A History of Food in 100 Recipes

The recipe for baked quince with sugar is as sensible and worthy as it is delicious. No species of birds were harmed in its preparation and the quince is a mighty and timeless fruit. The recipe calls for ‘clarry’ (sweet and spiced wine) to be poured over the quinces or some sugar and ‘wast pouders’. These were crushed spices – spicy powder – to add a medieval hue to your baked and sugary fruit.

British Museum: © The Trustees of the British Museum

Quince with sugar and sweet spiced wine baked in a ‘coffin’ is one of the recipes in This Boke of Cokery.

They are cooked in ‘coffins’ – pastry containers (#ulink_1e582ca9-efcc-55da-b225-e0bba19a0a87) – in the absence of a good ovenproof pot. If made of sweetened edible pastry, the recipe could make a good quince pie. And since This Boke of Cokery is not exactly precise with its instructions, who’s to say you can’t improvise?

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Hippocras jelly (#ulink_db8b9bfa-50bd-5663-ae02-3baff319f400)

1530

AUTHOR: Unknown,

FROM: Register of Evidences and Documents Concerning the Family of Stafford, Barons and Earls of Stafford, and Dukes of Buckingham

Wine 3 gallons

Cinnamon 8oz

Ginger 2oz

Nutmegs and Cloves 1oz

Sugar 3lb

Graines [grains of paradise spice] 2oz

This recipe made hippocras – you just needed to add isinglass, hartshorn, calves’ feet or ivory shavings to turn it into jelly!

Our experience of jelly today is pretty limited. We serve it at children’s parties – normally set in a big dish, having simply dissolved lab-created fruit-flavoured tablets in water to create it. We dish it out at student parties using the above method but adding vodka. We then, as adults, serve the student version again in an attempt to bring back those heady days of youth. However, vodka jelly is actually an historic throwback to rather more glamorous times than your own recollections of attempting to manoeuvre around drunk people and cheap furniture in whatever tip of a flat you might have been partying in.

The earliest recorded alcoholic jelly was served at a dinner thrown by Henry VIII. Blink while perusing the menu of a get-together at Windsor in May 1520 and you might miss it. There are only two words and they come in a long list of dishes served over two evenings of entertainment at the castle. ‘An ordinance for the King, the Queen, and the Knights of the Garter at Windsor for Saturday Supper and Sunday Dinner the 28 and 29 days of May,’ is how the event was advertised.

The two meals each had two courses, not that you should think that that made it a simple occasion. Each course comprised between fourteen and nineteen dishes. They flowed out of the kitchen: soups, fish (including salmon, pike, tench and sturgeon), chickens, quail, rabbits and more – the usual story. But the end of three of the four courses that were served over the two days was marked by the arrival of jelly – described in its ancient form of ‘leche’ or ‘leach’, which is jelly served in a more sophisticated fashion. Leach could come in the form of castle, or an animal. It could be multi-coloured. Doubtless its arrival merited the odd ‘ooh’, ‘ahh’, a possible whoop and probably some clapping.

There is no early recorded recipe for hippocras jelly, but the one heading this chapter, taken from the pages of a manuscript housed in the British Library, is from the same period and just needs a spot of gelatine to turn it into jelly. There were a variety of sources to choose from. Sometimes it was extracted from the bladder of sturgeon (isinglass), at other times from the antlers of male red deer (hartshorn). Calves’ feet were another good source, providing a high level of collagen and, more importantly, a neutral flavour. Raspberry jelly made using a calf’s foot might not sound appealing, but actually it’s rather more appealing than gelatine, the setting agent for modern jelly.

But it is not so much the jellies served at the end of the courses during that Windsor get-together that merit our attention, as the jelly served as the second plate of the second course during the Sunday dinner – in between ‘A sotelte’ and a ‘Kind Kid’. It was ‘Jely Ypocrass’ – that is, jelly hippocras.

