Leprosy in the time of Potatoes.

January 8

Gilbert White (1720-1793) was an English cleric and naturalist whose home was Selborne in Hampshire. Much of his detailed observation of the natural world (and the human one) was recorded in letters he wrote to other naturalists and scientists, and these were compiled in a book called The Natural History of Selborne. In a letter he wrote on this day in 1778, he mused on the possible causes of leprosy (particularly the dietary) – and in the course of this gives us a strong clue as to the timing of the acceptance of the potato as a useful crop in England.

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, Jan. 8, 1778.

Dear Sir,
In all ages the leprosy has made dreadful havoc among mankind…. Some centuries ago this horrible distemper prevailed all Europe over; and our forefathers were by no means exempt, …. It must therefore, in these days, be, to an humane and thinking person, a matter of equal wonder and satisfaction, when he contemplates how nearly this pest is eradicated … This happy change perhaps may have originated and been continued from the much smaller quantity of salted meat and fish now eaten in these kingdoms; from the use of linen next the skin; from the plenty of better bread; and from the profusion of fruits, roots, legumes, and greens, so common in every family. … Three or four centuries ago, before there were any enclosures, sown-grasses, field-turnips, or field-carrots, or hay, all the cattle which had grown fat in summer, and were not killed for winter-use, were turned out soon after Michaelmas to shift as they could through the dead months; so that no fresh meat could be had in winter or spring…. But agriculture is now arrived at such a pitch of perfection, that our best and fattest meats are killed in the winter; and no man need eat salted flesh, unless he prefers it, that has money to buy fresh…. One cause of this distemper might be, no doubt, the quantity of wretched fresh and salt fish consumed by the commonalty at all seasons as well as in Lent; …. Potatoes have prevailed in this little district, by means of premiums, within these twenty years only; and are much esteemed here now by the poor, who would scarce have ventured to taste them in the last reign.

It was an interesting turnaround for the potato – to be given as an example of the profusion of healthy vegetables available for the poor, and thereby contributing to the disappearance of leprosy. One of the things that delayed the adoption of the potato in Europe was the belief that it might cause leprosy - although this may well have been propaganda on the part of clerics who feared that what it would really do would be to precipitate a distracting lust amongst their flock. Many fruits and vegetables introduced from the New World were initially accused of being aphrodisiacs (the tomato and chocolate also for example) - the motto seemed to be ‘If in doubt, don’t trust it.’

Cookbooks of the eighteenth century do contain recipes for ‘potatoes’, but often this means the sweet potato. It is not always possible to be certain which potato is being referred to in a recipe. Sometimes the ‘ordinary’ white potato was referred to as the Virginia potato, or Irish potato or white potato – but ‘Spanish potato’ could mean either variety.

Which type of potato do you think Mrs Elizabeth Raffald expects you to use in this recipe from The Experienced English Housewife (1769)?

To scollop Potatoes.
Boil your potatoes, then beat them fine in a bowl with good cream, a lump of butter and salt. Put them into scolloped shells, make them smooth on top, score them with a knife. Lay thin slices of butter on the top of them, put them in a Dutch oven to brown before the fire. Three shells is enough for a dish.
[P.S. There are more historic potato recipes HERE.]

Tomorrow’s Story …

Polite Potatoes.

Quotation for the Day …

What I say is that, if a man really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow. A.A. Milne.

St George’s Day.

Today, April 23rd …

Today is the feast day of St George, the patron saint of England. In honour of the day, Sam at Becks‘n Posh has challenged bloggers to demonstrate why English food is not a joke.

A joke is something open to ridicule, not to be taken seriously, a laughing-stock. I put it to you that English food must be taken very seriously. There is nothing ridiculous about oysters from Chester, cheese from Wensleydale, bacon from Bath (especially that from the cheeks or chaps of the local pig), apples from Somerset, and roast beef from just about anywhere. Sure, the names of some English puddings are good for a laugh – Spotted Dick comes to mind – but a laughing stock they are not. One might gasp with delight at a fine summer berry pudding or an apple pie (with clotted cream from Devon, please) but they demand to be enjoyed most seriously.

Given the fantastic range of fresh produce, wild game, artisanal cheeses,and specially bred stock in the various (and varied) regions of England, plus a written corpus of historic recipes dating back to the fourteenth century – what to choose to make my point?

