The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England
Page 32
In a rich household, the carver will cut the meats and place them on pewter or silver dishes, which the servants will then carry to your table and place in front of you, together with the appropriate sauces. Sir Francis Willoughby strictly observes Fridays and Saturdays as non-meat days; therefore, if you happen to visit on one of these, expect four or five of the following dishes to appear, one after another in the following order, along with a dish of butter. Remember not to eat too much: this is just the first course.
A sallat (salad) with boiled eggs
A pottage of sand eels and lampreys
Red [smoked] herring covered with sugar
White [pickled] herring, ling or whiting with mustard sauce
Minced salt salmon in a sauce of mustard, vinegar and sugar
Pickled conger eel, shad or mackerel
Plaice or thornback ray with vinegar, or wine and salt, or mustard
Cod, bass, mullet or perch
Eels, trout or roach upon sops [bread soaked in the liquor in which the fish was cooked]
Pike in pike sauce
Tench in jelly
A custard tart.30
You might note that you start with a vegetarian dish: a salad. The wealthy have long disdained to look at anything green as a food in itself: as we have seen, vegetables are thought to be ‘noyful to man’. But attitudes are slowly changing. The still-life paintings of the sixteenth century demonstrate a new inquisitiveness about the natural world – and that includes food. Fruit and vegetables are now frequently depicted in artwork and sculpture. New vegetables such as the edible carrot and tubers from the New World are reverently treated, almost as if they have come straight from the Garden of Eden. Many householders now have a salad on a fast-day, following the lead of the trend-setting Italians. If your host is among them, expect to be presented with a concoction of leafy greens and herbs – coleworts, lettuce, sage, garlic, rampions, chervil, onions, leeks, borage, mint, fennel, watercress, rosemary, cucumber and parsley – washed and drenched in olive oil with vinegar, salt and sugar.31
There will be an interlude before the second course. When the carvers reappear, bearing their silver platters, expect another four or five dishes selected from the following list, served in this order:
Flounders in pike sauce
Salmon, conger eel, brill, turbot or halibut in a vinegar sauce
Bream or carp upon sops
Fried sole
Roast lampreys or porpoise in galantine sauce
Sturgeon, crayfish, crab or shrimps in a vinegar sauce
Baked lamprey
Cheese tart
Figs, apples, raisins and pears
Blanched almonds
You might be wondering about the pike sauce: this is actually a form of poaching used for most freshwater fish. The same cookery book that contains the lists of dishes provides the recipe for seething a pike:
Scour your pike with bay salt and then open him on the back. Fair wash him and then cast a little white salt upon him. Set on [to heat] fair water well seasoned with salt. When this liquor seetheth then put in your pike and fair scum it, then take the best of the broth when it is sodden and put it in a little chafer [a dish to keep it warm] and put thereto parsley and a little thyme, rosemary, whole mace, good yeast, and half as much verjuice [a bitter vinegar-like liquid made from fruit] as you have liquor, and boil them together, and put in the liver of the pike and the kell [the membrane around the intestines], being clean sealed and washed and let them boil well, then season your broth with pepper gross beaten, with salt – not too much because your liquor is salt that your pike is boiled in – put therein a good piece of sweet butter and season it with a little sugar that it be neither too sharp nor too sweet. So take up your pike and lay it upon sops the skinny side upwards, and so lay your broth upon it.32
I suspect you will consider pike a disappointment when cooked in this manner – especially as a single pike normally costs 10s, or thirty times a labourer’s daily wage.33 Salmon in vinegar is probably a safer option, although it is even more expensive: a large fresh salmon costs 13s 4d – forty times a labourer’s daily wage.
