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| Richard Collins "A Family of Three at Tea" c. 1727 |
The Bland Leading the Bland. Louis de Béchamel, Marquis de Nointel and head steward to Louis XIV of France, died. It is thought that it was either the marquis or one of his chefs who came up with a thick white sauce flavored with onion and seasonings, and it is generally agreed that this—one of the basic sauces of French cuisine—was named in his honor. In the spirit of petty jealousy that dominated court life at Versailles, another noble nonentity, the Duc d’Escars, complained: “That fellow Béchamel has the luck of the devil. My chef was serving breast of chicken à la crème years before he was even born, but no one bothered to name a sauce after me.”
1715
Out of the Ordinary. The term “hors d’oeuvre” was first used in English by Joseph Addison in The Spectator, No. 576. Initially the expression denoted, in Addison’s words, “something which is singular in its kind,” in other words, out of the ordinary course of things. The phrase was originally French, in which it literally means “outside [the] work,” but from the late sixteenth century, it denoted any small building, such as an outhouse, that was not part of an architect’s grand plan. By the 1740s, in England the phrase had acquired its modern meaning, something “out of the ordinary” to stimulate the palate before the main courses are served.
1718
Sheep Poo Banned from Coffee. The Irish Parliament passed a law banning the adulteration of coffee beans with sheep droppings. Coffee aficionados, although rejecting sheep or rabbit droppings, are more than happy for their coffee beans to have passed through the digestive system of a civet (see circa 1850).
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The Manchu Han Imperial Feast
In China in 1720, the so-called Kangxi Emperor, the fourth emperor of the imperial Qing (Manchu) dynasty, held a lavish series of banquets known as the Manchu Han Imperial Feast. The aim was not only to celebrate his sixty-sixth birthday, but also to reconcile the native Han Chinese with their Manchu conquerors by celebrating the cuisines of both peoples. The feast was spread over three days and six banquets, and featured over three hundred different dishes. Here is just a small sample:
Camel’s hump
Monkey’s brains
Ape’s lips
Leopard fetuses
Rhinoceros tails
Deer tendons
Shark’s fins
Dried sea cucumbers
Snowy Palm (bear claw with sturgeon)
Golden Eyes and Burning Brain (bean curd simmered in the brains of ducks, chickens and cuckoos)
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The Golden Cordial
"The Compleat Housewife", by E. (possibly Eliza) Smith, was first published in London in 1727, and in 1742, it became the first cookery book to be printed in America (in Williamsburg, Virginia).
Among the book’s many recipes is this one for the “Golden Cordial”:
Take two gallons of brandy, two drams and a half of double-perfum’d alkermes [a liqueur colored red by the inclusion of the insect Kermes vermilio], a quarter of a dram of oil of cloves, one ounce of spirit of saffron, 3 pound of double-refin’d sugar powder’d, a book of leaf-gold.
First put your brandy into a large new bottle; then put three or four spoonfuls of brandy in a china cup, mix your alkermes in it; then put in your oil of cloves, and mix that, and do the like to the spirit of saffron; then pour into your bottle of brandy, then put in your sugar, and cork your bottle, and tie it down close; shake it well together, and so do every day for two or three days, and let it stand about a fortnight.
You must set the bottle so, that when ’tis rack’d off into other bottles, it must only be gently tilted; put into every bottle two leaves of gold cut small; you may put one or two quarts to the dregs, and it will be good, tho’ not so good as the first.
Gold leaf has long been used in recipes, and is entirely harmless; in the EU list of permitted food additives, it is given the designation E175.
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1729
A Modest Proposal. Jonathan Swift published his savage satire entitled A Modest Proposal, for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick. His proposal is as follows:
I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well-nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.
I do therefore humbly offer it to public consideration, that of the hundred and twenty thousand children, already computed, twenty thousand may be reserved for breed, whereof only one fourth part to be males; which is more than we allow to sheep, black cattle, or swine, and my reason is, that these children are seldom the fruits of marriage, a circumstance not much regarded by our savages, therefore, one male will be sufficient to serve four females. That the remaining hundred thousand may, at a year old, be offered in sale to the persons of quality and fortune, through the kingdom, always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump, and fat for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt, will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.
I have reckoned upon a medium, that a child just born will weigh 12 pounds, and in a solar year, if tolerably nursed, encreaseth to 28 pounds.
I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.
1731
Fish Should Swim Thrice. Jonathan Swift completed the manuscript for A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation (published 1738), in which Lord Smart opines that “Fish should swim thrice,” elaborating that “first it should swim in the sea . . . then it should swim in butter; and at last, sirrah, it should swim in good claret.”
1735
The Roast Beef of Old England. Richard Leveridge penned the music and Henry Fielding the words of “The Roast Beef of Old England,” a patriotic song that soon became hugely popular, being regularly sung by theater audiences before and after the play.
When mighty roast beef was the Englishman’s food,
It ennobled our hearts and enriched our blood,
Our soldiers were brave and our courtiers were good,
O! the Roast Beef of Old England!
And O! for old England’s Roast Beef!
But since we have learned from all vaporing France,
To eat their ragouts, as well as to dance.
We are fed up with nothing but vain Complaisance,
Oh! The Roast Beef, &c.
Our fathers of old were robust, stout and strong,
And kept open house, with good cheer all day long,
Which made their plump tenants rejoice in this song—
Oh! The Roast Beef, &c.
But now we are dwindled to what shall I name,
A sneaking poor race, half begotten and tame,
Who sully those honors that once shone in fame,
Oh! The Roast Beef, &c. &c. &c.
A century and a half later, the tune of Leveridge’s song was played by a bugler every evening on board the Titanic to summon the first-class passengers to dinner.
