If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home (39 page)

The Tudors served all the dishes of a meal at once, mixing up sweet and savoury. They’d even happily combine the two in the same dish. A desirable meat pudding, for example, might contain parboiled liver, cream, eggs, breadcrumbs, beef suet, dates, currants, spices, salt and sugar. Perhaps their most important flavouring was salt. It was taken by each diner, using his or her own knife, from a common container. An expensive and decorative vessel known as a ‘salt’ was therefore always to be found upon a medieval table. It was usually the first and most valuable
item to be placed on the board as it was laid. Because the salt stood in the middle of a trestle along which people would be seated in order of status, those who found themselves ‘above the salt’ could celebrate this as confirmation of their high position.

Salt was also the chief preservative. ‘You must be careful that your Meat taint not, for want of good salting,’ ran the instructions for a cook-maid in 1677. Butter and cheese were also much saltier than today to help prevent them from going off. The Bishop of Worcester used one pound of salt for every ten pounds of butter made on his estate in 1305.

Salted fish was also common, especially on Fridays when meat-eating was forbidden by the church. Of the usual medieval salted fish, cod remains familiar, but ling, hake and whiting less so. Then there were eels, of which 2,000 were caught annually at just two mills on the River Avon belonging to Evesham Abbey (a statistic recorded in the Domesday Book). In fish ponds were reared young bream, pike, roach, perch or trout. The networks for getting foodstuffs to and around medieval England were really rather efficient: fish was imported from Iceland, for example, and fresh sea fish is mentioned in the fifteenth-century market regulations even for landlocked Coventry. If you really hated fish, you could get away with eating puffins or barnacle geese on fast days or during Lent instead. These seabirds were classified as fish rather than flesh.

After salt in importance came spices: expensive, rare and worth going to war for. The Tudors had surprisingly strong connections to some very distant countries. Henry VIII had a cup made from a coconut, while ginger, mace, cloves, cumin, cardamom, nutmeg, saffron, cinnamon and pepper were all well known in his kitchens, along with forgotten exotica such as galingale, cubebs and ‘grains of paradise’. Almonds, a staple of medieval cooking, were also imported in large quantities. Such was their rarity and value that spices were kept locked up: in 1597, the household of the Earl of Northumberland at Petworth
House, Sussex, purchased ‘a little trunk to keep spice in the kitchen’. There’s no evidence that spices were used to ‘disguise’ the flavour of bad meat, as you might often read. It seems that people simply liked the taste. One particularly popular Tudor dish was ‘frumenty’, named for the Latin
frumentum
(corn). Wheat was boiled in milk, spices were added, and the resulting sludge made an excellent side dish for venison.

The separating out of sweet from savoury was an important development of the sixteenth century. One step towards the breakdown of the communal household meal was the new Elizabethan practice of serving the sweets that now followed the main meat course in a different room.

Often a concert or play followed dinner in the great hall, so it was necessary to clear the tables away. The action of removing the dirty plates from the tables was in French called the
desert
, the creation of an absence (the same word used for the Sahara). This act of ‘deserting’ the table gave its name to the dessert or sweet course served elsewhere while the entertainers were setting up.

Dessert was eaten, then, in the parlour, or even in a specially constructed small room called a ‘Banqueting House’, a pleasant little chamber sometimes set upon the roof. A Banqueting House might even be a separate, fantastical little house in the gardens, a short, digestion-aiding walk away from the great hall.

The food at a banquet included confectionery, the sugar sculptures known as subtleties, or preserved flowers or fruits. Of course, sweet foods were known before sugar importation began, with honey doing sugar’s job (and furthermore being used to make drinks such as mead and its spiced cousin ‘metheglin’). ‘Raisins of Corinth’, figs and dates appear on medieval shopping lists to satisfy the sweet of tooth. But cane sugar also became available to the very richest medieval people. In 1288, the royal household used 6,258 pounds, and in 1421 ‘sugre candi’ from Italy was for sale in London.

Sugar grew more common in the sixteenth century when the Spanish plantations of the West Indies provided fresh supplies. Elizabeth I was extremely partial to it, and a visiting German traveller was not surprised by her black teeth: ‘a defect the English seem subject to, from their too great use of sugar’. Like most novel and expensive foods, sugar was initially plugged as an aphrodisiac. Indeed, a plateful of refined-sugar products such as subtleties and candies must have caused a very strange sensation. A person’s first sugar rush, as experienced today by toddlers at birthday parties, is something akin to feeling drunk, and produces similarly excessive behaviour.

