In towns and cities loads of ice were brought in by wagon and would be stored in insulated pits. In 2018 MOLA (the Museum of London Archaeology) discovered a vast “ice well” when they were working on the site of the redevelopment of one of John Nash’s terrace close to Regent’s Park. The well had been constructed in the 1780s by Samuel Dash, connected to the brewing trade.
The structure is 7.5 metres wide and 9.5m deep, a red brick, egg-shaped chamber with an entrance passage, and vaulted ante-chamber. You can see an image of it on the MOLA website. The diagram below shows a similar pit, but unlike the Regent’s Park, example the “egg” is standing on its pointed end. The Regent’s Park design seems more logical to prevent melting – the greatest mass of the ice would remain deepest in the earth with as small an area as possible exposed at the top. However the other way up would make access to gather ice more convenient.
By the 1840s ice was being shipped in from Norway and from the Wenham Lake Ice Company in Massachusetts and was brought into the heart of London on the Regent’s Canal.
I own a copy of The Complete Confectioner or, the Whole Art of Confectionary Made Easy by Frederick Nutt (1815 and wrote about ice cream with a recipe from his book some time ago.
Looking at my copy of the 1829 edition A New System of Domestic Cookery…Adapted To The Use of Private Families by “A Lady” it is clear that she expected that the well-equipped cook would own an ice bucket and an “ice-pot”. Get a few pounds of ice, break it almost to powder, throw a large handful and a half of rock salt among it. You must prepare it in a part ofthe house where as little of the warm air comes as you can possibly contrive. The ice and salt being in a bucket, put your cream into an ice-pot, and cover it; immerse it in the ice, and draw that round the pot, so as to touch every possible part. She then gives instructions to stir it regularly – the method is exactly that used today in the absence of an ice cream maker.
I am keeping my fingers crossed that I will be able to stay in one of the Landmark Trust’s properties in Cloth Fair, Smithfield, this summer. You can see Cloth Fair running off from the north-east side of Smithfield, just below Long Lane, in this map of 1682. The little street gets it name from Bartholomew Fair, founded by royal charter in 1133 for the benefit of the adjacent St Bartholomew’s Hospital. It became the greatest cloth fair in England and the Corporation of London held a cattle fair at the same time. Eventually it became one of the highlights of London life, running for three days in August and, by the 17th century, an entertainment, rather than a market. I wrote about it here in all its rowdy glory. By 1855 it was finally suppressed and Smithfield Market was built in the area at the top of Smithfield, covering the sheep pens and the open space to the east of them that you can see in the 1682 map.
Smithfield was originally the Smooth Field, an area for grazing horses outside the City walls. – you can see the Town Ditch in the lower right hand corner of the map above. It became a weekly horse market by 1173 and then sheep, pigs and cattle were added. Such a large open space outside the walls was convenient for tournaments and also for executions, allowing a large crowd to gather. The gallows was moved to Tyburn in the early 15th century but burnings of heretics and of women accused of witchcraft continued. Whereas a man might be beheaded or hanged, horrifyingly, women were also burned to death there for a number of offences termed treasonous, including forging currency and killing their husbands (seen as petty treason against authority). In 1652 the diarist John Evelyn recorded witnessing the burning of a woman for poisoning her husband.
The area was a rough one, notorious for duelling and less formalised fighting, but gradually the City authorities began to bring it under control. The area was paved and a cattle market established. The print below shows St Bartholomew’s Hospital in 1750 with the gatehouse and the church of St Bartholomew the Less and, in front, loose cattle, sheep and horses.
The view is of the south-east edge of Smithfield and the gate can still be seen today, although all the houses and shops on either side have been replaced.
By the time of Horwood’s map of London in the early 19th century (below) there were proper pens set out, but the market was still a chaotic, stinking, noisy and dangerous place, despite the development of the area all around with shops and houses. Animals were driven through the streets, even on Sundays, and beasts were slaughtered so that the gutters ran with blood or were blocked with entrails. In Oliver Twist Dickens wrote, “The ground was covered, nearly ankle-deep, with filth and mire; a thick steam perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle… the unwashed, unshaven, squalid and dirty figures running to and fro… rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene…”
Where that central diamond of pens was is now the “Rotunda garden” a patch of green sitting on top of the circular entrance to the underground carpark and the rectangular northern area is the London Central Meat Market built between 1851 and 1899. To the west is the Poultry Market, rebuilt in 1963 after a fire. The Museum of London is planning to take over the entire range of market buildings – what will happen to the current lively weekly market, I have no idea.