In 1748, the artist William Hogarth painted Oh, The Roast Beef of Old England (left), in which a side of beef is carried into the port of Calais for the consumption of English tourists, while various weak and scrawny-looking Frenchmen look on with envy. Hogarth had been prompted to paint this patriotic picture by a recent experience in which, while sketching the gate of Calais, he had been arrested by the French authorities and charged with espionage. Luckily for Hogarth, France and Britain were then negotiating a peace agreement, and the painter was merely put on the first ship back to Dover.
In the same year as Hogarth painted his picture, Per Kalm, a Swedish visitor to England, noted:
The English men understand almost better than any other people the art of properly roasting a joint, which is also not to be wondered at; because the art of cooking as practiced by most Englishmen does not extend much beyond roast beef and plum pudding.
Not for nothing, therefore, do the French refer to the English as les rosbifs (although, following the behavior of English football fans in France during the 1998 World Cup, they are now more commonly known as les fuckoffs).
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Cooking Meat by Necromancy
In 1735 or thereabouts, an English actor called John Rich invented a device called the “necromancer,” a type of chafing dish with a closely fitting lid that could rapidly cook thin slices of meat using spills of brown paper as fuel. The “necromancer” later metamorphosed into the “conjuror,” a description of which is to be found in Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845):
Steaks or cutlets may be quickly cooked with a sheet or two of lighted paper only, in the apparatus called a conjuror.
Lift off the cover and lay in the meat properly seasoned, with a small slice of butter under it, and insert the lighted paper in the aperture shown; in from eight to ten minutes the meat will be done, and found to be remarkably tender, and very palatable: it must be turned and moved occasionally during the process.
This is an especially convenient mode of cooking for persons whose hours of dining are rendered uncertain by their avocations. The part in which the meat is placed is a block of tin, and fits closely into the stand, which is of sheet iron.
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1736
Cuckold’s Comfort. In Britain, the Gin Act imposed high taxes on the increasingly popular spirit, leading to riots in London, Norwich, Bristol, and other cities. Retailers, in an effort to circumvent the letter of the law, sold gin under such names as Cuckold’s Comfort, Bob, Make Shift, Slappy Bonita, Madam Geneva, the Ladies’ Delight, the Balk, Cholic, Grape Waters, or even King Theodore of Corsica. The authorities were not deceived.
1741
The Effects of Scurvy. From the beginnings of the European age of exploration, long sea voyages had been accompanied by a terrible disease: scurvy. At its outset scurvy is characterized by lethargy, spongy gums, spots on the skin, and bleeding from the mucous membranes; as the disease takes hold, it is marked by suppurating wounds, loss of teeth, jaundice, fever, and death. When Admiral George Anson led his Royal Navy squadron in a circumnavigation of the globe in 1740–1744, it was still not understood that scurvy is caused by poor diet, specifically a lack of fresh fruit and vegetables (which we now know contain vitamin C, the absence of which causes scurvy). Anson’s chaplain, Richard Walter, in A Voyage Round the World (1748), described some of the terrible effects of the disease, which killed two out of every three men on the voyage:
This disease, so frequently attending all long voyages, and so particularly destructive to us, is usually attended with a strange dejection of the spirits, and with shiverings, tremblings, and a disposition to be seized with the most dreadful terrors on the slightest accident. Indeed, it was most remarkable, in all our reiterated experience of this malady, that whatever discouraged our people, or at any time damped their hopes, never failed to add new vigor to the distemper . . .
A most extraordinary circumstance, and what would be scarcely credible upon any single evidence, is, that the scars of wounds which had been for many years healed were forced open again by this virulent distemper. Of this there was a remarkable instance in one of the invalids on board the Centurion, who had been wounded above fifty years before at the Battle of the Boyne; for though he was cured soon after, and had continued well for a great number of years past, yet, on his being attacked by the scurvy, his wounds, in the progress of his disease, broke out afresh, and appeared as if they had never been healed.
A naval surgeon called James Lind proved in the 1750s that scurvy could be prevented by the consumption of lime or lemon juice; and Captain James Cook, on his voyages of discovery in the 1760s and 1770s, took along large stores of sauerkraut, which also proved effective. However, it was not until the end of the century that the Royal Navy made concentrated lime juice part of the standard seaman’s ration.
1744
Indigestion Versified. The Scottish physician John Armstrong put his medical advice into verse in The Art of Preserving Health, the second book of which concerns diet and warns against consuming too much oil and fat:
Th’ irresoluble oil,
So gentle late and blandishing, in floods
Of rancid bile o’erflows: what tumults hence,
What horrors rise, were nauseous to relate.
Choose leaner viands, ye whose jovial make
Too fast the gummy nutrient imbibes.
1745
Divine Guidance on Eating. At the commencement of his mystical career, the Swedish scientist and philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg was in London, as described a century later by Caroline Fox in her journal entry for April 7, 1847:
Swedenborg . . . went into a little inn in Bishopsgate Street, and was eating his dinner very fast, when he thought he saw in the corner of the room a vision of Jesus Christ, who said to him, “Eat slower.” This was the beginning of all his visions and mysterious communications.
Other accounts suggest that after finishing his meal, a darkness fell upon Swedenborg’s eyes, and he became aware in the corner of the room of a mysterious stranger, who told him “Do not eat too much.” Terrified, Swedenborg rushed home, only for the stranger to appear again in his dreams, announcing that he was the Lord, and that he had appointed Swedenborg to reveal the spiritual meaning of the Bible. History does not record whether Swedenborg’s eating habits were indeed altered by this experience.
1747
How Not to Fry an Egg. Hannah Glasse, the anonymous author of The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, by a Lady, decried the French method of frying eggs:
I have heard of a cook that used six pounds of butter to fry twelve eggs, when, everybody knows that understands cooking, that half a pound is full enough.