Most people would rather call on Sir Francis on a meat day, especially on a Sunday, which, in most great houses, is a day for luxuriating in the food available. This is the likely palette of first courses served on a Sunday, from which four or five will be prepared for you (turn up after 1 November if you want to eat the swan):
Brawn in mustard
Capons stewed in white broth
A leg of venison in beef broth
A chine of beef and a breast of mutton boiled
Mutton pies
Three green [young] geese in a dish of sorrel sauce
A stubble goose [a goose left to feed itself on stubble in the fields] with mustard and vinegar
A swan in sauce chaudron
A pig roast
A double rib of roast beef, with pepper and vinegar sauce
A loin or breast of veal with orange sauce
Half a lamb or a kid
Two capons roasted, either in wine and salt sauce or a sauce of ale and salt (but not the latter if it be served with the sops)
Two pasties of fallow deer in a dish
A custard tart
And for the second course, expect four to five dishes from the following list:
Jelly
Peacock in wine and salt
Two coneys or half a dozen rabbits in a mustard and sugar sauce
Six chickens upon sorrel sops
Six pigeons
Mallard, teal, gulls, stork or heronsew [young heron] in a mustard and vinegar sauce
Crane, curlew, bittern or bustard in a galantine sauce
Pheasant, or six rails [corncrakes], cooked in salt water with sliced onions
Six woodcocks cooked in mustard and sugar
Six partridges
A dozen quail
A dish of larks
A pasty of red deer
Tart, gingerbread, fritters
The jelly is not served in a bowl, but coloured and moulded into the shapes of flowers, herbs, trees, animals, birds and fruit. You will find ‘galantine’ sauce served almost everywhere – it is one of the most popular ways of presenting meat and has been for centuries. It consists of vinegar in which toasted bread has been soaked and removed, and to which claret, cinnamon, sugar and ginger are added and then boiled. As for the sauce chaudron in which the swan is served, it is made like this:
Take white bread and lay it into soak in some of the broth that the giblets be sodden in, and strain it with some of the blood of the swan, a little piece of the liver and red wine, and make it somewhat thin, and add cinnamon, ginger, pepper, salt and sugar, and boil it until it be somewhat thick and put in two spoonfuls of the gravy from the swan and serve it in warm saucers.34
The usual practice is to pick a little at each dish. Lift the meat on to your plate with your knife, cut away the bones, gristle and any other parts you don’t want, and dip the morsel into the sauces provided in the saucers. The bones and unwanted parts you may put into a ‘voider’ – you will find one on the table. Then move on to the next dish. Do not worry about waste; you are not expected to eat everything. Any leftovers will be reused the next day, or eaten by the servants or handed out to paupers at the kitchen door.
The principal difference between the daily fare described above and a feast is the level of ostentation. At a feast, all the above dishes in each course will be served, not just a selection. The best silverware will be on show. There will be dancing and playing of musical instruments – shawms, trumpets and sackbuts – as the host and his principal guests make their way to the great chamber to dine. The meal itself may be accompanied by viols and softer instruments. The hall will be decorated and all the servants will crowd in to enjoy the wide array of food. A man like Sir Francis Willoughby will sometimes slaughter an ox to celebrate a feast at his house, so that everyone may have as much meat as he desires, including the servants.35
At Christmas the wealthy are expected to entertain the less-fortunate members of society. Rich men with extensive estates treat their tenants to a feast on at least one of the twelve days set aside for the celebrations. This might entail the serving of beef, mutton, goose, pork, capon, coneys, chicken and such exotics as woodcock, turkey and swan, as well as the ever-popular venison pasties. Extra bread and beer will be laid on for all those who come to the house unbidden; it is not done to turn away the poor at this time of year.
