Gherkins & Tomatoes

(Continued from August 23, 2010):

Brillat-Savarin’s comments about the English being the worst cooks in the world drew a sniff from the proper Isabella, sure that her book would right that situation.

In spite of the moralizing tone, and the plagiarism, BOHM became a runaway bestseller. Readers and critics considered the soup, fish, sauce chapters the best.

Quantities of food served at dinner now seem phenomenal. But Isabella emphasized strict economy,  sometimes distressingly so, especially with family meals. She tackled the problem of leftover joints of meat, indexed in BOHM under “Cold Meat Cookery.” For surely, as you well know, leftovers  signal prosperity and abundance, a luxury not possible for the poor, whose next meal may just be a dream and a wish.

And Sam Beeton, crafty publisher that he was, decided to take advantage of that situation. In 1863, he and Isabella created and published The Englishwoman’s Cookery Book — a compendium of cold meat recipes and economical dishes. Leftover meat presented huge problems for households and readers clamored for ideas of how to use up the huge joints of meats.

Cooks still mine BOHM for recipes, for the book reveals social and cultural history. According to Aylett and Ordish in First Catch Your Hare,

It is still in print today, though modernised. First editions are extremely valuable properties; all nineteenth-century editions are collectors’ pieces.

The book provides an invaluable guide to the domestic life of Victorian England, especially eating habits. People gorged themselves, at least in the upper classes and whenever there was enough money for food. Obesity was a problem then, too. BOHM reflects the urban life of most of the readers, in that no one appears to have grown their own food. Isabella focused on doing the marketing/purchasing of goods for the household, including the food. At the

time, houses had official “back doors,” to which the tradesmen came and sold their wares, thus relieving the housewife of having to go out to do the marketing. Female servants did go out if necessary. Isabella included copious information on servants, their ranks in the household, and the pay they received. All food was cooked and nothing eaten raw,  understandably so because of the dangers of contamination by poor water and dirty hands. Isabella’s book came out  before Pasteur confirmed his germ theory discoveries around 1862. And the legendary Sweeney Todd, the evil barber of Fleet Street, killed his customers to make meat pies out of them.

Keywords characterizing the times of Isabella Beeton include Industrial Revolution, growing female literacy, appearance of new consumer goods, breakdown of social class, and democratic movements. Charles Darwin published his The Origin of Species two years before. So Sam’s magazines filled an important niche and fed his readers’ hunger for knowledge propelled by the burgeoning intellectual life and growing literacy of the times. The contents of the book included items arranged according to the manner in which they were served or eaten at large dinner parties:

Sauces

Meat

The Sheep and Lamb

The Common Hog

The Calf

Birds

Games

Vegetables

Puddings

Creams

Preserves

Milk and Eggs

Breads and Cakes

Beverages and

Invalid Cookery

Sample recipes:

CAPER SAUCE FOR FISH.

383. INGREDIENTS – 1/2 pint of melted butter No. 376, 3 dessertspoonfuls of capers, 1 dessertspoonful of their liquor, a small piece of glaze, if at hand (this may be dispensed with), 1/4 teaspoonful of salt, ditto of pepper, 1 tablespoonful of anchovy essence.

Mode.—Cut the capers across once or twice, but do not chop them fine; put them in a saucepan with 1/2 pint of good melted butter, and add all the other ingredients. Keep stirring the whole until it just simmers, when it is ready to serve.

Time.—1 minute to simmer. Average cost for this quantity, 5d.

Sufficient to serve with a skate, or 2 or 3 slices of salmon.

CAPERS.—These are the unopened buds of a low trailing shrub, which grows wild among the crevices of the rocks of Greece, as well as in northern Africa: the plant, however, has come to be cultivated in the south of Europe. After being pickled in vinegar and salt, they are imported from Sicily, Italy, and the south of France. The best are from Toulon.

A SUBSTITUTE FOR CAPER SAUCE.

384. INGREDIENTS – 1/2 pint of melted butter, No. 376, 2 tablespoonfuls of cut parsley, 1/2 teaspoonful of salt, 1 tablespoonful of vinegar.

Mode.—Boil the parsley slowly to let it become a bad colour; cut, but do not chop it fine. Add it to 1/2 pint of smoothly-made melted butter, with salt and vinegar in the above proportions. Boil up and serve.

Time.—2 minutes to simmer. Average cost for this quantity, 3d.