She goes on to include a recipe on “How to roast a pound of butter.” Mrs. Glasse had no great admiration for French cuisine: after giving detailed instructions on “the French way of dressing partridges,” she concludes, “This dish I do not recommend; for I think it an odd jumble of trash.” One of her more exotic recipes was for “Icing a Great Cake Another Way,” which involved the use of ambergris, a waxy and highly perfumed secretion from the intestinal tract of the sperm whale. (Incidentally, the Chinese, who sprinkled ambergris into their tea, called the substance “flavor of dragon’s saliva.”)
* * *
First Catch Your Hare
These words have long, and erroneously, been supposed to appear in Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747). Here, to set the record straight, is her recipe for roast hare:
To Roast a Hare
Take your hare when it is cased [skinned], and make a pudding [i.e., stuffing]:
Take a quarter of a pound of suet, and as much crumbs of bread, a little parsley shred fine, and about as much thyme as will lie on a sixpence, when shred; an anchovy shred small, a very little pepper and salt, some nutmeg, two eggs, and a little lemon-peel. Mix all these together, and put it into the hare.
Sew up the belly, spit it, and lay it to the fire, which must be a good one.
Your dripping-pan must be very clean and nice. Put in two quarts of milk and half a pound of butter into the pan: keep basting it all the time it is roasting, with the butter and milk, till the whole is used, and your hare will be enough.
You may mix the liver in the pudding if you like it. You must first parboil it, and then chop it fine.
To accompany the hare, Mrs. Glasse recommends a sauce made from gravy and either “currant jelly warmed in a cup” or “red wine and sugar boiled to a syrup.”
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1748
The Champion of the Potato. The Parlement in France passed a law forbidding the cultivation of potatoes, on the grounds that they caused leprosy, among other ailments—a suspicion perhaps based on the fact that the potato plant is related to deadly nightshade (as are the tomato and the tobacco plants). Potatoes had hitherto only been used for animal feed in France, although by 1755, pommes frites were being served at the banquets of the wealthy.
But it was the French pharmacist and nutritionist Antoine-Auguste Parmentier (1737–1813) who really achieved the widespread acceptance in France of the potato as food for humans. While serving in the French army during the Seven Years War (1756–63), Parmentier was captured by the Prussians; during his imprisonment, he was obliged to survive on potatoes—and became a convert. Thanks to his efforts, in 1772, the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris declared potatoes fit for human consumption.
Parmentier continued to promote the benefits of the potato, hosting lavish dinner parties, with guests such as Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier, at which a range of exotic potato dishes were served. Parmentier also presented the king and queen with bouquets of potato flowers, and placed an armed guard around his potato patch at Sablons, near Neuilly, west of Paris, to give the impression that his crop was of rare value. This had the desired effect: the local populace duly sneaked into the patch to filch the tubers, the armed guards having been instructed by Parmentier to accept all bribes and to stand down at night. However, it was not until the bad harvests of 1785 that the potato gained wider acceptance in France. In his honor, many dishes involving potatoes have been named after Parmentier, including hachis parmentier, the French version of shepherd’s (or cottage) pie.
circa 1750
The Tower of Plenty. At Carnival time in the eighteenth century, the Bourbon kings of Naples would court the loyalty of their poorer subjects by erecting a Cuccagna—the Italian word for Cockaigne, the land of plenty. The Neapolitan Cuccagna was a multistory wooden tower built to represent a mountain, decked with green branches and artificial flowers. The tower contained masses of food and drink, together with live lambs and calves, while geese and pigeons were nailed by their wings to the walls. According to a contemporary eyewitness, when the king gave the signal, “the mob fall on, destroy the building, carry off whatever they can lay hold of, and fight with each other till generally some fatal accident ensues.” The better-off found it all highly amusing. The tradition was abolished in 1779.
1755
From Pommes Frites to Freedom Fries. The French cookery writer Menon (he is always known simply by that name) published Les Soupers de la Cour (“The Dinners of the Court”), which concerns itself with dining on a grand scale, from royal banquets to more modest dinner parties for thirty or forty guests. More than a hundred dishes might be served at such dinner parties, in five courses, and among the recipes included is one for pommes frites (“fried potatoes”). The fact that a large quantity of oil was required to deep-fry the potatoes meant that at that time pommes frites were very much the preserve of the wealthy. It is thought that it was Thomas Jefferson who in the 1780s brought back the idea of pommes frites to the infant United States, and on the menu at a White House dinner in 1802 were “potatoes served in the French manner.” Thereafter, in America the dish became known as “French fried potatoes,” then “French fries,” or just “fries.” (In Britain, pommes frites are called “chips,” a term that in America and France denotes what the British call “crisps.”) In reaction to the refusal of the French (xenophobically dubbed “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”) to join in the Iraq War in 2003, a temporary change of nomenclature was adopted in many U.S. restaurants, whereby “French fries” became “freedom fries.” For a similar tale, involving French toast.
Dr. Johnson Insults Scottish National Dish. In his Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson famously defined oats as “A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.” The jibe was not forgotten. Following the 1773 visit of Dr. Johnson to the University of St. Andrews, where he was plied with French delicacies, the poet Robert Fergusson got in his retaliation, rousing his fellow Scots as follows:
But hear me lads! gin [if] I’d been there,
How I’d hae trimm’d the bill o’ fare!
For ne’er sic [such] surly wight as he
Had met wi’ sic respect frae me.
Mind ye what Sam, the lying loun [fellow]!
Has in his Dictionar laid down?
That aits in England are a feast
To cow an’ horse, an’ sican beast,
While in Scots ground this growth was common
To gust the gab [please the mouth] o’ man and woman.