Probably the only parts of Smithfield that the pre-Victorian visitor would recognize today are the churches of St Bartholomew the Great and Lesser. In 1123 Rahere, an Augustinian, founded a priory and its church, St Bartholomew’s the Great, was built in stages, completed in 1240 with a long nave that was demolished in the 1540s after the Reformation. The choir was left as the parish church and the monastic buildings sold off. Now, the half-timbered entrance just to the south of Cloth Fair stands on the site of the original west door.
St Bartholomew the Less was a chapel for the priory, built in about 1154. Although ancient, it has had a chequered history. The print below shows the interior as remodeled by Charles Dance the Younger in 1789: the box pews have been replaced. It was heavily restored after bomb damage in the Second World War.
St Bartholomew the Less, looking towards the altar. From Wilkinson’s Londina Illustra (1834)
Rahere’s priory had a chequered life after the Dissolution. The crypt of St Bartholomew the Great became a coal store, the Lady Chapel was converted into houses plus a printer’s business where Benjamin Franklin was employed in 1725, the surrounding area held a blacksmith’s forge, a hop store, a carpenter’s workshop and stables. The Victorians restored it in 1864-56 and 1884-96 and it is difficult to imagine the state it must once have been in.
Despite the Dissolution of the Monasteries Rahere’s great work, his hospital, survives to this day. It almost closed after the Dissolution through lack of funds, but somehow kept going until Sir Richard Gresham persuaded Henry VIII to re-found it in 1544 and it has been continuously rebuilt and developed since. Known as “Bart’s” it remains on site as a specialist cancer and cardiology hospital.
One curious feature of Smithfield is the Golden Boy of Pye Corner. On the map above you can see where Giltspur Street enters at the southern end of Smithfield and to the west is an angle known as Pie, or Pye, Corner. This is where the flames of the Great Fire of London (1666) finally flickered and died out. The fact that it began in Pudding Lane and ended in Pie Corner was taken to be a warning that it had been caused by Londoner’s sinful gluttony. Actually the name derives from the Magpie Inn that once stood here and has nothing to do with pastry!
Pie Corner in 1804 with the church of St Sepulchre’s behind.
Just south of Pie Corner, on the northern corner of Giltspur Street and Cock Lane, stood The Fortune of War inn. it was demolished in 1910 but had a particularly lurid history. The photograph below shows it just before demolition.
As well as being a ‘receiving house’, appointed by the Royal Humane Society as the location to bring bodies of those drowned in the Thames, it was also the chief hang-out for resurrectionists, or body-snatchers, providing bodies to the surgeons of Bart’s Hospital. It seems that many of the drowned found their way into the dissecting rooms along with corpses stolen from churchyards.
In the photograph you can see the small statue of a chubby child – The Golden Boy of Pye Corner. He was rescued when the pub was demolished and is now on the corner of the new building on the site. His inscription reads:
This Boy is in Memory put up for the late Fire of London Occasion’d by the Sin of Gluttony.
And finally, the church of St Sepulchre’s, which can be seen in the background of the print of Pie Corner, was another of Rahere’s foundations and contains the tomb of Captain John Smith, one of the founders of Jamestown and of the State of Virginia, and famous for his relationship with Pocahontas of the Powhatan tribe.
“This square is esteemed the next in beauty, as it is in extent, to Grosvenor-square. It is built with more regularity than the latter: but the very uniformity of the houses, and the small projection of the cornices, are not favourable to grandeur and picturesque effect.”
This modified rapture comes from the beginning of the article in Ackermann’s Repository of August 1813 accompanying this print of the north side of Portman Square.
The square was begun in 1764 as a speculative development by John Berkely Portman, MP, for whom it is named. It rapidly became one of the most fashionable addresses in London and ‘The residence of luxurious opulence,’ according to Priscilla Wakefield, the Quaker philanthropist and writer of children’s non-fiction books.
Amongst its residents was Lord Castlereagh, 2nd Marquess of Londonderry, closely associated with Lord Liverpool’s repressive government. The portrait below is after the original by Lawrence. Shelley wrote of him in The Mask of Anarchy,
‘I met Murder in the way –
He had a mask like Castlereagh.’
