18th century

Jaune Mange

2nd January 2020 by Regula 4 Comments

Jaune Mange jelly is the yellow sister to the ancient delicacy called Blanc Mange which means ‘white food’. It is one of the most international early dishes of European cuisine. From the Middle Ages onwards the name of this dish in its various forms – blanc mange, blanc manger, blamange, manjar branco, biancomangiare – can be found in most European cookery books.

It is believed by many food historians that the earliest recipe for blancmange dates back to the twelfth century. Two recipes for blancmange also feature in the earliest English cookery text, The Forme of Cury from C1390. By 1395, two recipes for blancmange can be found in the Viandier manuscripts, the first French cookbook: one is a dish for the sick, the other is a multicoloured dish, which is at odds with the name’s literal meaning.

This recipe uses seville orange juice, while others recommend lemon and lemon peel for flavour and colour. Later recipes by J.H. Walsh in The British Cookery Book (1864) instruct the cook to use sherry or ‘raisin-wine’. Because the eggs give this jaune mange a set already, you don’t need to use as much gelatine as you would for a blancmange.`…

How to make Quince Cheese

9th December 2016 by Regula 1 Comment

I’m not the biggest fan of sweet desserts after mains, I prefer an afternoon tea where the treats become the star of the show. That way you can enjoy them to the full and they do not become that thing you eat last when you’re actually too full to enjoy it. For an afternoon tea you can dress up, wear a hat, and pretend to be a lady of good breeding. Drinking tea with your pinky in the air, back straight, having polite conversations and enjoying the experience of eating from fine bone china. I’m also a sucker for a multi-tiered cake stand, and for clotted cream – lots of it.
Cheese and biscuits are my choice of afters and with a decent fruit cheese and port this quickly becomes my perfect kind of dessert.

Fruit cheeses are reduced jams or pastes. Centuries ago they were served after dinner as a digestive and they were often prescribed by apothecaries to cure minor ailments. The fruit paste was often pressed in a mould with fancy engravings and could look rather stunning. Moulds of this sort are rare to come by, I only know one person who has a mould and I believe he even carved it himself.

Although fruit cheeses should be thick and hold their shape, they should still be spreadable. You can make them into small cake trays for a nice shape or just in a large tray, you can then cut squares of the fruit cheese to wrap them and keep them. They are the most delectable accompaniment to blue cheese, but they can also be eaten all on their own, as a sweetie. A nice idea if you want to know what your child puts in its mouth, factory made sweets can contain all sorts of horrible additives. But it’s still sugar, make no mistake, to call it healthy would be wrong, but eaten and treated as a treat it is just fine.

My favourite fruit cheese is made of Quince. Quince are usually cooked and conserved. They look like otherworldly lanterns, large yellow pears with a strange downy covering. Raw they are considered quite unpalatable because of their tartness, but they are high in pectin which makes them ideal for making jams, jellies and fruit cheese. The pectin is most strong in the pips of the fruit, often ground up pips would be used to set other jelly like creations. But this is something I would not recommend you do as the seeds contain nitriles which turns poisonous when it comes in contact with your guts enzymes and acid. A few pips from your batch of quince are fine, just don’t chuck in a jar of ground up pips.

Quince and quince cheese was popular all over Europe since Medieval times. In Spain they call it ‘Membrillo’, in Italy ‘cotognata’ from the Italian word for quince ‘mele cotogne’ quince apple, the French call it ‘cotignac’ or ‘paté de coing’ from the French ‘coing’ for quince. Quinces are responsible for the word marmalade as their Portuguese word is ‘marmelo’ and they were made into fruit cheeses named marmalades. …

Queen cakes – 18th century dainty bakes

11th June 2016 by Regula 9 Comments

It is not a coincidence that I chose to write about Queen cakes today. If you’ve read the papers and watched the news, or if you are a royalist, then you know today the Queen of England celebrates her 90th birthday. This makes her the world’s oldest-reigning monarch and the longest reigning monarch in English history. Queen Victoria was the previous record holder with her 63 years and seven months. So Queenie has every reason to be smug and have a big party – which is a giant street picnic on the Mall (the strap of wide street in front of Buckingham palace) in june. Getting a ticket for it was near impossible to my regret, because this was a celebration I would have been happy to buy a new hat for, bunting I already have aplenty. So if you’re reading this Your Majesty… is there room for one more? I’ll throw in a book!