Fergusson then lists the Scottish dishes that he believes should have been served instead: haggis, sheep’s head, and white and blood puddings.
1756
Mahonnaise Sauce. The French under the Duc de Richelieu took the port of Mahon, capital of the island of Minorca, from the British. (It was the failure of Admiral Byng to prevent this outcome that led to him being court-martialed and shot—“pour encourager les autres,” as Voltaire famously quipped.) To celebrate his success, Richelieu ordered his chef to prepare a lavish banquet, but the chef, unable to lay his hands on any cream to prepare a typically rich French sauce, was obliged to improvise. Noting that the local aïoli—an emulsion of lemon juice and olive oil, stabilized with egg yolk and flavored with raw garlic—was of a similar consistency to cream, he adapted it to his needs by omitting the garlic. The result was a great success with Richelieu, who dubbed the new sauce “Mahonnaise” to commemorate his victory. Later, this name evolved into the familiar word we use today: mayonnaise.
1757
Tea: The Root of All Misery. In his Essay on Tea, Jonas Hanway lamented the deleterious effect of the beverage: “Men seem to have lost their stature, and comeliness; and women their beauty. Your very chambermaids have lost their bloom, I suppose by sipping tea.” The “execrable custom” of tea drinking, Hanway contended, diverted servants and other manual workers from honest labor, and also meant that for poor people there was less money for bread. Thus he describes how he found in the poorest dwellings “men and women sipping their tea, in the morning or afternoon, and very often both morning and afternoon: those will have tea who have not bread . . . misery itself had no power to banish tea, which had frequently introduced that misery.” Tea resulted in the “bad nursing of children,” and, what was worse, “this flatulent liquor shortens the lives of great numbers of people.” Indeed, he concludes that, “since tea has been in fashion, even suicide has been more familiar amongst us than in times past.”
In 1821, William Cobbett, in The Vice of Tea-Drinking, took up Hanway’s theme, regretting that tea was taking the place of good old ale:
It is notorious that tea has no useful strength in it; and that it contains nothing nutritious; that it, besides being good for nothing, has badness in it, because it is well-known to produce want of sleep in many cases, and in all cases, to shake and weaken the nerves.
To put it in a nutshell:
I view the tea drinking as a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an engenderer of effeminacy and laziness, a debaucher of youth, and a maker of misery for old age.
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A Trifling Thing
In 1759, the English cook William Verral, who had worked for the Duke of Newcastle before taking over the White Hart Inn in Lewes, published A Complete System of Cookery, a lively work that reflected his apprenticeship under the renowned French chef, Monsieur de Saint-Clouet. Here is one of his simpler recipes:
Anchovies, with Parmesan Cheese
Fry some bits of bread about the length of an anchovy in good oil or butter.
Lay the half of an anchovy, with the bone upon each bit, and strew over them some Parmesan cheese grated fine, and color them nicely in an oven, or with a salamander [a circular iron plate, heated and placed over a dish to brown it].
Squeeze the juice of an orange or lemon, and pile them up in your dish and send them to the table.
This seems to be but a trifling thing, but I never saw it come whole from the table.
At the time of the publication of Verral’s work, Britain was embroiled in the Seven Years War with France, and Verral’s adherence to the French style of cookery was regarded as deeply suspect by the more jingoistic of his readers. A contributor to the Critical Review (Volume 8, 1759), for one, could barely contain himself:
It is entitled A Complete System of Cookery; but, what if it should prove A Complete System of Politics, aye, and of damnable politics, considering the present critical situation of affairs! If not a system of politics, at least, it may be supposed to be a political system trumped up in favor of our inveterate enemies the French. Nay, the author forgets himself so far as even to own, in the preface, that his chief end is to show the whole and simple art of the most modern and best French cookery. Ah, ha! Master William Verral, have we caught you tripping? We wish there may not be some Jesuitical ingredients in this French cookery . . . [et cetera, et cetera].
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1759
A Love of Music and Food, Part One:. Handel Eats for Two The German-British composer George Frideric Handel died on April 14. Handel appears to have been something of a trencherman, if one is to believe the story told by the eighteenth-century music historian Charles Burney. One evening, Handel ordered dinner for two from a local tavern, and asked his landlord to send it up when it arrived. The landlord asked if he was expecting company, to which Handel replied, “I am the company.”
1762
Who Invented the Sandwich?. John Montagu, Fourth Earl of Sandwich, the politician and patron of the arts, was so reluctant to leave the card table to dine that he had his servant put a piece of cold beef between two slices of bread—so creating what became known as the sandwich. So goes the commonly told story, but by the standards of the day Sandwich was not such an inveterate gambler, and indeed his biographer N. A. M. Rodger suggests that, busy man of affairs that he was, Sandwich may well have ordered the first sandwich so that he could eat at his desk.
Sandwich’s sandwich was not, in fact, the first sandwich. Fourteen years earlier, the famous courtesan Fanny Murray—one of whose most regular clients was Sandwich himself—was so disdainful of the £20 note presented to her by Sir Richard Atkins for her top-of-the-range services that she “clapped” the note between two pieces of bread and butter and ate it. (Incidentally, Lord Chancellor Hardwicke claimed to have seen, in the collection of Sandwich’s brother, William Montague, a joint portrait of Fanny Murray and another famous courtesan, Kitty Fisher, both of them naked.)