Hippocras is an ancient type of mulled wine and while the fifth century physician Hippocrates might well have drunk it – indeed might have advocated its befits to health – the word comes from the name of the bag used to filter the wine. The manicum Hippocraticum – the sleeve of Hipocrates – was conical in shape and was used to strain the liquid, getting rid of any unwanted particles, while letting the spicy juice run clearer. Certainly mulled wine brings on feelings of warm well-being, although a hippocras is not necessarily heated. A jellied version would have made a spirited addition to the lavish proceedings. Henry’s Knights of the Garter enjoyed his favour for the likes of capturing Boulogne, raiding Calais or because they were the father of his current wife. They needed to make the most of their privileged times at the king’s court as life was precarious. One moment you’d be guffawing and wolfing down some boozy jelly, the next you might fall from favour and end up in the Tower or worse. And that’s a poor place to be when you’ve got the Tudor equivalent of a vodka jelly hangover.

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Turkey tomales (#ulink_036943ea-17ab-508e-8792-dd828c32dd20)

circa 1540

AUTHOR: Bernardino de Sahagún,

FROM: Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España

(General History of the Things of New Spain)

Here are told the foods which the lords ate … turkey pasty cooked in a pot, or sprinkled with seeds; tamales of meat cooked with maize and yellow chili; roast turkey hen; roast quail … turkey with a sauce of small chilis, tomatoes and ground squash seeds, turkey with red chilis, turkey with yellow chilis, turkey with green chilis …

Turkeys arrived on the shores of England in the mid sixteenth century. They must have startled those who first saw them. With their exotic plumage, their strutting, their ugliness and the strange noises they uttered, they characterised the wonder of what merchants were importing from overseas at the time.

The turkey was so named because that was where people reckoned it came from. Merchants had been trading in what was then called the Levant – the eastern Mediterranean – and when they came across these big edible birds they snapped them up. The birds then spread across Europe and while the English thought they were from Turkey, other nations – the Dutch, Danes, Finns, Germans and French –thought they came from India. And so the French today call the turkey dinde – the coq d’Inde, or ‘cock of India’. Meanwhile, the Danish word kalkun comes from the name of an Indian port on the Malabar coast, Calicut. Turkeys were breeding there but they weren’t indigenous, having been brought to Calicut by the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama. After sailing round the Cape of Good Hope and travelling up the east coast of Africa, he had crossed to India and landed in Calicut in 1498. On board his ship were turkeys, brought by him from Mexico.

And it was from Mexico that they arrived in Turkey. So really we should call turkeys ‘mexicos’. Except that at the time Mexico was called the New Spain as the conquistadors – led by Hernán Cortés – were conquering and killing their way through the country from 1521. These ‘new spains’ had been domesticated by the Aztecs and they called them huexolotl, which evolved into the current Mexican word guajolote. But ‘turkey’ is easier to say, so we’ll stick to that.

Whatever their name, the Aztecs loved them. Fossils of turkeys have been found in the Mexican highlands that date back 10 million years, and by the early sixteenth century they were an important part of their diet. More than that, they were a key ingredient at festivals and feasts. Their meat was devoured and their feathers used as head-dresses and to add colour to jewellery.

The most detailed accounts of the Aztecs consuming turkey come from a Spanish Franciscan friar, Bernardino de Sahagún, who was dispatched to the New Spain as a missionary in 1529. Having studied at the convent of Salamanca, he was, aged thirty, considered worthy of evangelising the natives. Doubtless he showed the right degree of religious zeal that it would take to convert to Catholicism those whom Cortés hadn’t killed. His companions reported that he never missed Matins and went into frequent ecstasies – of the religious kind.

It was only a few years since Cortés had defeated Montezuma (but not before joining him for a hot chocolate), the ruler of the Aztec nation, slaughtered thousands and torn down their altars. But life had settled down to a certain extent and Bernardino was tasked with getting to know the locals. ‘They chose out ten or twelve of the principal old men, and told me that with those I might communicate and that they would instruct me in any matters I should inquire of,’ he wrote. ‘With those appointed principal men I talked many days during two years. On all subjects on which we conferred they gave me pictures.’

