Category Archives: 18th century

A Recipe for Mince Pies in The Lilliputian Magazine (1752)

Posted on by
Reply

English Christmas continues to be associated with mince pies, even though the recipe has changed a good deal over the centuries.  There are no shortage of recipes in the eighteenth century, but the one in verse submitted by “Miss Taste” to the first number of The Lilliputian Magazine, the first children’s periodical, seems to have been overlooked by historians of holidays and of English food ways. The issue was published in March 1752, not December 1751, which may explain why Miss Taste says nothing about Christmas.

Here it is:

A Receipt to make Mince-Pies, of such Materials as are cheap, agreeable to every Palate, and will not offend the Stomach.  Communicated by Miss Taste.

Take golden pippins pared, two pound,

                Two pounds of well-shred beef suet,

Two pounds  of raisins, chop’t and ston’d,

                And put two pounds of currants to it;

Half an ounce of cinnamon, well beat,

                Of sugar, three-fourths of a pound,

And one green lemon peel shred neat,

                So it can’t with ease be found;

Add sack or brandy, spoonfuls, three,

                And one large Seville orange squeeze;

Of sweet-meats a small quantity,

                And you’ll the nicest palate please.

Although a relatively small recipe yielding around eight pounds of mincemeat, it represents hours of work peeling the apples, seeding and chopping the dried fruit, and shredding the suet, a task the doyenne of English Christmas cookery, Elizabeth David, hated so much that she substituted ready made.  With just a cup and a half of sugar, a touch of sherry or brandy, a couple spoonfuls of cinnamon, some orange juice, and green lemon peel (a kind of Italian lemon which stays green when ripe then much appreciated), Miss Taste’s mincemeat would not have been especially sweet, alcoholic, or spicy.

Her recipe does look relatively digestible and inexpensive compared to some others circulating in steady selling cookbooks.  The “best way” Art of Cookery author Hannah Glasse recommended in 1747 called for “half a hundred apples,” a pound more suet, a full pint of liquor, mace, cloves, nutmeg, citron, and orange peel–but only half a pound of sugar. For a more hearty pie, Glasse directed that filling be laid on top of two pounds of ox tongue or beef sirloin. This variation required doubling the amount of fruit!  This surely would have produced enough for more than one baking and any extra stored in crocks.

The Compleat Housewife  (1727) by Eliza Cook contained a recipe for a much richer mixture: four pounds of meat cut off a leg of veal, nine pounds of beef suet, seven pounds of currants, four pounds of raisins, eight pippins, nutmeg, mace, cloves, grated and candied lemon peel, citron and a speck of sherry or red wine.  Martha Custis Washington’s recipe was very similar, except for the addition of rosewater.

Instructions are  terrifyingly short on details, compared to modern ones which specify yield, precise quantities of ingredients, oven temperature, and baking time and much more.  Not a word is said by the eighteenth-century ladies about the crust—they seem to assume that any cook will know that the pan should be lined with the preferred type of pastry and baked blind before filling.  Or should the cook make hand pies instead of large ones?

Of the three recipes, that of Miss Taste is certainly the most affordable, as it calls just for suet instead of pounds of suet and meat.  Why did she make such a point of promoting her way with mincemeat as “cheap?”  A clue may lie in the introductory “Dialogue between a Gentleman and the Author.”  The author points out to the gentleman that educational books “are to be made as cheap as possible; for there are a great many poor people in his majesty’s dominions, who would not be able to afford to purchase it at a larger price, and yet these are the king’s subjects, and in their station, as much to be regarded as the rest.”   Would the inclusion of a grander recipe for mincemeat of the sort circulating at the time been regarded as excluding a certain class of reader, which was a natural constituent for it?  Certainly John Newbery  expressed more faith in social advancement through merit rather than birth, so perhaps it was no idle sentiment…

 

 

The Earliest Recipe for Turducken in the First Known Reference to “The House that Jack Built”

Posted on by
Reply

The ambitious cook can substitute a platter of turducken for the traditional turkey on the groaning Thanksgiving table.   This labor-intensive dish made famous by New Orleans chef Paul Prudhomme consists of a boned chicken inside in a boned duck inside a boned turkey with the empty spaces crammed with figs, bread stuffing, or a sausage force meat.  The beast is roasted until glistening brown.For those of you who are wondering what on earth this has to do with the nursery rhyme “The House that Jack Built,” don’t sign off.   Many of the rhymes we consider the province of childhood are repeated by lowlifes and servants in plays, bawdy songs, and nasty political satires before the publication of the first nursery rhyme collections in the 1740s.The earliest printed appearance of “The House that Jack Built” was in John Newbery’s Nurse Truelove’s New-Year’s Gift (1750) according to Iona and Peter Opie’s Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes.   But the Opies’ work is now over fifty years old and it is possible to search digital copies of 18th and 19th- century books, poems, magazines, etc. for new sightings.  Recently I ran a search for  the accumulative rhyme“The House that Jack Built” and I got a hit in a 1707 translation of the Spanish novel Estevanillo Gonzales, the Most Arch and Comical of Scoundrels.  I was sure I had hit paydirt because the “hero” was a lowlife and lowlifes speak colloquially.

In one adventures, the rascally Estevanillo  was hired as a chef on the strength of his bragging that he was the best cook in the army.  To show his chops, he directions for making for “Imperial Stuffed Meat,” an even more daunting version of turducken than Prudhomme’s.  It’s easy, he tells his audience:

It is just like the Tale the Children tell of, This is the Stick that Beat the Dog, the Dog that bit the Cat, that Jack Built; for this Egg is in the Pidgeon, the Pidgeon is to be put into a Partridge, the Partridge into a Pheasant, the Pheasant into a Pullet, the Pullet into a Capon, the Capon into a Turkey, the Turkey into a Kid, the Kid into a Sheep, the Sheep into a Calf, and the Calf into a Cow, all these Creatures are to be Pull’d, Flea’d [i.e. flayed], and Larded, except the Cow, which is to have her Hide on, and as they are thrust one into another like a Nest of Boxes.

All it needs is four hours’ roasting in a covered trench, he says, and it can be served forth. Incidentally, the 1707 recipe is rather similar to the one called the “Roti sans pareil” [ an incomparable roast] in the 1807 Almanach des gourmands, which today’s food historians cite as the earliest reference to the dish.   But curiously enough, the 1707 edition was the only one of all the reprints I found to refer to “The House that Jack Built”…  Another strange occurrence in the history of nursery rhymes…