At the time of the Peterloo Massacre in 1819 a furious mob attacked his house and smashed the windows.
Considerably more liberal was Mrs Elizabeth Montagu who lived in the house built for her 1777-82 on the north-west corner, now replaced by the massive block of the Radisson Blu hotel. Mrs Montagu was an intellectual – a ‘blue stocking’ – and philanthropist.
Elizabeth Montagu. Print after the portrait by Joshua Reynolds.
Every May Day she gave a roast beef and plum pudding dinner to chimney sweeps and their apprentices, the unfortunate ‘climbing boys’.
As the Ackermann article reports, these were children “doomed to a trade at once dangerous, disagreeable, and proverbially contemptible, the chimney-sweepers.”
May Day appears to have particular significance for chimney sweeps. In Brand’s “Observations on Popular Antiquities…Vulgar Customs, Ceremonies and Superstitions.” (1813) he notes “The young chimney-sweepers, some of whom are fantastically dressed in girls’ clothes, with a great profusion of brick dust by way of paint, gilt paper etc, making a noise with their shovels and brushes, are now the most striking objects in the celebration of May Day in the streets of London.” The little lad holding his brush in the centre foreground of this print by Cruickshank certainly seems cheerful enough.
At Mrs Montague’s feast tables were set out in the gardens and “servants in livery [waited on] the sooty guests, with the greatest formality and attention.” Great crowds watched the gathering, “highly diverted with the many insolent airs assumed on the joyful occasion by the gentlemen of the brush, who, bedizened in their May-day paraphernalia, would rush through the crowd of spectators with all the arrogance of foreign princes.”
The reality of their everyday lives is more honestly seen in another Cruickshank print which shows how a boy trapped and suffocated in a chimney was removed. (The Chimney-Sweeper’s Friend, and Climbing-Boy’s Album. Arranged by James Montgomery. Illustrations by George Cruickshank (1824)).
In the south-west corner was the residence of Monsieur Otto, negotiator for the French of the Peace of Amiens, signed 27 March 1802. He displayed illuminations in the square to mark the event and they can be seen in a print in the British Museum collection.
Ackermann’s also records that the residence of the Ottoman ambassador to the British court was on the west side of the square and, “Whilst the ambassador continued here, this square was the resort of all the beauty and fashion of this district of the metropolis.”
The square has suffered from bombing and redevelopment but number 20, Home House designed by Robert Adam, survives. In the print of the square above it is the tallest block.
Orchard Street leads southwards out of the square in the south-east corner. This is where Jane Austen’s aunt Mrs Hancock and her cousin Eliza were living in August 1788 when Jane dined with them during her first recorded visit to London.
Going east from the same corner was Edwards Street, now included in Wigmore Street, the location of Society caterer Parmentier.
From the north east corner Baker Street runs north. In the guide book The Picture of London, Baker Street was described as “perhaps the handsomest street in London.” It can no longer be said to be of much interest, except to record that it led to the Hindoostanee Coffee House in Baker Street, the site of the first Indian restaurant in London. It was opened in 1810 by Sake Dean Mohammed who became famous in Margate for his lavish bath house. The coffee house was less successful and closed within the year. You can read more about him here.
With the government in London, and the Allies at the Congress in Vienna, still unaware that anything was amiss, Napoleon continued his march northwards. On Sunday 5th he arrived at Sisteron, where he was not greeted with any great enthusiasm, but he pushed on to Gap where he arrived on Monday and was joined by the 7th Regiment of Infantry under its colonel, Charles de la Bédoyère.
By Tuesday 8th Napoleon reached Laffrey, 77 kilometres from the coast and 26 kilometres south of the significant city of Grenoble. The road was barred by a battalion of the 5th Regiment of the Line. Napoleon rode out in front, within pistol range, dismounted, walked forward, threw back his greatcoat to show his uniform and challenged the soldiers to shoot their Emperor. Instead they cheered and surged forward to surround him – it was a significant moment.
That day news of Napoleon’s escape from Elba reached the Congress in Vienna – but without any information about where he was.
Meanwhile Londoners had violence of quite a different kind to be concerned about – the Corn Law Riots. With the end of war there was a drop in demand for wheat for the army. At the same time the removal of the danger to merchant shipping allowed grain imports to flow in unimpeded and the price of wheat fell. This was a serious threat to landowners, just as it was a great relief for the poor, for whom bread constituted a major part of the diet, especially in the industrial towns.