At a truly great feast, dozens of dishes are laid out at each course. When Robert Dudley entertains the queen at Kenilworth in 1575 she is served by 200 gentlemen carrying more than a thousand dishes of silver and glass.36 Two years later Elizabeth decides to call on Lord North at Kirtling; she stays from suppertime on Sunday 1 September to after dinner on Tuesday 3rd, and this is the food that Lord North has to provide for the two-day visit:
Bread:
1,200 manchet loaves, 3,600 loaves of cheat bread and 276 extra loaves;
Meat:
11½ cows, 17½ veal calves, 67 sheep, 7 lambs, 34 pigs, 96 coneys, 8 stags made into 48 pasties, 16 bucks made into 128 pasties, and 8 gammons of bacon
Birds:
32 geese, 363 capons, 6 turkeys, 32 swans, 273 ducks, 1 crane, 38 heronsews, 110 bitterns, 12 shovellers, 1,194 chickens, 2,604 pigeons, 106 pewits, 68 godwits, 18 gulls, 99 dotterels, 8 snipe, 29 knots, 28 plovers, 5 stints, 18 redshanks, 2 yerwhelps, 22 partridges, 1 pheasant, 344 quail and 2 curlews
Fish:
3 kegs of sturgeon, 96 crayfish, 8 turbot, a cartload and 2 horse loads of oysters, 1 barrel of anchovies, 2 pike, 2 carp, 4 tench, 12 perch and 300 red [smoked] herring
Other:
2,201 cows’ tongues, feet and udders, 18lbs lard, 430lbs butter, 2,522 eggs, 6 Dutch cheeses, 10 marchpanes [marzipans], £16 4s-worth of sugar, and £29 1s 9d-worth of salad, roots and herbs
When you add Lord North’s gifts to her majesty’s officers and his expenses in decorating the rooms, putting up a temporary banqueting house, building several temporary kitchens, and hiring extra pewterware and cooks from London, you will see that a royal feast is prohibitively expensive and disruptive. The whole visit, during which he entertains more than 2,000 people, costs him £642 4s 2d (not including a present of a jewel worth £120 for the queen). For those two days his house becomes a town about the same size as Stratford. This is quite a contrast for Elizabeth, who, when at one of her own palaces, usually dines alone.37
After a feast there comes the ‘banquet’. This is a particularly English form of conspicuous consumption: a sweet course that has its own drama. There will be music as people mingle and pick at sweetmeats, preserved fruit and acres of sugar and marzipan confections that are designed in the shapes of animals, trees, fruit, flowers or household items such as cups, glasses and plates. The marzipan is coloured with saffron and egg yolk, azurite blue and gold leaf. If green is required, spinach is used; if white, milk curds.38 Curiously, a rich man’s banquet is probably the only place you will be offered a potato: William Harrison refers to ‘the potato and such venerous roots as are brought out of Spain, Portugal and the Indies to furnish up our banquets’. All these things are laid out on tables or placed in baskets, arranged to please the eye. Banquets might be held out of doors or in a banqueting house in the grounds of a mansion. Some go on late into the night; others are held over the course of an afternoon. It is hardly surprising that the term ‘banquet’ later becomes synonymous with a long, ostentatious feast.
Food in a Middling Household
As you pass down the social ladder, the character of dining changes. A wealthy Guildford merchant, like the vintner Simon Tally, has a great chamber and enough linen tablecloths and napkins to emulate the rich. He has ‘platters, dishes, chargers, saucers … all of pewter’ and eight silver bowls, three silver salts and eighteen silver spoons. However, the food at his table is produced on a much smaller scale than at Wollaton.39 He does not have a huge household to maintain, only his family and a few servants.40 Nor does he have tenants to feed at Christmas. If entertaining a few gentlemen, he might provide many of the same meats that you will find at Sir Francis Willoughby’s table: lamb, pheasant, quail, larks, chicken, rabbit, leveret, woodcock, snipe, pigeon and heron – although it is unlikely that he will have exotics such as young stork or bittern, and he will only provide venison if he has been given some by a wealthy friend.41 On the other hand, if he and his wife just dine by themselves, they will be served a first course of ham and pea pottage and perhaps powdered (salted) beef with mustard, followed by a second course of one or two roast meats, bread and butter, a custard tart and fruit. Of course, the standard of all this fare depends on the skills of the cook – there is an old English proverb: ‘God sends us meat and the devil cooks.’ Looking at the contemporary recipes for poached freshwater fish and boiled chicken, you might agree.
