Monthly Archives: March 2018

March 18, 2018 · 11:45 am

Directions to the Cook for March

Shivering as the snow is whirled round the house by winds of over 40mph I’ve turned to my Georgian cookery books for inspiration for today’s blog in the hope of something warming.

The New London Family Cook or Town and Country Housekeeper’s Guide by Duncan MacDonald “Head Cook at the Bedford Tavern and Hotel [on site of present Maple Leaf, Maiden Lane], Covent Garden, and Assistants” is probably the most comprehensive cookery book I own. My copy, dated 1812, is battered and without its covers or any of the index after “Daffy’s elixir, old receipt for…” but it has a large section of “Instructions for Marketing”, monthly guides to what is in season and several suggestions for entire dinners and recipes and carving instructions. The “Family Recipes” section provides solutions for everyday problems – thinning and falling hair, cramp, scorched linen – and “restoring the life to drowned persons.”

You can see Duncan MacDonald in the damaged frontispiece above surrounded by the tools of his trade. He looks a good advertisement for his recipes!

Many of these recipes and receipts occur in other cookery books – trying to work out who was stealing whose recipes – or copying wholesale, come to that – is a work of archaeology.

For March, Mr MacDonald informs us, beef, mutton, veal “house-lamb” and pork are the meats in season. The poultry and game are turkeys, fowls, capons, chicken, duckling, tame rabbits and pigeons. (I’m not clear what the difference between a fowl and a chicken is.) A wide range of fish is in season including oysters, flounders, eels, roach, crab, turbot and mackarel [sic]. The vegetables he lists are mainly roots and the cabbage family including borecole – what we now call Brussel Sprouts – plus mushrooms, tansy, parsley, fennel and celery. Lettuce and cucumbers are listed – presumably grown under glass – and a wide range of herbs.

The list of fruit is sometimes baffling – “Golden pippins (an apple variety dating from the 17thc), rennetings (one of the group of apples called reinettes now), love (no idea – unless it is ‘love apple’ ie tomato), pearmain and John-apples (there are a number of apples whose name includes ‘pearmain’ but I can’t trace John-apples), the bon-chretien (nowadays usually known as the Williams pear) and double blossom pear, oranges and forced strawberries.

Here is the menu and table layout for the first of his suggested March dinners. This is service à la française – the dishes are brought out all together in two or more ‘courses’ for the diners to help themselves and each other to whatever combination they like, as opposed to service à la russe, the modern method, where each dish is served separately by a waiter or footman.

Given how cold the weather is, I’ll give the two soup recipes – and a warning – I haven’t tried these, so I cannot vouch for what they’ll taste like if you try them at home!

Soup Sante or Gravy Soup

“Take turnips and carrots, shred them small with celery heads about two inches long; wash and steam them separately in a little water until nearly done; when quite done, cut the white of the celery small, likewise a small quantity of leeks, cabbage, cos lettuces, endive and chervil; put all the vegetables to boil til quite tender, with three quarts of cleared brown consumes [presumably consommé]; if in season, add green peas, tops of asparagus, and button onions, stewed, etc.

You may put in a small piece of bouille beef stewed; but dry it with a cloth, and put it in the soup with the vegetables when you serve it. This, however, is not very general.”

Rice Soup

“Put a pound of rice and a little cinnamon [stick, not powder] into two quarts of water. Cover close, and let it simmer till the rice is quite tender. Take out the cinnamon, sweeten it to your taste, grate in half a nutmeg, and let it stand until cold. [This sounds more like a cold rice pudding than a soup.]”

“Another way

Wash a handful of rice in warm water, put it into a stewpan, with as much stock as it is wanted to make, and let it simmer slowly for two hours. Season it to your taste, and serve it up.”

I’m now going to go off and try out the recipe for Portable Soup…

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March 11, 2018 · 11:26 am

The Story of a Square 6: Queen Square

Today I’m visiting Queen Square, built in the first decades of the 18th century and named for Queen Anne. The first image shows it in 1786 in a painting by Edward Dayes. [Yale Center for British Art. Public domain image, US]. This is the view from the south.

The second image is from Ackermann’s Repository for September 1812 and the artist is standing in Guilford Street on the northern, open edge.

Now there are buildings on the plot of land enclosed by the iron railings but, according to the text with this print, The north side formerly commanded fine views of Hampstead and Highgate. This view can be clearly seen in the Dayes painting and on Roque’s map of 1738 with, to the north-east, Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital. Fanny Burney, the novelist, playwright and diarist, lived in the square 1771/2 with her father and wrote of,  A beautiful prospect of the hills ever verdant of Hampstead and Highgate. Dr Burney was visited here by Captain James Cook, just before his second voyage.