But let’s talk about these Queen cakes. They are little cakes, and they started popping up in English cookery books in the 18th century. When reading the several recipes from the 18th to the 20th century I have in original cookery books, they remind me of a little cake I grew up with in Belgium. However, the recipe was slightly different as the Belgian cakes were flavoured with a little vanilla or almond essence, while Queen cakes are flavoured with mace, orange flower water, rose water and lemon depending on the date of the recipe. The Belgian cakes also look more like Madeleines, but they both have currants in them and the use of vanilla or almond essence is of course a slightly more ‘modern’ way to flavour bakes.

As with many English dishes, the Queen cakes come with their own dedicated cake pans. These were produced in the 19th century and depictions of them can be found in at least two books that I know of, one I own. 18th century recipes remain silent about the tins they should be baked in, but it is very possible that the then fashionable mince pie tins would have been used, leaving them without a need to create new tins….

Bath buns – or the tale of English buns #1

2nd April 2016 by Regula 2 Comments

If you have visited the city of Bath, nestled in a green valley with its Roman baths, elegant Georgian townhouses and impressive circus, you might have noticed that there are two famous buns in town. Both are competing to be the oldest, most authentic, and most valuable to the city’s heritage. The Sally Lunn and the Bath Bun – they both even have their own tea room in town. Of course the notion that one of these buns is more important than the other is bollocks. At the end of the day, it’s just something to spread your butter on. I’m far more interested in both of these buns history than I am in their importance.

One bun maker claimed that the Bath bun was just simply a Sally Lunn which was slightly changed and then given the name Bath Bun for the tourists. A rather simplistic way of looking at it, but it has happened to other foods in the past. Of course in this case we are talking about two entirely different buns.

What a difference a bun makes
We know that during the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, set up by Prince Albert, 934.691 Bath buns were sold to the public. This shows they were either popular, or they were the best option! According to bun legend people remarked that the Bath bun sold in London was not exactly like the one sold in Bath and soon Bath buns in London were renamed London buns. However, mentions for London buns can be found 20 years before the Great Exhibition. So I’m fairly sure we are again talking about two different buns. To confuse things even more is that in Australia a Chelsea bun is known as a London bun.

The Sally Lunn which I will get to in another posting, is a light bun with a nice dome shaped top, it looks like a brioche but is less rich and not sweet at all. It is known since 1776. The Bath bun used to be a Bath cake in the 18th century. But although it was called cake, it was definitely treated as a bun, which according to Elizabeth Raffald The Experienced English Housekeeper, 1769 should be the size of a French roll and sent in hot for breakfast. Bath resident and cookery author Martha Bradley, gave a recipe in her book in 1756 entitled ‘Bath seed Cake’. Over the course of the 18th century eggs were added to the batter making the buns richer. In Andre Simon’s ‘Cereals: A Concise Encyclopedia of Gastronomy’ from 1807 the recipe instructs the cook to:
Rub 1 lb. of butter into 2 lb. of fine flour; mix in it 1 lb. of caraway comfits, beat well 12 eggs, leaving out six whites, with 6 spoonfuls of new yeast, and the same quantity of cream made warm; mix all together, and set it by the fire to rise; when made up, strew comfits over them.

Jane Austen was a fan of Bath buns and promised to stuff her face with them if her sister Cassandra would not be joining her for a visit to Paragon that May….

Ox heart stuffed with kale, bacon and mushrooms

14th February 2016 by Regula 14 Comments

The meat of the heart is eaten quite commonly in Peru, but it might surprise some of you that for centuries is was also eaten in England. Beef heart is so unpopular I get mine from a local farm for as little as £3. That is great value for a huge piece of meat. I asked a couple of butchers, some in Belgium and also Borough Market. Beef heart is the kind of cut that doesn’t get sold and that is such a shame.

The flavour and texture of beef heart is like that of a good beefy steak because beef heart is a muscle just like steak is. I find beef heart great in any way it is cooked because it has so much flavour and it is very tender. In Peru they make kebab style roasted beef heart, in England beef heart was usually stuffed with a forcemeat.

