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The end of the Christmas Season in Jane Austen’s era was marked on Twelfth Night by many with a celebration, which often included games, charades, punch and the all important Twelfth Night Cake.
Celebrations on Twelfth Night had long been a tradition in England dating from the medieval period. The celebrations- or revels- of Twelfth Night had always incorporated elements of disguise, elaborate display and social role reversal, often led by a Master of Ceremonies or a Lord of Misrule, but more often by the Bean King, so-called because he was elected by him discovering a dried bean cooked in his chosen slice of the Twelfth Night Cake. His Queen Consort was similarly discovered: she was the woman who found a dried pea in the cake.
This topsy-turvy world where the “king’ and “queen” could be the lowest members of the household, empowered to give out orders to their betters for the duration of the night survived after the Interregnum and the attempts to ban such festivities, but in a slightly changed form.
Samuel Pepys wrote about the great expense of his Twelfth Night Cake ( it cost him 20 shillings in 1668). His cake was cut into twenty pieces to be distributed among his guests, but no bean or pea was concealed within it. The “king “ and “queen” and other characters were found by guests picking slips of paper containing names of their characters from a hat.
The characters varied, and often took their inspiration from popular books or plays.
During Jane Austen’s life time, the celebration of Twelfth Night was at the height its of popularity. And during the 1790s sets of “characters” were available to purchase from enterprising stationers, and above is one example. They were cut up and chosen from a hat, the person having thus chosen having to maintain their “character” all though the evenings party.
This is Issac Cruickshank’s satirical view of a Twelfth Night party in 1794- enlarge the picture to take a look at the saucy verse to get the gist of his barbed wit.
Fanny Knight, Edward Austen Knight’s daughter and Jane Austen’s niece, wrote about some of her Twelfth Night Celebrations at Godmersham, the Knight’s country estate in Kent. Here is her report of the 1809 Twelfth Night Party:
…after Dessert Aunt Louisa who was the only person to know the characters…took one by one out of the room and equipped them, put them into separate rooms and lastly dressed herself. We were al conducted into the library and performed our different parts. Papa and the little ones from Lizzy downwards knew nothing of it and it was so well managed that none of the characters knew one another ..Aunt Louisa and L.Deeds were Dominos; F.Cage, Frederica Flirt (which she did excellently); M.Deeds, Orange Woman; Mama, Shepherdess; Self Fortune Teller; Edward, beau; G, Irish Postboy; Henry Watchman ;William, Harlequin; we had such frightful masks that it was enough to kill one with laughing at putting them on and altogether it went off very well and quite answered our expectations.
Though by Jane Austen’s time the cake was no longer used to assist in the choosing of characters, it was still and important part of the proceedings. They were costly and complicated to make properly and many people if they could manage to afford them bought them from confectioners shops.
In towns it became a tradition for the highly decorated cakes- garlanded with sugar paste- pastillage- or Plaster of Paris figures and crowns-to be displayed in confectioners shop windows which were illuminated small oil lamps. In the winter evenings people would go from shop to shop admiring the displays.
The first known recipe for a Twelfth Night cake is given in John Mollond’s recipe book of 1803 (this is the 1808 edition):
And here it is:
This was the recipe we followed at Ivan Day’s Taste Christmas Past course which I attended in the summer. The cake was a light fruit cakes, yeast risen, which had a similar texture and taste to the mixture used in German Stollen cakes today.
Lets see how it was made, shall we?
First you have to prepare your hoop :these were the fore-runners of cake tins, most often made of wood, and had to be lined with cartridge or brown paper smothered in softened butter, to prevent the cake burning and sticking.
The yeast is prepared and mixed with the dry ingredients.
Then it is put in font of the fire to rise, covered with a damp cloth.
When cooked and cool it is decorated.
A paste of marzipan is coloured with cochineal and covers the cake.
Then the important decoration begins. Or in reality it began a few days before for the tiny crowns ,which always were part of the decoration of this cake, have to be made in advance.
They are made from moulded sugar paste –or pastillage- made from a mixture of icing sugar and gum dragon or tragacanth.The moulds are made of box wood and are extremely fine grained, which makes them a perfect medium for fine carving.