1764
Rosemary and the Dead. In his Dictionnaire raisonné universel d’histoire naturelle, the French naturalist Jacques-Christophe Valmont de Bomare recounted how, when coffins were opened after a number of years, the sprigs of rosemary that had been placed in the hands of the deceased had grown and flourished, covering the corpse. He does not inform us whether rosemary cultivated in such circumstances has any distinctive culinary qualities.
circa 1765
The First Restaurant The French word restaurant (which literally means “restoring”) had been applied since the fifteenth century to any food, cordial, or medicine thought to restore health and vigor—specifically a fortifying meat broth. However, it was not used to describe an establishment serving food until a certain Monsieur Boulanger, a seller of this broth, put up a sign outside his premises in Paris with the dog Latin slogan, Venite ad me, vos qui stomacho laboratis, et ego restaurabo vos (“Come to me, you with laboring stomachs, and I will restore you”).
1769
Infested Biscuits In September, Joseph Banks, chief naturalist on Captain Cook’s first voyage to the South Seas, commented in his journal on the “quantity of Vermin” (i.e., weevils) that were to be found in ship’s biscuit, also known as hardtack, the staple food of the mariner of the period:
I have often seen hundreds, nay thousands shaken out of a single biscuit. We in the [officers’] cabin had however an easy remedy for this by baking it in an oven, not too hot, which makes them all walk off.
Banks described the taste of the weevils as “strong as mustard or rather spirits of hartshorn.”
Hardtack—also a staple for troops during land campaigns of the time—was basic fare, comprising flour and water mixed into a paste and baked twice. Salt was sometimes added in the more luxurious versions. Alternative names included dog biscuits, tooth-dullers, molar-breakers, sheet iron, and worm castles. For long voyages, it was baked four times, six months prior to departure, and, as long as it remained dry, it kept indefinitely—unless entirely consumed by weevils. During the American Civil War, the soldiers would dunk their hardtack in coffee to soften it, with the added bonus that the weevil larvae would float to the top of the coffee, where they could be skimmed off.
The Fattest Hog in Epicurus’. Sty The eminent Scottish philosopher David Hume was also a passionate devotee of the culinary art, a weakness to which he openly confessed in a letter to Sir Gilbert Elliot dated October 1769:
Cookery, the Science to which I intend to addict the remaining years of my Life . . . for Beef and Cabbage (a charming dish) and old Mutton, old Claret, no body excels me.
Hume’s figure and his fondness for food led William Mason to describe him, in “An Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers,” as “the fattest hog in Epicurus’ sty.” Meanwhile Lord Charlemont, who had met Hume in Italy in 1748, described the great philosopher as resembling “a turtle-eating alderman.”
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To Make a Pease Soup for Lent
In 1769, Elizabeth Raffald, formerly housekeeper to Sir Peter and Lady Elizabeth Warburton, published The Experienced English Housekeeper, “consisting of near 800 original receipts, most of which never appeared in print.” Here is her recipe for a Lenten pea soup:
Put three pints of blue boiling peas into five quarts of soft cold water, three anchovies, three red herrings, and two large onions, stick in a clove at each end, a carrot and a parsnip sliced in, with a bunch of sweet herbs.
Boil them all together ’till the soup is thick.
Strain it through a colander, then slice in the white part of a head of celery, a good lump of butter, a little pepper and salt, a slice of bread toasted and butter’d well, and cut in little diamonds, put it into the dish, and pour the soup upon it; and a little dried mint if you choose it.
So successful was her book that Mrs. Raffald was able to sell the copyright for the then substantial sum of £1,400.
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1771
London Bread: A Deleterious Paste. In his novel The Expedition of Humphy Clinker, Tobias Smollett has one of his characters complain:
The bread I eat in London is a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum and bone ashes, insipid to the taste and destructive to the constitution. The good people are not ignorant of this adulteration; but they prefer it to wholesome bread, because it is whiter than the meal of corn [wheat]. Thus they sacrifice their taste and their health . . . to a most absurd gratification of a misjudged eye; and the miller or the baker is obliged to poison them and their families, in order to live by his profession.
French Food, Part One: A Parcel of Kickshaws In the same novel, Smollett decried French food as not only unwholesome, but unmanly:
As to the repast, it was made up of a parcel of kickshaws, contrived by a French cook, without one substantial article adapted to the satisfaction of an English appetite. The pottage was little better than bread soaked in dish washings, luke-warm. The ragouts looked as if they had been once eaten and half digested: the fricassees were involved in a nasty yellow poultice; and the rotis were scorched and stinking, for the honor of the fumet. The dessert consisted of faded fruit and iced froth, a good emblem of our landlady’s character; the table-beer was sour, the water foul, and the wine vapid.
The Admirable Thompson. Captain Cook returned from his first voyage to the Southern Ocean, having embarked three years previously. Many demands were made during the expedition upon the ingenuity of the cook, John Thompson, who had to come up with recipes for such unusual items as dog, cormorant, and penguin. Cook described the flesh of the latter as “reminiscent of bullock’s liver.” (Incidentally, for his last Christmas dinner before his fatal journey to the South Pole, Captain Scott also enjoyed penguin: “an entrée of stewed penguin’s breasts and red currant jelly—the dish fit for an epicure and not unlike jugged hare.”)
As for Thompson’s recipe for albatross, the expedition naturalist, Joseph Banks, gave this account:
The way of dressing them is thus: skin them overnight and soak their carcasses in salt water till morn, then parboil them and throw away the water, then stew them well with very little water and when sufficiently tender serve them up with a savory sauce.
The result was apparently so good “that everybody commended them and ate heartily of them, [as] though there was fresh pork upon the table.”
1773
On the Uselessness of Cucumbers. On October 5, Dr. Johnson pronounced: “It has been a common saying of physicians in England, that a cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.” Not everybody shared this opinion, as attested by this anonymous rhyme from the nineteenth century:
I love my little cucumber
So long, so firm, so straight.
So sad, my little cucumber,
We cannot propagate.
1775
The Perils of the Grand Tour. While traveling in Italy, Lady Miller was horrified at what she was served for supper in a village near Ferrara:
A pork soup with the bouillée in it, namely a hog’s head with the eyelashes, eyes and nose on, the very food the wretched animal had last eaten of before he made his exit remained sticking about the teeth.