The Corn Importation Bill was put before parliament in February and prohibited the import of foreign wheat at under 80 shillings a quarter, and also set minimum prices for other grains. It proved to be the start of one of the most furious political debates in British history and one that continued to divide opinion for thirty years.
Landowners argued that low wheat prices would prevent farmers from making a profit, they would have to cut labourers’ wages and the whole economy would suffer from a decline in purchasing power. It would also put the country at the mercy of foreigners. The cartoon below shows landowners refusing foreign wheat. The women and children harvesters are from a bat-print dish of about 1820.
Samuel Whitbread, the brewer, pointed out that by this argument, the recent war had been a good thing as it had prevented the French exporting their wheat and that on those grounds, “it would be better to set Boney up again.” He was about to get his wish.
In the industrial towns, which were virtually unrepresented in parliament, there was furious opposition to the Bill. Petitions flooded in – for example one from Bristol signed by 40,000, and the petition from the City of London speaking of “unexampled distress and privation.” The newspapers were full of column after column detailing the petitions. Parliament panicked and the Bill was hurried through – within three weeks it was already receiving its third reading.
On Monday 6th the chanting of the mob outside Parliament could be heard in the Chamber “No Corn Bill! No Corn Bill!”
Although the mob was dispersed, violence broke out that night, supporters of the Bill had their houses attacked and violent disorder continued through the nights of Wednesday and Thursday. The army was called in, mob rule and revolution was feared and the Society pages noted that the Marchioness of Camden’s rout & card party at the family town house in Arlington Street was thin of company because of the unrest in the streets. Even the bad news of the retreat of British forces on 18th Jan, after an initially successful attack on New Orleans on 23 December, was lost in the furore over the riots and the Bill.
Then on Friday Napoleon entered Lyons in triumph and the garrison, in the process of being reviewed by King Louis XVIII’s brother, the Comte d’Artois, changed sides, pulling faces at the helpless prince. The same day the news of his escape finally reached London. The Corn Law Bill was pushed out of the headlines.
In the words of the next day’s Morning Chronicle, “An extraordinary sensation was yesterday produced by the intelligence from France, of the landing of BONAPARTE at Frejus… the first notice of this most memorable event was announced by Mr Rosschild [Nathan Mayer Rothschild, shown left], the Exchange Broker, who sold stock to the amount of 600,000l. on the receipt of the news by express from France.”
At the same time as the Rothschilds’ efficient intelligence network delivered the news, the British government received dispatches from Lord Fitzroy Somerset in Paris and the confirmation that Napoleon was in France reached Vienna.
Thanks to the stage and mail coach network the news spread across the country with incredible speed. James Oakes of Bury St Edmunds wrote in his diary on the 10th, “This morning by mail the acct came of Bonaparte’s making good his landing in France with 10 or 20,000 men.”
That day, the 10th March, the Corn Law was passed by 245 votes to 75 – without any disturbances on the street whatsoever.
I love ice cream – which is fortunate as my husband, who is the cook in our house, has bought an expensive Italian ice cream maker which means we’ve got to eat lots to make it earn its keep!
But ice cream was a real luxury in the early 19thc. There was no way of making ice artificially – it had to be harvested and stored which was easy enough if you had a large estate with lakes and ponds which would freeze in winter and staff to do the work. Slabs of ice were cut and packed in ice houses where they could be insulated with thick walls and straw to keep the ice right through the year. But how did they manage in towns and cities? Presumably loads of ice were brought in by wagon, melting all the time, and would be stored in insulated rooms.
Once you had your ice, making frozen or chilled desserts was still hard work. I own a copy of The Complete Confectioner or, the Whole Art of Confectionary Made Easy by Frederick Nutt (1815). The book has a frontispiece (above) of a lady with a magnificent pineapple – a real status symbol at the time and so expensive that you could hire one as a centrepiece for your smart dinner party and then return it, untouched, the next day.
Mr Nutt has pages of receipts for ice creams and water ices. Here is the one for barberry ice cream, which gives the basic method used for all the others.
“Take a large wooden spoonful of barberry jam, and put it in a bason with one pint of cream; squeeze one lemon in, mix it well; put it into the freezing pot and cover it; put the freezing pot into a pail and some ice all round the pot; throw a great deal of salt on the pot in the pail, turning your pot around for ten minutes; then open your pot and scrape it from the sides, cover it up again and keep turning it for some time, till your cream is like butter, and as thick; put it in your moulds, put them into a pail, and cover it with ice and salt for three quarters of an hour, till you find the water is come to the top of the pail; do not be sparing of salt, for if you do not use enough it will not freeze: dip your mould into water, and turn it out on your plate to send to table.”