This is the mould we used to create the crowns, and as you can see all the component part are here in one exactly carved mould.
The part of the mould that is going to be used has to be prepared with a dusting of cornflower, to try to prevent the pastillage sticking to the mould.
The pastillage is worked into the mould and pressed down very hard to “take” the impression well.
The excess is cut off using a sharp blade,
and the completed piece removed from the mould by tapping it sharply on a hard surface
I can testify from my experience on the course that this is no easy exercise! No wonder people bought them from confectioners.
Once all the component parts are made,(above are the purple “velvet” cushion for the crowns) the cake can be decorated with the assembled crowns of coloured sugar paste, and edged with borders of roses
You can hopefully see from this close up just how beautifully intricate are the moulded pieces of pastillage .
These crowns can them be guided and painted and additional pastillage decorations can be added to suit.We ran out of time on our very hectic but fabulous course,and Ivan Day finished the cake after we had left to rest! This is the beautiful end result and I thank him for permission to use this image here:
So there you have it – Twelfth Night Regency Style,and as perhaps Jane Austen celebrated it. Sadly the tradition of celebrating Twelfth Night complete with character and cakes in England dwindled in the mid 19th century and now is virtually unknown. The Christmas Cake eaten in England today has more in common with the bride cakes of Jane Austen’s era (as we shall see in a few days time when our Emma season of posts begins) but I thought you might enjoy this excursion into this old celeration.
Like this:
We know that Mr Weston is a gregarious man , and as a host for a party I think he might be perfect- constantly replenishing drink and encouraging jollity…(though I admit, his gregariousness in everyday life might begin to pall……)
We also know, however, that Mr Elton partook a little too much of his hospitality, for he became emboldened by the wine he had consumed and, in that dreadful carriage ride home to Vicarage Lane, proposed to an astounded Emma:
And the bell was rung, and the carriages spoken for. A few minutes more, and Emma hoped to see one troublesome companion deposited in his own house, to get sober and cool, and the other recover his temper and happiness when this visit of hardship were over…Isabella stept in after her father; John Knightley, forgetting that he did not belong to their party, stept in after his wife very naturally; so that Emma found, on being escorted and followed into the second carriage by Mr. Elton, that the door was to be lawfully shut on them, and that they were to have a tête-á-tête drive. It would not have been the awkwardness of a moment, it would have been rather a pleasure, previous to the suspicions of this very day; she could have talked to him of Harriet, and the three-quarters of a mile would have seemed but one. But now, she would rather it had not happened. She believed he had been drinking too much of Mr. Weston’s good wine, and felt sure that he would want to be talking nonsense….
But Mr. Elton had only drunk wine enough to elevate his spirits, not at all to confuse his intellects.
(Emma, Chapter 15)
So what made Mr Elton a man who was …. Unsafe in Carriages?
In addition to wine I think it highly likely. as this was a special occasion, that Mr Weston would have provided punch for his guests for toasting purposes. Punch was traditionally used as a genial drink to be taken in company in Jane Austen’s era.
Punch was phenomenally popular during the long 18th century. It developed as a drink as a result of the opening up of trade between Europe and the Far East. Punch derived its name from the Persian word Panj and the Hindu word Panch, both meaning five-referring to the number of ingredients used in the drink .
It was a originally a strong mixture of arrack, water, lemon juice, sugar and spices. Arrack was a distilled alcohol made from the secretion of rubber trees in Goa, or if made in Batavia, it was a distilled sprit made from rice and sugar.
The records of the East India Company actually show that not many barrels of arrack were imported to England during the long 18th century: the English used brandy or eau de vie instead, realizing that it was not merely intended for use as a fuel for keeping chafing dishes or kettles warm( like a methylated spirit burner)as it had been in the 17th century, but that it could, in fact, be consumed as an fine alcoholic drink.
