Is There a Nutmeg in the House? (18 page)

The famous
Ménagier de Paris
,
²
a treatise composed
c
.1393 by a middle-aged bourgeois for the benefit of his young bride, gives lengthy and perfectly clear directions for making this preserve, a mixture of green walnuts gathered around St John’s Day (i.e. midsummer), steeped in water for ten days, and subsequently spiced with cloves and ginger and preserved in honey until All Saints (1 November), when you were to add peeled, quartered and boiled turnips; then carrots treated in the same way; next, pears, unpeeled, but cut in quarters; then, in due season, slices of pumpkin, unripe peaches (these obviously came into season long before November), and roundabout St Andrew’s Day, 30 November, you were to add some fennel root and parsley root (that last item must have been the ancestor of the variety we now call Hamburg parsley).

Once all the fruit and vegetables were ready in the honey preserve, mustard seeds and anis, fennel and coriander seeds were all pounded together in a mortar and mixed with vinegar. Horseradish root was also pounded up and moistened with vinegar. Cloves, cinnamon, pepper, green ginger, cardamom seeds, saffron and sandalwood (for colouring) were also required to be pounded. The spices were to be added to the mustard mixture, but the saffron and sandalwood were kept separate.

The next stage in the confection of this wondrous preserve was the heating and skimming of a large quantity of thick honey to which, when cool, you added your mustard and spice powder mixed with half and half red wine and vinegar. Now the saffron was to go in, then a handful of coarse salt, and the sandalwood heated in wine. Finally, having mixed all these preparations with your preserve of fruit and vegetables, you were to take two pounds of the small seedless raisins of Digne, newly dried,
³
pound them, moisten them with vinegar, strain this mixture through a fine sieve and put it to all the other things. As a final fling, the
Ménagier
adds: and if you put four or five pints of grape must or of
vin cuit
⁴
the relish will be all the better.

An English version of composte appears in the celebrated
Forme of Cury
, the book compiled toward the end of the
fourteenth century by the master cooks of Richard II. The English recipe is less complex and far less precise than the French one, and the confection is made all in one operation instead of being spread over a period of several months. Walnuts are omitted, and instead of the several different operations involving the addition of honey, wine, mustard and vinegar, the ingredient specified is ‘lumbard mustard’. People unfamiliar with Italian fruit mustards have taken ‘lumbard mustard’ to mean straight mustard seeds, without questioning what significant difference there might be between the mustard grown in northern Italy and our own native product.

In Italian,
mostarda
, of course, implied the presence in the compost of boiled and concentrated grape must or
mosto
; this, together with the honey, wine and vinegar constituted the thick sweet-sour syrup in which the medley of roots and fruits were preserved, while mustard in our terms, called
senape
in Italian, combined with the horseradish, pepper and ginger to contribute the hot element.

As far as the term Lumbard is concerned, the mustard mixture is by no means the only dish of the period to which it was applied. There were, for example, several different versions of Lumbard pies, recipes which persisted in our cookery books until well into the eighteenth century. They were huge, covered pies filled with mixtures of bone marrow, meat or fish – according to whether they were for a meat or fasting day – dried fruit, dates, pine nuts, spices and sugar. Sometimes the top crust was ornamented with a cluster of sugared and spiced pears.

In the contemporary French cookery books these pies were alternatively referred to as
tourtes pisaines
. Did they then originate in Tuscany, rather than in Lombardy? Possibly. But we have to remember that in the days when the Lumbard pies were introduced into England – it was probably a century or more before Richard’s cooks recorded them – Lombardy was that part of the Holy Roman Empire which encompassed almost the whole of Italy north of Rome and the Vatican States, and excluding only the Republic of Venice. So Pisa, Florence, Lucca, Parma and Bergamo were as much a part of Lombardy as Milan is today. There is good reason to suppose that the dishes designated as Lumbard – there were also Lumbard sweetmeats, solid pastes made of fruit and honey and spices – were in fact brought to us by Lumbards, perhaps even by those merchants and moneylenders
who settled in the city of London in the twelfth century and gave Lombard Street its name.

How was that Lombard compost eaten in the days of the Plantagenets? Although it is mentioned at one feast, given by a Lord de la Grey
⁵
early in the fifteenth century it appears bracketed with Brode Canelle (cinnamon broth) as a kind of sweet-sour hot relish, the broth itself no doubt being a sweetened one.

In England the tradition of the ancient European relishes died out, their place being taken by Indian chutneys and pickles of which English cooks made strange imitations. In France the roots and herbs, the honey and vinegar and spices were dropped and compost became
raisiné
, a sweetmeat of autumn fruits preserved in boiled-down grape must. By the end of the seventeenth century the term
composte
had come to have its present meaning of fruit cooked for current consumption. In Italy, however, the fruit mustards continued to flourish. The great French essayist, Michel de Montaigne, journeying about Italy in 1580 and 15 81 remarked two or three times on the excellence of the relishes and condiments. In October 1581 for example he was in the region of San Secondo
⁶
and ‘they put upon the table for me an assortment of condiments in the form of excellent relishes of various kinds. One of these was made with quinces.’ A few days later at Borgo San Donnino, in the Cremona region, ‘they put on the table a mustard-like relish made with apples and oranges cut in pieces, like half-cooked quince marmalade.’
⁷

References

1
.
Les Dix Livres de Cuisine d’Apicius
. Traduite du Latin pour la première fois et commentés par Bertrand Guégan. Paris, René Bonnel, 1938.

2
. First printed by the Société des Bibliophiles françois, 1847. The MS was edited by Baron Jérôme Pichon, the Society’s President.