So too a number of classic phrases and sayings first appeared in Household Management: “Dine we must and we may as well dine elegantly as well as wholesomely”, “A place for everything and everything in its place”, and “In cooking, clear as you go.” — all originated in Isabella’s book.

Other features of the book included an index, recipes numbered and alphabetized within the chapters, cost information, preparation times, and number of servings. Granted, Eliza Acton had pioneered some of these features found in Isabella’s book, but that Isabella adapted them and that her book went on to be reprinted and revised so many times—unlike Acton’s work—virtually guaranteed that these items would be carried over by other cookbook authors, including Fanny Farmer of the Boston Cooking School in the United States.

Excited about the delivery of her fourth child, Isabella worked on Beeton’s Dictionary of Cookeran abridged version of Beeton’s Book of Household Management, up to a week before she died. She also started a magazine called The Queen (now called Harper’s & Queen).

She died of puerperal fever at age 28 one day after the birth of her fourth son, Mayson, in January 1865. Sam’s broken-hearted eulogy read:

USQUE AD FINEM (Forever At Rest) Her hand has lost its cunning, the firm, true hand that wrote these formulae and penned the information contained in this little book…exquisite palate, unerring judgment, sound common sense, refined tastes, all these had the dear Lady, who has gone, ere her youth had scarcely come…her duty no woman has ever better accomplished than the late Isabella Mary Beeton.

Bibliography:

Aylett, Mary and Ordish, Olive. “Mrs. Isabella Beeton, 1836-1865.” In: Aylett, Mary and Ordish, Olive, First Catch Your Hare: A History of the Recipe Makers. London: Macdonald, 1965, pp. 220-239.

Beeton, Mrs. Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management. Oxford World’s Classics. Abridged Edition. Edited by Nicola Humble. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

David, Elizabeth. “Isabella Beeton and her Book,” in An Omelette and a Glass of Wine. London: Viking, 1986, pp. 303-309. Reprinted from Wine and Food, Spring 1961.

Day, Helen. “Isabella Beeton.” In: Arndt, Alice, editor, Culinary Biographies. Houston, Texas: Yes Press, 2006, p. 57-59.

Freeman, Sarah. Isabella and Sam: The Story of Mrs. Beeton. London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1977.

Hughes, Kathryn. The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton. New York: Knopf, 2006.

(Excellent bibliography and analysis of the life and work of Isabella Beeton.)

Spain, Nancy. Mrs. Beeton and her Husband. London: Collins, 1948.

Online Resources:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/10136

http://www.mrsbeeton.com/

© 2008, 2010 C. Bertelsen

This initiates a series on the women who wrote cookbooks.

In today’s world, where people still attempt to discover themselves as they approach 30 or 40 or 50, it’s rather sobering to look at the accomplishments of people like John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley and Isabella Beeton.  All of whom died before the candles on their cakes numbered 30. Yet they left mature works of almost immortal greatness.

Today in Britain, “Mrs. Beeton” is a culinary trademark not unlike “Betty Crocker,” whom General Mills created in a Frankensteinian moment to boost sales by appealing to Every Housewife.

The difference between the two ladies is that Mrs. Beeton was a real, breathing, living personage who wrote a monster of a book with a monster of a title: The Book of Household Management Comprising information for the Mistress, Housekeeper, Cook, Kitchen-Maid, Butler, Footman, Coachman, Valet, Upper and Under House-Maids, Lady’s-Maid, Maid-of-all-Work, Laundry-Maid, Nurse and Nurse-Maid, Monthly Wet and Sick Nurses, etc. etc.—also Sanitary, Medical, & Legal Memoranda: with a History of the Origin, Properties, and Uses of all Things Connected with Home Life and Comfort, BOHM for short.

But “ …Mrs. Beeton was a plagiarist.” So states biographer Kathryn Hughes In The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton, published in 2006, nearly 139 years after the death of twenty-eight-year-old author Isabella Mary Mayson Beeton, Mrs. Sam Beeton.

Kathryn Hughes was not the first twentieth-century writer to use the dreaded “P’ word. Elizabeth David, famed mid-twentieth century English food writer, pointed the turning fork at Isabella, too. And whispered all but the word “plagiarism, in her article, “Isabella Beeton and her Book.” David goes on to enumerate what happened to Isabella’s book after her death and the many revisions that occurred.