By the time of the 1812 print, Richard Horwood’s map (below) shows the extensive development over what had been Lamb’s Conduit Fields to the north and the private garden in the foreground of the image. Originally the site was an ancient reservoir, part of the waterways that formed the water source for Lamb’s Conduit and which supplied water to the Greyfriars in Newgate Street. If you look at the paved area at the southern end on StreetView you can see a black iron water pump, the late Victorian replacement for the original, which taps into the same source.

Number 31 (east side), now replaced by the Royal Homeopathic Hospital, was a school for young ladies, sometimes referred to as “the ladies’ Eton”. Deportment was clearly of great importance and the young ladies would travel by coach to attend the church of St George the Martyr, just a few metres away on the south-west end of the square. This meant they could practice getting in and out of a carriage in the correct manner and, according to the London Encyclopedia, when the carriage became too ancient to move it was installed in one of the schoolrooms so they could use it there.

St George the Martyr was built at the same time as the square as a chapel of ease, a subsidiary of St Andrew, Holborn. As London expanded these chapels sprang up in all the fashionable new developments and this one was created when (to quote Ackermann’s) several of those who resided at the extremity of the parish [of St Andrew] having proposed to erect a chapel for religious worship, Sir Streynsham Master [a prominent member of the East India Company] and fourteen other gentlemen were appointed trustees for the management of the building. Along with two houses it cost £3,500 and it was intended to recoup the cost by the sale of pews. However, by 1733 the density of new building was such that a new parish was created and the church, bought from the trustees, was named St George’s in honour of Master’s governorship of Fort St George in Madras (Chennai). Originally it was a plain brick building without steeple, and destitute of any pretensions to elegance, though convenient and well lighted. It was remodeled twice in the 19th century, a bell tower was added and the original exterior brickwork covered up, presumably adding some much-needed elegance. The 1786 painting at the head of this post shows the church in its original brick in the left foreground.

When George III first became unwell in 1788 he stayed for a short time in Queen Square with Doctor Willis before being treated at the White House at Kew. The King’s apparent recovery made Willis famous, fashionable and rich. Coincidentally, the statue of George’s wife, Queen Charlotte, that still stands in the square, was erected about 1775.

[Photograph by Stephen McKay, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10043271%5D

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March 4, 2018 · 12:12 pm

The Georgian Muff

I wanted to write this blog last week when the blizzards were howling, but I couldn’t get across the back garden to my studio and my print collection. Now the need for a muff has reduced I’ve managed to wade across and retrieve the volume covering 1795-1805. I found it was absolutely stuffed with illustrations of muffs.

For the early history of muffs, and the origin of the name, I can’t do better than refer you to this interesting post by The Costume Historian (snufskins anyone?). During the 17th and 18th century men used muffs too (Samuel Pepys borrowed his wife’s last-season muff and had to buy her a new one) but by the end of that period they were coming to be seen as effeminate and positively French (Horrors!).

Muffs could be made of fur, swansdown or padded fabrics, although all the ones in the prints in my collection look like either fur or the skin of very long-haired sheep, with the occasional one that might be feather. Infuriatingly, even when I have the description with the image they don’t describe the muff. Even if lined with silk and padded with down these vast muffs must have weighed a great deal and it is difficult to see how one could have put both hands into the biggest ones without your elbows sticking out like jug handles. There would certainly be room inside for other things – it was even possible to buy muff pistols, although confronted by a foot-pad it might have been more effective simply to smother him with the muff itself. In one or two images you can see that they are being held by the rim – the idea of a loop handle or strings around the neck doesn’t seem to come in until they reduced greatly in size with the Victorians.

The image at the top of this post is from Heideloff’s The Gallery of Fashion for February 1799 and show large, long-haired fur muffs, the brown one with walking dress and white one used inside. This next plate is from Phillip’s Fashions of London and Paris (February 1800) and shows two Full Dresses, one accessorized by a vast fluffy white muff. Presumably this was simply carried for effect – or would cold rooms have made it necessary?

I have a number of plates from The Lady’s Monthly Museum which are notable for their rather plain ladies and decided lack of elegance! Here is a pair of Morning Dresses for February 1800.

And for December that year two more Morning Dresses with very shaggy muffs. In the descriptions details right down to stockings are described – but not the muffs.

For March 1801 The Lady’s Monthly Museum has a charming pair of Morning Dresses with a poodle who seems to think the large white muff might come from a relative of his and an Afternoon Dress with the muff discarded on the sofa while the very nattily-dressed gentleman makes intense eye-contact.

For February 1802 here are two ladies from a very lovely Gallery of Fashion plate with below it Morning Dresses from the much less exclusive Lady’s Monthly Museum.

For March 1805 The Lady’s Magazine has a London Walking Dress with a very curly muff and a feather to match and The Ladies’ Monthly Museum a figure in Full Dress with a positively enormous white muff.

And finally, here is a rare plate from Le Miroir de la Mode by the mysterious Madame Lanchester. I blogged about her here with some more examples from my collection. In this example of a Walking Dress from January 1803 the muff is so large that it seems almost as long as the wearer’s legs!

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