The image of
the 17th century English aristocrat is fixed forever by Van Dyke. In
this post, which is inspired by Adam Smyth’s review of Wendy Wall’s Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in
the Early Modern English Kitchen in the latest LRB, I look at another artist who worked under aristocrat
patronage, and what kind of image of the aristocracy he provides. He’s the cook,
Robert May, author
of The accomplisht cook,
or The art and mystery of cookery (1660).
One of the patrons May shared with Van Dyke was Sir Kenelm Digby, and so
we can think first of Venetia Stanley in her silk dresses, we see her on her pathetic
and decorous deathbed, with that rose shedding its petals on the pillow beside
her.
May’s version of aristocratic life is different: barbaric, carnal,
fat-basted, one of tables surrounded by people enjoying banquets which were, on
special occasions, kinetic events, He opens his book with a joyous account of
what he considered a feast done properly should be like. What he describes for
his adventurous diners is recreated for his readers: making an amazing entrée
for both the feast and his book. The table set with a pasteboard galleon and a
castle, exchanging fire - gunpowder is involved, then the women present throw
eggshells full of rosewater at one another to allay the fumes, one of those
women next being set up as victim of a guffawing hoax – asked to pull a spear
from the side of a model stag, from which red wine will gush instead of
blood, then her or another female victim being invited to cut into pies that
were, in certain of their compartments, full of frogs, live birds, even snakes: “lifting first the lid off one pie, out skips some Frogs, which makes the
Ladies to skip and shreek”. The birds, May remarks complacently, would fly in
terror into the candles: “after the other pie, whence comes out the Birds; who
by a natural instinct flying at the light, will put out the candles: so that
what with the flying Birds and skipping Frogs, the one above, the other
beneath, will cause much delight and pleasure to the whole company”.
So we can
imagine the bangs, hubbub, shrieking, laughter, cries of vexation at ruined expensive
dresses. As May himself puts it, after this grand opening salvo for the feast,
everyone could then settle down to talk about what happened to them during the
action, before settling down to the meal itself: “at length the candles are lighted, and a Banquet brought in, the musick
sounds, and every one with much delight and content rehearses their actions in
the former passages.”
Robert May must have been deuced expensive to employ: it’s a principle with
him to hold his patron to a level of profligate expense. Publishing his fifty
years of experience as a master cook in 1660, he was advocating a return, in
England, to the old English ways of eating, before the puritan interregnum, a
return to meals that are a lavish medley of dead animals and animal parts (all
of them: sweetbreads, lips, and noses, “first tender boiled and blanched”),
displays of largesse and profusion, conspicuous consumption at a quite literal
level.
 |
| Kitchen scene by David Teniers |
The waste must have been terrific. One of his measures for an added
element is the ‘gubbin’: “Mutton, Venison, Pork, Bacon, all the foresaid in
gubbins, as big as a Ducks Egg”. No doubt every woman present was feeding her
lap dogs; it’s easy to imagine larger ‘gubbins’ from the feast being thrown by
the men to their larger dogs waiting round the edge of the room. Adam Smyth
aptly writes that there must have been a culture of the leftover, but for May
the profusion of meat at the table is always connected to charity in the proper
old English way, the poor folk at the gate eventually receiving the orts and
fragments.
As a master cook, May was a kind of culinary combine harvester,
processing whole animals into pies, pies of many compartments, animals stuffed
inside animals and coffined in pastry, pies that feature sections that are
bird-filled alongside the portions full of animal meats, with easily available animals
like rabbits, “pigeon-peepers and chicken peepers”, always thrown in to bulk
out the fare. There’s no buying of a cut of meat. If it’s pork, May starts with
a pig, venison is prepared from the whole animal. An amazing amount of boiling
goes on, and the animals are hashed, stewed in gobbets, fricasseed into hearty
fare for Lord or his hound, Lady and lapdog.
By 1660, May knows his culinary rivals very well, rivals to his proper
English way of doing food. Royalty never appeared among his patrons, he was
probably too olde tyme, too extravagant, and unsophisticated for Charles II –
who hah had so many years eating abroad. It’s French cooking a la mode that May fears, and
denigrates, rather superbly, as “epigram dishes”. We’d say nouvelle cuisine, a taste of something served on a plate, an
epigram in food, rather than a chorographical epic of food:
“Epigram
Dishes, smoak't rather then drest, so strangely to captivate the Gusto, their Mushroom'd Experience for Sauce
rather then Diet, for the generality howsoever called A la mode, not being worthy of taken
notice on. As I lived in France
and had the Language, and have been an eye-witness of their Cookeries, as well as a peruser of
their Manuscripts and printed Authours,
whatsoever I found good in them I have inserted in this Volume.”