Antonin Carême

Isabella also took a leaf so to speak from the pages of several other English cookbooks popular at the time, written by female authors like Hannah Glasse, Maria Rundell, and the well-known Eliza Action. And she grabbed material from William Kitchiner’s The Cook’s Oracle, too. As well as Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste and Thomas Webster’s Encyclopaedia of Domestic Economy. A Mrs. Parkes wrote a great deal of that book and included cost information and also listed ingredients at the beginning of the recipes, so Isabella really did not invent something new under the sun.

Born 1836, in Cheapside, London, Isabella was the oldest daughter in a family of 21 children, which she called a “living cargo of children.” At age 19, she married Samuel Orchard (Orchart as some researchers write it) Beeton. Sam Beeton made his fortune by publishing Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Britain. He adorned the book with the beehive symbol/logo of his company. Isabella served as his editor, copy editor, and compiler from 1859–1861 for The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, which Sam started in 1852. She also wrote a monthly cooking supplement for the magazine. In October 1861, Beeton published the twenty-four “supplements” as a single volume.

The only problem was that she did not know much about cooking— her own sisters called her “an indifferent cook.” A damning quote from a letter from Mrs. Henrietta Mary Pourtois English, who married Robert English in 1835, formerly a footman to George IV and well-versed in the ways of the kitchens of noble households and Henrietta also worked in the grand ancestral homes of the English aristocracy. The letter reads in part:

Cookery is a Science that is only learned by Long Experience and years of Study, which, of course, you have not had … .

Samuel Beeton

Mrs. English wrote to Isabella Beeton, July 21^st, 1857, when the Beetons were seeking support for what would become Isabella’s magnum opus, published in 1861 with an ornate front piece painted by Henry George Hine.

In her letter, Mrs. English brings up questions about just for whom Isabella was writing the book. The ensuing tone of the book resembled the voice of a comfortable, middle-aged lady appalled at the declining standards of competent womanhood. And Isabella was particularly concerned with extravagance of women driving their families into ruin, never mind their husbands with their gambling, horseracing, and other sundry vices!

Charges of plagiarism against Isabella take on a different perspective with this letter from Mrs. English. For Mrs. English is blatantly telling Isabella to “lift” the recipes from other sources, namely Simpson’s Cookery! This is, according to Hughes,

the way that cookery books had been put together from time immemorial … .

And so Isabella began her book with a poignant preface:

I must frankly own, that if I had known, beforehand, that this book would have cost me the labour which it has, I should never have been courageous enough to commence it. What moved me, in the first instance, to attempt a work like this, was the discomfort and suffering which I had seen brought upon men and women by household mismanagement. I have always thought that there is no more fruitful source of family discontent than a housewife’s badly-cooked dinners and untidy ways.

The book contained a number of interesting and somewhat unique characteristics, or at least features not common in many of the cookery books published at the time. A number of classic phrases and sayings first appeared in Household Management: “Dine we must and we may as well dine elegantly as well as wholesomely”, “A place for everything and everything in its place”, and “In cooking, clear as you go.”

In addition to anecdotal stories and history peppered throughout the recipes, Isabella quoted Byron, Milton, Keats and Tennyson in the chapter on “Dinners and Dining.” She created a usable index, numbered and alphabetized the recipes within the chapters, estimated cost information, measured preparation time, and included the number of servings for each recipe. She also paid attention to seasonality of ingredients.

The detailed engravings/illustrations — some in color — were outstanding, a very different thing for a book of it price (7S 6d). The first review appeared a year after publication in a magazine called Athenaeum. Even so, sixty thousand copies sold during that first year. A moralizing tone characterized many cookery books of the past, a trend which came and went like waves at the seashore, sometimes present during certain time periods and then absent for a while. BOHM took on a somewhat moralizing tone, as was the fashion of the time. Forty-six intensive detailed chapters, beginning with “The Mistress of the Household” and ending with “Legal Memoranda” comprised the book. The title page oozed ripely with Victoriana. Over 1,112 pages made this a massive book, with 900 of those pages devoted nearly 1400 recipes.

As Hughes and David mention in their twentieth-century analyses of BOHM, Isabella plagiarized a number of recipes from Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery for Private Families.