He uses jams and cordials extensively as flavourings for his ices and it was possible to buy syrups ready made. Here is the billhead for F Parmentier & Co. Confectioners of 9, Edwards Street, Portman Square for 1812. The purchaser had bought a bottle of orange syrup for 7 shillings, another of lemon at the same price and rout cake at 4 shillings.
Gunther’s in Berkeley Square was the most famous of the London tea rooms and there you could have ices brought out for the ladies to eat in their carriages under the spreading lime trees that shaded the square.
The illustration of the three young women is French, from Le Bon Genre series of the early 1820s. It is called L’Embarras du Choix, although the lady on the left seems more interested in staring at the handsome waiter than choosing her ice cream from the menu!
In my last blog I posted about a charming children’s book I had discovered and mentioned the Fish Machine – so here it is –
It seems to be a ‘machine’ in the same way that any vehicle with a specific purpose was called a machine, even if it had no engine other than the horse – bathing machines, for example. As well as describing the purpose of the vehicle Jane and Ann Taylor, authors of Rural Scenes; or, A Peep Into the Country for Good Children (this version 1813), point up a moral about co-operation in business and make a passing reference to the importance of fresh fish for the benefit of future housewives. I have seen lorries on Japanese harboursides for just the same purpose.
“This man is driving to some great town, to sell his fish to the inhabitants. he not only serves them, but also the fishermen and himself. Indeed, they find a mutual help in each other; for it would be very difficult always to find a market on he sea-coast, and equally inconvenient to the townspeople to go there for them. If he carries fish only, he pays no turnpikes.”
The authors also use every opportunity throughout the book to encourage children to be kind to animals while, at the same time, being very up-front about the use of animals as food, including being quite positive that the human position of power over other creatures was divinely ordained, as in the text that accompanies the two fishermen hauling in their net of river fish.
“These two men are labouring very hard to get an honest livelihood, and are, therefore, very commendable. Dominion was given to man over the birds of the air, the fishes of the sea, and the beasts of the field, which, with vegetables and fruit, were appointed for his food. As it is necessary to kill animals for our support, it is our duty to do it in the most humane methods we can invent, so as to give them as little pain as possible; therefore it is better to take fish with a net, than with a hook and line. I have read of a boy who was endeavouring to reach a plate off a shelf, to put some fish in which he had caught when, just in the same manner as he caught the fish, a sharp meat-hook that hung close by, did catch him in the chin.”
And here is the fisherman with road and line, rather uncomfortably perched on a bridge with the moral of the tale in verse below.
Some time ago I bought a battered little book from an on-line auction site for a few pounds. It measures approximately 8 x 6.5 inches (10 x 6 cm), the cover was battered and the thin spine had given way completely. The pages inside were loose and covered in handwriting in ink that, in places, had faded badly.
Many pages were difficult to read but I saw at a glance that it was what I had hoped – a book of household recipes and hints that some careful 19th century housewife had collected. But who was she and when did she keep her notebook?
Inside one cover was “9, High Row 60£” and “G.G.Mills Esq, North End Terrace, Fulham”. Somehow I didn’t think that Mr Mills himself was carefully collecting recipes for raspberry vinegar or fish sauce. The other cover, amidst various scribbled notes, had, “Mrs Bernard Ryan”, the date 31st August 1812 and “Kensington Wilds Library Hornton St.” There was also a strip that had been torn from a letter and stuck in with instructions for restoring the lustre to silverware written on it. The letter had been addressed to Mrs Mills. The glue obscures the notes in the top left hand corner of the inside cover but it is possible to read “1819 Sept 21st”, “G.G.M 10th Dec 1819” and very faintly below that “To make good curry.”
So, I had a Regency housewife’s notebook – but if this belonged to Mrs Mills, who was Mrs Bernard Ryan? And why had someone apparently tried to copy Mrs Bernard Ryan’s name in wobbly handwriting above it as “Mrs Renard Ry”? A child, perhaps?