Sugar remained a luxury item into the seventeenth century, when traders’ ships settled down into the ‘triangular’ pattern which sustained both the slave and sugar trades. They took guns from Britain to Africa, captured Africans to work the sugar plantations in the West Indian colonies, and brought back sugar to their starting point of Britain. In the years of the fight to get Parliament to outlaw slave-trading, abolitionist sugar bowls proclaimed their owners’ commitment to serving sugar imported only from the non-slave-owning parts of the West Indies. One example in the Museum of London has the caption: ‘East India sugar is not made by Slaves. By six families using East India, instead of West India sugar, one Slave less is required.’

Another novelty that changed social habits was Sir Walter Raleigh’s double-edged gift of pleasure and danger. He brought tobacco, and therefore the pipe, back to England from Virginia. (Once, a new servant of Raleigh’s saw smoke and assumed that his master had accidentally set himself on fire. He helpfully doused Raleigh with a bucket of water.) James I was another early friend to the prohibitionist lobby, making a strong stand against the habit of smoking on the grounds of health in his book
The Counterblast to Tobacco
(1604).

Yet smoking also had a practical function in a time of strong and noxious smells. Who can blame Samuel Pepys turning to
tobacco as he walked down a plague-stricken Drury Lane? ‘I was forced to buy some roll-tobacco’, he said, ‘to smell and to chaw.’ Likewise, those who worked in the dangerous industries of gilding or hat-making, where they were likely to encounter chemicals ‘offensive to the Brain’, were ripe for seduction by the makers of ‘Imperial Golden Snuff’. Snuff would ‘bring away all Mercury which lodges in the head’, it was promised.

The eighteenth-century fop, like cool people throughout the centuries, enjoyed holding ‘a Pipe in his Mouth to make his Diamond Ring the more conspicuous’, thereby showing off two consumer products at the same time. The desirable paraphernalia of clay pipes, wooden pipes, cigarette holders and jewelled and engraved cigarette cases would all find their way into smokers’ eager hands. Eventually the specialist ‘smoking room’ was created in grander Victorian houses, after Edward VII as Prince of Wales had made tobacco (almost) respectable. Smoking rooms were elaborate, gloomily decorated places, often in the Moorish style, and required a new outfit: the frogged smoking jacket.

The sixteenth century had seen the introduction of numerous other novelties from the vegetable world. They included the ‘apricock’, from Portugal, the melon, from France, and the tomato. Arriving from Mexico, tomatoes, or ‘apples of love’, were grown merely as decorative plants until, in about 1800, people decided to taste them, and concluded that they were delicious.

The humble potato was also unexpectedly slow to catch on in Europe. Only after a good deal of promotional work by agriculturalists did it achieve favour as a cheap and nutritious crop. The tubers we read about in Elizabethan times may well have been sweet potatoes. John Hawkins, slave trader, brought back a vegetable called ‘skyretts of Peru’ from ‘the coast of Guinea and the Indies of Nova Hispania’ in 1564; it was probably the sweet potato. (Skirrets were an old root vegetable, rather like a
parsnip, ‘sweet, white, good to be eaten, and most pleasant in taste’.) Richard Hakluyt, the great traveller, certainly described sweet potatoes in his
Principal Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation
(1589). He called them ‘the most delicate roots … the inside eateth like an apple, but it is more delicious than any sweet apple sugared’.

The Spanish brought over the savoury potatoes that eventually became more common, but the British clearly preferred the sweet variety. In a precursor of the sweet-potato pies of American cuisine, a recipe from 1596 describes how to make a tart ‘that is a courage to a man’. Sweet potato is mashed with quinces, dates, eggs, wine, sugar, spices and ‘the brains of three or four cock sparrows’.

The arrival of nicotine and the potato in the sixteenth century would have a lasting effect upon English society. The comparably significant novelty of the seventeenth century was the caffeinated hot drink. While people drank hot possets and caudles in Tudor times, these were chiefly reserved for people who weren’t feeling well. Coffee had been encountered by medieval crusaders in the Middle East, but they don’t seem to have liked it enough to bring it back to England. Its first recorded British sighting was in the study of a Greek scholar in 1630s Oxford, the town which went on to open the first public ‘coffee house’ in 1652.