Punch was traditionally served in ceramic punch bowls which were imported into England by the East India Company specifically for this purpose from the 1690s onwards. This is one from my collection dating from the mid to late 18th century:
The custom of sharing of a punch from a communal punch bowl takes its inspiration from the old Christmas custom of Wassailing, shown here in an illustration from Washington Irving’s book The Keeping of Christmas at Bracebridge Hall:
Punch was drunk from glass or metal-silver or silver gilt- punch cups, like these early 19th century (circa 1800) examples:
Not that in England punch was always consumed at room temperature ( unlike in Colonial America where many recipes for punch called for the use of ice).
Here is John Notts’ recipe for Punch Royal from his Cooks and Confectioners Dictionary of 1726:
And one for chamber maids….which is interesting and not a little saucy in its intent:
Mrs Rundell in her New System of Domestic Cookery (1819) records the fashion for milk punch
Punch was an expensive and time consuming drink to prepare. The rind of citrus fruit had to be carefully removed in a spiral for decorative purposes; the juice of citrus fruit lemons orange or limes- had to be squeezed by hand and sieved of its pips through a muslin strainer; the sugar and spices-expensive commodities both -had to be mixed in correct proportions and finally the expensive spirits added.
The spiral cut rinds of oranges were traditionally dangled in and over the edge of the bowl, as prepared by me on Ivan Day’s Christmas Past course;
And you can see from this section from A Punch Party by Thomas Patch circa 1760, that the butler is holding an immense porcelain punch bowl complete with sprial rinds….
and again, in this engraving of a more intimate but riotous punch party…..
Towards the end of the 18th century drinking punch in this manner communally from a bowl- was seen as a slightly old fashioned thing to do : the fashion in very smart society was for the passing not of ceramic bowls around the mahogany dining table, but for sliding bottles stands made of precious metal in various designs, and shimmering and expensive cut crystal decanters of individual spirits glittering in the candlelight ~ as shown in this sideboard at Fairfax House in York,
set up according to the directions given in Thomas Consett’s book The Footman’s Directory and Butlers Rememberancer (1823)
That is why Mrs Bennet betrays her old-fashioned habits when she orders a bowl of punch to be served to the servants at Lydia’s wedding in Pride and Prejudice…
“I will go to Meryton,” said she, “as soon as I am dressed, and tell the good, good news to my sister Phillips. And as I come back, I can call on Lady Lucas and Mrs. Long. Kitty, run down and order the carriage. An airing would do me a great deal of good, I am sure. Girls, can I do anything for you in Meryton? Oh! here comes Hill! My dear Hill, have you heard the good news? Miss Lydia is going to be married; and you shall all have a bowl of punch to make merry at her wedding.”
The taste for drinking punch still remained fashionable, even if it was not served in a bowl, but in individual glasses. As a method of conspicuous consumption it still remained popular as the ingredients here, for the recipe for the Prince of Wales Punch, demonstrates how very expensive it could be:
Three bottles of Champagne, tw of Madeira, one of Hock, one of Curacao, one quart of Brandy, one pint of Rum, and two bottles of selzer water, flavoured with four pounds of bloom raisins, Seville oranges, lemons,white sugar candy and diluted with iced green tea instead of water.
I tasted this on the Regency Cookery Course I attended at Ivan Day’s Historic Foods in Cumbria,and it was delicious. But potent. No wonder Mr Elton was emblodened.
If you would like to hear what happens on a Taste of Christmas Past Course, go here to listen to an Episode of Radio 4′s Food Programme which followed some people on one of Ivan’s courses.
And I take my leave of you till after Christmas,a season which for us ends just after New Year with the return to the office and to colleges and schools. But in Jane Austen’s era the end of the season was Twelfth Night-a time for revelry and great cakes, like the one below:
And that will be the subject of my next post.
So it only remains for me to wish you all a Merry Christmas with a view of Sir Joshua Reynolds Nativity...
and to hope to “see” you all again, on Twelth Night (January 6th!)
