forefront of the mind today, but in 1815 the public (and the scientific community) lived in blissful ignorance of microbes, as it was still several decades away from Louis Pasteur’s seminal work, and the development of Germ Theory.

I wondered what else the book had to say about the preparation of fowl for the table.

Out of the Fig Tree there comes such a sharp Vapour, that if a Hen be hanged thereon, it will so prepare her that she will be soon and easily roasted. Plut. And the like will be if the feathers be plucked off from the Fowls, and then laid or covered a day or two in a heap of Wheat. - It is confirmed by experience, saith Mizatdus

How to tell if it is boiled enough:

If the bottom of a Seething Pot, with Meat, newly taken from the fire, may be touched or felt without harm or danger of burning, then certainly the same Meat is boiled enough; but if it be hot, and not sufferable, then it is not sufficiently sod. This I know to be true, for I have seen the trial thereof.

Quotation for the Day.

As for those grapefruit and buttermilk diets, I'll take roast chicken and dumplings.
Hattie McDaniel

Hors d’Oeuvres.

I am constantly intrigued by the way that words and phrases change in meaning over time – particularly food words of course. We had an example yesterday in ‘a la mode’, and today we have another French culinary phrase to consider – hors d’oeuvres. Look into any ‘modern’ dictionary, and you will find that hors d’oeuvres are defined as appetizers – little morsels served before the meal, the exact nature of which includes and overlaps with zests, whets, canapés, amuse bouches, nibbles, and assorted cocktail party tid-bits. Hors d’oeuvres were not always thus.

The phrase ‘hors d’œuvre’ literally means ‘outside the (main) work’. From medieval times until the second half of the ninteteenth century, a dinner consisted of two (or sometimes three) courses, each of which contained a mixture of dishes, both ‘sweet’ and ‘savoury’, all of these dishes being set out on the table in a strictly ordered and hierarchical structure before the diners entered the room. This style became known as service á la française, to distinguish it from the new (early nineteenth century) service á la russe (see here for further explanation and a diagram.) The largest and most impressive dishes sat grandly in the centre of the table, sometimes elevated on an elegant plinth of some sort, with the ‘lesser’ dishes flanking them. By about the mid-eighteenth century these smaller, less important dishes became known as hors d’œuvres. At an important dinner cold hors d’œuvres might be served at one point during the meal, and warm hors d’œuvres at another.

I give you the words of several early nineteenth century cook book writers, to show how the term hors d’oeuvres was interpreted by that time.

From The French Cook, by Louis UstacheUde (1815):

In France, between the dormant (centre stationary dish) and the entrées, it is customary to place hors-d’œuvres, viz. sallads of anchovies, canapés, sallad dishes filled with lemons, bitter oranges, butter, radishes, turnip radishes, of figs in autumn, what we call hors-d’œuvres de cuisine, such as saucisses, boudins &c, &x, which indeed give a good appearance to the table. In England it is not customary to serve hors d’œuvres, as in very few houses they keep a Confectioner, and that the hors d’oeuvres belong to his department.

From French Domestic Cookery,by an English Physician, (1825):

A French dinner is usually composed of seven sorts of eatables: firs the soup, second the boulli, third the hors d’œuvre, (by-dishes,) either hot or cold, fourth the entrées, (or regular first course dishes,), fifth the roast, sixth the entremets (or relishing dishes,) and seventh the dessert.

From: Domestic Economy, for Rich and Poor, by a Lady (1827)

Celery, Radishes, Cresses, &c. in Water.

There are deep glasses made on purpose for sending these to table in water. Radishes and cresses are excellent digestives, when eaten with oil before dinner. They are also very ornamental. The French use them as hors d’oeuvres, not belonging to the course, although placed on table.

And for the recipe of the day, I go back to the early days of use of the term. Oh for the days when an elegant dish of pigeon was a mere side-dish!

Pigeons au Gratin.
Having young Pigeons picked dry, blanch them again over a Charcoal Fire, then pick them very clean, and when they are well picked, split them in the Back; then take the Livers, which you mince with scraped Bacon, Parsley, green Onions, Champignons and Truffles, seasoned with Pepper, Salt, fine Spice and Sweet Herbs; but all moderately: Then put in a silver dish Slices of Bacon, of Veal, and of Ham; after that place in it your Pigeons and put your Forced-Meat, mentioned before, in their Bellies; and lay over each Pigeon a small Slice of Ham and Veal: There is no need to put Seasoning, by reason of the Ham: Cover them with another Dish, half as small again as the other, and take a white Napkin moisten’d, which put around the Dish, to hinder it from taking Vent; then put it a stewing over a small Stove; it being done, dish it up with Essence of Ham in another Dish, and serve it up hot for a small Entry, or Hors d’Oeuvre.
[The Whole Duty of a Woman, or, an Infallible Guide to the Fair Sex, 1737]

Quotation for the Day.

Hors d’Oeuvre: A ham sandwich cut into forty pieces.
Jack Benny.

Turn of the Century Turkey.

Tonight, as those of you with any real or wished-for Scottish heritage are aware, is the anniversary of the birth of the famous Scottish poet, Robert Burns. We have discussed the essential elements of a traditional Burns Night dinner – haggis and all – in a previous post, so may I refer you to the details HERE? January 25 also happens to be the birth anniversary of Virginia Woolf, which we have also covered in a blog post on this day in a previous year (HERE) .

We are able to maintain the literary theme for January 25 thanks to the wonderful Jane Austen. Miss Austen, at home in Steventon, wrote one of her many letters to her sister Cassandra on this day in 1801.

Steventon: Sunday (January 25).

I dare say you will spend a very pleasant three weeks in town. I hope you will see everything worthy of notice, from the Opera House to Henry's office in Cleveland Court; and I shall expect you to lay in a stock of intelligence that may procure me amusement for a twelvemonth to come. You will have a turkey from Steventon while you are there, and pray note down how many full courses of exquisite dishes M. Halavant converts it into.

The cook in question - M. Halavant - was apparently French, so perhaps was expected to have a more extensive range of turkey recipes than English guests were used to? I thought it might be interesting to see what were the suggestions for turkey in English cookbooks of the time, and chose at random The Complete British Cook, by Mary Holland, published in 1800.

The author notes in the text that “For a turkey, good gravy in the dish, and either bread or onion sauce in a bason, or both” are appropriate sauces, and also that ‘portable soup’ cakes are useful in the making of make gravy for turkey or fowl. As far as specific recipes for turkey are concerned there are only slim pickings in this particular book: there is a single recipe for a turkey sauce (given below), a recipe for a liver ragout which includes turkey livers, and very elementary instructions on how to boil and stew the bird.


[To Boil] Turkey, Fowl, Goose, Duck, &c.
Poultry are best boiled by themselves, and in a good deal of water; scum the pot clean, and you need not be afraid of their going to table of bad colour. A large turkey, with a force-meat in its craw, will take two hours; one without, an hour and a half; a hen turkey, three quarters of an hour, a large fowl, forty minutes; a small one, half an hour; a large chicken, twenty minutes; and a small one a quarter of an hour; a full grown goose salted, an hour and a half’ a large duck, near an hour.