The soup, having been removed untasted, was replaced by a dish of boiled house sparrows. “Need I say,” her ladyship concludes, “we went to bed supperless.” She was not the only English person on the Grand Tour who was appalled by Italian country fare. Others complained of being faced with “mustard and crow’s gizzards” or “an egg, a frog, and bad wine,” while one unfortunate was obliged to drink wine mixed with water in which there were a multitude of tadpoles—a circumstance addressed with pluck and ingenuity: “While I held the pitcher to my lips, I formed a dam with a knife, to prevent the little frogs from slipping down my throat.”
1779
Royal Table Manners. In his Reminiscences (1826), the celebrated Irish tenor Michael Kelly recalled his time in Naples in 1779, where he studied at the Conservatorio Santa Maria di Loreto. While in the city he became the protégé of Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador, who arranged for him to be presented to King Ferdinand IV, for whom he sang. When the party sat down to dine, Kelly was astonished at the way the king set about a bowl of pasta:
He seized it in his fingers, twisting and pulling it about, and cramming it voraciously into his mouth, most magnanimously disdaining the use of either knife, fork or spoon, or indeed any aid except such as nature had kindly afforded him.
Ferdinand had something of a reputation for boorishness, kicking the bottoms of his courtiers, groping his queen (the sister of Marie Antoinette) in public, and on one occasion scuttling after his fleeing retainers with his breeches around his ankles demanding that they inspect the contents of the chamber pot he brandished in his hands.
circa 1780
Painful Puns. Dr. Johnson’s biographer James Boswell, together with two of his cronies, indulged in some shocking wordplay while taking tea—as here recounted by the novelist and raconteur Henry Mackenzie (1745–1831):
Lord Kelly, a determined punster, and his brother Andrew were drinking tea with James Boswell. Boswell put his cup to his head, “Here’s t’ye, my Lord.”—At that moment, Lord Kelly coughed.—“You have a coughie,” said his brother.—“Yes,” said Lord Kelly, “I have been like to choak o’ late.”
1781
Tripping on Raw Pork. Henry Fuseli painted The Nightmare, a phantasmagoria that encapsulates the dark side of the Romantic imagination. In conceiving of his subject, it was rumored that Fuseli drew on the dreams he experienced after eating raw pork chops—a practice traditionally believed to induce visions. Lord Byron alluded to this belief when he dismissed the poetry of Keats as nothing but “a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium.”
The Strange Consequence of Eating Asparagus. Benjamin Franklin penned a cod letter “To the Royal Academy of Farting,” in which he proffered a specific against a well-known side-effect of eating asparagus:
A few stems of asparagus eaten, shall give our urine a disagreeable odor; and a pill of turpentine no bigger than a pea, shall bestow on it the pleasing smell of violets.
Similar advice is given in that bible of Italian cookery, Pellegrino Artusi’s Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well (1891), which suggests one puts a few drops of turpentine in one’s chamber pot. About 50 percent of people find that eating asparagus lends their urine an unusual smell. This effect is the result of the metabolizing of the asparagusic acid in the vegetable into various sulfur-containing compounds.
1782
The United Salad of America. By Act of Congress, the phrase E pluribus unum (Latin for “out of many, one”) was adopted as one of the mottos on the seal of the infant United States. The phrase derives from one used in “Moretum,” a Latin poem attributed to Virgil (70–19 BC):
It manus in gyrum; paullatim singula vires
Deperdunt proprias; color est e pluribus unus.
In John Augustine Wilstach’s 1884 verse translation, this is rendered as:
Spins round the stirring hand; lose by degrees
Their separate powers the parts, and comes at last
From many several colors one that rules.
Moretum means “garden herbs,” and the poem describes the making of a salad of garlic, parsley, rue, and onions, seasoned with cheese, salt, coriander, and vinegar, and finally sprinkled with oil.
Toast “Incomparable”. In his Journeys of a German in England in the Year 1782 (published the following year), the German author Karl Philipp Moritz waxed lyrical about one aspect of English food:
The slices of bread and butter given to you with tea are as thin as poppy-leaves, but there is a way of roasting slices of buttered bread before the fire which is incomparable. One slice after another is taken and held to the fire with a fork until the butter is melted, then the following one will be always laid upon it so that the butter soaks through the whole pile of slices. This is called “toast.”
The idea of toast as a way of making stale bread more palatable was not in fact an English innovation, but originated with the Romans, and the word itself comes from Latin tostare, meaning “to parch.” The other sort of toast, in which one raises a glass to someone, has the same origin. When the word first entered the English language in the fifteenth century, it denoted a piece of bread browned at the fire and put into wine or ale (perhaps to improve the flavor)—as when Falstaff demands in The Merry Wives of Windsor (III, v), “Go fetch me a quart of sack; put a toast in’t.” The word “toast” in the sense of a lady to whom the company raises its glass results from a figurative transference: the name of the lady supposedly flavored one’s glass in the same way as did a piece of spiced toast.
Then, said he, Why do you call live people toasts? I answered, That was a new name found out by the wits to make a lady have the same effect as burridge [borage] in the glass when a man is drinking.
(Richard Steele, in The Tatler, No. 31 (1709))
1784
A Hot Potato. Dr. Samuel Johnson died. There is a possibly apocryphal story that once while dining Johnson spat out a hot potato, to the alarm of the assembled company. Johnson turned to his shocked hostess and explained, “Madam, a fool would have swallowed that.”
Johnson took his food seriously, as Boswell recorded in his Life of the great man:
Some people have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously and very carefully; for I look upon it that he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else.