We have very little knowledge of the food served at Randalls when Mr and Mrs Weston hold a Christmas Eve dinner for their surrogate family the Wooodhouses and the Knightleys-and Mr Elton in Chapters 14 and 15 of Emma. We are told that a saddle of lamb is included in the fare:
With such sensations, Mr. Elton’s civilities were dreadfully ill-timed; but she had the comfort of appearing very polite, while feeling very cross — and of thinking that the rest of the visit could not possibly pass without bringing forward the same information again, or the substance of it, from the open-hearted Mr. Weston. So it proved; — for when happily released from Mr. Elton, and seated by Mr. Weston, at dinner, he made use of the very first interval in the cares of hospitality, the very first leisure from the saddle of mutton, to say to her —
“We want only two more to be just the right number. I should like to see two more here, — your pretty little friend, Miss Smith, and my son — and then I should say we were quite complete. I believe you did not hear me telling the others in the drawing-room that we are expecting Frank? I had a letter from him this morning, and he will be with us within a fortnight
So we are left somewhat to our own devises to imagine what else would be on the table.
Duncan Macdonald, in common with many of the writers of cookery books in this era, gives seasonal bills of fare in his book ,The New London Family Cook(1809), suggesting dishes for four categories of tables: Table I- small family dinners of two courses, Table II -grander family dinners,Table III – a single course dinner, and Table IV- very grand dinners of two courses.
As it is a special occasion therefore I have selected Table IV fare for December to suggest what might have been eaten at that special meal:
And here is the second course….
Most dinners of this era consisted of two courses, the second course was a mixture of sweet and savoury dishes. On special occasionas a desert- fruits,nuts and sweetmeats- would have also been served in addition, and so I have decided that the gregarious and generous Mr Weston would have served one too..Here are Macdonald’s suggestions for a small winter dessert:
One of the dishes served in MacDonald’s first course is a sirloin of beef. At Christmas ,especially in the north of England this was often served with hackin- a Christmas pudding cooked in an animal’s intestine or stomach-usualky a sheep or ox . Beef and goose were the favoured meats at Christmas in Jane Austen’s era, not turkey.
Spit roast meats were the glory of the English kitchen,and the English cooks’ ability to spit roast was envied throughout Europe. It is an art and a difficult one to master. Let’s see how it was done….as we did on Ivan’s Days Christmas Foods of the Past Course, earlier in the summer
First take your sirloin and thread it carefully on an iron spit to set before a good fire.
You have to carefully negotiate the centre of the meat with the spit to ensure that as it turns around on the spit, it cooks evenly.
While it is cooking you can either be high-tech and use, as Ivan Day does in his Georgian kitchen, a clockwork spit ,as modelled here by my friend ,Farah:
This magical labour saving contraption had to be wound every 30 minutes or so ,for the clockwork is unwound by a weighted chain( the weight is an old cannon ball,which you can just see hanging behind Farah’s shoulder); gravity forced the mechanism to work. The sound of this ticking away and being re- wound is very atmospheric…
Or if you were in Bath you might have used a turnspit dog….
Bath was the last place in England which used these on a regular basis: the turnspit dog was a special breed, now extinct…
Or if you had none of these devices then you would have turned the spit by hand. I’ve done it and its a very , very hard and skilled job
and very hot as you can see. Here is my friend, Katherine Cahill author of Mrs Delays Menu’s Medicines and Manners working very hard here roasting a suckling pig in Ivan’s kitchen in the heat of the summer….
.
The beef did not need constant attention if the clockwork pit is turning it gently in front of the fire-freeing the cook for other tasks…
..but sometimes the beef needed to be moved closer or further away from the heat in order that it cooked evenly and did not burn.
While the beef is slowly roasting in front of the fire it is time to make a hackin,which ,as I explained above was a form of plum or Christmas pudding cooked in the intestines of animals- and, in the north of England, was served with the meat, not as a separate sweet pudding.Here we used lambs stomach….
They had to soak for a long time in water-which was changed repeatedly in order to clean them and rid them of their slightly cheesy smell.
Here is the pudding stuffed stomach, wrapped in muslin ready to be cooked
.We also made puddings in the form of a ball , wrapped in a floured pudding cloth- an art that has mostly been lost today:
and put one pudding in a mould..all variations that were in use in the long eighteenth century.