It’s hard now to imagine that tea too was once a wildly novel and possibly dangerous drink, expensive, and therefore kept under lock and key. Samuel Pepys had his first ‘cup of tee, (a China drink) of which I never drank before’ in 1660. At first people simply didn’t know how to make it: Sir Kenelm Digby thought it necessary to inform readers that the correct length of brewing was ‘no longer than while you can say the Misere Psalm very leisurely’. This tea was usually drunk black. Before refrigeration, milk was much more perishable than it is today, and most was quickly made into butter or cheese, or reserved for invalids.

As tea became established, it brought with it a whole new category of kitchenware: the tea set. Tea leaves were locked in a caddy, like the ‘Japan box for Sweetmeats and tea’ owned by the seventeenth-century Duchess of Lauderdale and kept in her private closet at Ham House. Then cups were required. Initially these were the delicate, handle-less, Chinese porcelain containers known as ‘dishes’, imported from the Orient merely as a sideshow to the business of transporting tea leaves: the crates of china acted as ballast in the tea clippers. Tea dishes purchased in the seventeenth century rarely matched, and the idea that cups should form an identical set did not develop until home-grown British ceramic production took off in the eighteenth century.

Next, a small heater was required to heat the water, along with a teapot in which to stew the leaves. At first, the ‘mote spoon’, a spoon with holes in it, was used to fish stray leaves out of the tea dish, but in due course this would be replaced by the tea strainer. A tea table might complete the set-up for a tea party in a lady’s drawing room.

Along with this new drink, a whole new social entertainment had been born. Tea-drinking was a welcome excuse to invite guests into your living room, where you would then show off both your purchasing power (through your tea set) and your good manners (through knowing how to serve the tea). Once the servants had brought everything in, the ceremony of pouring out would be performed by the hostess.

Yet tea’s reputation remained somewhat dubious: it was alien, exotic and expensive. ‘I can feel little or no abatement of my pain’, wrote an anxious father to a sickening, tea-drinking son in 1731, ‘till I hear you are finally determined to drink no more of that detestable, fatal liquor.’ In turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York, the craving for strong tea still symbolises the sorry state of fallen woman Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s
The House of Mirth
. ‘“You look regularly done up, Miss Lily. Well, take your tea strong.” Lily smiled faintly at the injunction to take
her tea strong. It was the temptation she was always struggling to resist.’

Chocolate – mixed with eggs and spices to form a rich drink – began to appear at late seventeenth-century breakfasts. Samuel Pepys discovered it was a good cure for a hangover, relishing it especially when his head was ‘in a sad taking thro’ last night’s drink’. William III’s new palace at Hampton Court had a special private kitchen off ‘Chocolate Court’, the workplace of the king’s own hot-chocolate-maker, the fortuitously named Mr Nice. I feel rather jealous of the newly married Lady Myddleton of Chirk Castle, who in 1686 received delivery of ‘a box of Chocholett for my Lady weighing 37 pounds’. Yet chocolate could not be produced in a solid form until the nineteenth century, and Lady Myddleton’s box would have contained a powder for drinking or cake flavouring.

Enjoying smoking, coffee, tea or chocolate with friends created new and intimate forums for conversation in the seventeenth century. Their eighteenth-century equivalent, the next novel drink to cause a social revolution, was gin. It had no such benign effect.

Because the craze for gin suddenly sprang up almost from nowhere, gin-drinkers had no notion that it was not a good idea to drink it by the pint as they did ale. Gin had such a marked effect on London’s sobriety that people talked about it just as they might discuss crystal meth or any other dangerously addictive drug today. Henry Fielding, in his
Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers
(1751), accused gin of causing a crime wave: ‘Many of these wretches there are, who swallow pints of this poison within the twenty-four hours; the dreadful effects of which I have the misfortune every day to see, and to smell too.’

The streets of 1730s London were littered with the bodies of the insensible, most memorably depicted in William Hogarth’s print of
Gin Lane
, where mothers neglect their children and
suffer all kinds of drink-sodden humiliation. There were many attempts to clamp down upon the sale of gin; informers were bribed to turn in unlicenced gin-sellers; there was much moralising. All these efforts were in fact in vain: the ‘problem’ of gin was only solved when macroeconomic changes and an increase in the price of its raw ingredients simply made it unaffordable for the poor.