3
. If the preserves were being made at the end of November, it would have meant that they were very recently dried. Digne is a town in the Basses Alpes. The local raisins appear to have had a considerable reputation in the fourteenth century. It sounds as though they were rather like sultanas.

4
. Newly-made wine boiled down and reduced.

5
. Probably Lord Grey de Ruthyn who had been Naperer at Henry IV’s coronation feast in 1399.

6
. Now in the province of Parma.

7
.
The Complete Works of Montaigne
. Translated by Donald M. Frame. London, Hamish Hamilton, n.d.

MOSTARDA D’UVA

(grape must preserve)

The following Piedmontese recipe – from Anna Gosetti della Salda’s
Le Ricette Regionale Italiane
(1967) – appears to answer almost exactly to Montaigne’s description of the relish he enjoyed at San Donnino.

Ripe but firm figs, 1 kg (2 lb), quinces 1 kg (2 lb), Martin pears 1 kg (2 lb), grape must 10 litres (2¼ gallons), walnuts and hazelnuts, a few.

The grape must requires very lengthy cooking, and the preserve is one for which you really need a wood or coal fired cooking stove. Ten litres of new must are reduced to one litre of
mostarda
.

Wash and pare the quinces and pears and cut them in pieces. Put the must to cook with the prepared fruit, add the figs, cut up but not peeled, the peeled walnut kernels and the hazelnuts, toasted in the oven and then rolled back and forth on a metal sieve so that the scorched skins rub off.

Leave the mixture to cook very slowly for several hours, until the preserve or
composta
has reduced to a thick
mostarda
; the fruit should be partially disintegrated. This preserve is served as an accompaniment to hot or cold
bollito
, the mixed boiled meats of Piedmont.

Note

Martin pears are a late autumn variety, small, russet-coloured and with firm flesh. They are little cultivated nowadays.

MOSTARDA DI CREMONA

This is the version given by Ada Boni in her famous
Talismano della Felicità
, 13th edition 1947 (first published 1934). The must is omitted from this one.

You need a certain quantity of fruit such as pears, apples, cherries, unripe figs, orange peel, etc.; and each variety should be cooked

separately in a little water and sugar syrup. Cooking should be done carefully so that the fruit remains slightly hard, and not reduce to pulp.

Once all the fruit is cooked, amalgamate all the different syrups, add more sugar and reduce until you have a somewhat dense syrup to which you add mustard moistened in a little water. You put all the fruit together in a pot and cover it with the prepared syrup. Leave it several days before broaching it.

Note

It was this kind of mostarda which I first encountered in northern Italy in 1952 when I was researching there for my book on Italian food. In Milan, the Cremona mustard fruits were sold by the kilo from huge barrels. They were beautiful and good, even though the grape must had long since vanished from the mustard fruits of commerce.

Unpublished article, late 1980s

Elizabeth was always interested in Italian fruit mustards and had a file of notes about them. I think this article was written soon after she had made the revisions to
Italian Food
in the late 1980s, but it was never published. Most of her articles underwent several drafts, sometimes quite radically different, and it may be that this was an earlier version of
Relishes of the Renaissance
.

JN

A True Gentlewoman’s Delight

Having expressed doubts as to the authorship of
A True Gentlewoman’s Delight
, usually attributed to Elizabeth Grey or de Grey, Countess of Kent, I should perhaps explain my reasons. The story is rather an odd one.

The Countess we are concerned with was born Lady Elizabeth Talbot in 1581. She was the second daughter of Gilbert Talbot, 7th Earl of Shrewsbury, and Mary Cavendish, daughter of Sir William Cavendish, founder of Chatsworth, and his third wife, the renowned Bess of Hardwick. Confusingly, this lady, now widowed for the third time, and mother of six Cavendish offspring, shortly married our Countess’s grandfather as his fourth wife and became Countess of Shrewsbury. Not however before she had assured the marriage not only of her daughter Mary to the Earl’s son Gilbert, but also of her eldest son Henry to the Earl’s youngest daughter Lady Grace, the two couples being married at a great double wedding ceremony at Sheffield in February 1568. Later, after Bess had married her Earl, she contrived the marriage of another daughter, Elizabeth, to the young Scottish Earl of Lennox. (The daughter of that marriage was the celebrated beauty of James I’s court, Lady Arabella Stuart.) Bess, creator of
Hardwick Hall and several other great Midlands houses, was born in 1518, lived through almost the entire Tudor age and became one of its most powerful women. Immensely rich, ‘proud furious and selfish’ as her biographer wrote, she died in 1608 aged ninety.

In 1601, two years before Queen Elizabeth’s death, Bess’s grand-daughter, Lady Elizabeth Talbot, married Henry, Lord Grey de Ruthin, son and heir of the 6th Earl of Kent. Both the young Grey de Ruthins were eventually appointed to positions at the Court of James I, Lady Grey as lady-in-waiting to the Queen, Anne of Denmark. This place she held from
c
.1610 until the Queen’s death in 1619, when she is recorded as having followed her late mistress’s coffin in the funeral procession.
¹

As one of her father’s co-heiresses,
²
the Countess of Kent – her husband succeeded to the title in 1623 – must have been a very rich woman, and the Kents evidently kept up some state, maintaining a large household of waiting women and gentlemen (the youthful Samuel Butler was a page in the Countess’s household, so Aubrey recorded). As legal adviser and steward at Wrest Park in Bedfordshire, the family seat, the Earl employed John Selden, the distinguished lawyer and historian. Concerning this gentleman and the Countess, Aubrey has a typical piece of scandal to recount. The Countess, he says, ‘being an ingeniose woman and loving men, would let him lie with her and her husband knew it. After the Earle’s death he married her.’