With the exceptions of some exotica, there is no great difference between the diets of the middling sort and the rich. In 1562 Alessandro Magno sits down each day to a dinner in his London inn that consists of a choice of two or three types of roast meat or meat pies, savouries, fruit tarts and cheese.42 In June 1560 Henry Machyn attends the feast at which his friend, the herald William Harvey, is elected Warden of the Skinners Company and he notes that the banquet afterwards consists of spiced bread, cherries, strawberries, pippins, marmalade, suckets, comfits and Portuguese oranges.43 Cooking with spices and sugar is another feature that middle-class households share with the rich.44 But on the whole, the less wealthy the household, the more you’ll find that practicality takes precedence over ostentation and taste. Meals are served to the family in the hall. Food is provided by the householder’s wife, not a male cook, and meat is carved by the head of the household, not a servant.
What does the average housewife in town cook for her family? This is a question best answered by looking at the recipe books aimed at the literate townswoman of the day, such as John Partridge’s The Treasurie of Commodious Conceites and Hidden Secrets, first published in 1573. This popular little volume is priced at just 4d; the eighth edition appears in 1596 and an enlargement is produced in 1600.45 It contains instructions for some high-status dishes, such as marchpane wrapped in gold leaf for a banquet; but most of the recipes are for meals that every housewife might be expected to make. This is what Partridge says about baking a chicken:
Truss your chickens, cut the feet off, put them in a coffin [a case of pastry], then for every chicken put in a handful of gooseberries and a quantity of butter … then take a good quantity of sugar and cinnamon, with sufficient salt, put them into the pie, let it bake one hour and a half. When it is baked, take the yolk of an egg and half a goblet of verjuice with sufficient sugar sodden together, and serve it.
The success of John Partridge’s book inspires others. The Good Hous-wives Treasurie is produced anonymously in 1588. You might like to compare the recipe for mince pies in this book with what you’d expect of its modern equivalent at Christmas:
Take your veal or mutton and parboil it a little, then set it cooling. When it is cold take 3lbs of suet to a leg of mutton or 4lbs to a fillet of veal, and then mince them small by themselves, or together whether you will, then take to season them ½oz nutmeg, ½oz cloves and mace, ½oz of cinnamon, a little pepper, as much salt as you think will season them, either to the mutton or to the veal. Take eight yolks of eggs when they be hard, ½ pint of rosewater full measure and ½lb of sugar; strain the yolks with the rosewater and the sugar and mingle it with your meat. If you have any oranges or lemons you must take two of them and take the peel very thin and mince them very small, and put them in [with] 1lb currants, six dates, ½lb prunes. Lay the currants and dates upon the top of your meat. You must take two or three pomewaters or wardens [apples] and mince them with your meat.
Fish days in a middling household depend hugely on geographical location as well as wealth. In winter you will need to stay by the coast to get the most popular seawater fish, such a
s conger, turbot, mullet and gurnard; or in a city to be able to buy freshwater fish like pike, roach and tench. Most people eat these fish only occasionally; the most common varieties consumed are smoked and pickled herrings, and dried and salted cod. The latter are caught in the waters off Iceland or Newfoundland and can be transported long distances in their preserved state; they are therefore available all year round. Oysters can be transported live and are eaten in huge quantities by the rich and middling sort alike, both whole and chopped up in oyster pies. Eels are popular among all classes. The Good Hous-wives Treasurie gives the following recipe for a very affordable eel pie:
Take two pennyworth of very fat eels when they be flayed and very fair washed, seeth them in a little fair water and salt till they be half sodden, that they may slip from the bones, cut away the fins on every side, then slip them from the bones, and shred them somewhat fine with a knife and take two or three wardens and shred them very fine to put among them, or pippins or other apples. If you do want wardens then take a little salt, a little pepper, cinnamon, cloves, mace and sugar and season it with all. Put in a ¼lb of sweet butter, so make it into a paste and bake it not too rashly. You may put in the yolk of an egg and a little verjuice when it is half baked if you will but I think it is better without.46