On another occasion, Johnson boasted: “I could write a better book about cookery than has ever been written.” He never did, though.
The Café of the Blind. The Palais Royal in Paris was reopened after refurbishment as a complex of shops, cafés, bars, sideshows, and other forms of entertainment. One of its more notorious establishments was the Café des Aveugles (“Café of the Blind”), which had a score of private rooms where customers could indulge in all kinds of debauched behavior, without worrying what the café’s musicians might see—because the members of the café’s small orchestra were all blind.
In 1805, the complex was enlivened by the addition of Le Caveau du Sauvage (“The Cellar of the Savage”), opened by a man who had formerly been Robespierre’s busman, and where for the price of two sols clients could watch “copulating savages.” Another of the must-go destinations in the Palais Royal was the Café Mécanique, where orders were given to the kitchen by means of a speaking tube, and food was delivered to diners on a plate that rose from below into the middle of each table.
1785
The Wrong Scotch. In Captain Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, we find a fearsome drink called “Scotch chocolate,” which, according to the author, consists of “brimstone and milk.” Several decades later, in the Victorian era, sailors would drink something called “Scotch coffee,” comprising hot water flavored with burned biscuit. In both instances, the allusion appears to be to the proverbial meanness of the Scots. An even more invidious concoction associated with the Scots in the following century was the so-called “stair-heid shandy” once drunk in the tenement slums of Glasgow; this consisted of a pint of milk through which coal gas had been passed, for the narcotic effect.
1787
Toward a Sublime Concentration. The French nobleman, Charles, Prince de Soubise, died. He had employed a chef who believed in only the finest and most concentrated of stocks as the basis of his sauces, and to this end had once asked the prince for fifty hams.
“Fifty hams, sir? Why, you will ruin me!” expostulated the prince.
“Ah, Monsieur,” replied the chef, “but give me those hams and I will reduce them into a vial the size of my thumb, and make with it something wonderful!”
The chef had his way.
Address to a Haggis. Robert Burns published his famous poem in praise of the Scottish national dish:
Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie [reddish] face,
Great chieftain o’ the puddin-race!
In fact haggis—which comprises minced sheep offal, oatmeal, suet, seasonings, and finely chopped onion, wrapped in a sheep’s stomach lining and boiled—is not exclusively Scottish. Until 1700 or thereabouts, it was eaten in England; what is more, the earliest known recipe appears in a fifteenth-century manuscript from Lancashire, and the earliest printed recipe is in Gervase Markham’s The English Huswife (1615). The classic recipe, however, is that supplied by Meg Dods in 1826. More modern recipes involving haggis include “Flying Scotsman” (chicken breast stuffed with haggis) and “Chicken Balmoral” (like Flying Scotsman, but with a bacon wrapping). Haggis bhaji is on the menu of certain Indian restaurants in Glasgow, while in Edinburgh one can buy haggis-flavored chocolate truffles. The importation of haggis into the United States was banned from 1989 to 2010, for fear that it might carry scrapie, the sheep version of mad cow disease.
Little Worms. In a letter dated November 27 to Lady Hesketh, the poet William Cowper recounted the following incident:
A poor man begged food at the Hall lately. The cook gave him some vermicelli soup. He ladled it about some time with the spoon, and then returned it to her, saying, “I am but a poor man, it is true, and I am very hungry, but yet I cannot eat broth with maggots in it.”
The poor man had a point: the Italian word vermicelli, the thin, string-like pasta used in soups, literally means “little worms.”
The Stomach of Ostriches. In a journal he kept while traveling in Spain and Portugal, William Beckford had this to say:
The Portuguese had need have the stomach of ostriches to digest the loads of greasy victuals with which they cram themselves. Their vegetables, their rice, their poultry are all stewed in the essence of ham and so strongly seasoned with pepper and spices that a spoonful of pease or a quarter of onion is sufficient to set one’s mouth in a flame. With such a diet and the continual swallowing of sweetmeats, I am not surprised at their complaining continually of headaches and vapors.
1788
The Monster Pies of Denby Dale. The White Hart Inn in Denby Dale in Yorkshire baked a massive game pie to celebrate the fact that King George III had recovered his sanity (only temporarily, as it turned out). The pie, a sort of “stand pie,” in which the crust supports the pie without the need of a dish, was served to the villagers in the field behind the pub.
Since then, the villagers have baked several more gargantuan pies to mark various occasions of particular moment.
The 1815 pie celebrated Wellington’s victory at Waterloo. The celebrations were attended by George Wilby, a veteran of the battle and a native of the village. The pie was baked at the Corn Mill, and probably included several chickens and a couple of sheep. Wilby was given the honor of cutting the pie with his sword.
The 1846 pie celebrated the repeal of the Corn Laws, which, by preventing the import of cheap foreign grain, kept the price of bread high, leading to widespread hardship in the “Hungry Forties.” The 1846 pie was 7 feet 10 inches in diameter, nearly 2 feet deep, and contained 100 pounds of beef, 1 calf, 5 sheep, 21 rabbits and hares, and 89 assorted game birds and poultry. It took ten and a half hours to bake, and was so heavy that the stage on which it was placed to be cut up collapsed. The crowd of fifteen thousand, frantic with hunger, then rushed forward to grab what they could, with the result that the pie was trampled underfoot. Some say the collapse of the stage was engineered by pro–Corn Law Tories, or by the rival village of Clayton West (which had just baked a giant plum pie), or that the speechifying was so tedious that two local lads, determined to spice up proceedings, knocked down the supports of the stage—with the result that the speechifier, a certain Mr. Hinchcliffe, was tipped into the pie.