[To Stew] a Turkey or Fowl.
Take a turkey or fowl, put into a sauce-pan or pot, with sufficient quantity of gravy or good broth; a bunch of celery cut small, and a muslin rag, filled with mace, pepper, and all-spice, tied loose, with an onion, and a sprig of thyme; then these have stewed softly till enough, take up the turkey or fowl; thicken the liquor it was stewed in with butter and flour; and having dished the turkey, or fowl, pour the sauce into the dish.


Oyster Sauce for boiled Turkey, Fowls, or any white Meat.
Open a pint of large oysters and just scald them, strain the liquor through a sieve, wash an beard them, put into a stewpan, and pour the liquor from the settlings in, put in half a lemon, a piece of butter mixed with flour, a quarter of a pound of butter, and a gill of cream, boil it gently till it is thick and smooth; take out the lemon and squeeze the juice in, stir it round, and then put in your sauce-boat.


Post-script.
There are other food stories inspired by Jane Austen in previous blog posts HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.
 

Quotation for the Day.
What a shocking fraud the turkey is. In life preposterous, insulting – that foolish noise they make … in death – unpalatable … practically no taste except a dry fibrous flavour reminiscent of warmed up plaster-of-paris and horsehair. The texture is like wet sawdust and the whole vast feathered swindle has the piquancy of a boiled mattress.
“Cassandra” (columnist William Connor), The Daily Mirror, 1953.

I wish you Turkey ....

I wish you, for your Thanksgiving turkey, one such as that eulogised by the American writer and humorist Irvin S Cobb (1876-1944) in Cobb’s Bill of Fare (1913).

First, he describes a turkey served at a large restaurant for a Thanksgiving feast – an ‘ancient and shabby ruin’ of a turkey, ‘full of mysterious laboratory products and … varnished over with a waterproof glaze or shellac, which rendered it durable without making it edible.

Then he tells it how a Thanksgiving turkey should be (and this is the one I wish for those of you celebrating the day):

“But there was a kind of turkey that they used to serve in those parts [‘up North’] on high state occasions. It was a turkey that in his younger days ranged wild in the woods and ate the mast. At the frosted coming of the fall they penned him up and fed him grain to put an edge of fat on his lean; and then fate descended upon him and he died the ordained death of his kind. But oh! the glorious resurrection when he reached the table! You sat with weapons poised and ready – a knife in the right hands, a fork in the left and a spoon handy – and looked upon him and watered at the mouth until you had riparian rights.
His breast had the vast brown fullness that you see in pictures of old Flemish friars. His legs were like rounded columns and undadorned, moreover, with those superfluous paper frills; and his tail was half as big as your hand and it protruded grandly, like the rudder of a treasure-ship, and had flanges of sizzled richness on it. Here was no pindling fowl that had taken the veil and lived a cloistered life; here was no wiredrawn and trained-down cross-country turkey, but a lusty giant of a bird that would have been a cassowary, probably, or an emu, if he had lived, his bosom a white mountain of lusciousness, his interior a Golconda and not a Golgotha. At the touch of steel his skin crinkled delicately and fell away; his tissues flaked off in tender strips; and from him arose a bouquet of smells more varied and more delectable than anything ever turned out by the justly celebrated Islands of Spice. It was a sin to cut him up and a crime to leave him be.
He had not been stuffed by a taxidermist or a curio collector, but by the master hand off one of those natural-born home cooks – stuffed with corn bread dressing that had oysters or chestnuts or pecans stirred into it until it was a veritable mine of goodness, and this stuffing had caught up and retained all the delectable drippings and essences of his being, and his flesh had the savor of the things upon which he had lived – the sweet acorns and beechnuts of the woods, the buttery goobers of the plowed furrows, the shattered corn of the horse yard.
Nor was he a turkey to be eaten by the mere slice. At least, nobody ever did eat him that way – you ate him by rods, poles, and perches, by townships and by sections – ate him from his neck to his hocks and back again, from his throat latch to his crupper, from centre to circumference, and from pit to dome, finding something better all the time; and when his frame was mainly denuded and loomed upon the platter like a scaffolding, you dug into his cadaver and found there small hidden joys and titbits.
You ate until the pressure of your waistband stopped your watch and your vest flew open like an engine-house door and your stomach was pushing you over on your back and sitting on you, and then you half closed your eyes and dreamed of cold-sliced turkey for supper, turkey hash for breakfast the next morning, and turkey soup made of his carcass later on. For each state of that turkey would be greater than the last.
There must still be such turkeys as this one somewhere. Somewhere in this broad and favoured land, untainted by notions of foreign cookery and unvisited by New York and Philadelphia people who insist on calling the waiter garçon, when his name is Gabe or Roscoe, there must be spots where a turkey is a turkey and not a cold-storage corpse. And this being the case, why don’t those places advertise, so that by the hundreds and thousands men who live in hotels might come from all over in the fall of the year and just naturally eat themselves to death?

And for the recipe for the day, a fine dressing.


Cornbread Dressing
(For one 10 to 12 lb turkey and one 1-qt casserole)
½ cup chopped onion, 1 ½ cups chopped celery, ¾ cups butter or margarine, melted, 1
pan corn bread, coarsely crumbled, 5 cups dry bread cubes, 2 teaspoons salt, 1 teaspoon pepper, 1 teaspoon poultry seasoning, 1 cup milk and 1 egg, beaten.
Lightly brown onion and celery in ¼ cup of the butter.
Combine corn bread, bread cubes and seasonings in large bowl. Add onion and celery to bread mixtures. Add milk, egg and remaining ½ cup butter, tossing lightly to combine. (Use an additional ¼ cup milk for a moister dressing.)
Lightly stuff about ¾ of dressing into body cavity and neck region of turkey.
Roast according to standard roasting directions.
Bake remaining dressing in uncovered 1-quart casserole during last 45 minutes
of roasting time.
From the News-Palladium (Michigan, nov 11, 1965)

Quotation for the Day.
May your stuffing be tasty
May your turkey plump,
May your potatoes and gravy
Have nary a lump.
May your yams be delicious
And your pies take the prize,
And may your Thanksgiving dinner
Stay off your thighs!
Anonymous.

A Greenlander Feast.

In August 1761, the Dutch missionary David Cranz was sent by his sect to propagate Christianity in Greenland – “a region of cold, gloom, and defoliation, where nature has scattered no herbage, and art can produce no grain: where there are neither flocks nor herds, nor woods nor fields … and the inhabitants are savages, deplorably wretched and grossly ignorant, living in hovels no better than the dens of wild beasts, and subsisting on the oil and flesh of whales, frequently in a state of putrefaction.”

Some years later he published his insights in The History of Greenland, containing a description of the country and its inhabitants, and of the mission carried on for above thirty years by the Unitas Fratrum and New Herrnhuth in that country.

The author describes in great detail the day to day lives and traditions of the Greenlanders – noting (in spite of himself, it seems,) the unfailing hospitality, the good humour, and the high morals of the “savages” who are his putative flock. Naturally, the discussion of the foodways of the eighteenth century Greenlanders is what interests us on this blog. Here, then, is a description – filtered, it must be remembered, through the Christian European eighteenth century sensibilities of the author.