This is Macdonald’s recipe which is very similar to the one we used on our Christmas Past course:
Here are eggs, lemons, candied citrons,spices including nutmeg
Raisins, currants and a good Georgian glass of brandy:
The puddings were boiled or baked for hours before they were ready to serve. Sometimes as here the puddings cooked in the intestines-known as Hackin -were sliced and placed under the roasting beef to soak up the juices , dropping from the beef
The beef was here covered with cartridge paper to prevent the outside from burning….
We didn’t eat the hackin cooked in the lambs intestines, but we devoured our cannon ball-shaped pudding and sliced it to serve with our beautifully cooked beef.
Unconventional today, but delicious, I am happy to confirm.
Tomorrow..the sort of alcohol that made Mr Elton the type of man known as a U.I.B. (Unsafe In Coaches)….
Among the pies on Mrs Musgrove’s festive tressel tables is some brawn, a dish probably very unfamiliar to us today:
On one side was a table occupied by some chattering girls, cutting up silk and gold paper; and on the other were tressels and trays, bending under the weight of brawn and cold pies, where riotous boys were holding high revel…
(Persuasion, Chapter 14)
The term originally meant the flesh of a wild boar and, then by extension, the preserved meat preparation made therefrom. It is interesting to note that well before the long 18th century the ‘boar pig’ used for making brawn was a tame, and not a wild, animal.
The term “brawn” later came to have the more general meaning of the fleshy part of a hind leg of an animal, not necessarily a pig. And by Jane Austen’s time the term “Brawn” really meant just a kind of potted meat and it was most often referred to in recipe books of the era as “Sham” or “Mock brawn”
This is Mrs Rundell’s recipe,taken from my 1819 edition of her New System of Domestic Cookery. Do note she does not use only a cut of belly-pork but “neat’s feet”,and by that she means the feet of Ox:
Susanna Carter in her book, The Experienced Cook (1822)
gives slightly more detailed instructions:
As Ivan Day of Historic Foods writes:
This spectacular English special occasion dish was also garnished with elaborately carved citrus fruits. Brawn was a kind of pickled pork prepared from domestic boar meat poached until very tender in a souse of wine, vinegar and spices. The cuts of boned meat, which were called collars, were cooked for such a long time that they were tightly wrapped in linen parcels to stop them disintegrating. When they cooled, they became firmer as a result of the jelly released in the cooking process. Collars of brawn could be kept for a number of weeks in the souse. To leach the brawn was to carve it into thin slices. This now extinct dish had been a mainstay of English cookery since the late medieval period when it was usually served with mustard at the beginning of a meal.
Here is a brawn prepared and ready to be soused in its linen fillet:
And here is a finished brawn decorated in the old fashioned way with accompanying rosemay “tree” covered in snow (really whipped egg white),which though the traditional manner of serving a brawn in the early 18th century ,as advised by Robert May in his book The Accomplish’d Cook ,
may still have held sway in the Musgrove’s old fashioned household.
Yesterday we considered the Yorkshire Christmas Pie which would most certainly have been among the cold pies weighing down Mrs Musgrove’s festive trestle tables at Uppercross:
On one side was a table occupied by some chattering girls, cutting up silk and gold paper; and on the other were tressels and trays, bending under the weight of brawn and cold pies, where riotous boys were holding high revel; the whole completed by a roaring Christmas fire, which seemed determined to be heard in spite of all the noise of the others.
(Persuasion ,Chapter 14)
Today we are going to consider the other pies that would have made up the number on those groaning tables, Mince Pies,(see above ), familiar to all in the UK for they are still eaten today at Christmas.
However today they are rarely made with real meat: this was most definitely an option in Jane Austen’s day.
Here are some recipes from Mrs Rundell’s New System of Domestic Cookery (1819) which I have written about before:
And some from Duncan MacDonald’s book, The New London Family Cook Book (1809).
MacDonald is of interest to Austen devotees, for he was a tavern cook in London and, moreover, the cook to the Bedford Tavern in Covent Garden the haunt of John Thorpe and General Tilney in Northanger Abbey:
“Know him! There are few people much about town that I do not know. I have met him forever at the Bedford; and I knew his face again today the moment he came into the billiard–room. One of the best players we have, by the by; and we had a little touch together, though I was almost afraid of him at first: the odds were five to four against me; and, if I had not made one of the cleanest strokes that perhaps ever was made in this world — I took his ball exactly — but I could not make you understand it without a table; however, I did beat him. A very fine fellow; as rich as a Jew. I should like to dine with him; I dare say he gives famous dinners. But what do you think we have been talking of? You. Yes, by heavens! And the general thinks you the finest girl in Bath.”