It was one of the first books to publish recipes in the format that we find familiar. With her maid, Isabella also supposedly tested every recipe, but Hughes is skeptical about that.  She chose recipes to be used in middle-class homes, with few of the fanciful flourishes favored by Charles Francatelli, chef to the Queen Victoria and author of another popular book of the time, The Modern Cook.  Beeton’s book made a tremendous impact on Englishwomen’s cookery, for better or worse, like a marriage.  She provided a list of prepared/canned foods available at the time, and includes the prices. One section focused on the nutritional value of various foods and is quite on the money.  Seven recipes for Plum Pudding appear in BOHM, catering to the pocketbooks of the various economic situations of her readers. Cakes were a luxury food until the end of the nineteenth century. “A Nice Useful Cake,” recipe number 2414, calls for new-fangled baking powder. She also included recipes for Australian, Indian, French, German, and Italian dishes.

(Continued on August 26, 2010.)

© 2008, 2010 C. Bertelsen

Sliced Ginger Root

Sir Toby Belch: Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?
Clown: Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot i’ the mouth too.

Twelfth Night. Act ii. Sc. 3.

If anyone ever makes a movie about ginger’s long and fascinating history, I want Leonardo DiCaprio to play the lead.  Imagine him sporting a multi-colored pair of hose, leaping from bow to stern on a flimsy wooden caravel …

Anyway, Shakespeare described ginger (Zingiber officinale) as being  “hot in the mouth.”  Confucius dictated rules about cutting it. No poets have praised it, yet.

Young Ginger Plant

In ancient Bengal, in a time out of mind, people discovered a hot spicy yellow root – related to turmeric and galangal – and called it sringavera, meaning “horned root” in Sanskrit. Ginger, a rhizome plant almost twin to bamboo and easy to grow, quickly spread throughout Asia. The Chinese and Japanese soon learned to pair ginger with fish, because ginger eliminated fishy odors. As a cure for seasickness, ginger had no equal and early Chinese sailors swore by it.

By 100 AD, the Romans and Greeks used ginger in huge quantities in their cooking. Homesick Roman legionnaires camped in Britannia and Gaul demanded ginger (and got it) to spice up their less-than-fresh food. Thus, ginger took hold in Europe, where it dominated the art of cooking throughout the Middle Ages.

During the Age of Discovery, sailors on long voyages, like the Chinese, chewed ginger to combat seasickness. English cooks made the “ginger pills” more palatable for the sailors by baking cookies and cakes flavored with ginger. Ginger became so ingrained in English cooking that cooks laced traditional English Christmas Eve carp heavily with ginger. So important was ginger for the English palate that special containers sat on the dining table, alongside salt and pepper shakers. English settlers bound for the New World carried ginger in their luggage and that is how ginger first came to America.

Tingly yellow ginger  imparts a certain pep and prance to gingerbread boys and bestows the snap in  gingersnaps.

Ginger turned up in many English recipe books during the period of the Renaissance. A Book of Cookyre Very Necessary for all such as delight therein, Gathered by A.W. (1591) includes a number of ginger-studded recipes for poultry, as indicated by the following offering:

To bake Chickins.

Season them with cloves, mace, sinamon ginger, and some pepper, so put them into your coffin, and put therto corance dates Prunes, and sweet Butter, or els Marow, and when they be halfe baked, put in some sirup of vergious, and some sugar, shake them togither and set them into the oven again.
Bake Sparowes, Larkes, or any kinde of small birds, calves feet or sheepes tunges after the same manner.

Here’s another example, from the 1691 A New Booke of Cookerie:

To smoore an old Coney, Ducke, or Mallard, on the French fashion.

PArboyle any of these, and halfe roast it, launch them downe the breastwith your Knife, and sticke them with two or three Cloues. Then put them into a Pipkin with halfe a pound of sweet Butter, a little white Wine Uergis, a piece of whole Mace, a little beaten Ginger, and Pepper.
Then mince two Onyons very small, with a piece of an Apple, so let them boyle leisurely, close couered, the space of two howers, turning them now and then. Serue them in vpon Sippets.

Minced Ginger Root

On the other side of the Atlantic, America’s Revolutionary war soldiers received rations of ginger, probably for the same reasons that Roman soldiers clamored for it. As the years went by, American housewives added ginger only to cakes, cookies, ice cream, and pumpkin pies. Ginger ale and ginger beer became popular. Christmas sweets hogged most of the ginger. And that’s still the case.

