Blog Posts

As part of the module on Baker we have been encouraged to interact with the concept of recipe books, kitchen science or anything connected with our digital studies. Our contributions reflect our changing attitudes towards what we admittedly suspected at first may have been a narrow and domestic field of study. How wrong we were...

Currying Favour with the Empire in the ERO, by Karen Bowman

It was a revelation to me to find that curry was part of eighteenth century cuisine. I had not seen it in Baker and, my curiosity aroused I looked to the Essex Record Office to see if this phenomena of east meets west was something I could see locally. I wasn’t disappointed. With access to digital images on the their SEAX website I found Mrs Elizabeth Slany’s recipe book.

The ERO has a blog featuring an overview of Slany's recipes which also points to an article in Essex Countryside magazine dated February 1966 written by Daphne E Smith who judges Elizabeth to be 'a most efficient housewife who nurtured her family with care.' Smith also assumes that the recipe book was started in preparation for her forthcoming marriage. However the 1715 date on the fly leaf is a full eight years before Elizabeth married Benjamin LeHook in 1723 so if true it was quite a lengthy engagement.

The Fly Leaf of Slany’s recipe book dated 1715 – ERO D/DRZ1

With Benjamin a London agent it is probable Elizabeth did not reside in Essex . However, her eldest daughter did, marrying into the Wegge family of Colchester. As the 'hand' within the book changes halfway through it can be assumed it was she who entered the 'currey' recipe, giving me the local Essex location I was looking for.

I admit, realising the recipe was probably the daughters not her mothers did dilute my first ecstatic light-bulb moment of,

'I've discovered curry in England as early as 1715 !' into, 'stop jumping to conclusions and analyse, you're an historian!'

However, on reflection it was just as exciting to realise young Elizabeth's 'currey' was realistically contemporary with Hannah Glasse's inclusion of this hot and spicy dish in her book The Art of Cooking Made Plain and Easy 1747.

Madhur Jaffrey, in the introduction to her book Curry Nation dismisses Glasse's recipe as little more than a spicy gravy, consisting of pepper and Coriander seeds which were to be 'browned over the fire in a clean shovel' before being beaten to a powder. At this point the rice was added during cooking. Nevertheless, it gave the women who cooked these exotic dishes a connection to Britain's growing empire. It also gave the recipients of such meals a way to 'virtually tour' the wider world. Though such recipes were effectively Anglicised claims that they were 'true' Indian dishes seems not to have been questioned.

The Art of Cookery by Hannah Glasse. 1758

Inevitably the taste and composition of the dish gradually changed, as seen in subsequent editions of Glasse’s book plus by the end of the century a commercial curry powder blend had became available. Bickham, in his study of C.18 culinary imperialism, Eating the Empire tells us how curry recipes were included in mass produced affordable cookery books. Aimed at a lower to middling sorts these women would have used curry powder for convenience buying it from grocers shops who in turn sourced it directly from spice wholesalers or from larger shops.

Elizabeth LeHook’s receipt book lists two curry recipes and the first does appear to be a glorified stew consisting of 2-3 Lbs of mutton and onions. She then recommends it be thickened with ‘the curry stuff’ plus to add the juice of two lemons, some salt and cayenne pepper, adding a note at the end...

NB. 2 large spoonfuls is be sufficient for a curry of two pounds and so in proportion – add to the curry powder about a fifth of turmeric.

John Caird's curry powder advertisement from 1798.'Edinburgh Evening Courant'.

Her second recipe calls for chicken, lamb, or duck to be prepared in the same fashion, stewing the meat in enough water to see it become tender. Shallots or onion are added. Then the gravy is strained off, thickened with a tablespoon of ‘the powder’ and returned to the pan so everything stews together for a further half an hour or,

‘...until it is of a proper thickness to be sent to the table’.

Rice was then to be served up as usual.

A Lady at the Hearth. Pehr Hilleström.(1732-1815)

Elizabeth Slany’s connection to the empire is still visible over the page. Here she tells us how to make a Turkish pilau. Interestingly as featured in my previous post Methods of Measurement and Delight , Elizabeth uses money as a visual aid stating the pound of mutton required should be cut up small about the size of a crown piece.

On the opposite page are instructions as to the Chinese way of boiling rice. This reflects on the importance eighteenth century housewife’s placed on authenticity or at least the pretence of it, in connection with their perceived social status. The process was simple, the rice being washed in cold water then boiled in hot until soft. It was then left in a clean vessel to blanch until snow white and as hard as crust. By then it had apparently become an excellent substitute for bread!

To find the exotic in Essex was gratifying and I was fortunate to have found what I was looking for in one of the few recipe books in the ERO to have been digitalised. It was not a groundbreaking discovery; after all I hadn’t found curry in 1715 had I ? But, I had found local evidence of what we, as HR650 students had been seeing in recipe books far grander than Elizabeth Slany’s. If nothing else its a testament to shared domestic knowledge and the proof of domestic involvement in what was then a new and expanding British empire.