A couple of years ago I found a recipe for a stuffed beef heart in Elizabeth Raffald’s book The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769):

Wash a large beast’s heart clean and cut off the deaf ears, and stuff it with forcemeat as you do a hare, lay a caul of veal, or a paper over the top, to keep in the stuffing, roast it either in a cradle spit or hanging one, it will take an hour and a half before a good fire; baste it with red wine; when roasted take the wine out of the dripping pan and skim off the fat, and add a glass more of wine; when it is hot put in some lumps of red currant-jelly and pour it in the dish; serve it up and send in red currant-jelly cut in slices on a saucer.

The recipe was copied later by M. Radcliffe in her A Modern System of Domestic Cookery: Or, The Housekeeper’s Guide (1823) and it was also published in a later edition of Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy – A new Edition (1803). The recipe dit not appear in the first edition of 1747. Copying recipes from other cooks was common practice in those days and they were often copied word for word, making it easy to determine their source.

To make this dish slightly lighter I opted to stuff the heart with a duxelles, which is a mixture made with mushrooms, bacon and in this case kale or cavolo nero. If I had caul – a thin lace-like membrane which surrounds the stomach internal organs of some animals – like Raffald suggested, I would have used it as it keeps in the stuffing in nicely and tidy. But if you can not obtain it, some creative string-work will do the trick just fine.
…

Quince Ratafia

14th November 2015 by Regula 12 Comments

Quince really are a mystical fruit. They hang like lanterns from the trees, forcing the branches to bend down with their weight. One can not ignore their smell, how they fill your kitchen with that sweet incense-like scent. The smell far sweeter than they really are, because as far as fruits go, they are very tart. So tart that they are considered inedible raw.

Recipes over time always require you to cook quinces, and cook them long and slow. Some authors claim you should never put spices with quinces but most instruct you to add cinnamon, cloves, peper and more sweet spices.

Quinces are responsible for the word marmalade as their Portuguese word is ‘marmelo’ and they were made into fruit cheeses named marmalades. The marmalades were served after dinner as a digestive and they were often prescribed by apothecaries to cure minor ailments.

The pear shaped yellow fruits were made into pies, preserved whole and in form of a syrup and they were also made into Ratafia. Ratafias were infused alcohols much like the Amaretto we know today. It could be made with apricot kernels, bitter almonds – which produce the original Amaretto, cherry kernels and cherries, and our beautiful quinces.

Ratafia of quinces was popular in the 18th century in England, and in the 17th and 18th in France. The following recipe is that of Vincent La Chapelle, the master cook to the fourth earl of Chesterfield, William IV, the Prince of Orange, John V of Portugal and even the mistress of Louis XV of France: Madamme de Pompadour.

Like with so many historical writers, he borrowed a lot of his recipes of another author, in this case the French Francois Massialot who published a book on court cookery and confectionery in 1692. These two gentlemen both share recipes for Quince Ratafia, but La Chapelle instructs us to bring the quince juice to a boil, while Massialot does not. They also use different spices, making the end result not the same drink at all.

You must have some Quinces, and rasp them with a Grater; all being grated, you must have a Piece of strong Cloth, put in a small handful, and squeese it with all your Might, that the Juice may come from it; when all is squeesed and you have all the Juice, put it in a Preserving pan, let it take just one single Boiling, and let it cool; being cooled, measure two Quarts of Juice and two Quarts of Brandy, Measure by Measure, and clarify some Sugar; to each two Quarts, ten Ounces of Sugar, a Piece of Cinnamon, four Cloves, and three or four Grains of white Pepper whole; stop up your Jug very close, put it aside for two or three Months, put it through a Straining-bag, until it come very clear, and put it up in Bottles flopped very close.
Vincent la Chapelle, The Modern Cook, London, 1733

In 1830 ‘The Cook’s Dictionary’ by Richard Dolby instructs us to leave the scrapings of quince for 24 hours until they start to ferment, then extract the juice and add it to spiced brandy. We’re not going to ferment the quince, I will try that next year as I just caught the last of the quinces of the year at the market. And I’m going to leave out the spices because I want to know how it tastes like without them, quince have such a delicate flavour.

What is your favourite quince recipe?…

18th century

Footer

Connect