The 1887 pie celebrated Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. In order to avoid the fiasco of 1846, an organizing committee arranged for the pie dish to be built out of iron and steel by a Huddersfield firm more used to constructing gasometers. A special oven was constructed behind the White Hart Inn, adjacent to a giant stewing boiler to cook the meat: 1,581 pounds of beef, 163 pounds of veal, 180 pounds of lamb, 180 pounds of mutton, 250 pounds of pork, 67 rabbits and hares, and 153 game birds and poultry—not to mention 588 pounds of potatoes. The meat was cooked in batches in the boiler, being added bit by bit to the pie—a very slow process—while the game birds were added raw, with the idea that they would cook in the oven. The result was, that when the pie was eventually cut open before another enormous crowd, the air filled with the nauseating stench of rotting meat. The next day the pie was dragged to Toby Wood, buried in quicklime, and mourned with the following verse:
Tho’ lost to sight, yet still to memory dear,
We smell it yet as tho’ it still was here;
Tho’ short its life and quick was its decay,
We thought it best to bury it without the least delay.
To restore the honor of the village, the ladies of Denby Dale promptly set to work to make a replacement “Resurrection Pie,” containing 1 heifer, 2 calves, 2 sheep, 1,344 pounds of potatoes—and no game birds.
The 1896 pie marked the fiftieth anniversary of the repeal of the Corn Laws. The pie again eschewed game birds, and before it was served it was certified as fit for consumption by a medical officer of health. In addition, the stage was specially reinforced, and railings erected to prevent a crowd surge.
The 1928 pie was belatedly baked to commemorate victory in the Great War. This time the villagers deliberately set out to bake the world’s biggest ever pie. It was rectangular in shape, measuring 16 by 5 feet, and 15 inches deep; it contained 4 bullocks and 15 hundredweight of potatoes, and took 30 hours to cook. The only hitch was that the dish got stuck in the oven and was only freed by knocking part of the wall down.
The 1964 pie celebrated four royal births (Prince Edward, Lady Helen Windsor, Lady Sarah Armstrong Jones, and James Ogilvy). The pie was even bigger—18 by 6 feet, and 18 inches deep, weighing 6.5 tons—and its recipe was advised upon by a panel of experts, including Clement Freud. A total of thirty thousand servings were sold and eaten within one hour.
The 1988 pie marked the bicentenary of the first pie. This was another record pie: 20 by 7 feet, and 18 inches deep, and its contents were measured metrically—3,000 kilograms of beef, the same again of potatoes, and 750 kilograms of onions. Environmental health legislation required that a method be found of keeping the pie sufficiently hot while it was paraded around the village prior to consumption, and this was achieved by means of hot water piped around the dish. Some hundred thousand visitors arrived on Pie Day, and £8,000 was raised to purchase Wither Wood, now managed by the Woodland Trust.
The 2000 pie was the Millennium Pie. The 12-ton monster again broke all records, measuring 40 by 8 feet, and 44 inches deep. The project involved a Rotherham sheet-metal company and the School of Engineering at the University of Huddersfield. In addition to the usual gargantuan quantities of beef, potatoes, and onions, the pie also contained gallons of beer and was blessed by the Bishop of Wakefield.
1789
Another Debt to Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson, then American minister plenipotentiary in Paris, asked a young friend visiting Naples to bring him back a macaroni machine. The young friend duly obliged, and the machine became the first of its kind in the United States when Jefferson returned home in September of the same year. It is unknown whether Jefferson followed the advice of the Parisian pasta-maker Paul-Jacques Malouin, who in 1767 had advised that the best lubricant for a pasta machine is a little oil mixed with boiled cow brains.
1790
Nothing so Dainty as Elephant Foot. In his Travels from the Cape of Good Hope into the Interior Parts of Africa, François LeVaillant recounts how he breakfasted with a group of Hottentots upon baked elephant’s foot, leaving us the following encomium:
It exhaled such a savory odor, that I soon tasted it and found it to be delicious. I had often heard the feet of bears commended, but could not conceive that so gross and heavy an animal as the elephant would afford such delicate food. “Never,” said I, ‘can our modern epicures have such a dainty at their tables; let forced fruits and the contributions of various countries contribute to their luxury, yet cannot they procure so excellent a dish as I have now before me.
In contrast, two centuries later, Laurens van der Post, in First Catch Your Eland: A Taste of Africa (1977), states that elephant flesh has “too giant a texture ever to be truly palatable.” Nevertheless, he records that in certain parts of the continent, British district commissioners would always eat a dish of elephant head and trotters on Sundays. Giraffe, on the other hand, he avers is “perhaps the oldest and most sought after delicacy of primitive man in Africa.” Regarding the giraffe, C. Louis Leipoldt, in Leipoldt’s Cape Cookery (1976), adds that “the long succulent tongue, properly cooked, is not only eatable but delectable.” However, it should be pointed out that the giraffe is protected throughout most of its range. Leipoldt also recommends lion meat (apparently comparable to venison), especially lion steaks marinated in wine and vinegar and then fried.
1794
A Miser’s Diet. Daniel Dancer, the notorious miser, died on September 30. Although worth £3,000 per annum, Dancer would dress himself largely in bundles of hay. He did splash out on a new shirt once a year—and once went to law with his shirt-supplier over one such transaction, claiming he had been cheated out of threepence. Dancer ate but one meal a day, consisting of a little baked meat and a hard-boiled dumpling. His only friend, Lady Tempest (to whom he left his fortune), once gave him a brace of trout, but, fearing the expense of lighting a fire, Dancer attempted to warm up the fish by sitting on them.
1799
British Food, Part Two:. Only One Sauce The Neapolitan diplomat Francesco Caracciolo died. He once had famously observed that “In England there are sixty different religions, and only one sauce.
By Ian Crofton in "A Curious History of Food and Drink", Quercus, New York/London, 2014, excerpts chapter 6. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.