(Northanger Abbey, Chapter 12)
Beef or Neats tongue(Ox tongue) were the favoured meats in this pie,which had its origins in the 15th century.
But, there were other ways of preparing them, both meat free : with lemon mincemeat, or mincemeat made without meat Macdonald and Mrs Rundell give recipes for this type of mincemeat. Below are MacDonald’s:
Mince pies were eaten throughout the 12 days of Christmas,and the cook would be busy in the days before the season began making them in advance.
As you can see from the recipes given here, they were normally made with a casing of shortcrust pastry. But in Yorkshire they used puff pastry,as we can see here in Mary Ellen Best’s illustration:
So, Frank Churchill living with his grand relatives in Yorkshire would have been used to eating these at Christmas and not the short crust kind more likely to be found in Mrs Musgrove’s great hall.
Immediately surrounding Mrs. Musgrove were the little Harvilles, whom she was sedulously guarding from the tyranny of the two children from the Cottage, expressly arrived to amuse them. On one side was a table occupied by some chattering girls, cutting up silk and gold paper; and on the other were tressels and trays, bending under the weight of brawn and cold pies, where riotous boys were holding high revel; the whole completed by a roaring Christmas fire, which seemed determined to he heard in spite of all the noise of the others… It was a fine family-piece.
(Persuasion, Chapter 14)
What sort of cold pies would Mrs Musgrove be serving to all and sundry as they come to pay their Christmas visits to the Mansion House at Uppercross? Most certainly she would have and a large Yorkshire Christmas Pie sitting on that trestle table.
This Yorkshire Pie was made by Ivan Day of Historic Foods and I thank him for his permission to use his photograph here.
From Yorkshire originally, where there was a thriving trade at Christmas sending the pies around the country as gifts in the festive season, they were great pies filled with many different kinds of meat, intended to feed many people over many days. The concept was to cut off the crust lid, chop up the cooked meat within,serve everyone to some of each of he different the meats,then recover the remaining meat with clarified butter and re- seal the crust lid, to serve more people another day.
They were traditionally served on the Fest of Stephen- the 26th December-and afterwards.
And whilst some were made in the North of England, recipes were published for them so that people living all over the country, if they could afford the ingredients, could make them in their own kitchens. It took a skilled cook to make them prior to the days of pie moulds, for these pies had to be raised by hand.
The picture above shows an early 19th century Christmas Pie , on the right behind the jug, raised by hand, as recorded by the amateur artist, Mary Ellen Best. She was a Yorkshire woman, so we can therefore assume that this pie was authentically decorated and recorded. This was the template for Ivan’s example of the Yorkshire pie, above. This picture is her still life of Christmas food, which shows us not only great examples of the Yorkshire Christmas Pie but also of Yorkshire ’s unique version of Mince Pies (the smaller pies in the picture on the plate in front of the Yorkshire Pie),which were always made with puff pastry. More on them tomorrow…
Back to Christmas Pies. Here is Richard Briggs’s version. Briggs was a real Tavern cook of the Temple Tavern, London
and his book was published in 1794, perfect for our period.
As you can see the pie is expensive and complicated to prepare because of the sheer amount of meat it contains. The size can be calculated by the fact that a whole bushel of flour ( over 50 lbs!) is recommended to be used in this recipe for the pie’s pastry. Let’s see how we made our version in the summer on Ivan Day’s Christmas of the Past cookery course (note our version was slightly later than Jane Austen’s era, the form inspired by Mrs Marshall’s Cookery Book of 1880
..but the filling and the crust were similar to the Richard Briggs recipe).
So, here is the step by step way to make an authentic Yorkshire Christmas Pie…
Make a forcemeat with minced veal, minced pork, breadcrumbs, parsley, mace and nutmeg.
