Category Archives: 18th century

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

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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…

 

Once There Was a Man with a Goat, Cabbage, and Wolf and They Had to Cross a River…

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Lewis Carroll gave his pupils puzzles to make logic and mathematics instruction more interesting.   He might have sprung on them the well-known river crossing problem which goes something like this… There was a man who had to get a goat, cabbage, and wolf across the river in a boat too small to hold all four of them. What was he to do? The goat was sure to eat the cabbage if left alone with it and the wolf the goat if given a chance.  With a little quick thinking, the task can be successfully completed.

People have been solving this problem at least since the 12th century, when an illumination featuring a wolf, a sheep, and a vegetable that looks like kale appears in the Ormesby Psalter.  Since the 12th century, many variations on the river crossing problem have been noted in at different times, places, and sources.

The Schoolmasters Assistant. London: Richard and Henry Causton, (1773). (Cotsen 33112)

Between 1705 and 1801, there were seventeen occurrences with a fox, a goose, and a bag of oats, five for a fox, a goose, and a bag of wheat, and three for the more familiar goat, cabbage, and wolf.  The majority appeared either in Jacques Ozanam’s famous Recreations for Gentlemen and Ladies or well-established school books like Thomas Dilworth’s Schoolmaster’s Assistant, under the heading “pleasant and diverting questions.”

Jeux Nouveaux Réunis. Paris: JJF, [1904]. (Cotsen)

For some time it seems that the goat, cabbage and wolf puzzler had been simultaneously associated with instruction and amusement.  Yesterday I discovered more evidence for that in an unlikely place, a recent acquisition, Jeux nouveaux reunis dating from around 1904.  Four or five Parisian companies involved in making pastimes seem to have partnered to produce a big wooden chest shown below stuffed with 64 entertaining pastimes individually boxed. Le souci du batelier: question du vieux tempts [The boatman’s problem] is the only logic puzzler to be found among all the dexterity and disentanglement puzzles.   The box contains a printed slip with the solution and figures of the goat, cabbage, and wolf on little wire stands and the boatman.

Players who couldn’t work it out in their heads could experiment with the figures plotting a sequence of trips across the river  that  would  preserve  cabbage  and  goat.It’s been speculated that the Jeux nouveaux reunis was a salesman’s sample.  Jerry  Slocum, the great historian and collector of puzzles shows in Puzzles Old and New that dexterity and disentanglement puzzles became an increasingly popular family entertainment in  early twentieth century.  He photographs the box of his copy of  Puzzle Parties (1911) sold by a Connecticut firm which contains many of the same French puzzles in the box Cotsen acquired.  Perhaps boxes were sold in France for puzzle parties as well as for sale overseas.