Not until hordes of other immigrants came to America did ginger begin to take on other cooking roles. Ginger teases the palate in Indian curries, Moroccan stews, and West African chicken and peanut sauces. Asian cooks re-introduced the idea of pairing ginger with fish and shellfish. Used gingerly, ginger indeed reduces the fishiness of fish.

For the modern cook, ginger appears widely in markets, available in both fresh and ground form.

Fresh ginger stores well in the fridge and in the freezer when wrapped in foil and bagged in plastic. Just cut off what you need and refreeze.

Store ground ginger, made from the dried root, in a glass jar in a cool dry dark place. Substitute ground ginger for fresh only when fresh cannot be found in any grocery store or Asian market. Use only one-fourth the amount of ground ginger for fresh ginger. When making curries or other dishes (see “Spiced Moroccan Shrimp” below) where directions call for the dried spices to be fried first, take care not to scorch the spices, as this will permeate the dish with a bitter flavor. Remove large pieces of fresh ginger from the finished dish or finely grate the ginger before cooking. Why?  Biting into a large chunk of fresh ginger can be unpleasant, to put it mildly.

Ginger Plant with Ginger Root

For no less an authority than the famous English herbalist, John Gerard, said, “It heateth in the third degree,” seconding Shakespeare’s adage: ginger indeed sits “hot in the mouth.”

Now about that movie,  Mr. DiCaprio …

NUTRITION NOTES

Some commercial motion-sickness preparations include potassium-rich ginger. Some things never change, do they?

SPICED MOROCCAN SHRIMP
Serves 4

4 garlic cloves, mashed
4-6 T. oil
1/4-1/2 t. salt
1 t. sweet paprika
1 t. cumin
1/2 t. ground ginger
1/8 t. cayenne pepper
1 lb. peeled shrimp
1/2 c. chopped parsley

Fry the garlic in the oil for 30 seconds over medium-high heat and add the spices. Fry for 15 seconds and then quickly add the shrimp. Stir shrimp until they turn pink and just begin to curl.

Toss in the parsley, stir briefly, and serve the shrimp with saffron rice.

FISH FILLETS SAUCED WITH GINGER
Serves 2

1 lb. fresh fish fillets, preferably red snapper, flounder, or mackerel
4 T. oil
Salt to taste
1 T. Chinese rice wine or dry sherry
2 scallions, chopped
1 clove garlic, mashed
2 T. finely grated fresh ginger
4 T. soy sauce
1 t. sugar

Heat 2 T. of the oil over high heat and quickly sear the fish on one side until fish is cooked through. Remove pan from the heat. Lightly salt the fish to taste. Place cooked fish seared side up on 2 warm plates in a warm oven.

Pour out any juices from the pan. Reserve. Wipe out the pan and return it to the heat. Add the remaining 2 T. of oil and the ginger. Cook, stirring constantly, for 1 minute. Add the scallions and the garlic. Fry for 10 seconds  Add the soy sauce and the reserved juices or 2 T. water. Stir in the sugar, cook for 15 seconds, and remove from the heat. Pour the sauce over the fish and serve immediately.

Cookbooks about Ginger or of Interest Because of Recipes Containing Ginger:

Ginger: Common Spice and Wonder Drug, by Doug Schulick (2001)

Ginger East To West: The Classic Collection Of Recipes, Techniques, And Lore, Revised And Expanded, by Bruce Cost (1989)

Spoonful of Ginger, by Nina Simonds (1999)

© 2008, 2010 C. Bertelsen

Jane Grigson is the nearest thing that we have on this side of the great green bouillabaisse to M.F.K. Fisher, with learning and wit that are rarely devoted to such a banausic subject as stuffing food down one’s cake hole.

~~ Philip Howard

No wonder I’m feeling a bit green.

The annual Oxford Food Symposium begins in a few days and this year’s theme trumpets “Cured, Fermented, and Smoked Foods.” Now, for foodists, foodies, gastronomes, and just plain folks, this Symposium takes on the same nature as that of the Super Bowl for those inclined to love American football or, if soccer is more your heritage, the World Cup.

This is the big one, in other words.

The program/programme sounds fantastic.

Since I won’t be sitting in a pub quaffing Guinness this year, I decided to dig out a few of my British cookbooks and think of England. Thinking of England, especially if you’re a food-crazed food blogger, means recalling food writer Elizabeth David, of course, Alan Davidson (who started the whole Oxford Food Symposium thing), and Jane Grigson.