Bernardino is a little modest about his endeavours. The men must have taken to him and his gentle nature and not just because he learnt their language and became a fluent speaker. His work, translatable as a ‘General History of the Things of New Spain’, is one of the great works of anthropology, accompanied by 2,000 detailed drawings produced by the Aztecs themselves.

The vivid picture he painted of the Aztecs ran to twelve books and a total of 2,400 pages detailing their society, economics, rituals and, of course, food. On which subject the Aztecs were quite keen, particularly when it came to eating people. But aside from freshly sacrificed and cooked young man, the Aztecs liked turkey, as did Bernardino. Given that in the early months of his arrival much of the food seemed to consist of ‘tadpoles, ants with wings, and worms’, turkey must have been a welcome relief.

Templo Mayor Library Mexico / Gianni Dagli Orti

Friar Bernardino de Sahagún’s General History of the Things in New Spain in mid-sixteenth century Mexico showcased drawings produced by the Aztecs (who liked eating turkey).

He found it ‘always tasty, savoury, of very pleasing odour’ and he noted the various ways his hosts cooked it – the section above from the eighth volume of the Historia being the closest we’ll get to a contemporary recipe – from boiling to roasting, served with different sauces, coloured with green, yellow and red chillies. But he was particularly taken by the turkey-stuffed tomales. These early wraps were made with a corn-based dough, usually stuffed with meat. The wrap – a local leaf – was discarded before eating and its contents sustained the conquistadors, who turned their noses up at the human- or ant-type items the menu otherwise had to offer.

Bernardino noted that one of the first things the Aztec women did as a feast day approached was to prepare the tomales, which they had taken to an art form. Young girls would aspire to twist and plait the dough, imprinting them with designs of seashells and shaping them into butterflies. The skill in their construction belies the Americanised reputation of Mexican food as a sloppy pile of lettuce, rice and beans. To honour the various gods, tomales were made with different fillings, be it beans and chilli, shrimps, fish or frogs. But our Spanish friar preferred his with turkey. ‘Very good-tasting, it leads the meat,’ he wrote. ‘It is the master, it is tasty, fat, savoury.’

As brilliant as Bernardino’s work was, however, it never saw the light of day in his lifetime – he stayed in Mexico until he died, aged ninety-one. The closer he worked with the natives, the less he believed in the task of converting them all to Catholicism. So honest was his description of their lives, in fact, that the Spanish authorities thought publication would be dangerous. They feared the Aztecs might return to their heathen ways. Much of the work also made uncomfortable reading on the subject of Cortés’s conquest, including many first-hand accounts of the terrible massacres he had perpetrated.

The work was quietly buried and didn’t see the light of day until an astonishing 250 years later. It was finally published in its full glory in 1829, by which time turkey had become widespread everywhere. Today it is virtually the national dish of Mexico, the ubiquitous mole poblano containing a delicious mix of turkey in chilli sauce, flavoured with chocolate and thickened with seeds and nuts.

It is not surprising the meat took off in Britain and Europe. The King of Spain ordered that each returning conquistador ship bring back ten turkeys – five male and five female. It soon replaced the stringy peacock or goose of banqueting tables. The English were well used to serving big birds and took to it quickly. Championed by Henry VIII, it regularly graced the tables of English and European royalty by the end of the sixteenth century.

By 1600 it had caught the eye of Shakespeare, who mentions it in Twelfth Night, clearly amused by the ridiculously aggressive pose of the bird, its puffed out feathers and strutting gait. ‘Here’s an overweening rogue!’ says Sir Toby Belch of the posturing Malvolio, to which Fabian replies: ‘O, peace! Contemplation makes a rare turkey-cock of him; how he jets under his advanced plumes!’

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Hot chocolate (#ulink_4e41de6b-79d2-5fec-b3e3-52ea90dd7bb3)

1568

AUTHOR: Bernal Díaz del Castillo

FROM: Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Neva España