“They are very dirty in dressing their meat as well as in every thing else. They seldom wash a kettle, the dogs often spare them that trouble, and make their tongue the dishcloth. Yet they like to keep their bastard marble vessels neat. They lay their boiled meat in wooden dishes having first drunk the soup, or eat it with spoons made of bone or wood, but their undressed meat lies on the bare ground or on an old skin not much cleaner. Fish, they take out of the dish with their hands, pull fowls to pieces with their fingers or their teeth, and flesh meat they take hold of with their teeth, and bite off the mouthful. When all is over they make the knife serve the office of a napkin, for they give their chops a scrape with it, lick the blade and lick their fingers, and so conclude the meal. … And when they vouchsafe to treat an European genteelly, they first lick the piece of meat he is to eat, clean from the blood and scum it had contracted in the kettle, with their tongue; and should any one not kindly accept it he would be looked upon as an unmannerly man for despising their civility.

… They know nothing of salutations, tokens of respect, or reverence: they laugh at a European’s compliments, and at a man standing uncovered [presumably unhatted] before his superior; and wonder to see a man strike his servant.

They sometimes visit, and give entertainments. The following is the bill of fare at a great entertainment, given by some principal Greenlanders to a factor: 1. Dried herrings. 2. Dried seal-fish. 3. Boiled ditto. 4. Half-raw and half-rotten ditto, called mikiak. 5. Boiled willocks. 6. Piece of half-rotten whale’s tail; this was the dainty dish, or haunch of venison to which the guests were properly invited. 7. Dried salmon. 8. Dried rein-deer venison. 9. A desert of crow-berries, mixed with the chile [chyle] from the maw of a rein-deer. 10. The same enriched with train-oil [whale oil.].”

Well, there it is. The eighteenth century European was revolted by the thought of mikiak, but expected his own partridge to be “well-hung” (i.e slightly putrefied). Even in the best regulated households however, things can get a bit out of control, but the housekeeper be unwilling to throw away good and expensive protein. Some of the “rescue” attempts made on stinking meat products in the English kitchen of yesteryear seem pretty scary today. Here is one such retrieval method, from The Art of Cookery, made plain and easy, by Hannah Glasse, 1774.

To save potted birds that begin to be bad.
I have seen potted birds which have come a great way, often smell so bad, that no body could bear the smell for the rankness of the butter, and by managing them in the following manner, have made them as good as over was eat.
Set a large sauce-pan of clean water on the fire; when it boils, take off the butter at the top, then take the fowls out one by one, throw them into that sauce-pan of water half a minute, whip it out, and dry it in a clean cloth inside and out; so do all till they are quite done. Scald the pot clean; when the birds are quite cold, season them with mace, pepper, and salt to your mind, put them down close in a pot and pour clarified butter over them.

Quotation for the Day.

It is not the quantity of the meat, but the cheerfulness of the guests, which makes the feast.
Edward Hyde.

Holy Water Recipe.

I cannot fathom the recipe I am giving you today. It is from Officers of the Mouth, by Giles Rose, published in 1682 (the English translation of Riboule's L'escole parfait of 1662). We have had some fun with this book earlier this year (March 23-27), but barely touched on the recipes. This one really puzzles me. It is time for you to do some of the work around here, and suggest some explanations. Here it is:

Partridges a leau beniste, or Holy Water.

Take Partridges and rost them, and when they are rosted, cut them into little pieces, and put them into a Dish with a little fair Water and Salt, and make them boyl a little, and serve them away.

I presume ‘a leau beniste’ is ‘à l’eau bénite’, which does mean Holy Water (when it is not a brand of Belgian Beer. Seriously. What a marketing idea.)

I know that ‘fair Water’ simply means pure clean water. It does not, as far as I am aware, imply any degree of holiness.

Roast partridges are probably heavenly, but not as heavenly as if they had been stuffed with foie gras and truffles, and basted with butter and ancient cognac as they cooked, and followed with chocolate and champagne.

Not having access to the original French text, and in any case being illiterate in French, I don’t know if this is a translation error or not.

So, tell me the connection between this recipe and Holy Water, please.


Quotation for the Day.

A cook, when I dine, seems to me a divine being, who from the depths of his kitchen rules the human race. One considers him as a minister of heaven, because his kitchen is a temple, in which his ovens are the altar.
Marc Antoine Desaugiers (1772-1827).

Dinner with Queen Eleanor.

Queen Eleanor (Leonora) of France (1498-1558) visited her brother, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V (1500-1558) in Brussels in 1544. A royal retinue took some feeding in those days, as a contemporary account of her visit shows:

“Queen Leonora received daily for her mouth, 128 lbs. of beef, 2 ¼ sheep, 1 calf, 2 swine, 2 fat capons, 18 fowls, 4 partridges, 2 woodcocks, 2 pheasants, 2 hares, 24 quails or turtle doves.”

Clearly, all of this food was not for the Queen herself. I am not sure what the phrase “for her mouth” means (and hope that one of you will enlighten me) – perhaps it refers to the members of her personal household?

There was more. The same document tells us that additional supplies were provided for others in her train.

“For the kitchen of the suite were daily supplied 2 oxen, 18 sheep, 3 calves, 12 swine, 60 capons, 48 fowls and pigeons, and 40 head of game.”

When the omitted vegetables, bread, sweetmeats, ale and wine are added to this list, it was an awesome amount of food indeed. Sadly, there are no details of the actual dishes made from them, so we do not know what was served to the Queen. There are plenty of sources of medieval recipes however, and not a great deal changed over a few hundred years or so. I give you the recipe for a right royal quantity of small birds and poultry from the early fifteenth century cookbook Du Fait de Cuisine, by Master Chiquart Amizco.

And again a gravy of small birds and poultry: to give understanding to him who makes it, let him take about a thousand small birds and let these small birds be well plucked and carefully cleaned so that there remains neither feathers nor refuse; and take a hundred large poultry which are fair and clean, and let them be cut in half and cut into pieces, and one should make four pieces from each quarter, and wash them very well and cleanly with the small birds; and, being washed, put them to dry on fair, white, and clean boards. And take a great deal of lard and melt it in fair, large, and clean frying pans; and arrange that you have a fair and clean cauldron and put your small birds and poultry therein and strain your melted lard well and cleanly, then put it into the said cauldron over the said small birds and poultry. And take a great deal of bread according to the quantity of your meat and slice it into rounds and put it to roast on the grill until it is well browned; and have beef and mutton broth -- and let it not be too salty -- put in a fair and clean small cask, and put therein a great deal of clear wine; and when your bread is roasted put it to soak in the said cask of broth and clear wine. And take your spices: cinnamon, ginger, grains of paradise, pepper; minor spices: nutmeg, cloves, mace, galingale, and all spices -- and let the said master be advised not to put to much in of anything, but have a temperate and sure hand in putting in that which it seems to him is necessary. And while he is straining his bread and his spices, let him have his meat sautéd over a fair clear fire; and let him have a man who stirs it constantly with a big slotted spoon so that it does not stick to the bottom and that it does not burn; and the said master in straining his bread and his spices should put while straining either a third or a half or what he has strained with his meat, so that the said meat will neither be spoiled nor burn, until he has strained all of it and put it into the said broth. And, being strained and set to boil, the said master should check and taste if it needs spices, vinegar, salt or something else and that it has too much of nothing; and do not wait until your meat is overcooked but draw it back over a few coals, at least until it is time to take it to the sideboard, and there, at the sideboard, it should be arranged in serving dishes well and properly.