Jane Grigson

Not as well known here in the U.S. as Elizabeth David, who incidentally was responsible for propelling Grigson into the public eye in the first place, Jane Grigson (1928 -1990) wrote eleven books and numerous articles for The Observer. When she died in 1990, one day shy of her 62^nd birthday, Alan Davidson said of her,

She won to herself this wide audience [of millions of people] because she was above all a friendly writer, equipped by both frame of mind and style of writing to communicate easily with them.

Davidson considered each of her books to be classic.

In his The Wilder Shores of Gastronomy (2002, a collection of 20 years worth of articles from Petits Propos Culinaires), Davidson included a chapter entitled “Jane Grigson: A Celebration in Three Parts.” Isobel Holland, Lynette Hunter, and Geraldine Stoneham compiled a 33-page bibliography just of the numerous editions and printings of Grigson’s thirteen books, and in the introduction, reprinted in Wilder Shores, they said,

Her books glow with a warm awareness of history, of the myriad tangled skeins of connection which link a kitchen of today with kitchens of the past, of the gradual evolution of recipes and customs, of how some things have got better and others, many others, worse. … (p. 328)

As for a complete bibliography of her many articles and such, dream on. No such thing yet exists.

Here’s a list of her books, none of which are in my local public library, although the university library sports three of them, and I own four (Charcuterie, Mushroom,  Vegetable, and British):

Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery (1967)
Good Things (1971)
Fish Cookery (1973, recently reissued)
English Food (1974)
The Mushroom Feast (1975)
Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book (1978)
Food With The Famous (1979)
Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book (1982)
The Observer Guide to European Cookery (1983)
The Observer Guide to British Cookery (1984)
The Cooking of Normandy (for Sainsbury’s) (1987)
The Enjoyment of Food – The Best of Jane Grigson (1992, posthumous)

Grigson’s charcuterie book attests to her underlying sense of humor and ever conscious awareness of the hand of history sweeping over the dinner table. And the book came in very handy for me once when, in Haiti, a development project rearing goats from the central plateau hired me to make goat liver pate for a marketing effort aimed at the Haitian elite. Testing took place in a local upscale supermarket and at local butcher shop owned by a French-Canadian butcher. Although the recipe I chose for the base, Pâté de Foie de Porc, turned out well enough, I found that with goat liver as a base, I needed to add a little more wine with a splash of brandy and quatre-épices (black or white pepper, cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon or ginger) to pep things up.

Actually Jane Grigson, more than Elizabeth David, might well be considered to be one of the first modern food writers to tout the glories of local food. As Isobel Holland, Lynette Hunter, and Geraldine Stoneham in their comments in Wilder Shores,

She emphasizes the need to husband our own agricultural heritage and to understand that of others. (p. 329)

Grigson won both the Glenfiddich Writer of the Year Award and the André Simon Memorial Fund Book Award twice. The International Association of Culinary Professionals established an award — the Jane Grigson Award — which “honours distinguished scholarship and depth of research in cookbooks.”

Her other legacy includes her daughter, Sophie Grigson, who is also a renowned British food writer and cookbook author, a celebrity on the same scale with many American FoodTV stars.

Sophie Grigson

Since most of us will not soon be in England, why not seek out one of Jane Grigson’s books and get acquainted with a talented writer? Given the heat of the days, you might prefer Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book or Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book, of which Jane Davidson said,

Brillant … A lovely cover evoking thoughts of idyllic summer ensures that the Fruit Book is rapidly picked up. Its contents ensure that it is not rapidly put down … .

As a matter of fact, when librarians in England were asked why none of Grigson’s books seemed to be available on the shelves, the answer was that the books were so good that people continuously “nicked” them all.

Now that’s quite a plug for a writer, I think.

__________________________________

*Any American over the age of 40 will recognize the allusion to the horrendously boring little readers featuring the stifling little lives of the children Dick and Jane and their dog Spot. It’s a wonder anyone ever wanted to read a book ever again!

**Charcuterie was translated into French, an amazing turn of events for an English writer on food.

For more about Jane Grigson, see The Jane Grigson Trust. Also Jones, Steve and Taylor, Ben. “Food writing and Food Cultures: The Case of Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 4: 171 – 188, 2001.

© 2010 C. Bertelsen

[A photograph, and nothing more, for silent contemplation.]