Naturally I am inclined to provide a recipe with some historic significance today. In spite of a huge range of possibilities, I made my choice easily. Hare Soup has a fine lineage, and is particularly associated with St George, or at least with St George’s Day dinners – although I have no idea why. The famous French chef Antonin Carême (1784-1833), the man referred to as “the chef of kings and the king of chefs” was for a short while the Chef to the Prince Regent. He made Hare Soup from an English recipe, and it is said he dedicated it to St George – perhaps that is where the association developed.

Here is a recipe for it from the very English Mrs Elizabeth Raffald’s book, The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769).

To make a Hare Soup.
Cut a large old hare in small pieces, and put it in a mug with three blades of mace, a little salt, two large onions, one red herring, six morels, half a pint of red wine, three quarts of water. Bake it in a quick oven three hours, then strain it into a tossing pan. Have ready boiled three ounces of French barley or sago in water. Scald the liver of the hare in boiling water two minutes, rub it through a hair sieve with the back of a wooden spoon, put it into the soup with the barley or sago and a quarter of a pound of butter. Set it over the fire, keep stirring it but don’t let it boil. If you don’t like liver put in crisped bread steeped in wine. This is a rich soup and proper for a large entertainment where two soups are required, almond or onion for the top, and hare soup for the bottom.*

* Hannah is referring to the placement of the soups at the top and bottom of the table. Dishes were arranged on the table in her day with geometric precision in strict formal order, in the form of service known as service à la française. The method may have produced an impressive display, but the food must have had plenty of time to cool by the time guests sat down.

Tomorrow’s Story …

Chocolate Malted Milk Cake.

Quotation for the Day …

[Soup] … must be the agent provocateur of a good dinner. Carême

Macaroni: with cheese?

Today, March 6th …

The American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne spent the years from 1853-1857 as United States consul in Liverpool, England. Naturally, he kept notes of his impressions of the people and the country, and on this day he ate aboard the Princeton.

These daily lunches on shipboard might answer very well the purposes of a dinner; being in fact, noonday dinners, with soup, roast mutton, mutton chops, and macaroni pudding – brandy port and sherry wines….There is a satisfaction in seeing Englishmen eat and drink, they do it so heartily, and on the whole, so wisely, - trusting so entirely that there is no harm in good beef and mutton, and a reasonable quantity of good liquor; and so these three hale old men, who had acted on this wholesome faith so long, were proofs that it is well on earth to live like earthly creatures.

‘Macaroni’ is a problem word for the OED, which finds itself unable to confidently explain its origin. It may come from the Latin for a sort of dumpling, but the Romans may have gotten it from the Greek word for barley-broth, which seems a bit convoluted. In the second half of the seventeenth century the word came to refer to a particularly foolish type of young man who affected the latest fashions and fads, especially if they were from ‘the Continent’. Co-incidentally the second half of the seventeenth century was also when macaroni, the dish, started to appear fairly regularly in cookbooks.

Macaroni did not always have its current tubular form. In early recipes it seems to be more like gnocchi, but there is an intriguing recipe in the first known English cookbook, the Form of Cury (about 1390) for a dish called ‘macrows’, which sounds similar enough to be intiguing. Macrows were made with thin sheets of dough cut into pieces, which were boiled and then served with butter and cheese – perhaps justifying it as an early version of mac n’ cheese.

Macrows.
Take and make a thynne foyle of dowh. and kerve it on peces, and cast hem on boillyng water & seeþ it wele. take chese and grate it and butter cast bynethen and above as losyns. and serue forth.

By 1769 when Elizabeth Raffald published her Experienced English Housekeeper the dish was pretty well what we would recognise today.

To dress Macaroni with Parmesan Cheese.
Boil four ounces of macaroni till it be quite tender and lay it on a sieve to drain. Then put it in a tossing pan with about a gill of good cream, a lump of butter rolled in flour, boil it five minutes. Pour it on a plate, lay all over it parmesan cheese toasted, send it to table on a water plate for it soon gets cold.

But of course, Nathaniel Hawthorne had Macaroni Pudding, not Macaroni Cheese. Here is a recipe for pudding from Mrs. Beeton, who follows it with a short description for the edification of her readers.