Quotation for the Day.

Chicken one day, feathers the next.

Leftovers Day.

I always think of Boxing Day as Leftovers Day and Reading Day (all those lovely books received as gifts – especially the cookbooks).

Really, the leftovers are the best part of Christmas eating. I favour the minimal change system – cold turkey and ham in salads or sandwiches, and quickly re-roasted vegetables. A lot of stock from the bones of course, to be frozen for later use. What I do not favour are dishes such as this:

Curried Turkey Wings and Bones.
Prepare a curry sauce as follows: saute 2 large onions in butter or margarine, add 1 apple with peel, finely chopped, cook until tender.
Add 2 cups of turkey broth, vegetable broth, or water with bouillon cubes. Add 2 tablespoons of curry powder. Cook for 30 minutes. Then add turkey wings, disjointed, and leg and thigh bones. Continue cooking until they are heated through.
Add any leftover turkey gravy, or 1 tin of cream of mushroom soup and a little evaporated milk.
Season to taste, adding more curry if desired. Add a handful of white grapes.
Serve with rice, cranberry sauce, thinly sliced cucumbers with oil and vinegar, salted peanuts and baked bananas. “Beer is good with this”, says James Beard.
[Jefferson City newspaper, 1957]

Curry powder? Mushroom soup? Apples and Grapes? Served with cranberry sauce?

And a James Beard recipe? Is it really?

Quotation for the Day …

Cooking Rule: If at first you don't succeed, order pizza. Anonymous.

Every Englishman a Cook.

Earlier this year (in the week of May 12-16), we had fun with Dr William Kitchiner and his Magazine of Taste, as described in his book The Cook’s Oracle (1817). See the links below if you wish to revisit his ideas.

Dr Kitchiner loved essences, spice mixes, and pre-made condiments of all sorts, which he used to jazz up a huge range of dishes. While acknowledging his particular passion, and the general Englishman’s love of proprietary sauces (Worcestershire, Harveys, HP etc), I had no idea that this concept of seasoning at the table was quite so – well, English - until I came across a little article in an issue of The New Monthly Magazine of 1833. The article disinguishes between seasoning in the kitchen (French) and seasoning at the table (English).

Here for your enjoyment, is most of it:

COOKERY.

There is a very general idea abroad, that the French are peculiarly artificial in their preparation of meats for the palate, and that the English taste is distinguished by its simplicity. In this, as in so many other things, we apprehend that the superficies alone is looked at. True, the Englishman prides himself on his joint, and pretends when he sits before his mountain of flesh, that he is approaching a state of nature. But with how many condiments is he not prepared to savour his viands? Has he not vinegars and sauces innumerable, mustard, pepper, salt, horseradish, and other flavourous pungencies, which, when joined to a gravy rich and hot, altogether make up a plat, worthy of any continental epicure! This is called plain living, simply because the cookery goes on in the dining-room instead of the kitchen. A Frenchman takes his dish as it pleases the chef de cuisine to send it, and he would as soon think of tampering with his coat as his meat, - both tailor and cook are artistes, and each considered equal to his business. In England a gentleman relies upon his servant, a mere subordinate, for nothing but precise roasting and boiling, and is himself in reality his own meat-preparer. England expects every man to be his own cook. All that is trusted to the kitchen is the application of heat. The composition of flavours is supposed not only an art above the Leonora of the realms below, but to require the test of each individual’s palate. Thus it would seem that a general system of cookery serves France while the individuality of this country demands that each man should interfere in the composition of his own dish. What is called seasoning is carried to an Oriental pitch at all English tables; while in France, whe are struck by the extreme insipidity of their most elaborate chef d’oeuvres. What is called French cookery in this country, is in fact truly English: it is the table composition manufactured over the kitchen stoves, and owns no originality in France, where they strive after a variety of flavours, but to the utter contempt of what an Alderman would esteem in the way of richness …. The respect felt for French cookery in England is the respect felt for regular art above empiricism … Though an individual epicure may succeed on his own plate, by means of a variety of condiments, in fabricating a delicious compound, he can neither offer it to another, nor give it a name: the French artist on the contrary, when he has studied forth a new variety of palatable flavours, can offer it to a whole table, and sanctions and canonizes the dish for ever by imposition of a title. Here are the elements of the apparent superiority of French cookery over English!

I had better let Dr. Kitchiner have the last word; from The Cook’s Oracle (1817). Here is his advice on the roasting and seasoning of geese – in the kitchen.

Green Goose.

Geese are called Green until they are about four months old.

The only difference between roasting these, and a full-grown Goose, consists in seasoning it with pepper and salt instead of sage and onion, and roasting it for forty or fifty minutes only.

Obs. This is one of the least desirable of those insipid premature productions – which are esteemed dainties.

Dr. Kitchener’s Magazine of Taste was featured in May 2008 - here, here, here, here, and here.

Quotation for the Day …

There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn't believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavor, size and cheapness were the themes of universal admiration. Edged out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family; indeed, as Mrs. Cratchit said with great delight (surveying one small atom of a bone upon the dish) they hadn't ate it all at last! Yet every one had had enough, and the youngest Cratchits in particular were steeped in sage and onion to the eyebrows.
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

The Natural Diet of Man.

John Harvey Kellogg of cornflake fame was a serious vegetarian (he had some other rather strange ideas too, which we have considered previously.) He was not just a vegetarian, he was an evangelical vegetarian, and like all good evangelists he lost no opportunity (and probably created quite a few) to promote his cause. In his book The Natural Diet of Man ( 1923), one of his theories was that vegetarians were physically stronger. He published a list, compiled by ‘Russell’ (I don’t yet know who this is) of thirty-nine examples of races capable of great strength and endurance which showed (he said) that only three (less than 8 per cent) were associated with ‘flesh eating’. A further 14 examples (one third) ate meat occasionally, and the remaining 25 had completely flesh-free diets.

The list and conclusions would hardly be accepted as having much scientific validity today (which goes for a lot of modern ‘health’ claims too), but it is an interesting insight into ….. something. An interesting insight into the opinions of a nineteenth century evangelically vegetarian teetotal anti-sex American on the diet and strength of ‘others’, I suppose.