Make your paste ( pastry) ..a communal activity……
Knead the paste, roll it and line a tin that has been previously coated in melted lard.
Line the pastry with the forcemeat mixture…
Begin to add the boned meats….goose, chicken
..duck, grouse….
..turkey…..
Add a final layer of the forcemeat mixture….
Cover the pie with your paste….
And begin to decorate it….
We emulated Mrs Marshall’s example and added leaf upon leaf…..
Don’t forget to make holes for the steam to escape during the long cooking period….
Decorate with a pastry rose….
And get ready to put it in the oven for , in this case, 4 hours.
And the next day here is the cooked Christmas Yorkshire Pie
Carefully remove the rose and add liquid gelatine to help preserve the meats…
Et voila! All done…
For curiosity’s sake we cut the pie in half to see what it looked like. Spectacular, frankly. As I have explained above this would not have happened in Mrs Musgrove’s house :the lid would have been carefully removed and re-sealed every time a serving-to many people- was made.
Tomorrow…Mince Pies.
Like this:
This book has been in print for some time( it was first published in 2003) but I thought I would recommend it to you here , now I have the opportunity so to do , and because I find it is one of the best books written on food in the long eighteenth century.
It is published by Prospect Books and Tom Jaine who runs the company should be knighted for services to food history. His catalogue of wonderful books make for rewarding and fine reading: most of them in his present an past catalogue are to be found on my book shelves, and I can highly recommend them to anyone keen to learn about the practical details of cookery performed in a long gone era.
Gilly Lehamn’s book is an extract from her doctoral dissertation. Despite its academic nature it is a very readable book, and is not dry as dust. Like most of my favourite historians she refers to Jane Austen as a source( though not as frequently as Amanda Vickery!) and that can’t be a bad thing. I do tend to favour a writers who appreciate Jane Austen’s accuracy I recording life in the late 18th can early 19th century.
This book will teach you all you really need to know about the food styles of the 18th century( the rage for French food versus plain English fare),how it was eaten and how recipes etc were disseminated throughout the 18th century.
Though she concentrates on the cookery books of the era, she also give us fabulous information(which is hard to find in books or on the net) on the authors of these books and their readership, detailing the types of person- from grand mistress to servants –who was intended to be the reader of the books.
She takes pains to tell us about the Tavern Cooks , like John Farley, Collinwood and Wollams (see their portraits above from my copy of The Universal Cook) celebrity chefs whose popular books were “ghost written” by a hack journalist: nothing really changes does it?
This book also provides , in one volume, delicious detail about the way meals were eaten,manners, customs, mealtimes, the ever changing time for diner throughout the century and what that said about your status, etc., etc. This helps explain Jane Austens despairing remark when writing to her sister Cassandra who was staying with Edward Knight at Godmersham in Kent, who was of course as Ms Lehman notes ”the rich member of the family”:
We dine now at half after three & have done diner I suppose before you begin-We drink tea at half after six.-I am afraid you will despise us.
The illustrations are few but what few there are ,are interesting, as in the reproduction of this frontispiece to Hannah Glasse’s1775 edition of The Art of Cookery:
When Tom Jaine announced the publication of this book, he predicted that ”This is a biggy”. I can only agree….
We do tend to forget, in an age when every food-stuff one could possibly desire is readily available all year round, how special seasonal food was to people in the past. We can buy strawberries all year round, Jane Austen could not.
And unless she knew someone rich enough to have an ice house she would not have been able to eat ice cream in the country at any time of her year. In the larger towns- York and London for example- it was available from smart confectioners shops (which were much more like the ice cream parlours of today) such as Negri’s which operated from the Sign of the Pineapple in Berkeley Square, London.