REFERENCES.

Essex Record Office. ERO D/DRZ1. Recipe book of Elizabeth Slaney. (1715)

A Lady at the Hearth. Pehr Hilleström.(1732-1815)

The Art of Cookery by Hannah Glasse, 1758 [1747}, page 101

Edinburgh Evening Courant. 1798.

The Creation of the Kitchen By Tracey Cornish

The reading for this week’s seminar was a topic that I had not thought much about before. Just as I had never really thought about recipes and their meaning in the early modern period before I began studying this module. The topic in question is kitchens. I suppose I had thought that kitchens had always existed in the way in which we think of kitchens now. When you visit castles or stately homes there is always a kitchen where the hustle and bustle of daily life took place. The kitchen in Hampton Court is indeed huge. It was built in 1530 and was designed to feed at least 600 members of the court, entitled to eat at the palace, twice a day.

The kitchens had master cooks each with a team working for them. Annually the Tudor Court cooked 1240 oxen, 8,200 sheep, 2,330 deer, 760 calves, 1,870 pigs and 53 wild boar. That is without mentioning the chickens, peacocks, pheasant and vegetables which were also on the menu.[1]

Hampton Court Kitchen plan

Interestingly, Hampton Court Palace also has a chocolate kitchen. The royal chocolate making kitchen which once catered for three Kings: William III, George I and George II is the only surviving royal chocolate kitchen in the country. Recent research has uncovered the precise location of the royal chocolate kitchen in the Baroque Palace’s Fountain Court. Having been used as a storeroom for many years, it is remarkably well preserved with many of the original fittings, including the stove, equipment and furniture still intact.[2]

Chocolate Kitchen in Hampton Court Palace

The only original 17th century kitchen to be preserved is at Ham House. In the basement there are several small rooms comprising of the kitchen, the scullery, the servants hall, a laundry, several pantries, a wet larder, a still house, a wash house and a dairy room. All these rooms would have had servants working in them and would have made the workings of the kitchen easier as it would have provided room to prepare and cook food.[3]

Original 17th Century kitchen

Of course, this is an example of a palace so what about everyday houses? Peasants in the middle ages lived in one room which served as a room for cooking, general living and eating. It consisted of a hearth stone, a fire with a pot of the top. Sara Pennell suggests in The Birth of the English Kitchen 1600-1850 that kitchens in the early 1600’s were ‘unfixed and at times contested’[4] and that it wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that kitchens were ‘distinctive yet integrated spaces in the majority of households.’[5] Food could be prepared in any room with a table and could be cooked in any room with a fire. However it was the need to provide space for the works of the kitchen and other ‘food’ rooms such as pantries, larders and sculleries which reallocated eating to its own distinctive space.[6] Pennell argues that histories of the domestic interior and its evolving design neglected the kitchen and yet arguably the kitchen is and was an important room in a household. [7]

Margaret Baker never mentions in her recipes as to where the production of the recipes should take place, one just imagines that she is in her kitchen trying out the recipes (the ones which she did try) and writing them down. Of course, the fact that her kitchen would have been nothing like our kitchens today should also be taken into account if a reproduction of one of her recipes takes place. As Florence mentions in her blog, Replicate, Authenticate and Reconstruct Baker uses ‘learned knowledge’ in her recipe book. There would have been no modern oven to set to a certain temperature as they would have used a fire.

Evolution of the kitchen was linked to the invention of the cooking range or stove and the supply of running water. The living room began to serve as an area for social functions and became a showcase for the owners to show off their wealth. In the upper classes cooking and the kitchen were the domain of servants and the kitchen was therefore set away from the living rooms.

17th Century Kitchen

The kitchens of elite households were not originally in the basement. In fact basement level kitchens were almost unheard of in England before 1666. Yet by 1750 kitchens were found in the basement. One could argue this was to keep the kitchen staff out of sight of the main household and to ensure that the kitchen smells did not overwhelm the main living accommodation.

A 17th Century Distiller

So what about the medical and scientific recipes? Many kitchens or basements formed laboratories for people to experiment and write down their medical recipes. It was popular for higher class women to have stills and alembics in their kitchens for making essences. . Even the lower classes would gather herbs together and make remedies in their kitchens.

Experiments took place in many places such as coffee houses, laboratories and universities but the private residence was a popular place to experiment. Many renowned scientists used their kitchens as a ‘laboratory' including Frederick Clod who was a physician and a ‘mystical chemist’ who used his father in law’s kitchen to experiment. [8]

It could be argued that the design of kitchens have come full circle with many people preferring to have open plan living areas which include the kitchen with people enjoying socialising whilst cooking and enjoying all those cooking smells.