Sweet Macaroni Pudding.
Ingredients: 2- ½ oz. of macaroni, 2 pints of milk, the rind of ½ lemon, 3 eggs, sugar and grated nutmeg to taste, 2 tablespoonfuls of brandy.
Mode: -Put the macaroni, with a pint of the milk, into a saucepan with the lemon-peel, and let it simmer gently until the macaroni is tender; then put it into a pie-dish without the peel; mix the other pint of milk with the eggs; stir these well together, adding the sugar and brandy, and pour the mixture over the macaroni. Grate a little nutmeg over the top, and bake in a moderate oven for 1/2 hour. To make this pudding look nice, a paste should be laid round the edges of the dish, and, for variety, a layer of preserve or marmalade may be placed on the macaroni: in this case omit the brandy.

MACARONI is composed of wheaten flour, flavoured with other articles, and worked up with water into a paste, to which, by a peculiar process, a tubular or pipe form is given, in order that it may cook more readily in hot water. That of smaller diameter than macaroni (which is about the thickness of a goose-quill) is called vermicelli; and when smaller still, fidelini. The finest is made from the flour of the hard-grained Black-Sea wheat. Macaroni is the principal article of food in many parts of Italy, particularly Naples, where the best is manufactured, and from whence, also, it is exported in considerable quantities. In this country, macaroni and vermicelli are frequently used in soups.

Tomorrow’s Story …

A new potato.

A Previous Story for this Day …

Dried strawberries were the topic of the day.

Quotation for the Day …

Fettucini alfredo is macaroni and cheese for adults. Mitch Hedberg.

In Memory of a Mistress.

Today, December 8th …

The beautiful Jean Becu, Comtesse Du Barry was guillotined on this day in 1793, in her fiftieth year. She did not go quietly - weary and accepting - like Marie-Antoinette. In her last hysterical moments she wept and pleaded with the executioner for "Encore un moment, monsieur le bourreau, un petit moment". A sad and undignified end for a beautiful woman who had had an undignified beginning as an illegitimate seamstress but – thanks to her great beauty - rose to enjoy a powerful and extravagant life as a courtesan and the last mistress of Louis XV.

Her name has become associated with a number of dishes based on cauliflower. There was certainly a fashion a century or so later for naming dishes after the rich and famous, but why cauliflower and Mme. Du Barry? Perhaps the white cauliflower suggested her fine pale skin, or powdered wig – or the complicated design of the wig itself? Perhaps it is the sheer, velvety voluptuousness of the Mornay sauce that is a traditional part of the garnish “à la du Barry”?

Before we move on to recipes, let us pause and consider the cauliflower itself. Cauliflower is one of the cultivars of Brassica oleracea, which also encompasses cabbage, broccoli, kale, collard greens, kohlrabi and Brussels sprouts. In other words, all of these important vegetables are exactly the same species. Hundreds, probably thousands of years of tweaking by horticulturalists have allowed one or other part of the plant to be the desirable feature. In the case of the cauliflower, it is the flowering head of the plant which has been encouraged.

Cauliflower is usually sold today stripped of its leaves. The leaves indicate the freshness of the vegetable (perhaps that is our clue to why they are removed) and they are also quite edible in their own right. Mrs Raffald got it right in the simple recipe for cooking cauliflower in her book “The Experienced English Housekeeper” (1769).

To Boil a Cauliflower.
Wash and clean your cauliflower, boil it in plenty of milk and water (but no salt) till it be tender. When you dish it up lay greens under it, pour over a good melted butter and send it up hot.

The traditional garnish “à la Dubarry” came later, historically. According to the Larousse Gastronomique it consists of “Small flowerets of cauliflower covered with Mornay Sauce, sprinkled with grated cheese and breadcrumbs and browned.” The other well-known cauliflower dish with her name is a cream soup, but there are also non-cauli dishes with her name. For example there is “Eggs Du Barry” (hard-boiled eggs with anchovy, chives, and white sauce), and “Fricasee of Fowls à la Dubarry” which we featured in a previous story.

Finally, while we contemplate her fate and her culinary legacy, there is:

Cocktail Du Barry.
1 ½ oz Gin, ¾ oz dry Vermouth, ¼ oz Pastis, 1 dash Bitters: stir with ice, strain into a cocktail glass, add a slice of orange and serve.

Monday’s Story …

Soup as a weapon.

On this Topic …

We have had several previous stories on the French Revolutionary era.

“Marie-Antoinette and Cake” on November 2nd 2006.

““A Lunch too Leisurely”.

On the subject of royal mistresses, Mme Fontanges, a mistress of Louis XIV also has a dish named in her honour. It was featured on the menu of the famous “Dinner of the Three Emperors”.

Quotation for the Day …

Cauliflower is cabbage with a college education. Mark Twain.