Jane Austen’s rich brother, Edward had an ice house at his home Godmersham in Kent
It was protected by a planting of trees from the heat of the sun, and was sunken into the ground,wherein winter ice from the lakes and ponds on the estate was taken by men and boys using horse drawn carts. The ice was kept safe in the ice house so that it could be used for culinary purposes( for ices,ice creams and Piece Montees but not for the preservation of food by freezing at this point in history).When the last of it finally melted in the late summer heats, no more ice cream, for there would be no more ice till the next winter freeze …
Jane Austen certainly ate ices at Godmersham. In a letter written to her sister Cassandra dated July 1st, 1808 she wrote about forgetting the cares of their normal homely domestic parsimony ( “The Orange Wine will need our care soon”) and instead about enjoying a rich man’s more sophisticated pleasures:
But in the meantime for Elegance & Ease & Luxury . . . I shall eat Ice & drink French wine, & be above Vulgar Economy.
I learnt to make ice cream without a freezer in the Georgian fashion a few years ago at a course on Georgian Food run by Ivan Day of Historic Foods. I thought you might be interested to see the process.
Here is William Jarrin’s recipe for Strawberry Ice Cream from his book The Italian Confectioner (1826) (By the way, do click on it and the other pictures in this post to enlarge them and see the detail)
William Jarrin arrived from Italy via France to work at Gunther’s in Berkeley Square (the successor to Negri’s business) in 1817.
This is his portrait from my copy of the 3rd edition of his book The Italian Confectioner.Mr Jarrin had a sad end to his life, and died as a bankrupt, but he did have a thriving busines with premises at 123 New Bond Street in 1822. More of Mr Gunter later …….You will have no doubt noticed that Jarrin’s recipe is rather silent as to how you actually are to freeze the strawberry cream mixture.
The answer is provided by Mrs Rundell’s concise explaination of the process, this extract being taken from her book, A New System Of Domestic Cookery,which has recently been published as a facsimile edition by Persephone Books;
The salt added to the powdered ice helps take the temperature to well below freezing. What follows are some photographs of the whole process taken whilst I attended the course.
Here is my friend, Katherine Cahill, author of Mrs Delaney’s Menus Medicine and Manners just before she began her hard work on our strawberry ice cream. After you have made your strawberry and cream mixture as Jarrin advised above, you needed to prepare a bucket filled with a mixture of crushed ice and salt as Mrs Rundell advised . On the table to the right of Katherine you can see a pewter canister with a handle . This is the sabotiere, or ice-pot,and it is into this that the strawberry cream mixture is poured.
Here is Jarrin’s illustration of a Sabotiere and bucket, from The Italian Confectioner
The Saboitere is placed in the wooden ice-filled pail…
And the ice/salt mixture is packed carefully around the sabotiere.
After ten or so minutes, the ice crystals form and have to be tapped down from the sides of the sabotiere with the spaddle- you can see it here resting on the lid of the sabotiere.
Ideally ,you should be able to spin the sabotiere in the pail,as Mrs Rundell advises, and the strawberry/cream mixture will be frozen up along the sides of the lead container.
This process is repeated about 3 or 4 times, depending on the mixture. The ice crystals will all be broken up by the spaddle and the mixture will be terribly smooth.
Here is Katherine dextrously working away at scraping the ice crystals from the side of the sabotiere. Once the ice cream is set you can eat it…or if you want you can put it into a mould.
This is a great reeded cone pewter mould, one of many owned by Ivan Day: but this one is rather special …..because the owner was one Mr Gunther, confectioner supreme of Berkeley Square.
You can see his signature engraved into the pewter base. Gunther’s tea shop was where The Regency “Ton” would go to eat ices while sitting in their carriages parked around the leafy square.
Once packed with ice cream, the mould is sealed with liquid lard to keep the ice cream safe from the ice/salt mixture( Yes, I know,but that was all they had).The filled mould would be replaced into the pail in order to set. Sometimes an extra layer of insulation was added-brown or cartridge paper was wrapped around the mould as here….you can see it peeping from the ice .
And here is the wonderful confection, turned out and ready to be devoured. I can confirm it was stunningly fragrant :the best strawberry ice cream I’ve ever eaten,the texture was smooth and fabulously silky. A triumph.
The Georgians didn’t stop at strawberry for they used many wonderful flavourings including elderflower and savoury ones such as parmesan.
No wonder Jane Austen loved eating ices the height of luxury in the country in a non refrigerated age.
This is the first of yet another series-Jane Austen and Food. I will be adding posts to this series from time to time. I do hope you will join me.