Medieval Woodcut

The price of fish is something nice — for fishmongers through the centuries, that is. And over the years, observers noted the rise and fall in the cost of fish according to the liturgical season and changes in the rules of the Roman Catholic Church.*

Because of the price of fish, or even the mere existence of fish in an otherwise protein-scarce environment, people utilized every bit of the fish in the same way they used the carcasses of pigs — even the blood became part of dishes, many served with blood-thickened sauces.

The Forme of Cury, a cookbook compiled in 1390 by the cooks of English king Richard II and put in book form by Samuel Pegge in 1791, is now available as page images as well as transcribed. The manuscript contains several recipes specifically associated with the Lenten fast.

For to make noumbles in Lent. — 114.

Take the blode of pykes other (or) of conger, and nyme (take) the panches (paunches) of pykes, of congers, and of grete cod lyng and boile hem tendre and mynce hem smale, and do hem in that blode. Take crustes of white brede, and styne (strain) it thrugh a cloth. Thenne take oynons iboiled and mynced. Take peper, and safron, wyne, vynegar aysell other alegar, and do thereto, and serve it forth.

For to make chawdon [a sauce) for Lent. — 115.

Page Images, The Forme of Cury, "For to Make Noumbles in Lent"

Take blode of gurnardes and congar, and the panches of gurnardes, and boile hem tendre, and mynce hem smale; and make a lyre of white crustes, and oynons ymynced, bray it in a mortar, and thanne boile it togyder til it be stondyng (thick). Thenne take vynegar, other (or) aysell, and safron, and put it thereto, and serve it forth.

Now one thing that should be clear here is that “chawdon,” “chaudron,” or “chawdron,” a black sauce made with blood and browned breadcrumbs, came to table with roasted swan, definitely not a dish for the poor. But what’s interesting, to me anyway, is the use of breadcrumbs and blood to thicken the sauce, the attempt to make a fish into a bird, to speak.

These faux techniques, to trompe l’oeil and the tongue both, testify both to the ingenuity of the cooks and the need to make use of everything that could be eaten.

Blood.

Dry old bread.

Things we might casually pitch into the garbage without a second thought today.

*An example is “The Pope and the Price of Fish,” by Frederick W. Bell (1968).

More to come …

© 2010 C. Bertelsen

Photo credit: Martin Deutsch

Shriven/Shrove: archaic : to confess one’s sins, especially to a priest*

When they heard the “pancake bell,” people flocked to the church to be “shriven” or confessed on Shrove Tuesday, and ready to make the pancakes that date back to Saxon times.

If you think of Shrove Tuesday pancakes as stodgy, thick American pancakes, think again.

Meant to use up eggs, butter, and milk just before Lent, these pancakes resemble French crêpes and Italian crespelle more than the flapjacks so beloved by lumberjacks and that mythical figure, Paul Bunyan. One recipe, meant for the rich, included cream instead of milk, sherry, orange-flower water, and nutmeg in addition to the basic recipe ingredients provided below.

In some towns in England today, people race,  flipping these pancakes in contests. I suspect their pans are larger than mine or their aim is better!

Or maybe not …

Photo credit: Simon Huggins

MAKING SHROVE TUESDAY PANCAKES

1 large egg or 1 egg and one yolk
1 ¼ cup whole milk
1 cup minus 2 T. unbleached all-purpose flour
1 T. melted butter
Pinch of salt

Butter for frying

Photo credit: C. Bertelsen

Put flour into a bowl and make a well in the middle. Break in the egg and yolk. Whisk the eggs and about ¼ cup of the milk, gradually incorporating the flour, to make a smooth cream. Whisk in the rest of the milk, the melted butter, and a pinch of salt.

Photo credit: C. Bertelsen

Heat 8-inch crêpe pan over medium-high heat.

Photo credit: C. Bertelsen

Add about ½ t. of butter to pan.

Photo credit: C. Bertelsen

Take a 1/4 cup measure, fill with batter, and swirl in pan.

Photo credit: C. Bertelsen

Cook over medium-high heat until spots show on one side.

Photo credit: C. Bertelsen

Flip, and cook briefly on the other side. Keep adding butter to the pan in between “cooks.”

Photo credit: C. Bertelsen

Stack. Serve stacked with syrup or rolled up, filled with jam, butter, and/or sugar.

Makes about eight pancakes.

© 2010 C. Bertelsen