EUROPE.
DALECARLIAN SWEDE
Grain, milk, cheese, etc, probably fish also.
LAPLANDERS (SOME)
Flesh, blood, barley, coffee, alcohol.
FINNS (SOME)
Rye, barley, potatoes, fruit
RUSSIAN GRENADIERS
Eight lb. black bread, 4 lb. oil, 1 lb. salt, for eight days.
RUSSIAN LABORERS AT A PORT
Rye bread, garlics, etc.
ASIA
SIBERIAN SOLDIERS
Rye bread, soup
GREEK BOATMEN
Black rye or wheat bread, raisins or figs, etc
TURKISH SOLDIERS
Bread, mutton, beans, rice, butter, salt.
PART OF OTTOMAN ARMY
Vegetarian generally, water drinkers
BOATMEN, ETC., AT CONSTANTINOPLE
Bread, cucumbers, sherries, figs, dates, or other fruit, a little fish.
PORTERS AT SMYRNA
Vegetables, grain, or fruit.
KOLASHIN (MONTENEGRO)
Maize, milk, oil, onions, mutton
MONKS OF CYPRUS
Beans and barley bread; flesh rarely
CHINESE LABORERS (COUNTRY)
Rice, vegetables; sometimes a little fish or flesh; in some parts, rice, millet, sweet potatoes, beans etc.
KOREAN COUNTRYMEN (SOME)
Rice, eggs, dried fish, flesh; or rice, beans, spice, vinegar, radishes, occasional flesh.
JAPANESE SOLDIERS
Rice, 36 oz. vegetables, some fish, barley and beans at times.
SAMURAI
Unhulled rice chiefly, some fish or eggs, dried fruit, tea, cool, not cold, water.
TARTARS OF THE CHIN HILLS
Flesh, alcohol, etc
MADRAS MESSENGERS
Boiled rice, etc.
HIMALAYANS
Rice, etc.
SIKHS
Vegetarian chiefly, wheat flour.
ARMENIAN PORTERS
Bread, olives, cheese, onions, salad.

AFRICA
JENNA PEOPLE (CENTRAL AFRICA)
Chiefly yams and maize
ARAB TRIBES IN NORTH AFRICA
Dates, milk etc
CONGO SLAVES
Vegetarian
CANARY ISLAND LABORERS
Coarse vegetables, fruit, grain
SOME NATIVE RACES OF SOUTH AFRICA
Millet, sour milk.

AMERICAS
TOBASCO INDIANS (MEXICO)
Maize, sugar, etc
MEXICAN INDIANS AND MINERS
Maize, sugar, omelets, vegetables.
CHILIAN LABORERS (FROM DARWIN)
Two small loaves, 16 figs, boiled beans, roasted wheat.
YAQUIL MINERS (FROM DARWIN)
Boiled beans and bread
RIO SALADE SPANIARDS
Vegetarian
BOLIVIAN TROOPERS
Maize, cocoa, water.
BRAZIL SLAVES
Rice, fruit, bread, roots.
OPON INDIANS
Maize, sugar-cane, game, bananas, bread-fruit, mangoes, oranges.
FRIENDLY ISLANDERS
Bread-fruit, potatoes, taro, fruit, fish.
IPALAOS ISLANDERS
Bread-fruit, vegetables, fish, yams, potatoes, taro, bananas, coconuts, birds, eggs, turtles, etc.
COMANCHES (RED INDIANS)
Animal, chiefly; buffalo, piñon-nut, etc.
OSAGES (RED INDIANS)
Buffalo, maize, beans, pumpkins, wild plums.

Well, there you are. Glean what you may from that list. Start your own health-fad industry from it. Drink cool, not cold water. Revel in the idea that Cypriot Monks are amongst the strongest men in the world. Find out where the Ipalaos Islands are (and let me know).
John Kellogg’s wife Ella Eaton Kellogg assisted him in his work, and in 1893 published a book on diet and nutrition called Science in the Kitchen. I have to say there is not much in there that is fun. I have given you recipes from it before, so instead today I give you a recipe from Favorite dishes, by Carrie V. Shuman, published the very same year but with a different attitude.

Chicken Croquettes.
From MRS. SARAH H. BIXBY, of Maine, Alternate Lady Manager.
Chop one-half pound chicken quite fine; add one teaspoonful salt; one saltspoonful pepper; one saltspoonful celery salt; one teaspoon lemon juice; one tablespoon chopped parsley and a few drops of onion juice; moisten with the thick cream sauce.
Thick Cream Sauce --Melt two tablespoons butter; add two heaping tablespoons cornstarch; one teaspoon salt and one saltspoon pepper; add slowly one pint hot cream and beat well.
[The Alternate Lady Manager did not feel the need to spell it out, but these croquettes would probably have been crumbed and fried.]

Quotation for the Day …
The hippopotamus is a vegetarian and looks like a wall. Lions who eat only red meat are sleek and slim. Are nutritionists on the wrong track? Erma Bombeck.

High and mighty tasty?

July 17 ...

I have never quite understood the desire to eat decomposing flesh, even when it is referred to as ‘well hung’ or ‘high’ rather than half-rotten. Call me plebeian if you wish. It seems however that I am in good company.

The poet John Keats and his friend Charles Armitage Brown wrote a joint letter from Bedhampton in the south of England to ‘Mrs Dilke’ in January 1819 – Keats writing in black ink, Brown in red.

“ … Keats is much better, owing to a strict forbearance from a third glass of wine. He & I walked to Chichester yesterday, we were here at 3, but the dinner was finished; a brace of Mure fowl had been dresse; I ate a piece of the breast cold, & it was not tainted; I dared not venture further. Mr. Snook was nearly turned sick by being merely asked to take a mouthful. The other brace was so high, that the cook declined preparing them for the spit, & they were thrown away. I see your husband declared them to be in excellent order: I suppose he enjoyed them in a disgusting manner, - sucking the rotten flesh off the bones, & crunching the putrid bones. Did you enjoy any? I hope not, for a woman should be delicate in her food. ”

The muir-fowl (or moor-fowl) is a Scottish red grouse, I believe. Or it may be the ruffled grouse, or a ptarmigan. Usage seems to overlap, and it certainly overflows my intelligence on the topic.

In the early nineteenth century a leisurely trip from the moors of Scotland to the south of England might have been sufficient for it to be quite enjoyable (for those inclined to tainted flesh) by the time it arrived.

Here is Mrs. Rundell’s method for potting Moor Fowl – a nice trick if you have an embarrassing supply of them, as they should keep nicely this way. You are making a confit, really, and it does not matter whether you have the grouse or the ptarmigan or any other small bird for that matter. She only wants them ‘pretty high’ in the spicing department, which is quite acceptable to me.

To Pot Moor Game.
Pick, singe, and wash the birds nicely; then dry them; and season, inside aud out, pretty high, with pepper, mace, nutmeg, allspice, and salt. Pack them in as small a pot as will hold them, cover them with butter, and bake in a very slow oven. Whon cold, take off the butter, dry them from the gravy, and put one bird into each pot, which should just fit. Add as much more butter as will cover them - but take care that it does not oil. The best way to melt it is, by warming it in a basin set ii a bowl of hot water.
A New System of Domestic Cookery. Maria Rundell. 1814

Quotation for the Day …

“Ham: 40 days in salt, 40 days hanging, in 40 days eaten … Pork at walking pace, beef at a trot, game at a gallop.
Joseph Delteil, La Cuisine paleolithique, 1964

Entertaining the Queen.

July 9 ...

Queen Elizabeth I arrived at Kenilworth, the home of her favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester on this day in 1575. It was the highlight of her summer ‘progress’ (Royal Tour): the visit, the feasting, and the pageantry lasted eighteen days. Impressing the Queen was an expensive exercise and the honour cost Dudley an unbelievable thousand dollars a day.