May makes no suggestions about what wine might go
with a particular dish. Everyone was clearly getting on splendidly drinking
just whatever was being poured, and as the dishes contain everything – avian,
animal, oysters, lemons – you could hardly drink wine according to whatever had
turned up in the last unctuous and dribbling mouthful.
May presided over this animal holocaust for fifty
years. Fish that can now barely be found (lampreys, sturgeons), birds protected
24/7 in these days by the RSPB (bustard, or look at “To boil all other smaller Fowls, as Ruffes, Brewes,
Godwits, Knots, Dotterels, Strents, Pewits, Ollines, Gravelens, Oxeyes,
Redshanks, &c.”). By the sheer number of his employers, people must from
time to time have looked at their kitchen bills and decided that that swan must
be the last.
The cook book in his hands is a celebration of fifty
years of cooking it my way. It starts with a brief life of the artist. That’s
what he has become, though the narrative is also a tale of the long
apprenticeship necessary for the mastery of such an art.
A short Narrative of some passages of the Authors Life.
For the better knowledge of the worth of this Book, though it be not
usual, the Author being living, it will not be amiss to acquaint the Reader
with a brief account of some passages of his Life, as also what eminent Persons
(renowned for their good House-keeping) whom he hath served throughout the
whole series of his Life ; for as the growth of the children argueth the
strength of the Parents, so doth the judgement and abilities of the Artist
conduce to the making and goodness of the Work: now that such great knowledge
in this so commendable Art was not gained but by long experience, practice, and
converse with the most ablest men in their times, the Reader in this brief
Narrative may be informed by what steps and degrees he ascended to the same.
He was born in the year of our Lord 1588, his Father being one of the
ablest Cooks in his time, and his first Tutor in the knowledge or practice of
Cookery; under whom having attained to some perfection in that Art, the old
Lady Dormer sent him
over into France, where
he continued five years, being in the Family of a noble Peer, and first
President of Paris; where
he gained not only the French Tongue, but also bettered his knowledge in
Cookery: and returning again into England was
bound apprentice in London to
Mr. Arthur Hollinsworth in Newgate Market, one of the
ablest workmen in London, Cook
to the Grocers Hall and Star Chamber. His Prenticeship being out, the
Lady Dormer sent for
him to be her Cook under his Father, (who then served that Honourable Lady)
where were four Cooks more, such noble Houses were then kept, the glory of
that, and shame of this present age; then were those golden dayes wherein were
practised the Triumphs and
Trophies of Cookery, then was Hospitality esteemed, Neighbourhood
preserved, the Poor cherished, and God honoured; then was Religion less talk't
on and more practised, then was Atheism and Schisme less in fashion; and then
did men strive to be good rather then to seem so.
The nation has slipped and declined from its golden days, but May’s Art
has remained. His message is ‘eat like this, and make England great again‘.
The latter parts of his book, once he gets past the heroic and
Rabelaisian meat-eating, offer more to appeal to the etiolated modern palate.
His tarts and cheesecakes sound delicious. There are even some signs of
economy, especially with venison that has been hung just too long:
“To make meer sauce, or a pickle to keep venison in that is tainted.
Take strong ale and as much vinegar as will make it sharp, boil it with
some bay salt, and make a strong brine, scum it and let it stand till it be
cold, then put in your venison twelve hours, press it, parboil it, and season it,
then bake it as before is shown.
… Other wayes to preserve tainted Venison.
Bury it in the ground in a clean cloath a whole night, and it will take
away the corruption, savour, or stink.”
This is May on passing off inferior meats as venison:
Other meer sauce to
counterfeit Beef or Mutton to give it a Venison colour.
Take small beer and vinegar, and parboil your beef in it, let it steep
all night, then put some turnsole to it, and being baked, a good judgement
shall not decerne it from red or fallow deer.
Otherwayes to
counterfeit Ram, Wether, or any Mutton for Venison.
Bloody it in sheeps, lambs, or pigs blood, or any good and new blood,
season it as before, and bake it either for hot or cold. In this fashion you
may bake mutton, lamb, or kid.
I will leave him with his recipe to make umble pie. This is again a matter of eking out your venison. I gather that the edible inner organs of a deer were the perquisite of the huntsman who had given his professional assistance at the hunt. Samuel Pepys was eating Umble pie in 1663: “Mrs. Turner… did bring us an Umble-pie hot out of her oven”. It became a joke in the 19th century:
To make Umble Pyes.
Lay minced beef-suet in the bottom of the pye, or slices of interlarded
bacon, and the umbles cut as big as small dice, with some bacon cut in the same
form, and seasoned with nutmeg, pepper, and salt, fill your pyes with it and
slices of bacon and butter, close it up and bake it, and liquor it with claret,
butter, and stripped time.
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