I began with the library by digging in on-line newspaper indexes and soon found that F. P. Wild’s Library at 8, Hornton Street, Kensington appears in newspaper advertisements for newly-published books between 1816 and 1825. It seemed I was definitely dealing with someone living in London
Then I turned to genealogy websites and discovered that a George Gillam Mills was resident at North End Terrace, Fulham when he died in May 1844 aged 74. He was buried in the District Chapel of the Parish of St Mary’s, North End, Fulham on 17th May. I tried to find North End Terrace on maps but could not pin-point it but but North End Road joins Hammersmith Road just where St Mary’s Chapel, now a church, stands. It seems likely that it was at the northern end of the road that Jean and George lived. Until the late 19th century North End was a scattered hamlet of houses along North End Road surrounded by fields and market gardens and included many substantial properties and villas owned by prosperous middle class and aristocratic families.
Now I knew Mr Mills’ first names I could chase him further and found that on the 15th May 1815 he had married Jean Ryan, a widow, at St Luke’s, Chelsea. They had married by licence and on the bond which he signed to obtain the licence George stated that he was over twenty one years of age, unmarried and living in the parish. It seemed highly likely that Jean Ryan was the Mrs Bernard Ryan named on the inside cover of the book.
I was able to find George’s christening record at St Alfege’s church in Greenwich on 24th November 1771 with the note that he had been born that month. His parents were Samuel Gillam Mills, a surgeon, and Catherine. So George was from a middle class home and was forty four when he married Jean Ryan.
Could I find ‘Jean’ marrying a Barnard Ryan? To my delight I found that on 26 August 1805 Lieutenant Bernard Ryan married Miss Jean Forbes in Secunderabad in British controlled India. But sadly the marriage lasted only six years. He died, a Captain in the 12th Regiment of Native Infantry of the Honourable East India Company, aged twenty eight and was buried 17th October 1811 at Fort William in Calcutta (now Kolkata). His will leaves everything to his wife Jean.
This image of the fort is from 1754, but it must have looked very much like this when the Ryans knew it, and having seen it when in Kolkata myself, it is still recognisable today.
In September 1812 the records of the Lord Clive Military Fund Pensions Committee in the Madras (now Chennai) Presidency show that a pension of two shillings and four pence a day was granted to Mrs Jean Ryan, widow. Soon after this she must have set sail for England, a voyage of perhaps a year unless she was very lucky with the weather.
How did the widowed Mrs Ryan meet Mr Mills? How old was she? That at least I could answer because her burial record for 19th March 1825 gives her age as only forty. She had been twenty when she married Bernard and thirty when she married George. But her second marriage to a man fourteen years her senior seems to have been a happy one because below a recipe for stewing flounders she wrote: “13th April 1820 – recd. a New Crown Piece from Darling Husband. Keep Sake.”
What happened to George? He was a prosperous businessman and civil servant, it seems. In 1815 he was Cashier of Half-Pay at the Army Pay Office in Whitehall and in 1819 had been promoted two steps up to Ledger Keeper. The Royal Kalendar and Court and City Register for 1817 and 1819 lists him as one of the directors and an auditor of the British Fire Office, “for assuring Houses, Goods and Ships” located at Cornhill in the City. How did he pass the nineteen years of widowerhood? I hope he had a good housekeeper who cooked him some of the familiar recipes from Jean’s notebook.
The notebook itself has a wide selection of recipes with notes on who gave them to her, a good selection of curries – not surprisingly perhaps – and notes on everything from making mistletoe grow to polishing a mahogany table. I transcribed the whole book and Mock Oyster Sauce and a Cure For Corns: A Regency Lady’s Receipt Bookis out in April but available to pre-order now.
I’ve been trying out gingerbread and spice cake recipes as warming treats so here are some genuine 19th century recipes for you to try (Warning! I haven’t tried these as they are, so it is at your own risk!).
I made mine using the smaller of the the three antique biscuit moulds that I own – the only one that will produce a biscuit small enough for a modern oven. This is the result – not quite firm enough, I think, it has lost definition so more experimentation needed. It tastes great though.
First here are Gingerbread Cakes, a simple recipe from The Housekeeper’s Instructor; or Universal Family Cook (1807). Given the amount of nutmeg these might be quite hallucinogenic!
Take three pounds of flour, a pound of sugar, the same quantity of butter rolled in very fine, two ounces of beaten ginger, and a large nutmeg grated. Then take a pound of treacle, a quarter of a pint of cream, and make them warm together. Work up the bread stiff, roll it out and make it into thin cakes. Cut them out with a tea-cup or small glass, or roll them round like nuts, and bake them in a slack oven on tin plates.