There was morris dancing, ‘sundry kinds of very delectable music’, play-acting, stag-hunting, bear-baiting, and all sorts of other frolicsome pastimes in addition to many extravagant dining experiences. The details of this fine little holiday were recorded by one Robert Laneham. He hints at the vast quantities of dainty viands and says that there were ‘full cups everywhere, every hour all kinds of wine’, but unfortunately for us does not give any detailed bills of fare. We must be satisfied with a general description of one of the banquets:

“After the play, out of hand followed a most delicious and (if I may so term it) an ambrosial banquet: whereof, whether I might more muse at the daintiness, shapes, and the cost; or else, at the variety and number of the dishes (that were three hundred), for my part, I could little tell then; and now less, I assure you. Her Majesty eat smally or nothing; which understood, the courses were not so orderly served and sizely set down, but were, by and by, as disorderly wasted and coarsely consumed; more courtly, methought, than courteously : But that was no part of the matter : it might please and be liked, and do that it came for, then was all well enough.”

I have chosen a chicken recipe for you from the Elizabethan era. Simple, but quite good enough to serve a Queen.

To bake a Capon with yolkes of Egges.
When the Capon is made redi, trusse him in to a Coffyn: then take .viii. yolks of egges sodden hard, a pick into every one of them, .v. Cloves, and put the yolks into the Coffyn with the Capon. Then take a quantitie of gynger and salt, and cast it upon the Capon and bake it .iii. houres. Then take .ii. raw yolkes of egges beaten into a Gobbett of veriuce, with a good quantitie of sugre sodden togither, put it into ye Coffyn and so serve it.
[A Treasurie of commodious Conceits, & hidden Secrets. John Partridge, published in 1573.]

Tomorrow’s Story …

Gravy, Part 1.

Quotation for the Day …

I never see an egg brought on my table but I feel penetrated with the wonderful change it would have undergone but for my gluttony; it might have been a gentle, useful, hen leading her chickens with a care and vigilance which speaks shame to many women. St. John de Crevecoeur.

Waterloo Food.

June 18 ...

On this day in 1815 the British defeated Napoleon Bonaparte (and hence their traditional enemy, the French) once and for all near a Belgian town called Waterloo, and they (the British, that is) have celebrated the event ever since. The Duke of Wellington - he who was responsible for the victory - held a banquet on the anniversary every year at Apsley House (his London mansion) until his death. It was a grand affair, and only the elite (including King George IV in 1821) and one was only invited if one was from the elite of society, or was one of his old military comrades.

Other less grand celebrations went on, each individual or community commemorating the day as they could. The villagers of Denby Dale in Yorkshire in 1815 made the second of their famous giant pies, calling it The Victory Pie. In 1845, the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt and his team in deepest Australia had been saving their sugar bags for just this day. The starving men boiled them up with their tea, dissolving out the last sweet fugitive grains as a delicious treat.

So how shall we celebrate the day? Surprisingly, there is little named for the battle iself, so we must be content to celebrate the man who made it all happen.

There is of course, Filet of Beef Wellington, the beef covered in foie gras and truffles, the whole wrapped in golden puff pastry, and the absolute dinner party dish of the 60’s . Apocryphal stories abound as to its naming. The reality is that beef wrapped in pastry has been around for as long as there has been pastry. The particular incarnation that we refer to may indeed have been named in his honour – or is it in honour of his highly polished boots, as some say?

Nineteenth century chefs often named their dishes after famous people (living or dead) or famous events. Here is one from Queen Victoria’s chef, Francatelli – a dish which also looks to Wellington’s legs.

Legs of Fowl à la Wellington.
In this case also the legs of fowls whose fillets have already been used will serve the purpose : the legs, wings, and back-bones should be separated and neatly trimmed, placed in a deep sautapan with two tablespoonfuls of salad-oil, a sprig of thyme, one bay-leaf, a clove of garlic, a little pepper and salt. Fry the members of fowls over a sharp fire until they are done of a light-brown colour, and then, after removing the bay-leaf and thyme, shake in two tablespoonfuls of flour, and one of Crosse and Blackwell's Indian Chutnee; stir all together, moisten with half a pint of good gravy, simmer the whole over the fire for ten minutes, and serve.
[The Cook’s Guide, Charles Elmé Francatelli, 1863]

Tomorrow’s Story.

Superdreadnought food.

Quotation for the Day.

Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event. Oscar Wilde.

Dying for food.

June 11 ...

A dish is pleasant beyond your expectations. What is there beyond mere delicious or yummy (see previous posts) to describe it? A modern phrase that thankfully seems to be declining is ‘to die for’. I don’t like the phrase, I think it is silly, but I am interested in its origins.

The Roman poet Horace wrote the line Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori , meaning ‘It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country’. The line has been used ever since in a military sense to glorify past or future deaths, but it has not to my knowledge ever been seriously used in a food context until recent times. I don’t intend to get into any sort of existential debate over this, but I will say that I dont think any piece of chocolate cake is worth dying for. You may disagree.

There are many ways to die food related deaths of course, and I don’t just mean by poisoning. They are not sweet deaths however. The seventeenth century chef known as Vatel ran himself through with his sword in 1661 – ashamed when insufficient fish was delivered for the King’s dinner (he was impatient, the fishmonger was running a little late). A London butcher in the reign of Henry VIII was boiled to death in the Smithfield market for allegedly attempting to poison members of the household of the Bishop of Rochester (apparently the process took two hours.) A ‘poor silly man’ known as The Great Eater of Kent in the early seventeenth century was famous, as his name suggests, for his great feats of eating. For the amusement of his neighbours he would devour an entire sheep, raw, in one sitting, and he regularly ate eighteen yards of black pudding for breakfast. He did not die, however, like Mr Creosote in the movie The Meaning of Life, by bursting asunder. His death was far more ironic than that. King James I came to hear of him, and ‘His majesty asked what he could do more than any other man; and being answered, that he could not do so much; he replied, hang him then, for it is unfit a man should live that eats as much as twenty men, and cant do as much as one.’

If you yourself do like the phrase ‘to die for’, may I caution you in respect of its written use. I have seen it used in the form of an acronym. Be advised that the acronym TDF can also mean ‘Total Dietary Fibre’ (and it is highly unlikely that the food under discussion fits this category), but even more alarmingly, it can also mean Testis-Determining Factor (the context is purely scientific.)

It is perfectly possible that a food could shock you to death. The cost of the truffles in this recipe, for example.

Turkey with Truffles.
Take a fat turkey, cleanse and singe it; if you should chance to burst the gall-bladder or intestines, wash the inside of the body very carefully. Then peel three or four pounds of truffles; chop up a handful of the worst with some fat bacon, and put them, into a saucepan, together with the whole truffles, salt, pepper, spices, and a bay leaf; let these ingredients cook over a slow fire for three quarters of an hour ; then take them off, stir, and leave them to cool ; when quite cold, put them in the body of the turkey, sew up the opening, and let the bird imbibe the flavour of the truffles, by their remaining in for several days, if the season permit. When you wish to dress the turkey, cover it with thin broad slices of bacon, and over that, strong paper, and roast it two hours: when nearly done, take off the paper that the bird may brown a few minutes, and serve.
[French domestic cookery, by an English physician. 1825]

Tomorrow’s Story …

Shortbread.

Quotation for the Day …

A nuclear power plant is infinently safer than eating, because 300 people choke to death on food every year. Dixy Lee Ray.

Dinner with Jane.

June 6 ...