There’s a very similar recipe in The Complete Confectioner (1815) by Fredrick Nutt with the note: N.B. These are very good for the stomach in cold weather.
Mr Nutt has a more elaborate recipe for Spice Biscuits. It uses Lisbon sugar – cane sugar imported from the West Indies and double-refined in Portugal leaving it an off-white colour. A third refining was necessary to make it pure white, which would be more expensive.
Take three pounds of flour, and three pounds of sweet almonds cut in half, and put them with the flower [sic] and three ounces of spice, such as cinnamon and mace pounded, and one pound of powdered sugar, and mix them together on your dresser; then take three pounds of Lisbon sugar, and put it in a saucepan with some water, and just boil it, then mix it with the other ingredients on the dresser; when it is all mixed to a paste, heat your oven very hot, and put three papers next your plate; then roll your paste to the size of a large rolling-pin; then put it on your paper and flat it down with your hand about three inches wide, but higher in the middle than at the ends, then put them in the oven; when they are baked take them out, while hot, cut them with a sharp knife about the eighth part of an inch thick, in the form of a rusk, and you will see the almonds very well in them.
The third of my moulds is so long that it wouldn’t fit in any modern domestic oven – and it is a pig to photograph, but here goes!
The evenings are drawing in, there’s a nip in the air – what better time to think about making a warming pudding?
I’ve been consulting A New System of Domestic Cookery formed upon Principles of Economy and Adapted to the Use of Private Families by A Lady. It was published in 1829 by John Murray (Jane Austen and Byron’s publisher) and cost seven shillings and six pence.
Some of the recipes certainly would have been very economical, using up left-overs in a way that resonates with today’s concern about food waste. There are a number of recipes using bread such as this one:
A Rich Boiled Bread Pudding
Over half a pint of crumbs (from a previous recipes I think these must be stale white bread crumbs) pour half a pint of scalding milk; cover for an hour. Beat up four eggs, and when strained, add to the bread, with a tea-spoonful of flour, an ounce of butter, two ounces of sugar, half a pound of currants, an ounce of almonds beaten (I assume these would be ground almonds), with orange-flower water, half an ounce of orange, ditto lemon, ditto citron (juice??). Butter a basin that will exactly hold it, flour the cloth and tie tight over and boil one hour.
I rather like the sound of this savoury pudding although I’d add more cheese myself. I imagine it would be baked in a pie dish:
A Cheese Pudding
Grate three ounces of cheese and five of bread (stale, I assume); and having warmed one ounce of butter in a pint of new milk (making this today I would use full fat milk), mix it with the above; add two well-beaten eggs and a little salt. Bake it half an hour.
Another one that I’d like to try is:
An Exceedingly Good Orange Pudding
On half a pound of crumbs of bread pour a pint of milk; let it boil up; stir in two ounces of butter and one of marrow (I think I might give the marrow a miss and add a bit more butter!), keeping the pan over the fire until all is incorporated. Let it become cold then mix in two eggs, two ounces of sugar, the same of orange marmalade, and a spoonful of orange flower water. Choose a basin that will exactly hold it, and tie over with a floured cloth very closely. Boil it an hour and a quarter. For sauce, melted butter, sugar, a little lemon-juice, and a spoonful of brandy.
Finally here’s a real novelty. I’m trying to persuade the cook in our household to try it to see if it lives up to its name. If I succeed, I will let you know!
Transparent Pudding
Beat eight eggs very well; put them into a stew-pan with half a pound of sugar pounded fine, the same quantity of butter, and some nutmeg grated. Set it on the fire and keep stirring it until it thickens. Then set it in a basin to cool; put a rich puff pastry round the edge of the dish; pour in your pudding, and bake it in a moderate oven. It will cut light and clear. You may add candied orange and citron, if you like.
I haven’t tried any of these – so if you do, it is at your own risk! Happy baking.
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…
I love ice cream – which is fortunate as my husband, who is the cook in our house, has bought an expensive Italian ice cream maker which means we’ve got to eat lots to make it earn its keep!
There’s a very similar recipe in The Complete Confectioner (1815) by Fredrick Nutt with the note: N.B. These are very good for the stomach in cold weather.
Jane Austen's London 