On this day in 1811 Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra, and let her know that the Wedgwood dinner service that they had ordered had arrived safely. She was clearly delighted – although in an example of pure Austen-ese commented that ‘I think they might have allowed us rather larger leaves, especially in such a year of fine foliage as this … ’

The Wedgwood company was founded in 1759 by Josiah Wedgwood who came from a family that had been potters for four generations. Within a decade he was supplying the nobility of Britain and Europe. Josiah died in Jane’s twentieth year, but the Wedgwood pottery continued on, and still continues - as it should, indefinitely and forever. Jane would no doubt be delighted.

Jane Austen would be high on my list of famous five people you could invite to a dinner party. What would I give her to eat? I have chosen a couple of recipes from her own era, inspired by her own words.

“Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.”

Pigeons en Surprise.
Truss five small pigeons ; put them into boiling water, and let them boil up, keeping the livers apart; then take them out, and put into the same water five fine coss lettuces ; let these boil a quarter of an hour, squeeze them well, and open them into two parts, without separating the leaves; then cover them with a forcemeat, made with the livers of the pigeons, some parsley and green onions, five or six leaves of tarragon, a little chervil, and two shallots, the whole shred fine, and mixed with some butter or grated bacon, salt, coarse pepper, and the yolks of two eggs ; then put a pigeon upon each lettuce and cover it with the leaves in such a manner as that it cannot be seen; tie them thus with packthread, and stew slowly for an hour, with some rather fat stock, a bunch of parsley and green onions, two cloves of garlic, two large onions, a carrot and a parsnip, adding salt and pepper to your taste. When the pigeons are done, drain and untie them, wiping with a linen cloth : serve over them a good veal cullis, if you have any, otherwise put less salt into the stew ; strain it off, skim, and reduce it to the consistence of a sauce, thickening over the fire with a piece of butter, about the size of a walnut, rolled in flour, and the yolks of two eggs beat up ; serve the pigeons wrapt in the lettuces.
[French domestic cookery, by an English physician …. 1825]

“Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim.”

A Fashion Cake.
Mix a handful of flour with a pint of good cream, half a pound of beef suet, melted and sifted, a quarter of a pound of sugar powder, half a pound of raisins stoned and chopped, dried flowers of orange, a glass of brandy, a little coriander and salt; bake it as all other cakes, about an hour, and glaze or garnish it.
[Every Woman her own House-keeper …. John Perkins, 1796]

Jane Austen has featured in other blog stories HERE and HERE.

Monday’s Story …

Yum-Yum.

Quotation for the Day …

A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of. Jane Austen.

A wedding breakfast, 1571.

March 25 ...

I don’t think I am giving you enough historic menus - in spite of a great surplus on my computer. I have plenty to spare because quite a large number in my ‘collection’ do not have an exact date, so they are no use in my book Menus from History, which has an ‘on this day’ theme. It seems a shame that these fine bills of fare should languish un-appreciated, so I will bring one out from time to time and dust it off for your interest.

I confess to another motive for my generosity: I have been completely stumped by some of these menus. I am unable to authenticate a number of them, or to discover any other interesting details on an awful lot more. Perhaps you might be able to help?

Today’s menu is mentioned as a curiosity under ‘Banquets’ in Larousse (at least, in my 1961 edition). The ‘bill of fare’ is the from the Nuptial Dinner of Maître Baude Cuvillon (Conseiller et Maître ordinaire de la Chambre des comptes), in 1571. The Larousse says that there was an afternoon banquet with two courses plus ‘Issue’ (dessert), and then at midnight there was a supper (disner de chauldéau). The bill of fare is apparently preserved in the archives of the Nord Department, but it is not detailed in Larousse. It is, however, described on several internet sites, without its exact provenance being stated. A crash course in sixteenth century French and a visit to the Archives du Nord both being slightly the other side of impossible for me at present, I give you the internet version, and hope that one of you can spread some light.

First Course.
Salads of various kinds.
Flesh of prinsels with parsley and vinegar.
Mutton broth.
Fricasse of gosling.
Spring chickens with spinach.
Cold saille.
Pigeons a la tremoulette.
Roast joints of mutton.
Roast brest of veal.
Small pastries with hot sauce.
Roast roebuck.
Dainty pate.
Spring chickens in aspic.
Sweetened mustard.

Second Course.
Venison broth.
Roast capon.
Orange salad.
Roast pheasants.
Roast rabbits.
Roast spring chickens, some stuffed some larded.
Cheriots.
Roast quail.
Roast crousets.
Smoked tongue.
Boulogne sausages.
Pheasant pates.
Pate of meaux hams.
Crousets pates.
Turkey or peacock pate.
Venison pate.
Leg of lamb daube.
Capon in aspic.
Roast swan.
Sweetened mustard.
Olives

Issue [dessert]
Mousse tart.
Apple tart.
Chervil tart.
Jam tart.
Cream flan.
Gohier.
Waffles.
Pate of pears.
Clove apple.
Pears in mead.
Sartelles pears.
Angelots.
Morbecque.
Gren walnuts.
Fresh fruit.
Ample jelly.
Cheese.

I gave you a recipe for roast swan from the late fourteenth century Le Menagier de Paris, so I looked further afield for today. I was surprised to find one in Alexis Soyer’s Gastronomic Regenerator (1847) in the section intriguingly entitled Amateur Receipts . It is in the form of a rhyme, and is also in serious need of light-shedding.

Roast Swan à la Norwich.
Take three pounds of beef, beat fine in a mortar,
Put it into the Swan - that is, when you've caught her ;
Some pepper, salt, mace, some nutmeg, an onion,
Will heighten the flavour in Gourmand's opinion ;
Then tie it up tight with a small piece of tape,
That the gravy and other things may not escape.
A meal-paste (rather stiff) should be laid on the breast,
And some whited-brown paper should cover the rest.
Fifteen minutes at least ere the Swan you take down,
Pull the paste off the bird, that the breast may get brown.

The Gravy.

To a gravy of beef (good and strong) I opine
You'll be right if you add half a pint of port wine :
Pour this through the Swan - yes, quite through the belly :
Then serve the whole up with some hot currant jelly.
N. B. - The Swan must not be skinned.

Tomorrow’s Story …

Conspicuous Consumption.

Quotation for the Day …

Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian; wine and tarragon make it French. Sour cream makes it Russian; lemon and cinnamon make it Greek. Soy sauce makes it Chinese; garlic makes it good. Alice May Brock.

The Pope comes to dinner.

January 14 ...

Over a thousand people, including Queen Christina of Sweden attended a banquet give for Pope Innocent XI in Rome on this day in 1687. Mine host was His Excellency the Earl of Castelmaine, English Ambassador to Rome, and he put on a fine spread indeed – so fine that the feast remained set out “for two whole days, (according to the Roman way) that everyone's curiosity might have some share in the Entertainment”.

The event was recorded by the Ambassador’s steward, John Michael Wright, and he left some details about the food.

“This large table, having (as is said) these adornments in the middle, had between them, and the napkins, (which were also most artificially folded) two rows of Assiets, or Intermesses, on either side, fill'd with all sorts of relishing bits, whether salt, sweet or soure; as Pickles, Butter, slices of delicate Bacon, Bologna-Sausiges, Taratufoli, Composts, &c., all which, stood in the abovesaid order, for two whole days, (according to the Roman way) that everyone's curiosity might have some share in the Entertainment."

The art of napkin-folding had impressed Samuel Pepys a few decades earlier, so it seems that it was a relatively new fashion in England. The ‘adornments’ were the incredibly elaborate food ‘sculptures’ – like the medieval subtelties or illusion foods that were not necessarily eaten but served as messages of propaganda or symbols of religious devotion, or simply – as in this case – to impress the guests with the wealth and status of the host. These ‘adornments’ were given to eminent ladies to take home – so no doubt they did second duty in eminent homes as symbols of rank and influence.

Mr. Wright’s inclusion of ‘composts’ in his list seems a little old-fashioned for the time. It was already an old word to describe a ‘composition’ or combination of ingredients – as in the modern use of the word to describe a mix of garden refuse in the process of melting down into rich soil. We do still use it in a culinary sense too – although we use the Frenchified version: the little accent mark over the second ‘o’ in compôte indicates the loss of a letter ‘s’. So there you are – next time you have a fruit compote you are really having a modern version of compost.

Composts were not exclusively made of fruit in medieval and early modern times. Here are a couple of versions from Englands first printed cookbook, A Noble boke off cookry ffor a prynce houssolde or eny other estately houssolde (1500)

Peres in composte.
To mak peres [pears] in composte tak a good quantite of canelle [cinnamon] and sugur and set it on the fyer to boile and draw yt throughe a stren then lesk [slice or chop]dates thyn and put them ther to in a pot and boille wardens [pears] and pair them and put them in the ceripe [syrup] put ther to sanders [red sandalwood, used to color the dish] and boile them and alay them up with chardwins and salt it and mak yt doucet [sweet] and chargaunt and put it out of the vesselle in to a treene vesselle and let it boille then pare smalle raisins and tried guinger and temper it ij dais or ij nyghtes with wyne then lay it in clarified hony cold a day and nyght then tak the raisins out of the hony and cast ther to peres in composte and serue it furthe with a cold ceripe.

To mak compost.
To mak composte tak chekins [chickens] and halve them then tak saige parsly lekes and other good erbes and chop them small then tak a pint of hony and som of the erbes and lay in the botom of the pot and som of the chekyn then tak lard of pork smale mynced and lay it on and cast ther to pouder of guingere and canelle and boille it and serue it.

Tomorrow’s Story …

Living on Parmesan.

Quotation for the Day …

Monsieur Guizot assures us that while he was ambassador in London, his cook was more useful to him politically than his secretaries.
Lucien Tendret (1825-1896) great-nephew of Brillat-Savarin.

The Third Day of Christmas.

Today, December 28 …

“On the third day of Christmas my true love sent to me: "Three French hens ….".

Why French? I guess because “Three Bresse chickens” doesn’t have the right ring to it? To the English, a “French Hen” was an alternative name for a particular variety of bantam chicken with frizzled (i.e upcurled) feathers. I have no idea why. Does the rhyme mean three of these little birds? But why hens? Old laying hens are not much use for anything other than making chicken stock – mind you, that’s a pretty noble end. What would we do without chicken stock? Live on ice-cream I suppose.

Once upon a time, recipes and bills of fare specified the type of fowl that made up the dish – capon, pullet, hen, rooster etc. Now we mostly just get “chicken”, because mostly the bird is factory reared to standard specifications, and is culled at a standard age. Chicken-rearing practices would have to be drastically re-discovered for us to regularly see these old names on menus – but in case it does happen, here is a short summary:

Hen: the female of the “common domestic barnyard fowl” i.e Gallus domesticus; usually refers to a bird beyond its pullet stage.

Pullet: a young female, at the beginning of her egg-laying life (about 20 weeks) but has not yet moulted.

Rooster, Cockerel: the male of the “common domestic barnyard fowl”, most usefull in the household to make Cock-Ale (a useful beverage to restore your fighting spirit).

Capon: A castrated cock. Capons are bigger, fatter and more docile than their intact brothers, so desirable on all counts to farmers and the first two to cooks (they make the best roasters, apparently).

In case the chicken-rearing revival does not become widespread, but you have a yen for roast capon on Sundays, here is how to caponize your birds, as told by William Ellis in his marvellous Country Housewifes Companion (1750)

To make Capons. This operation belongs to the country housewife. I know a yeoman living near Hempstead in Hertfordshire, whose estate is but about fifty pounds a year, that makes (as it is credibly reported) fifteen pounds a year by the sale of capons; his wife and daughter cut the young dunghill cocks, but I don't suppose they were all bred on his farm, for some for this purpose make it their business after harvest-time to go to markets for buying up chickens, and between Michaelmas and Allhollantide caponize the cocks, when they have got large enough to have stones of such a bigness that they may be pulled out, for if they are too little, it can't be done; and to know when a cock is fit for it, he should be pretty well grown, have a good comb, and be well fleshed, for these signs shew they are bigger than those of leaner fowls. To cut them, the cock must lie on its back, and held fast, while with a very sharp knife she cuts him only skin-deep about an inch in length, between the rump and the end of the breast-bone, where the flesh is thinnest; next she makes use of a large needle to raise the flesh, for her safer cutting through it to avoid the guts, and making a cut here big enough to put her finger in, which she thrusts under the guts, and with it rakes or tears out the stone that lies nearest to it. This done, she performs the very same operation on the other side of the cock's body, and there takes out the other stone; then she stitches up the wounds, and lets the fowl go about as at other times, till the capon is fatted in a coop, which is commonly done from Christmas to Candlemas, and after. Now if the stones are but big enough, as they lie to the back, they may be safely taken out with a greased fore-finger, without much danger of killing the creature, but when they are too small there is danger. This way of caponizing a cock, I have had done at my house for my information, by a woman deemed to be one of our best capon cutters, else it would have been a difficult matter for me to give a description of it; for they that never saw such an operation, and venture at it, must expect to kill one or more, before he or she gets master of the science. And indeed it is for want of this knowledge that the art of caponizing fowls is not so much practised as formerly; but as I have given a pretty good account I hope of it, I am of opinion the art will be revived, and capons sold in greater plenty than ever.

I stand firmly by my statement about the indispensibility of chicken stock, so our foodie Twelve Days of Christmas now reads:

“On the third day of Christmas, my good friend sent to me
Three boiling hens,
Two chocolate tarts,
And a partridge in a pear tree.”

Susanna Kellet, whose book A complete collection of cookery receipt… was the source of yesterday’s recipe, knew some other things to do with boiling hens.

A dish of Boiled Hens.
Dress your hens for boiling, fill their bellies with the yolks of hard boiled eggs, and boil the hens; when enough, lay them in order on a dish, then pour sauce over them, and thin slices of bacon round.

Sauce for Boiled Hens.
Take some good turnips, pare them, cut them into square small dices, and boil them in milk and water, but don’t boil them too much; then drain them, and have some bacon boiled and cut like turnips, and lay them together; then shred some lemon and oysters, and melt some butter; when it is ready, put all into it, and pour it over your hens; you may boil square pieces of bacon, to lay in the middle of the dish.

Tomorrow’s Story …

The Fourth Day of Christmas.

Quotation for the Day …

The dinner table is the center for the teaching and practicing not just of table manners but of conversation, consideration, tolerance, family feeling, and just about all the other accomplishments of polite society except the minuet. Judith Martin (“Miss Manners”)